Wednesday, February 01, 2012
RIP ...
... The Associated Press: Poland's 1996 Nobel poet Szymborska dies at 88. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
The subject is destiny ...
... The Old Bunch | Meyer Levin | Destiny's Children | Masterpiece by Joseph Epstein - WSJ.com.
The method is that of realism. Details add up to form character, and character becomes destiny. For example, young Sam Eisen's strain of nonconformity impels him first to leave the boyhood club of friends because of its want of seriousness; later he will drop out of the University of Illinois because of his repugnance toward compulsory ROTC service; the bourgeois spirit of his wife drives him to divorce; and he ends up a lawyer whose career is devoted to idealistic but ultimately empty radical causes.
Restored ...
... America Magazine - The Church and the Fiction Writer.
In her essay, O’Connor measured her argument and her prose carefully, and it is understandable that she was upset that Father Gardiner had altered one of her paragraphs, which we have inserted into the text below in brackets. We publish this original paragraph with our belated apologies.
Speaking out ...
... Carol Ann Duffy is 'wrong' about poetry, says Geoffrey Hill | Books | guardian.co.uk. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
"When the laureate speaks to the Guardian columnist to the tremendous potential for a vital new poetry to be drawn from the practice of texting she is policing her patch, and when I beg her with all due respect to her high office to consider that she might be wrong, I am policing mine," said Hill, in a lecture entitled "Poetry, Policing and Public Order". The Oxford professor of poetry has previously described difficult poems as "the most democratic because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing they are intelligent human beings", saying that "so much of the popular poetry of today treats people as if they were fools".
Thought for the day ...
Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that's their order of importance.
- Muriel Spark, born on this date in 1918
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Typical befuddlement of debate...
...Verses and Versions of Power
The author bemoans Bellow's remark on Rushdie trying, unsuccessfully, to do an Ulysses on the Islamic world as Orientalism but that does not take away from the truth of Bellow's assertion. By claiming that Rushdie's pariah-like status has something to do with the West's supposedly blinkered view of Islam, the author does great disservice to the right of free speech. Rushdie is very much an "Indian" writer in the themes that he explores. His exile in the West is a necessity borne out of the vicious and threatening tirade against him. And to compare the Rushdie affair with the situation in Kashmir is patently laughable. Here is s country where an Arundhati Roy can foster secession by urging Kashmiris to "get azaadi (freedom) from bhookey nangey (impoverished) Hindustan" in the heart of Delhi. Forget violence, not an iota of trouble visits her.
The author bemoans Bellow's remark on Rushdie trying, unsuccessfully, to do an Ulysses on the Islamic world as Orientalism but that does not take away from the truth of Bellow's assertion. By claiming that Rushdie's pariah-like status has something to do with the West's supposedly blinkered view of Islam, the author does great disservice to the right of free speech. Rushdie is very much an "Indian" writer in the themes that he explores. His exile in the West is a necessity borne out of the vicious and threatening tirade against him. And to compare the Rushdie affair with the situation in Kashmir is patently laughable. Here is s country where an Arundhati Roy can foster secession by urging Kashmiris to "get azaadi (freedom) from bhookey nangey (impoverished) Hindustan" in the heart of Delhi. Forget violence, not an iota of trouble visits her.
A good idea ...
... Transterrestrial Musings - Time To Get Religion Out Of Science Classes.
I have a modest proposal. Instead of promulgating either the Christian religion, or the Green religion in our science classes, let’s get teachers who actually have degrees in science (as opposed to “education”), so they don’t need “teaching materials,” and teach kids how to do math (including statistics), think critically, and actually formulate testable and falsifiable hypotheses and test them, so that they will be inoculated to all religions, when it comes to learning science.
More dumbing down ...
... Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe: Did they take out the “J” word, too? | The Book Haven.
Where did we get the idea that all reading must be easy reading?
Congratulations ...
... Kudos to Fern G. Z. Carr, poet lawyer - The Globe and Mail. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
And two others ...
... The Pope’s Life of Jesus | TLS.
Benedict’s book ... is full of surprises. There is a welcome emphasis on the rootedness of Jesus and his followers in Israel’s Scriptures, something which older exegesis, both Protestant and Catholic, often passed over. The heart of the volume is an exposition of Jesus’s vocational understanding of his own death in terms of the Psalms and Isaiah, particularly the “servant songs” of Isaiah 42–53, leading to a clear statement of the cross as the moment of vicarious, substitutionary atonement. This, Benedict writes, “constitutes the most profound content of Jesus’ mission”. This is not a view that Protestants normally expect popes to hold. Some Roman theologians, I suspect, will be surprised as well.
Here we go again ...
... Jonathan Franzen: e-books are damaging society - Telegraph. (Hat tip, Joseph Chovanes.)
Franzen said he took comfort from knowing he will not be here in 50 years’ time to find out if books have become obsolete.
In even less time that that, I won't have to hear about a new Jonathan Franzen novel being published. That's one good thing about being 70.
Inquirer news ...
... Philly newspapers boss responds to NYP story | JIMROMENESKO.COM. (Hat tip, Paul Davis.)
Depends ...
... The self-epublishing bubble | Ewan Morrison | Books | guardian.co.uk. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
This may be so for those who take up writing in order to get rich. John Jakes once told me that the thing that was most surprising when he had his first best-seller is how many people he met who thought it was his first book. It was, in fact, his 26th. I think most people who write do it for reasons other than becoming rich quick.
Thought for the day ...
Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how.
- Thomas Merton, born on this date in 1915
Monday, January 30, 2012
And he paid for doing so ...
... He Told the Truth About China’s Tyranny by Simon Leys | The New York Review of Books.
The award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 brought the name of Liu Xiaobo to the attention of the entire world. Yet well before that, he had already achieved considerable fame within China, as a fearless and clearsighted public intellectual and the author of some seventeen books, including collections of poetry and literary criticism as well as political essays.2 The Communist authorities unwittingly vouched for the uncompromising accuracy of his comments. They kept arresting him for his views—four times since the Tiananmen massacre in June 1989. Now he is again in jail, since December 2008; though in poor health, he is subjected to an especially severe regime.
Putting things in perspective ...
... Feel special, do I? Well... | Facebook.
In many respects, being gay has been the most fantastic thing in my life. It has enabled me to chart my own course of social and personal development without having to fit in to the dominant model peopled by straights.
Fighting back ...
... The Washington Monthly - The Magazine - Boarish Behavior.
Feral pigs have been devastating the American landscape since they were first introduced to this continent by European explorers in the 1500s. Some people call them razorbacks, or wild hogs—and, like the John Travolta movie of the same name, you will have trouble finding anyone with a good word to say about them. They ravage every ecosystem into which they’re introduced. They can grow to 500 pounds. They reproduce rapidly, and can begin breeding when they’re only eight months old. They’re violent and dirty and ugly and omnivorous—and they are everywhere.
Superhuman focus ...
... Dan Neil on the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Van Gogh Up Close - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
It's not surprising that Van Gogh found transcendence in a "blade of grass"—an image he perhaps borrowed from the Calvinist critic Thomas Carlyle. And Van Gogh was not the only artist possessing a Zen-like zoom lens. Ms. Kienle might as easily have name-checked T.S. Eliot, who writes in "Four Quartets": "We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion."
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