Thursday, March 31, 2011
Appreciation ...
... Diana Wynne Jones | tor.com | Science fiction and fantasy | Blog posts. (Hat tip, Lee Lowe.)
Diana, like any sensible fiction writer, regarded this rush of academic activity with a complex mixture of interest, embarrassment and perhaps a little ridicule. Actually, make that a lot of ridicule. Diana, as many of the memorials will tell you, was kind, warm, and generous—the web is now teeming with anecdotes from fans who met her at conventions in the 1980s before her travel jinx cut in*—but she was also very witty and sardonic and more than one of us flinched at her comments on our interest. To an extent the academic interest reflected the growing wealth of children’s literature criticism, and fantasy criticism, but again the age profile of the academics interested in her work was noticeable. These too were readers Diana Wynne Jones had grown.
Retro techno ...
... The Digital Generation Rediscovers the Magic of Manual Typewriters - NYTimes.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I don't get it myself. But then I was never a great typist. I don't miss having to use Wite-Out.
A stubborn mystery ...
... ASHGATE RESEARCH COMPANION TO THOMAS HARDY, reviewed by Seamus Perry - TLS.
Hardy might encourage us to think it an “irony” that he was himself not a companionable person. It is no reflection on the learning and expertise represented in these pages that you feel at times as though the subject of the book has slipped out the back while you were otherwise occupied with some fascinating piece of context. Probably any author worth writing about will finally elude the criticism that gets written about him, but if so, then Hardy seems the extreme case of a general law, somehow intrinsically tricky to capture ...
Money for poetry ...
... New $50,000 Montreal International Poetry Prize launched - The Globe and Mail. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Ishiguro
I know I'm a little late to the game on this one, but Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go is one powerful novel. True, it's not a perfect book, and true, it might not be as, well, as lasting as The Remains of the Day, but come on, this is one affecting, one moving, novel. Having recently finished the book, I found it interesting to hear Ishiguro talk about it. Here's a link to his interview on NPR. And here's a link to his exchange with The Paris Review. Now, I can watch the movie...
Thought for the day ...
In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.- John Fowles, born on this date in 1926
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Permissive vs. ordained ...
... A Momentary Taste of Being: Fr. Wilfrid Stinissen.
I'm ashamed to admit it, but I din;t know that about Kindle edition highlights and notes can be made available online. I must study my Kindle features more.
Forthcoming events ...
... at the Library.
Yours truly will be doing the introductory honors for Henning Mankell on Tuesday.
Baker's dozen ...
... Man Booker Prize: Amelia Hill on the 'Olympics of literature' | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I thought the Nobel was the most prestigious literature prize.
Maybe ...
... Why the Basis of the Universe Isn’t Matter or Energy—It’s Data. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Except that data isn't about data. It is about something that is not the data itself.
Hmm ...
... From the Editor, 13 Thoughts on War and Failure. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
But if you haven't experienced war, you can only have an idea about war. It is not wise to write about what you have not experienced. Compare poems by Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon to poems protesting war by those who have never seen combat, and this point becomes obvious.
Knowing what you're doing ...
... Book Review: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Once upon a time I taught English composition. I had the advantage that I had already worked for a while at a journal and had published my first professional review. I also understood that my job was to be a writing instructor. The syllabus I was supposed to follow had obviously been put together by someone with little or no real-world publishing experience. So I ignored it. I reminded my students that they had things on their minds, things they thought about and talked about. Maybe they even had some things they'd like to tell me. So I asked them to write me a letter -- and not to worry about grammar and usage -- just say what they wanted to say the way they would say it to anybody.
They seemed enthusiastic about the idea and what they turned in proved interesting. So, I sat down with each of them and showed them how to improve what they had written, pointing out how, in some cases, the ideas could be arranged better, and how they might have phrased things better. This enabled them to understand that there was no great mystery to writing clearly and correctly. The aim was not to turn them into Tolstoys, but to show them how to be able to communicate on paper. They all ended up doing quite well, that is, learning the subject.
Thought for the day ...
All artistic discoveries are discoveries not of likenesses but of equivalencies which enable us to see reality in terms of an image and an image in terms of reality.- Ernst Gombrich, born on this date in 1909Dave Lull sends along this, from Modern American Usage by Wilson Follett.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Small remains beautiful ...
... New Statesman - In praise of little magazines. (Hat tip, Paul Davis.)
Cheap shots ...
... A Commonplace Blog: Chic literary disgust.
As a Catholic who first (really) learned of the Holocaust when I was in grade school and we read excerpts from Ann Frank's diaries, I am (to put it mildly) flabbergasted by this sort of thing.
An antidote ...
... to incessant connectivity: The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time.
Double metaphor ...
... Rooted - by Adam Kirsch. (Hat Tip, Rus Bowden, who writes that I found this review ... so interesting, I would like to read the book.")
Time to diet ...
... Bloated nation states. (Hat tip, Vikram Johri.)
... there are also two structural causes of big government. First, productivity in the state sector, especially in fields such as education and health, has lagged behind the private sector. And second, there has been a huge increase in "social transfers," especially benefits for the middle classes and the elderly.To lose weight, governments have to do two things: learn how to do more with less, which means modernizing the state, and cut back on what they offer, which means tackling the social transfers. Both are inevitable, but the first offers the best chance of immediate gains.
Back to reality ...
... Bruce Charlton's Miscellany: Do you believe in...?
It is experience that puts us in touch with what is real. All beliefs derived therefrom should be regarded as provisional, since they are ideas about what is real and are always to some extent speculative.
Freshly celebrated ..
... The Handel Revolution | Books and Culture.
Between Winton Dean's assertion that neither true religion nor any serious engagement with Christianity is to be found in Handel and the idea that he was essentially a religious and Christian composer there is a lot of elbow room, and it properly includes the reaction of Christians who from the first until now have found Messiah to be a prayerful meditation on the mysteries of faith ...
Well, like all of us, Handel was not of a piece, but complex, contradictory, and inconsistent.
Listen in ...
... Geoffrey Hill Zinger: Geoffrey Hill's inaugural lecture podcast. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Thought for the day ...
Really, doesn´t everything make sense? There are, of course, things from which we more or less recover, although some of them are too harsh even for saints. But that is no reason to accuse God. Even if there are reasons to doubt him, the fact that he did not arrange the world like a well-ordered parlor is not one of them. It speaks rather in his favor. This used to be much better understood.- Ernst Jünger, born on this date in 1895
Monday, March 28, 2011
Fate and freedom ...
... Boston Review — Leland de la Durantaye: How to Be Happy. (Hat tip, Daniel Pritchard.)
In the fullness of time, Aristotle’s sea battle gave rise to modal logic—the branch of formal logic concerned with possibility and necessity—and thereby to David Foster Wallace’s youthful attempt to use modal logic to refute arguments in favor of fatalism. Sea battles are full of accident and adventure, and thus the sort of thing that generally appeals to budding novelists. Modal logic, however, is a rarer taste, and requires some special explanation. Readers of academic philosophy may be interested in the modal logic, but what is there for Wallace’s literary fans in his thesis? A ready answer is nothing whatsoever. But a better, if hidden, one is that in it is the most important idea of all, the one that links together all his works, all his most passionate thinking: the idea of how truly to be free, or, as he more colorfully expressed it, of how to be “a fucking human being.”
Anti-authoritarian traditionalists ...
... Anecdotal Evidence: `These Remarks Are Heretical.'
Or, as Brian of Nazareth said, "You can think for yourselves."
And the winner is ...
... The John Updike Society · Tom Sleigh receives the first John Updike Award. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Follow-up ...
A Commonplace Blog: Why Judith Butler hates Israel.
Perhaps Butler is worried that being known as a Jew will efface her connections to feminism and the Left, but the worry is misplaced. The notion that Jewish identity somehow cancels out any other identification is so numbskulled that only an intellectual ambivalent about her own identity could come up with it. A human being is a convergence of identities; she is the experience in which her loyalties and commitments overlap. My children belong to their mother and me, but they also belong to the Jewish people, the student body of the school they attend, their teams and scout troops, the United States of America. Belonging to a people or an institution is nothing like investing all of your retirement savings in just one stock.
Thought for the day ...
The Impossible Generalized Man today is the critic who believes in loving those unworthy of love as well as those worthy - yet believes this only insofar as no personal risk is entailed. Meaning he loves no one, worthy or no. This is what makes him impossible.- Nelson Algren, born on this date in 1909
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Well deserved ...
... YouTube - Neil Young Inducts Tom Waits - Make It Rain and Rain Dogs. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Very sad ...
... Lanny Friedlander, Founder of Reason Magazine, RIP - Reason Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Without knowing where he was living (or even if he was living), we saved a seat for Lanny at our 35th anniversary bash in L.A. and I prayed that he would show up unexpectedly, like a member of the Lost Battalion finally wandering back home, dust-covered, battle-scarred, and beaten to hell. But finally honored.
He didn't show, of course and alas. It was like he had disappeared, vanished into the ether like a mirage across a huge, hot, shimmering desert. Had he ever really existed in the first place?
Thought for the day ...
Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?- Alfred de Vigny, born on this date in 1797
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Hometown blues ...
Kate's Book Blog: Robert Louis Stevenson and Edinburgh.
Stevenson is one of the authors I have always thought of as friend.
Lots of perhapses ...
... Matt Ridley on Nick Humphrey's New Book Soul Dust | Mind & Matter - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Optical illusions such as the Penrose triangle ... demonstrate that you do "create" an imagined reality out of the raw material of vision, what Mr. Humphrey calls a "magical mystery show that you lay on for yourself," yourself being the rest of the brain.
But I don't think of myself as the rest of my brain, and I doubt if anyone else does, either. The principal problem in all of this is that it has less to do with explaining a given phenomenon than with explaining a given phenomenon in a particular way, in this case in terms of evolutionary theory. So we start with the theory and then show how the phenomenon can be understood in terms of said theory. But the fact that one can do that only demonstrates one's ingenuity, since, absent hard evidence, it remains purely speculative.
Staying on top ...
Mary Higgins Clark: The Case of the Best-Selling Author - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Ms. Clark knows and caters to her sales demographic. She holds book signings not just in bookstores but in big-box stores, club warehouses and grocery stores, where she regularly draws 500 people. To mark the coming April 5 release of her 43rd book, "I'll Walk Alone," a suspense novel about a woman whose identity is stolen and who stands accused of kidnapping her own son, she'll meet fans at a Wegmans grocery store in Collegeville, Pa. She'll hold signings in seven more states and in France, where her books have sold 24 million copies.
Nice ...
The Saturday poem: Il bacio by Paul Verlaine | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Karl did a nice job with this.
Thought for the day ...
We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.- Joseph Campbell, born on this date in 1904
Friday, March 25, 2011
Well-dressed and inscrutable ...
Oprah Magazine’s Adventures in Poetry - NYTimes.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Bad and verse ...
Poetry as a Weapon of War in Afghanistan | Art Beat | PBS NewsHour | PBS. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Devising analogs ...
... Anecdotal Evidence: `That I May Catch Life and Light.'
Patrick's lead-in reminds me of Browning's line about Shelley (used as an epigraph for Carl Ruggles's tone poem Sun-Treader): "Life and light be thine forever."
We interrupt our browsing ...
... Google Launches Online Magazine, Think Quarterly. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Just think -- but only four times a year!
I fear so ...
... It is possible to inherit a great civilization without possessing the will to defend its ideals:
Hidden Treasure. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Mr. Armstrong is firmly on the side of the popularizers. Unlike many intellectuals, who resent any linking of wealth and culture, he sees the two as intimately connected, but they need to be integrated, he says, since wealth by itself does not compel admiration. Thus he looks for "the sweet spot where luxury and spiritual prosperity meet." In no age was this more the case than in the Renaissance, which went back to classical times for the best in literature, sculpture and architecture and confidently built upon it with the riches of a newly mercantile age. "What is striking," Mr. Armstrong finds, "is how well money was spent."
Links, and more
... So Much for That.
Mark poses a question in regard to a comment I made on a post of his: "What makes those novels interesting?" For me it is something comparable to what makes life interesting: I find the people inhabiting the novel -- as well as what is happening to them and what they are doing -- interesting. Good paintings prompt you to look at the world more closely than you are ordinarily wont to do. Good novels make you more aware of life and its nuances. There is, of course, a powerful emotional component to this.
Mark thy calendar ...
... Counting down. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
It's a the Perelman in the Kimmel Center. Excellent acoustics.
Well worth knowing ...
... Elizabeth Anscombe -- A Courageous and Holy Woman. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Dave also sends along this:
Walter Hooper wrote a letter to The Telegraph in which he points out that:
In her [book] Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, she wrote: "The fact that Lewis rewrote that chapter . . . shows his honesty and seriousness. The meeting of the Socratic Club at which I read my paper has been described by several of his friends as a horrible and shocking experience . . .
"My own recollection is that it was an occasion of sober discussion of certain quite definite criticisms, which Lewis' rethinking and rewriting showed he thought were accurate. I am inclined to construe the odd accounts of the matter by some of his friends . . . as an interesting example of the phenomenon called 'projection'."
And Jenny Teichman in her "Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, 1919-2001" for the Proceedings of the British Academy (v115, pages 31-50) quotes Anscombe:
"The meeting ... has been described by several of his friends as a horrible and shocking experience which upset him very much. Neither Dr Havard (who had Lewis and me to dinner a few weeks later) nor Professor Jack Bennett remembered any such feelings on Lewis's part. My own recollection is that it was an occasion of sober discussion of certain quite definite criticisms ... some of his friends seem not to have been interested in the actual arguments or the subject matter." (page 44)
Anscombe’s international reputation as a debater had early roots. At Oxford in 1948, at age 29, she took on — and trounced — C.S. Lewis in a debate that is still discussed now, more than six decades later. Their debate focused on the third chapter of Lewis’s book Miracles. Everyone present — including Lewis — recognized that the young woman’s critique had completely unraveled his arguments. Yet she didn’t disagree with Lewis’s conclusions; she just thought his arguments were too loose, too easy to pull apart. She wanted a more rigorously tough-minded defense of miracles.
Incidentally, she and Lewis remained on friendly terms, and Lewis rewrote the disputed chapter, taking her criticism into account. Anscombe considered this an act of admirable intellectual honesty.
Dave also sends along this:
Walter Hooper wrote a letter to The Telegraph in which he points out that:
In her [book] Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, she wrote: "The fact that Lewis rewrote that chapter . . . shows his honesty and seriousness. The meeting of the Socratic Club at which I read my paper has been described by several of his friends as a horrible and shocking experience . . .
"My own recollection is that it was an occasion of sober discussion of certain quite definite criticisms, which Lewis' rethinking and rewriting showed he thought were accurate. I am inclined to construe the odd accounts of the matter by some of his friends . . . as an interesting example of the phenomenon called 'projection'."
And Jenny Teichman in her "Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, 1919-2001" for the Proceedings of the British Academy (v115, pages 31-50) quotes Anscombe:
"The meeting ... has been described by several of his friends as a horrible and shocking experience which upset him very much. Neither Dr Havard (who had Lewis and me to dinner a few weeks later) nor Professor Jack Bennett remembered any such feelings on Lewis's part. My own recollection is that it was an occasion of sober discussion of certain quite definite criticisms ... some of his friends seem not to have been interested in the actual arguments or the subject matter." (page 44)
Post bumped.
Thought for the day ...
The past becomes a texture, an ambience to our present.- Paul Scott, born on this date in 1920
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Ongoing debate ...
... E-books’ Dreaming. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I agree with the comment my friend Lee Lowe posted: the technology itself will inspire artistic innovation. I was also intrigued by the question as to why we read novels. I certainly don't read them to validate my feelings about anything, if only because I feel no need to validate my feelings.
I read them to be transported to an interesting place where interesting things are taking place.
Quixotic farewell ...
... Michael Holroyd's Lives.
Holroyd describes this unusually compendious volume as “my last book”, and it acts as a sort of coda to his life's work, in which he takes the opportunity to consider the literary form in which he has made his career. As in A. J. A. Symons’s The Quest for Corvo, his pursuit of these minor and not altogether attractive figures becomes part of the story ...
Bryan wonders ...
... Elizabeth Taylor – What Is Missing? (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I was actually surprised that I did have an emotional reaction. Thinking of her took me back to a time in my life that seems so long ago now, a time when Liz was in the news practically daily. So maybe I am just feeling sorry for myself. But around the time of Suddenly Last Summer and Butterfield 8 she seemed as beautiful as any woman ever.
Thought for the day ...
I can say that I never knew what joy was like until I gave up pursuing happiness, or cared to live until I chose to die. For these two discoveries I am beholden to Jesus.- Malcolm Muggeridge, born on this date in 1903 (one man who told the truth about the Ukrainian famine, thus becoming a model for what all journalists should be)
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Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Oh, my ...
... a novelist chronicling real life (don't tell Jonathan Franzen): ‘Emily: Alone’: Stewart O’Nan writes on aging gracefully. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Cool guy ...
... Edward Conlon's Red On Red: An NYPD Detective's Foray Into Fiction.
Ed Conlon not only is a cool guy, but -- speaking as the son of a cop and the uncle of another -- I think Blue Blood is th best book about what it means to be a cop. Were I given to regrets, I would regret not having been a cop myself. I sometimes think I owed it to my father.
Cynthia in New York ...
... “Too big to be swallowed”: Robert Hass, Adam Zagajewski, Clare Cavanagh remember Czesław Miłosz.
I should have gone. But I am old and increasingly lazy.
About time ...
... Louis Sullivan, the author of the modernist skyline, is finally getting the recognition he deserves: The Architect of the City. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Wild apples ...
... `A Peculiarly Pleasant Bitter Tang.'
For those of us of an age this is meaningful. See also: Dame Elizabeth Taylor dies in Los Angeles aged 79. To quote Browning, "I feel chilly and grown old."
For those of us of an age this is meaningful. See also: Dame Elizabeth Taylor dies in Los Angeles aged 79. To quote Browning, "I feel chilly and grown old."
Tawdry and golden ...
... Buddhism is the new opium of the people. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
... it's mistaken to think that the western categories that shape us can be circumvented. You can't chose the gods that you worship. To hope you can, by adopting someone else's gods or a cluster of eastern ideas, is the fundamental error.
Labor economy ...
... Peter Stothard on Tools of the Trade. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
For thousands of miles around the Roman Mediterranean, foreign slaves were as much a part of the landscape as the fields and farms on which they worked, their presence as undisputed as sea, clouds, and mountains. Anyone might be a slave or might be free. Many in their lifetimes would be both. It was a matter of mutable fortune, part of the conditions of life for rich and poor, black, brown, and white, for Germans, Africans, and Gauls, a status so ubiquitous and little challenged that it leaves a huge challenge now to anyone who wants to comprehend it. Poetry and pottery, theater and history books can all play their variously deceptive parts in our imaginations. None gives a picture that is complete.
Determination ...
In one experiment, some people read a passage from Francis Crick, the molecular biologist, asserting that free will is a quaint old notion no longer taken seriously by intellectuals, especially not psychologists and neuroscientists. Afterward, when compared with a control group that read a different passage from Crick (who died in 2004) these people expressed more skepticism about free will — and promptly cut themselves some moral slack while taking a math test.
Well, Crick also cut himself some moral slack when it came to using Rosalind Franklin's purloined photo of a DNA molecule.
See also what Bryan has to say: Free Will.
(Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Thought for the day ...
Man is a genius when he is dreaming.- Akira Kurosawa, born on this date in 1910
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Striving women ...
... THIS WOMAN’S WORK. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
After creating two antiheroines, probably inspired by Hemingway’s view of woman-as-death, Cain paid homage to his friend’s indomitable spirit. He set out to explore what one of his characters would call “the great American institution that never gets mentioned on the Fourth of July, a grass widow with two small children to support.” As he was writing, employing the third person and creating a female protagonist for the first time, Cummings stood over him, prodding him to revise whenever she felt that his perceptions of a working mother did not ring true. When “Mildred Pierce” was finally published, in 1941, Cain’s alternately stilted and full-bodied portrait of a striving woman was well received, but few reviewers noted the fact that the novel was also a study of a woman who, time after time, subjugates her own needs to those of her child.
Comeback ...
... Terence Rattigan sounded the deep blue sea of English feeling. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Back to his first love ...
... The Critic Returns, as the Performer. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Twenty years is a long time between gigs, and before I could clear out the cobwebs and reacquaint myself with music’s interconnected disciplines, I had to do battle with fear. What would musicians who knew me as a critic think if I caused a train wreck onstage? Eventually, I worked up the nerve to call an in-demand guitarist I’d written about several times — mostly favorably, but the last time was in a scathing negative review of a band that later broke up. I left a message that said I didn’t expect a return call, and that I understood completely if he wanted no part of me.
Tom and I sat next to each other for years. Great guy.
Applied history ...
... Strategic Lessons From Hannibal’s War.
Once again today we are living through a geographical shift in the world’s center of gravity. This time the shift is from Europe and the Atlantic toward Asia and the Pacific. The great European powers whose exploits ring down the centuries of modern history are now secondary powers — as Athens and Sparta were at the time of Hannibal, and as Florence and Venice were in the time of Machiavelli.
Truly sublime ...
Yesterday afternoon, Debbie and I went to see Of Gods and Men. I thought it one of the greatest films I have ever seen, perhaps the best cinematic treatment of faith ever. Here's a review. (I thought the Swan Lake heartbreaking. In fact, I cried. Here is another review.
And here my former colleague Steven Rea's review: Monks and Muslims - and then terror.
Do see this film.
Thought for the day ...
Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles.- Paul Fussell, born on this date in 1924
Monday, March 21, 2011
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes ...
... The AP Stylebook editors visit ACES 2011. (Hat tip, Paul Davis.)
Isn't Kolkata what you get at the deli?
Something worth doing ...
... Revisiting “The Lottery.”
I see that someone cites the usual BS about the "conformist" '50s. I've heard that the story was aimed at McCarthyism, but I always took it to be just a good scary story.
No more crocodile tears ...
... 'Civility' Was Always Dead. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
See also, Glenn Reynolds, Uncivil disobedience: Media ignores union thuggery.
Before the black swan ...
... there was Friedrich Hayek: Tsunamis of Information.
"Unlike the position that exists in the physical sciences, in economics and other disciplines that deal with essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones," [Hayek] said. That makes it impossible to produce simple and reliable forecasts.
Radical ...
... but not extreme: Rob Bell's intervention in the often ugly world of American evangelicalism. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
"Will everybody be saved, or will some perish apart from God forever because of their choices?" Bell asks. "Those are questions, or more accurately, those are tensions we are free to leave fully intact. We don't need to resolve them or answer them because we can't, and so we simply respect them, creating space for the freedom that love requires."
This seems reasonable to me. We do well to acknowledge there are questions we cannot answer. I must say, though, Mark's disparagement of American evangelicals seems clichéd and unfair. I met and talked with many when I wrote for The Inquirer's religion page. None that I encountered came close to matching the media caricature.
Not so dry and dusty after all ...
... Inevitable Scholasticism. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
In the first volume of his Church Dogmatics (1932), Karl Barth provocatively wrote: “Fear of Scholasticism is the mark of a false prophet.” As a well-known critic of modern Catholic theology, Barth was not commending specific Scholastic arguments or conclusions. Instead, he was making a broader point about the intellectual project of Scholasticism, which he thought indispensable.
Judith Butler, Kafka, and the LRB
The March 3, 2011 volume of the LRB featured a reproduction of Judith Butler's recent essay on Kafka's literary remains. A link to that essay can be found here. (For more on Butler, follow this link.)
In response to Butler's essay, I submitted a letter to the editors of the LRB. As I have not heard back, I felt it important to post my response here:
"While I did not have the opportunity to attend Judith Butler’s lecture on Kafka in person, I read its reproduction with considerable interest. To say that I was disappointed would be a severe understatement. Ms. Butler commits the opening stages of her essay less to Kafka and his literary remains and far more to a polemical assault on the state of Israel. What issues pertaining to the the Galut, for instance, or the ‘Occupied Territories’ have to do with Kafka remain a mystery. Equally mysterious is Ms. Butler’s foray into the theoretical. What, for example, does she mean by ‘a non-Zionist theological gesture’? Or worse, ‘the poetics of non-arrival’? In her attempt to cast Kafka as marginally Jewish, and to read his stories as meditations on displacement, Butler seems, ultimately, to be offended by the idea that Israel might benefit from the monetization of Kafka’s legacy. The sad part, of course, is that in her attempt to prove this point, Butler fails to recognize what she herself is up to - which is, in short, the hijacking of Kafka for the sake of a political argument against Israel. One need not look further than the start of Butler’s essay to find evidence of this thinly-veiled prejudice: for it is here that she suggests - seemingly with a snicker - that the ‘public good’ is, for all intents and purposes, dictated by the priorities of the ‘Jewish people.’ Unfortunately, this is not the only reference of this sort which Ms. Butler makes to Jews and Judaism."
--Jesse Freedman