https://vimeo.com/87145201
Sunday, May 31, 2015
Objecting strongly …
… Two good friends, and a third guy - The Washington Post. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
In fairness, telling the story of two men who liked each other is difficult if you don’t like one of them. Schultz detests Buckley.
“ . . . a salesman’s eyes, as though Buckley were trying to sell something he knew you didn’t really want to buy.”The Buckley I knew (only slightly) seemed pretty much as O'Rourke describes him: "… a mainmast of courtesy, an anchor of encouragement and a spinnaker of enthusiasm for whatever one had written."
Versions of Tolstoy …
… languagehat.com : The Scythe, the Swath, and the Hired Men. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Our Father ...
Chaput said he is sometimes asked if the tens of millions of dollars that will be spent on a modest four-day convention and the pope's brief appearances might be better used to serve the poor or other worthy causes.
He said that was a question for the major donors to answer."
NONONONO - OH LORD, BRING the Spirit into this man's heart, Show him the Light. Give him an answer according to Your Will. And maybe give him a better answer like:
"It is in God's hands, who guides the Church."
The power of Story …
… In the Beginning — Sally Wiener Grotta.
The nature of Story is that it is as changeable as the world it seeks to understand, as varied as the many storytellers who weave the tales. With every retelling, new threads and new colors are added, as new answers try to reshape the questions, sometimes replacing the old.
Saturday, May 30, 2015
Another fantasy bites the dust …
… A Plea for Culinary Modernism | Jacobin.
For all, Culinary Modernism had provided what was wanted: food that was processed, preservable, industrial, novel, and fast, the food of the elite at a price everyone could afford. Where modern food became available, populations grew taller, stronger, had fewer diseases, and lived longer. Men had choices other than hard agricultural labor, women other than kneeling at the metate five hours a day.
Something to think on …
For we do not do what we want to do, but what is easiest and most natural for us to do, and if it is easy for us to do the wrong thing, it is that that we will do.
— Randolph Bourne, born on this date in 1886
Back from oblivion …
… 'I spent most of my life as a nobody': the last of the silent movie stars | Film | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Cary’s father died in 1961, her mother in 1977. “It was sad – I realised they never really learned anything, about me or about themselves.” The Baby Peggy experiment was never discussed in the family. “They didn’t ask if it affected my life… if I enjoyed it. It’s astonishing, in a way. I was the one who did all that, earned all that money, and they weren’t even curious.” It was only Cary’s sister who, before she died in 2005, wrote to acknowledge something. “She said, ‘I’ve been thinking about your life. How hard you worked at an age when my own children had nothing more to think about than potty training. And I think it’s time that somebody said thank you.’”
Good question …
… Could Philly Newspapers Survive a Strike? | News | Philadelphia Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
In case you wondered …
… How the Modern Detective Novel Was Born. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The roots of the modern detective novel can be traced back to Trent’s Last Case, written by E.C. Bentley, and published in 1913. Bentley intended to write an ironic exposure of detective fiction, but the book’s cleverness and lightness of touch meant that readers took it seriously, and it became a wildly successful best-seller. Above all, it influenced a new generation of writers after the First World War.
A riddling ancestry …
… Widespeak - Sydney Review of Books — Waiting for the Past by Les Murray. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
In a riddle what the words mean does not displace how they sound until the riddle is solved. Until the riddle is solved, it could mean anything – everything. Only after it is solved does meaning settle into being in the words: a strange transformation, something like the one this riddle describes: water becoming bone.
Friday, May 29, 2015
Social Perfectionism kills men
6,233 suicides were registered in the UK in 2013. While the female suicide rate has remained roughly constant since 2007, that for men is at its highest since 2001. Nearly eight in ten of all suicides are male – a figure that has been rising for over three decades. In 2013, if you were a man between the ages of 20 and 49 who’d died, the most likely cause was not assault nor car crash nor drug abuse nor heart attack, but a decision that you didn’t wish to live any more. In every country in the world, male suicides outnumber female. The mystery is why? What is it about being male that leads to this? Why, at least in the UK, are middle-aged men most at risk? And why is it getting worse? Those who study suicide, or work for mental health charities, are keen to press upon the curious that there’s rarely, if ever, a single factor that leads to any self-inflicted death and that mental illness, most commonly depression, usually precedes such an event. “But the really important point is, most people with depression don’t kill themselves,” O’Connor tells me. “Less than 5 per cent do. So mental illness is not an explanation. For me, the decision to kill yourself is a psychological phenomenon. What we’re trying to do in the lab here is understand thepsychology of the suicidal mind.”
What could possibly go wrong?
Mohammed cartoon rally is ON...
Ritzheimer anticipates possible problems because of the rally and says people should bring their guns.
"People are also encouraged to utilize (their) second amendment right at this event just (in case) our first amendment comes under the much anticipated attack," the event's Facebook page says.
The trial that is faith…
… Beyond Eastrod: the journey continues: Put yourself on trial with Shakespeare, Supreme Court Justice Scalia, Father Tom Matthews, and Flannery O'Connor: a few special thoughts (and a supplemental posting) for the day . . .
As the Bible says, "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God." (Though as D. H. Lawrence pointed out, "It is an even more fearful thing to fall out of them.")
As the Bible says, "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God." (Though as D. H. Lawrence pointed out, "It is an even more fearful thing to fall out of them.")
Q & A …
… The Crossover Audience on Music and Liturgy: An Interview with Ted Gioia - Ethika Politika. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Music has power. And its greatest power is to create a pathway between the human and the divine. Shamans in every part of the world knew that long ago. And every form of worship has tried to draw on this power. Only in the modern world, with our fixation on music as entertainment, have we forgotten this basic fact.
Ambition and deflation …
… on Paper Collage by Georges Perros, translated by John Taylor (Seagull Books/University of Chicago Press) | On the Seawall: A Literary Website by Ron Slate (GD). (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
“Although literature makes waste, at least it has a chance of making a man stand straighter. It’s important to understand this. Nearly all trades produce waste. Literature is one of the few occupations demanding rare willpower of a man, a way of running his existence that slows down the progress of a mediocrity that is natural to all of us.”
Something to think on …
Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.
— G. K. Chesterton, born on this date in 1874
Oscar Wilde
I'm not sure why, but my high school syllabus didn't include The Picture of Dorian Gray. Instead of Wilde, we were reading Emerson, I guess. You know, New England...
In any event, I've now righted that wrong, and let me say to begin just how gifted Wilde was as a stylist. The plot of the book aside (because parts of it aren't entirely convincing), Wilde's writing alone is the worth the price of admission, and Dorian Gray is the work of a master, of a man firmly in control of his craft. Wilde is at turns humorous and grave, pointed and prescient.
My only other exposure to Wilde's work was The Importance of Being Earnest, which I saw in a theater. And so I was not prepared exactly for Dorian Gray, which is book that's far darker than Earnest, even if it pretends at times to be something else (like a pulp Gothic novella for starters).
For me, Dorian Gray was a book about aging and about the frailty of the human condition. Dorian sees his portrait as a double for his conscience, which fills - slowly, and then rapidly - with "sin." But that part of the book I found least compelling: I mean, who hasn't been to an opium den?
Instead, the bit of this book that worked best for me, and that was most compelling as a sort of moral tale, had to do with that inevitable doubling: that sense in which adventure and sin are associated with youth, while adulthood is reserved for its opposite: all that is drab and...gray.
Dorian Gray struggles as a character to reconcile his dive into the muck with his longing for youth, with his anxiety, really, about aging, and his loss of that youthful purity (of form, of persona, of emotion). Ultimately, of course, by ridding himself of sin, by practicing a form of self-sacrifice against his portrait, Gray comes to terms with his years, and experiences a sort of liberation. But by then of course, it may have all been too late...
Thursday, May 28, 2015
10 Most Addictive Books of 2015?
From Kirkus Reviews
Me, I'm entranced by a thriller series by Jonathan Mayberry featuring a character called Joe Ledger. Awesome junky brain food. As far from the KJV, say, as you can get.
Me, I'm entranced by a thriller series by Jonathan Mayberry featuring a character called Joe Ledger. Awesome junky brain food. As far from the KJV, say, as you can get.
Majestic and Without Peer
The KJV’s overall superiority derives...from its being the product of a historical period in which the Bible’s divinely revealed character and literal truth, every word of which was assumed to matter supremely because it was God’s, were still taken for granted by most people, including the King James’s highly cultivated and sophisticated translators
Radically imperfect …
… Berryman: Tragedy & Comedy Together by Helen Vendler | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Hmm …
… Lechery à la Grecque | Standpoint. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I don't remember feeling that way about Miller, but I loved the book. So did my wife, and she's been to Greece. Miller never pretends to be better than he is. Or to think less of himself than he does.
I don't remember feeling that way about Miller, but I loved the book. So did my wife, and she's been to Greece. Miller never pretends to be better than he is. Or to think less of himself than he does.
History and progress …
… Modernity’s False Messiah - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
As one of commenters notes, Eric Voegelin — who counseled against immanentizing the eschaton — connected Gnosticism to modernism years ago.
Something to think on …
I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.
— Ian Fleming, born on this date in 1908
Wednesday, May 27, 2015
Odd couple …
… William F. Buckley, Jr., and Norman Mailer’s Friendship — The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
In “Buckley and Mailer” (Norton), whose overstated subtitle is “The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties,” Kevin M. Schultz, a historian at the University of Illinois-Chicago, sets out to reconstruct an association that in fact had less warp and woof to it than Buckley’s friendship with Galbraith. John B. Judis’s biography of Buckley says that he was “friendly with” but never “very close” to Mailer. Still, Buckley’s durable cordiality toward Mailer is more remarkable than his being amigos with Galbraith or belligerents with Vidal, and it seems pardonable for Schultz to extend what ought to have been a magazine article into a book-length safari in search of something significant. Here and there he even finds it.
What we're made of …
… Stardust by Freeman Dyson | The Gallery | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The Ninth...
It is not hard to understand why the Ninth enjoys such iconic status. It is the classic symphonic journey from darkness to light, from minor to major, and from chaos to order. It is also a massive undertaking, still one of the longest pieces in the symphonic repertoire. Beethoven's introduction of a chorus in the final movement — singing Schiller's Ode to Joy — gives the piece the searingly optimistic finale to end all finales. The message that all mankind will be brothers (no mention of sisters) is at the heart of its appeal.
Seeing forever …
… A First Look at the Freedom Tower’s One World Observatory — WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
FYI …
Skinner to Host Fine Books & Manuscripts Online Auction May 27th-June 7th
Boston, MA –May 21, 2015 – This spring’s Fine Books and Manuscripts auction at Skinner, Inc. will remain true to its title, featuring printed and handwritten material spanning six centuries and celebrating cultural, literary, and historical milestones. The online-only sale will begin on May 27th, 2015 at 12 P.M. ET and conclude on June 7th, 2015 at 4 P.M. ET
. Live previews will be held at Skinner’s Boston Gallery on Wednesday, June 3rd, from 2 P.M. to 5 P.M.; Thursday, June 4th, from 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.; and Friday, June 5th, from 10 A.M. to 7 P.M.
Marc Chagall
Featured lots include an important archive of Marc Chagall letters and documents, along with signed photographs, and inscribed copies of Chagall publications. The keystone of these lots is a Large Archive of Letters, 1964-1971 (Lot 13, Estimate $80,000-$120,000) documenting Chagall’s work with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, including the sets and costumes he designed for the Magic Flute, and the two iconic murals that grace the lobby.
Rare Books
Incunabula are represented in two lots, including a favorite of all book lovers: the Nuremberg Chronicle (Lot 222, Estimate $25,000-$35,000). Published in 1493 in large folio format, this ambitious project is illustrated throughout with almost 2,000 woodcuts. Its goal was to chronicle the history of the world from Genesis right up to contemporary times. The resulting images feature Bible illustration, portraits of kings and queens of ancient times, and numerous city views. The 1494 Venice edition ofOvid’s De Arte Amandi will also be offered (Lot 196, Estimate $2,000-$3,000 ), along with an important post-incunabula edition of Raimundus Sabundus’s Theologia Naturalis, printed in Nuremberg by Koberger in 1502, in contemporary boards (Lot 211, Estimate $2,000-$3,000 ).
Many lots of decorative bindings along with collectors’ copies of first editions by Robert B. Parker, Sue Grafton, and Elmore Leonard, and a charming Dutch and Latin prayer book, circa 1500 featuring hand-colored woodcuts (Lot 147, Estimate $2,000-$2,500) round out the books section.
Early American Manuscripts & Books
Two lots of 18th century American manuscripts offer exciting research opportunities for those interested in the American Revolution and early international ship voyages and trade.
The account books of John Roberts III, a Pennsylvania Quaker executed for treason during the American Revolution (Lot 61, Estimate $6,000-$8,000), documenting goods and materials taken from him by the Continental Army during the conflict. The controversy surrounding his execution has persisted for centuries, with meager original documents available. This collection of unique source material has been unknown to scholars until now.
The shipping account books of Captain William Trotter (Lot 237, Estimate $12,000-$15,000) have been studied, but have never been available for sale. Seven volumes of Trotter’s ship’s logs from the late 18th and early 19th century document his voyages and observations in South America, the Far East, the Pacific Islands, the Northwest coast of North America, and elsewhere. Hundreds of handwritten pages include detailed business transactions and fascinating ethnographic observations.
Americana collectors will find many interesting lots throughout the sale, including Hodder’s Arithmetic, the first book on math published in North America (Lot 169, Estimate $6,000-$8,000), with provenance connecting this copy to Myles Standish’s great-granddaughters. A folio copy of McKenney and Hall’s North American Indian Tribes, including all of volume one and a portion of volume two will also be included in the sale, featuring seventy-one full-color portraits of Native American Indian leaders (Lot 189, Estimate $8,000-$12,000).
Letters, Documents & Maps
The sale contains a diverse array of interesting letters and signed documents by early American presidents, musicians, artists, and literary figures, including Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Melville, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins , Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Browning, Truman Capote, Amelia Earhart, Orville Wright, Andrew Jackson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.E. Cummings, Giacomo Puccini, John and Charles Wesley, and others.
Natural history prints are represented with botanical illustrations and Audubon prints (Lots 245-247, estimates vary) as well.
The final section of the sale contains a nice selection of early maps, including nine lots of New World maps from the 16th and 17th century, four early maps of the Far East (Lots 268, 269, 273 and 274), and a rare gold rush map from 1850 (Lot 265, Estimate $800-$1,000). Two early 20th century maps in the sale are notable for their graphic style: MacDonald Gill’s Wonderground Map of London, 1914 (Lot 289, Estimate $800-$1,000); and Elizabeth Shurtleff and Helen F. McMillin’s Highways and Byways of Girl Scouting, 1927 (Lot 272, Estimate $300-$500).
Catalog and Bidding
Catalogs are available online, from the Subscriptions Department, at 508-970-3240, or from the Gallery. Prices realized will be available online, at www.skinnerinc.com, both during and after the sale. The Skinner website enables users to view every lot in the auctions, leave bids, order catalogs and bid live, in real-time, through SkinnerLive!
About Skinner
Skinner auctions draw international interest from buyers and consignors alike, with material regularly achieving record prices. The company’s auction and appraisal services focus on fine art, jewelry, furniture, and decorative arts from around the globe, as well as wine, fine musical instruments, rare books, Asian art, clocks, Judaica, and more. Monthly Skinner Discovery auctions feature a breadth of estate material. Widely regarded as one of the most trusted names in the business, Skinner appraisers have appeared on the PBS-TV series, Antiques Roadshow, since the show’s inception. Skinner has galleries in Boston and Marlborough, Massachusetts, as well as in New York City and Coral Gables, Florida, with bidders participating in person, by phone, and online. Join auctions live with SkinnerLive! and Bidsquare. For more information and to read our blog, visit the website at www.skinnerinc.com, find us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.
Finer tuning …
… How One Psychologist Is Tackling Human Biases in Science. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
The role of bias in science became clear to Nosek as a graduate student in psychology. “Like many graduate students, my idealism about how science works was shattered when I took research methods”, he says. “In that class, we read lots of papers that were old even then—articles from the 1950s through the 1970s—articles about publication bias, low-powered research designs, lack of replication, underreporting of methodology in published articles, lack of access to original data, and bias against null results.”
Revolutionary aristocrat …
… Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary by Anita Anand | Mumsnet. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Something to think on …
Some people think that all the equipment you need to discuss religion is a mouth.
— Herman Wouk, born on this date in 1915
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
Literally
YouTube's highest paid star is a woman who unboxes Disney toys.
She made $4.9 million in 2014 from YouTube ads alone.
Translating Knausgaard
An Interview with Don BartlettYears ago I was on a case that involved hundreds of Dutch and Arabic banking and legal documents, and I had to hire a number of translators. I soon learned that translation is as much a science as an art, perfect translation is impossible, and an invisible translator nearly so.
Sour outlook …
… Review: 'Crow Fair' by Thomas McGuane - Chicago Tribune. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
… reading these stories as a body is dispiriting, and one begins to wonder if the book's portrait of mid-American life isn't fundamentally expressive of an excessively easy pessimism. Like the characters it describes, the prose too often feels weak and uninspired. Several of the stories deploy clichés, and a couple even end on them, most disappointingly "River Camp," which builds up to a fine and memorable penultimate sentence, then squanders this achievement with a banal final phrase.
Credit due…
… The TLS blog: Oh Hull. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… a Redpath poem did receive a little belated recognition last week: it appeared in the TLS as a previously unpublished poem by Philip Larkin. That’s right: contrary to what we and the Larkin scholars who inspected it believed, “In and Out” isn’t by Larkin, after all. Yet it seemed so perfectly (too perfectly?) Larkinesque. And as Tom Cook wrote in last week’s issue, it ended up as two halves of loose typescript tucked into one of Larkin's archived workbooks at the University of Hull.
Something to think on …
Be not therefore solicitous for to morrow; for the morrow will be solicitous for itself. Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.
— Jesus
Monday, May 25, 2015
Something to think on …
The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself.
— Edward Bulwer-Lytton, born on this date in 1803
Sunday, May 24, 2015
Age and memoir …
… Can Young People Write Memoir? | BREVITY's Nonfiction Blog.
Anyone can write anything. The question is whether anyone else will want to read it.
Anyone can write anything. The question is whether anyone else will want to read it.
Representation and what it represents …
… Thinking Straight About Curved Space | Issue 108 | Philosophy Now. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
This sounds a bit like the fallacy of reification, regarding something abstract as if it were concrete.
Physics, and the technology based on it (and indeed our civilisation), has flourished by being prepared to set aside the common sense that tells us that the earth must be flat otherwise people will fall off it, that a small object will always fall slower than a big one, and that the state of rest and motion in a straight line are fundamentally different. But we should not conclude from this that the mathematical portrait of the world is the last word on what is really there, or that everyday experience of lived space is in some profound sense defective or even wrong.
This sounds a bit like the fallacy of reification, regarding something abstract as if it were concrete.
Better late …
… F Scott Fitzgerald's 1936 piece finally appears in print | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
"Thank You for the Light" suggests that Fitzgerald's faith – in life, in art, even in Catholicism – may have lapsed, but it never expired. A year or so later, he would begin work on his last, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon. Mrs Hanson's lit cigarette is not a green light at the end of a dock, but it's an image of renewed faith, and signals the beginning of Fitzgerald's struggle to regain his capacity for hope – his greatest theme of all.… Thank You for the Light.
Happy 74th …
… May 24, 1941: Birth of Robert Allen Zimmerman | Zenith City Online. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Something to think on …
I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change — within himself, not on the outside.
— Joseph Brodsky, born on this date in 1940
Saturday, May 23, 2015
Pressing on …
… Beyond Eastrod: the journey continues: Rage, rage against the dying of the light: the return of Beyond Eastrod.
It isn't about death, but a favorite villanelle of mine is Auden's "Miranda," from The Sea and the Mirror.
It isn't about death, but a favorite villanelle of mine is Auden's "Miranda," from The Sea and the Mirror.
Doing it themselves …
… 5 Famous Books That Were Originally Self-Published | Mental Floss. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Questions and numbers …
… Myles Away From Mathematics, Magic and Mystery | Colm Mulcahy. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Something to think on …
One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands in the midst of the struggle and says, 'I have it,' merely shows by doing so that he has just lost it.
— Henrik Ibsen, who died on this date in 1906
Friday, May 22, 2015
Curiouser and curiouser …
… Quantum physics: What is really real? : Nature News & Comment.
If there is no objective reality, does that mean that reality is purely subjective? And what exactly does that mean?
If there is no objective reality, does that mean that reality is purely subjective? And what exactly does that mean?
Hmm …
… Bryan Appleyard — How to Fix the Failed Arts. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Well, I have no right to comment on the UK's domestic politics, but this piece by Terry Teachout that I just linked to has this in it:Molly Guptill Manning tells the story of the ASEs in the informative if lightweight When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II. All who read it will be awed by the industry of the men and women who published the books, most of whom donated their services for free. (The authors and publishers of the reprints split a one-cent royalty on every paperback copy.)
Starting from scratch, these civilians quickly managed to get large numbers of books into the hands of large numbers of grateful servicemen. Without their efforts, America’s soldiers and sailors would have found their wartime service to be even more cruelly burdensome than it was—and America’s authors and publishers would have faced a very different set of problems when the war ended and those servicemen returned home.
I rather suspect the program succeeded as well as it did precisely because civilians managed it. It's one thing to have a patron of the arts like Lorenzo de Medici. It's another to have a bureaucrat or an arts administrator attempt to take the place of a Lorenzo. Lorenzo was genuinely cultured, not merely credentialed or appointed.
Triumph of the middlebrow …
… How The Second World War Made America Literate. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
At the heart of middlebrow culture was the belief that high art was accessible to anyone who was willing to put in the effort to understand it, and that reading “serious” bestsellers such as Lust for Life or Marquand’s The Late George Apley could serve as preparation for more ambitious ventures into great literature. For those servicemen who were already in the habit of reading for pleasure, the stateside counterpart of the ASEs was the Book-of-the-Month Club (which is mentioned only in passing in When Books Went to War). Both enterprises were essentially aspirational in their goals, both drew on the same wide-ranging pool of books, and both were broadly successful in elevating the literary tastes of those readers who made good use of them.Reading this, I was reminded that I am myself a product of middlebrow culture. I grew up thinking that even a working-class kid like me could aspire to enjoy Bach and Shakespeare and Rembrandt. All I had to was open myself to them.
Language, literature, and enrichment …
… Anecdotal Evidence: `All the Niceties of Melodious Speech'. (Hate, Dave Lull.)
I can’t speak to Auden’s state of mind but one can readily forgive his lapse in etiquette. It must have been a dreary event: On stage with Sexton were Pablo Neruda, Charles Olsen, Allen Ginsberg and Stephen Spender – world-class gasbags all.True, but Spender, whom I met once, seemed not only nice, but rather humble.
Something to think on …
When the soul drifts uncertainly between life and the dream, between the mind's disorder and the return to cool reflection, it is in religious thought that we should seek consolation.
— Gerard de Nerval, born on this date in 1808
Snowflakes …
…The Trigger-Happy Generation - WSJ.
With any luck, these people will be subjected to so much ridicule that they'll become afraid to bore us any further with their drivel.
With any luck, these people will be subjected to so much ridicule that they'll become afraid to bore us any further with their drivel.
Thursday, May 21, 2015
Pianist James Rhodes memoir blocked no longer
Rhodes’ memoir details the very serious assaults he suffered as a young boy and the way in which music has helped him to deal with the trauma. However, his ex-wife sought to prevent publication of key passages, arguing that they would have too distressing an impact on their 12-year-old son.
Retraction Watch
Listing scientists and others who issue retractions of their work...for example, "[t]he authors of a study that helped foment the public and governmental obsession with bike helmets later issued research that undermined their initial findings."
Masterpiece of masterpieces …
… I Am Not a Cheese - The Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I am a professional musician, and even without a detailed exploration of the harmonic relationships, the counterpoint, or the vocal nuances, I devoured every page. I know these songs very well, but 90 percent of what Bostridge wrote was completely new to me. Ever the history major, Bostridge explores the time and place — circa 1828 in Vienna, where both Müller and Schubert were working — and the cultural significance of some of the references in the songs: a history of tears (in No. 3 “Frozen Tears”), natural phenomena such as Ignis fatuus (No. 9 “Will-o’-the-Wisp”), and an especially fascinating treatise on the linden tree in German literature — No. 5 “The Linden Tree” being perhaps the most famous song in the cycle. A chapter on “The Crow” explores not only Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings but also the symbolism in Hitchcock’s The Birds. Even as I write, I know this threatens to sound dull, dull, dull, but in Bostridge’s beautiful prose, the entire story comes to life, and I swear I could hear little syphilitic Schubert finishing his famous unfinished symphony in the other room. (As a side note, he was one of the first composers to succeed financially simply as a musician, without patronage, and was quite successful in his day.)
Today's nonsense …
… The History of PTSD and the Evolution of Trigger Warnings | The New Republic.
Nice to see that those commenting disagree. Lo, how the New Republic has fallen.
Nice to see that those commenting disagree. Lo, how the New Republic has fallen.
At home, with the sea...
...Colm Tóibín: Writing is always a battle against your own laziness
I have a suspicion that he is terribly lonely.
I have a suspicion that he is terribly lonely.
"Old men should be explorers …"
… Sir Andrew Motion moves from 'suffocating' UK to US - BBC News. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
A copper's son …
… Havoc. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
For many, certainty has become the new normal. But it’s an illusion. Like it or not, as the song has it, trouble is “laying and waiting on you”. Each of us wades in the swamp of everyone else’s actions and intentions. We’ll forever be vulnerable to havoc. And no amount of insurance, risk management or technology will keep it from our door. You might not have sharks in your neighbourhood, but there’ll always be a catastrophic diagnosis in the wings, or a financial crash, or just some moron running a red light.
Appreciation …
… Review: V.S. Pritchett and J.B. Priestley – The Turnpike short stories | The Dabbler. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
A free speech primer …
… How To Spot And Critique Censorship Tropes In The Media's Coverage Of Free Speech Controversies | Popehat.
"Hate speech" means many things to many Americans. There's no widely accepted legal definition in American law. More importantly, as Professor Eugene Volokh explains conclusively, there is no "hate speech" exception to the First Amendment. Americans are free to impose social consequences on ugly speech, but the government is not free to impose official sanctions upon it. In other words, even if the phrase "hate speech" had a recognized legal definition, it would still not carry legal consequences.This is not a close or ambiguous question of law.