I had to look up ableist. Apparently it means “discrimination in favor of able-bodied people.” So I’m discriminating if I prefer my roofer to be able-bodied. Damn straight.
Tuesday, July 31, 2018
Latter-day puritans …
… The Nation' Apologizes for Publishing Poem With 'Disparaging and Ableist' Language. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
In case you wondered …
… Informal Inquiries: “Here’s why you should study the Bible” — an argument.
Even Richard Dawkins appreciates the KJV as a literary masterpiece.
Good for laughs, though …
… A Reminder That Newsweek Is Very, Very Bad News Site.
The Virgin Galactic headline really is funny.
Blogging note …
My blogging will resume sometime later, since I have things to do around town today.
Delight in disagreement …
… Melissa Balmain: A Literal-Minded Virgin Reads Robert Herrick. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Together at last …
… Wodehouse and Aristotle: On “A Nameless Dread” - The Catholic Thing. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Something to think on …
Who is secure in all his basic needs? Who has work, spiritual care, medical care, housing, food, occasional entertainment, free clothing, free burial, free everything? The answer might be nuns and monks, but the standard reply is 'prisoners'.
— Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, born on this date in 1909
Monday, July 30, 2018
Listen in …
… Episode 280 – David Lloyd – The Virtual Memories Show.
“Art should be an adventure, and once it ceases to be that, you’re done.”
Bigfoot Porn ...
NEWS ITEM - Republican Congressional Candidate in VA reach accused by Democratic opponent of being into "Bigfoot porn" ...
From the comments:
"When furries go rogue."
"Big feet, big hands, or so I would assume."
"Why is a Democrat trying to kinkshame this guy?"
Note to Self: "Kinkshame" - new word
From the comments:
"When furries go rogue."
"Big feet, big hands, or so I would assume."
"Why is a Democrat trying to kinkshame this guy?"
Note to Self: "Kinkshame" - new word
Bad guys …
… BOOK REVIEW: 'The Vory' by Mark Galeotti - Washington Times.
“In the post-Soviet Russia, they blended in with the new elite. The tattoos disappeared, or were hidden beneath the crisp white shirts of a rapacious new breed of gangster-businessman, the avtoritet (authority).” Mr. Galeotti writes. “In the 1990s, everything was up for grabs, and the new vory reached out with both hands. State assets were privatized for kopeks on the ruble, businesses forced to pay for protection that they might not need, and, as the Iron Curtain fell, the Russian gangsters crashed out into the rest of the world.”
Sounds reasonable …
… Murder Case of Salvadoran Poet Roque Dalton's Reopened | News | teleSUR English. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
As Auberon Waugh sagely observed, in explaining why he opposed capital punishment: It is wrong to kill people.
As Auberon Waugh sagely observed, in explaining why he opposed capital punishment: It is wrong to kill people.
Nature and prayer …
… Oliver Sacks on Nature’s Beauty as a Gateway into Deep Time and a Lens on the Interconnectedness of the Universe – Brain Pickings. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
The primeval, the sublime, are much better words here — for they indicate realms remote from the moral or the human, realms which force us to gaze into immense vistas of space and time, where the beginnings and originations of all things lie hidden. Now, as I wandered in the cycad forest on Rota, it seemed as if my senses were actually enlarging, as if a new sense, a time sense, was opening within me, something which might allow me to appreciate millennia or eons as directly as I had experienced seconds or minutes.
Just wonderful …
… “Swallows” | The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I just bought the Kindle version of her translation of Works and Days.
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes …
… The Progress of Reading – the AGNI blog. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Things changed again as I took up teaching and, later, editing AGNI. Now I had a steady flow of student papers to study and grade, and submissions to read. There was also my late arrival in front of the digital screen, with its scrolling text and multiple hyperlinks, not to mention the add-on distractions. The beam of attention began to fracture. The reading life, that vale of soul-making, could not but register the change. The full-on plunge into alternate worlds was becoming less and less frequent. And also more taxing. I felt it. The will to imaginative projection was not as strong as it had been, and it was diminishing steadily.After I became The Inquirer's book editor and had to read more than ever before, I found I had less interest in movies and television. I still watch films from time to time, but about the only thing I watch on TV is the ball game.
Something to think on …
If I could I would always work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be known by their results.
— Emily Brontë, born on this date in 1818
Sunday, July 29, 2018
Our town …
… Last Philly Glimpses, by Linh Dinh - The Unz Review. (Hat tip, Felix Giordano.)
I know a good many of these places. And I've got 22 years on Linh.
Spiritual journey …
… The Book Haven | Cynthia Haven's blog for the written word.
“Camus’s strong bond with his mother is beyond and sometimes against words,” says Apostolidès. Yet Camus’s own mother never read a word of his many books. She was illiterate, half-deaf, and a speech impediment made it difficult for her to hold a conversation.
Inquirer reviews …
There are three reviews in The Inquirer newspaper this morning, but as has become usual, none appear on philly.com. (In the past couple of weeks, I have had to get in touch with John Timpane to correct this, but he is on vacation.)
Hear, hear …
… Nigeness: This and That. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The only thing that matters about fiction – or pretty much anything else – is whether it's good or bad.Once again, Nige and I find ourselves, as they say, on the same page.
Saturday, July 28, 2018
Speaking truth to fashion …
… The Casual Villainy of Feel-Good Neoliberal Bullshit – Reluctant Habits.
The film played. The affluent crowd that gathered in the basement of this tony Manhattan restaurant cheered as some talking head boasted about delivering forty pairs of socks to the homeless. The socks, said this starry-eyed subject, were a way to give the homeless an identity. But I knew damn well that what these people really needed, as I once so desperately begged for, was food, a shelter that wasn’t committed to daily debasement and that actually did something to protect residents from random stabbings, and a stable job that permitted someone who had nothing to save enough resources for first and last month’s rent.
Hmm …
… The Bad Idea That Keeps on Giving - Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I had a run-in with some Randians many years ago when I gave a lecture at what is now Rockford University. They didn't strike me as particularly libertarian, since they were strictly doctrinaire and utterly uninterested in any viewpoint but their own. Randianism is hardly the only brand of libertarianism out there, despite what this writer seems to think. Naturally, he brings up the Koch brothers, conveniently overlooking that they are pro-choice, support same sex marriage, and worked with the ACLU and the Obama administration on criminal justice reform.
Something to think on …
To lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory, but a man with a dungfork in his hand, a woman with a slop pail, give Him glory, too. God is so great that all things give Him glory if you mean that they should.
— Gerard Manley Hopkins, born on this date in 1844
PSA ... for a summer morning in July
GENEVA—In an effort to prevent people from falling into the same dangerous habits, the sudden and tragic death of the world’s oldest woman, Chiyo Miyako prompted the World Health Organization to issue an official warning Friday against eating fish every day and staying active, the 117-year-old’s most widely known avocations.
Fun!
As I lurched down Broad Street on Friday, my Indego bike seat sliding inexorably downward, my knees at my ears, drivers behind me honking to raise the dead, and drivers in front of me deploying the one-finger salute, it occurred to me that following a bike route recommended by my own paper in 1897 might not have been the wisest choice.Still, I felt that Alphonse Estoclet, the Gilded Age Inquirer columnist who came up with the route, would have sympathized with my plight. The paper’s first bicycle columnist, “The Inquirer Roadster,” started riding bikes at a time when people would throw tacks in the road to deter speed demons like Alphonse on their newfangled cycling machines.
Friday, July 27, 2018
Both cryptic and direct …
… Verlyn Klinkenborg and Creative Destruction | BREVITY's Nonfiction Blog.
To Klinkenborg, the sentence is foundational. Creative vocabulary languishes in a shoddy sentence. Tricks of the trade bend and buckle when the glue is weak. He suggests writing only sentences; not grouping them in paragraphs, but treating each separately. He forms them mentally, editing in real time and revising out of order and context. If a sentence stumbles without its neighbor, it has no business on the page.
Who knew?
… Charles Krauthammer’s Gift to Jewish Music - Jewish Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
To my surprise, their inspiration derived from a chance encounter with the very same group of obscure early 20th-century Jewish composers—Joseph Achron, Joel Engel, Alexander Krein, and others—that I was about to research in the archives. These musical men and women had labored alongside the likes of Marc Chagall, Sholem Aleichem, and Chaim Nachman Bialik to transform Yiddish folk traditions into modern art: the first Jewish operas, violin concertos, art songs, and the like. I was en route to the newly opened former Soviet archives to recover their forgotten musical legacies. Charles and Robyn had embarked on ambitious plans to launch a semiannual concert series at the Kennedy Center focused on unknown Jewish classical music.
What a corrspondence …
… The Nun Who Wrote Letters to the Greatest Poets of Her Generation | Literary Hub. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
In 1951, after a literary critic detected a sense of spiritual “nothingness” in his poetry, Stevens wrote Sister Bernetta with a clarification: “I am not an atheist although I do not believe to-day in the same God in whom I believed when I was a boy.” Considering the debate over Stevens’s deathbed conversion to Catholicism, his heartfelt letters to Sister Bernetta are tantalizing. What made the poet comfortable sending such honest thoughts from Hartford, Connecticut to Winona, Minnesota?
Revival …
… Pater in Arcadia by Paul Dean | The New Criterion. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… of the twenty-one contributors, only seven are academic teachers of literature. The others are classicists and art historians. Their collective aim is to make the case that Pater, whom they describe as “our greatest aesthetic critic,” is also a force to be reckoned with in classical studies.I have always enjoyed Pater, actually, whom I read when I was in high school.
Poetry and train travel …
… On “Adlestrop” – Mentor & Muse. (Hat tip, Virginia Kerr.)
… to arrive at a full appreciation of those closing lines, the reader must first traverse the poem and imaginatively join the poet on the train.
Something to think on …
The gentleman is generous and treats all men as his equals, especially those whom he feels to be inferior in rank and wealth.
— Hilaire Belloc, born on this date in 1870
Thursday, July 26, 2018
Appreciation …
… Sarah Caudwell. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Of the six key characters who recur in Caudwell’s novels, five are barristers practising in Lincoln’s Inn. Scatty and sexy Julia Larwood is a member of the small set of Revenue Chambers in 63 New Square; her friends Timothy Shepherd, Desmond Ragwort, Michael Cantrip and Selena Jardine, are to be found next door at Number 62. The final member of this unusual band of partners in crime is Professor Hilary Tamar, tutor in Legal History at St George’s College, Oxford, whose ‘interest in the principles of English law wanes with the Middle Ages.’ Hilary is, in part, narrator of the stories, and the extraordinarily elaborate, mannered style with which the tales are told is an important part of their charm for many readers. One hardly expects a modern crime novel to begin: ‘Cost candour what it may, I will not deceive my readers.’ But that is the opening sentence of The Shortest Way To Hades, and it captures accurately the Tamar voice.
Something to think on …
Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.
— Carl Jung, born on this date in 1875
Reporting while being the story ...
I am a gay man reporting on gay rights in India. But I am also invisible in many situations, asking the questions but never answering them. As a journalist, I struggled with my own place in the narrative.
Wednesday, July 25, 2018
Unfortunately so …
… “The reason we don’t have any privacy is because people can make money off of our not privacy.” | The Book Haven.
In a 17th century village, everything was known because it was nearby. The late twentieth century atomized that model. Now, in a strange inversion of the village culture, everything is known even if far away, while many of us do not know the names of the person who lives next to us, in Apartment 3B.We actually live in an old-fashioned neighborhood. Except for the newcomers, who pretty much stick to themselves, we do know each other and hang out together.
Look and listen …
… Episode 279 – Hal Mayforth – The Virtual Memories Show.
“As a kid, I was scared of Superman comics. Robots, too.”
Listen in …
… The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale: Jean Guy Boin on the French Book Publishing Experience.
Economist Jean-Guy Boin is the former Director General of the International Bureau of French Publishing (www.bief.org), the international promotion organization of French books. He has held various positions in the book sector: teacher and trainer, researcher specializing in publishing economics, general administrator of a publishing house of literature and human sciences, head of the department "book economics" department at the Ministry of Culture and Communication. He is the author of two books on "small publishers" (La Documentation française) and has written numerous articles on the economics of publishing, the bookstore and the distribution of the book.
Something to think on …
Learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
— Eric Hoffer, born on this date in 1902
Tuesday, July 24, 2018
Important, if inconsistent …
… Memoirs of a Survivor. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
She sounds to me to be like all of us — a work in progress.
When the wish is father to the thought
… Quid plura? | “How soft your fields so green can whisper tales of gore…” (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
These 19th-century racial notions aren’t surprising, but they’re a good reminder to be wary when authoritative scholars in any age argue primarily from trendy thinking. Horsford isn’t content with his wealth, his impressive accomplishments in chemistry, or his legacy in the kitchens of the world. Driven in part by racial pride, he hopes to use his well-trained mind to disentangle the knotted mysteries of human civilization.But before you dismiss him, just remember that "If you’ve baked anything this week, you can thank a Viking-obsessed Harvard chemist."
Music and life …
… Poem of the week: Prison Camp Violin, Riga by Robert Sheppard | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Worth noting …
… The Wit and Wisdom of John D. MacDonald | CrimeReads. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
“Most beginners think that writing is a quick ticket to some kind of celebrity status, to broads and talk shows. Those with that shallow motivation can forget it. Here’s how it goes. Take a person 25 years old. If that person has not read a minimum of three books a week since he or she was ten years old, or 2,340 books—comic books not counted—and if he or she is not still reading at that pace or preferably, at a greater pace, then forget it. If he or she is not willing to commit one million words to paper—ten medium-long novels—without much hope of ever selling one word, in the process of learning this trade, then forget it. And if he or she can be discouraged by anyone in this world from continuing to write, write, write—then forget it.”John Jakes once told me that, when he had his first best-seller, he was surprised at how everybody just assumed it was his first book. It was his 26th.
Another mob …
… BOOK REVIEW: 'The Corporation' by T.J. English - Washington Times.
“Given the ubiquitous presence of bolita among Cubans of all classes and genders, it was perhaps inevitable that the game would thrive in the Cuban exile communities of Miami and Union City,” Mr. English writes. “The man whose name would come to be associated with this illegal activity in the United States had not been a seasoned bolitero, or bolito boss, back in Cuba. He had been a cop in the city of Havana during the reign of the Batista dictatorship. His name was Jose Miguel Battle y Vargas.”
Jane Austen and the Prince Regent
Jane Austen’s novels may epitomize Regency England, but she didn’t think much of the man for whom the period was named.
Like many of her compatriots, Austen loathed the Prince Regent, once railing in an 1813 letter against the man whose gluttony, profligacy and infidelities scandalized the nation. In 1815, when she was strong-armed into dedicating her fourth novel, “Emma,” to the future George IV, she produced a tribute so strained that a scholar called it “one of the worst sentences she ever committed to print.”
But now, in a delicious irony that Austen herself might have appreciated, it turns out that the man who was counted among her most reviled readers might also have been one of her very first...
Something to think on …
The friends we have lost do not repose under the ground ... they are buried deep in our hearts. It has been thus ordained that they may always accompany us.
— Alexandre Dumas, born on this date in 1802
Monday, July 23, 2018
Frontiers …
… David Bohm, Quantum Mechanics and Enlightenment - Scientific American Blog Network. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.
Bohm hoped scientists would eventually move beyond mechanistic and even mathematical paradigms. “We have an assumption now that’s getting stronger and stronger that mathematics is the only way to deal with reality,” Bohm said. “Because it’s worked so well for a while, we’ve assumed that it has to be that way.”
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes …
… Leaving New York to Find the American Dream in Philadelphia - The New York Times. (Hat tip, Dan Bloom.)
Well, we're pretty settled, since we own the house we live in, and it just keeps increasing in value. But for various reasons — taxes, stunningly inept politicos — Philadelphia may well prove a liability eventually, and we could take ourselves elsewhere if necessary, probably upstate, where we used to vacation and have friends.
Bok, by the way, is just eight blocks due south of us.
Well, we're pretty settled, since we own the house we live in, and it just keeps increasing in value. But for various reasons — taxes, stunningly inept politicos — Philadelphia may well prove a liability eventually, and we could take ourselves elsewhere if necessary, probably upstate, where we used to vacation and have friends.
Bok, by the way, is just eight blocks due south of us.
Bok is topped by two rooftop bars with dynamite views of the surrounding rowhouse neighborhood, where, in a scene straight out of “Rocky,” vendors at the outdoor Italian Market still burn cardboard in garbage cans for heat in the winter.Literally so, since Rocky was partly shot in the Italian Market, off of which we live.
Curious classic …
… Lovers of Wisdom | by Jim Holt | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Now, one is loath to put oneself in the position of adjudicating between Hegel and Nietzsche. In this case, however, I think it is safe to render a verdict, if a disappointingly bland one: they are both partly right. The philosophers chronicled by Diogenes Laertius fall into two broad categories: those who are primarily interested in the ethical question of how to live and those who aren’t. In treating the former, he does a pretty good job; in treating the latter, he is horrible.
Bees and yarn …
… Forgotten Poems #46: "The Bee," by Anne Lynch Botta.
This poem does the classic volta or "turn" that sonnets do in the 9th line, explaining what that bee simile is about: finding the "hidden sweet" in the "varied human flowers we meet," even the worst ones. I think the point of the final lines ("like the bee, if home the spoil we bear, / Hived in our hearts it turns to nectar there") is that we should try to see and appreciate the good in everyone, or that we can learn something even from people we can't stand, or, probably, both of those things.
Sunlight and noir …
… BBC News - Where Jeeves meets a hard-boiled detective. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… for all the undoubted differences in their lives and their work, Wodehouse and Chandler also had quite a lot in common. They both grew up with distant relations to their parents, and they were intimidated by overbearing aunts. They were both denied the opportunity to go on from school to Oxford or Cambridge, because the family funds were deemed to be insufficient.And they eventually became hugely successful bestsellers throughout the English-speaking world. Even more importantly, Wodehouse and Chandler were profoundly influenced by their time and their teachers at Dulwich.
Something to think on …
The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should by the rules be dated.
— Raymond Chandler, born on this date 1888This appeared yesterday because of a glitch.
Sunday, July 22, 2018
Hmm …
… Midlife crisis? It’s a myth. Why life gets better after 50 | Society | The Guardian.
Not long before my 50th birthday I interviewed the composer Lou Harrison. During our conversation, my impending birthday somehow got mentioned, and Lou said, “That’s the best decade of your life.” I was skeptical and asked him why he thought that. “You know what you want to do, you know how to do it, and you still have the energy.” He turned out to be right, including his afterthought that sooner or later you start to fall apart.
The Dickens of Detroit …
… The Humane Vision of Elmore Leonard | The Russell Kirk Center. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… unlike the novels of hard-boiled fiction master Raymond Chandler, Leonard’s novels aren’t (ultimately) about the moral ambiguities of crime detection or the pleasures of solving a puzzle. Nor are they (ultimately) about beach bum expertise or access to friends in high places, as in John D. MacDonald’s wonderful private investigator series starring Travis McGee. Trained as Leonard was by writing for pulps like Dime Western, Leonard tends to focus instead on moments of truth that people either rise to or flee from, according to varying degrees of valor, imagination, and moral probity.
Summer reading ...
I am in an early 20th century English popular lit period, from P.G. Wodehouse to Agatha Christie to Anne Perry. While Anne Perry is a contemporary writer, the other two are closer in time, with P.G. Wodehouse beginning to publish around the turn of the century, then Agatha Christie in the 20's.
It occurred to me the older authors write similarly, Perry more in a current reading style, more about social consequences of the lives of people back then. All three of course, are within a period that has been richly chronicled in so many ways, including TV ("Upstairs, Downstairs", "Downton Abbey").
The best author of the period is Wodehouse:
It occurred to me the older authors write similarly, Perry more in a current reading style, more about social consequences of the lives of people back then. All three of course, are within a period that has been richly chronicled in so many ways, including TV ("Upstairs, Downstairs", "Downton Abbey").
The best author of the period is Wodehouse:
My Aunt Dahlia, who runs a woman's paper called Milady's Boudoir, had recently backed me into a corner and made me promise to write her a few authoritative words for her 'Husbands and Brothers' page on 'What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing.' I believe in encouraging aunts, when deserving; and, as there are many worse eggs than her knocking about the metrop. I had consented blithely. But I give you my honest word that if I had had the foggiest notion of what I was letting myself in for, not even a nephew's devotion would have kept me from giving her the raspberry. A deuce of a job it had been, taxing the physique to the utmost. I don't wonder now that all these author blokes have bald heads and faces like birds who have suffered.
"Jeeves," I said, when he came back, 'you don't read a paper called Milady's Boudoir by any chance, do you?'
"No, sir. The periodical has not come to my notice."
"Well, spring sixpence on it next week, because this article will appear in it. Wooster on the well-dressed man, don't you know."
"Indeed, sir?"
"Yes, indeed, Jeeves. I've rather extended myself over this little bijou. There's a bit about socks that I think you will like."
He took the manuscript, brooded over it, and smiled a gentle, approving smile.
"The sock passage is quite in the proper vein, sir," he said.
"Well expressed, what?"
"Extremely, sir.' I watched him narrowly as he read on, and, as I was expecting, what you might call the love-light suddenly died out of his eyes. I braced myself for an unpleasant scene. 'Come to the bit about soft silk shirts for evening wear?' I asked carelessly. 'Yes, sir,' said Jeeves, in a low, cold voice, as if he had been bitten in the leg by a personal friend. ...
Wodehouse, P.G.. Carry On, Jeeves (illustrated) (p. 199). A.R.N. Publications. Kindle Edition.
Something to think on …
If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.
— Carl Sandburg, who died on this date in 1967
we used to call this gigo* ...
... now machines "hallucinate".
Google Translate is giving sinister religious prophecies.
*garbage in, garbage out
Google Translate is giving sinister religious prophecies.
*garbage in, garbage out
Saturday, July 21, 2018
I’m not so sure …
… How to crack consciousness. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Consciousness is meant to be employed, not analyzed.
Hmm …
… “Restless digging for the deepest human truths”: playwright Christopher Shinn on “Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard” | The Book Haven.
Perhaps Girard’s reticence about his life derived from a conviction that his ideas were too important to get contaminated by a cult of personality, and silence protected him from such temptations.Perhaps also because his life was his own and we have a right to privacy.
And the winners are …
… Thousands entered the iPhone Photography Awards contest. These are the winners. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Influential photos …
… These Century-Old Photos Inspired Some of the West's First Bird Refuges | Audubon. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
The Oregon Historical Society and Oregon State University recently collaborated on a project to collect and digitize much of the work of Finley and his colleagues. During 2016 and 2017 they digitized more than 6,800 images and more than 8,000 pages of manuscript materials. The small sampling featured here offers a fascinating inside look at the beginnings of the conservation movement.
Something to think on …
Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.
— Marshall McLuhan, born on this date in 1911
Alessandro Baricco
Last time I posted, there was an interesting discussion which emerged around literary style. (My original post focused on the novels of Ian McEwan.)
In that discussion, I argued that beauty alone is not a style, and that McEwan, despite his beautiful sentences, does not have much of a style. I still believe that to be true -- not least because of the novel I've just finished by the Italian writer Alessandro Baricco.
Baricco has a clear style, and in The Young Bride he makes that known. His sentences are rambunctious and disjointed; he jumps from the first to the third person (and back); he engages in meditations on art and the creative process -- all while furthering his narrative. Reading Baricco's book was like riding on a cobbled road: there are bumps, but after a while, they give way to a certain rhythm.
Don't be mislead: I'm not saying The Young Bride is a perfect novel: in many ways, it's quite flawed: Baricco, for one, can be quite self-indulgent. But the book does chart new territory, especially in its exploration of the bizarre. Baricco imagines a family full of quirks, and full of quirky sexual deviance. At the same time, however, there's a charming quality to that family, something about them that attracts.
Style aside, The Young Bride is also notable for its references to theater. Baricco capitalizes the names of his central characters, for instance: the Father, the Mother, the Daughter, etc. This has the effect of establishing them as a playwright might: they interact in an artificial space devised by the author, but at the same time, they represent something real, something tangible.
As I say, The Young Bride is not a perfect book, but on style alone, it's worthy of the attention it's garnered. I was pleased by my introduction to the world of Alessandro Baricco.
Friday, July 20, 2018
And trip others up with …
… Edward Feser: Fallacies physicists fall for. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Scientism is simply not a coherent position. You cannot avoid having distinctively philosophical and extra-scientific theoretical commitments, because the very attempt to do so entails having distinctively philosophical and extra-scientific theoretical commitments. And if you think that these commitments are rationally justifiable ones – and of course, anyone beholden to scientism thinks his view is paradigmatically rational – then you are implicitly admitting that there can be such a thing as a rationally justifiable thesis which is not a scientific thesis. Which is, of course, what scientism denies. Thus scientism is unavoidably self-defeating.
Anniversary …
… 50 Years Ago, Kingsley Amis Had a Midlife Crisis and Turned to James Bond for Help - The Millions. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
“I do expect to make quite a lot of money out of the venture,” Amis admitted in a 1968 article for The Observer. I’m hardly surprised. Ian Fleming ranks as the highest-earning British crime-fiction writer of all time, and his estate collected royalties on the sales of a staggering 60 million books during the two years following the author’s death. Amis only needed to hold on to this installed base of James Bond fans to ensure a life of wealth and luxury.But Amis also ardently defended the move on its purely literary merits. A few years earlier, Amis had responded to criticisms of Fleming’s Thunderball with one of the most cogent arguments ever made for the worthiness of escapist fiction. “I think wish fulfillment is a common and normal human activity…No adult ought to feel like an adult all the time.” Even if the Bond novels simply served as a means of compensating for adolescent inferiority complexes, they would be “praiseworthy rather than blameworthy on that ground.”
The style and the man …
… On the Art and Influence of Hemingway's Short Stories | Literary Hub. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… it is the Hemingway style, developed slowly as he toiled away at his first book of short stories while in Paris, that distinguished his stories from reportage, a style long afterwards as codified as answers in a sophomore lit exam: Short simple declarative sentences; limited choice of words; a shortage of adjectives; Biblical phrases and cadence; stream of consciousness passages.
A tale of two books …
… Zen and the Art of a Higher Education - Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
While Pirsig’s ZAMM did the most to establish the genre, his book is neither derivative of Herrigel’s mystification and authoritarianism, nor befuddled by the slack anti-intellectualism of the knockoffs that followed it. Too many of these books, however, followed Pirsig’s title but not his book’s erudition or earnest intellectual engagement. They used “Zen” only to mock expertise, evade thinking with evidence, or badmouth analytic thought.
Still we might ask of Pirsig’s opus: What’s Zen got to do with it? If we heed Pirsig’s “Author’s Note” on the first page of the book, the answer might be: nothing. “It should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice.” Note taken.
Something to think on …
An attitude of permanent indignation signifies great mental poverty. Politics compels its votaries to take that line and you can see their minds growing more impoverished every day, from one burst of righteous indignation to the next.
— Paul Valery, who died on this date in 1945
Subcultures
Women’s media, as a result, has never been scammier. The product sold by Refinery29, Bustle, PopSugar, and TheSkimm is bad ...
Women’s media has also run on the first-personal travails of women. Though it sets a wildly different editorial tone, the Money Diaries invoke the ghost of xoJane, which exploited readers and writers alike by holding a “contest” for the best “It Happened To Me” first-person story. What happened was that it ran an endless stream of unpaid blog posts in which readers were invited to offer up their most traumatic experiences in return for zero dollars. The site came to represent the worst of the Personal Essay Industrial Complex, in which a publication creams the profits off women’s trauma, especially women of color, in the name of feminist solidarity.
Plus ca change ...
3000 or so years after King David's United Monarchy, Israel again becomes a Jewish nation-state:
The head of the special committee that legislated the bill, MK Amir Ohana (Likud), told the plenum it could be the most important legislation in the history of the state. He said the bill had been discussed more than any of the basic laws that have been passed before.
The law's sponsor, Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Avi Dichter, turned to Arab MKs in the final address before voting and told them: "We were here before you, and we will be here after you." But he said their rights as minorities would not be harmed by the law.
Thursday, July 19, 2018
Good Sport...
Art consultant satirized in Sacha Baron Cohen's Who is America?:
How did you feel when you saw the final segment?I felt lucky and fortunate. Thank you, God or gods or destiny, for bringing me into the path of this comic genius and letting me be tangentially involved in a project that is noble and worthy, even if it ruffles feathers. You gotta learn to laugh and realize that without art and satire, humanity would have perished thousands of years ago. We have to identify things that are wrong in our culture and we have to find solutions and the best way to do that sometimes is to view them from a perspective that will cause less pain.
I just don’t take myself as seriously as the politicians. They put themselves in the limelight and then they act so victimized. I don’t feel like I got shammed or look like a fool. I think to most people I came off pretty good.
Goats and much more …
… Another Yellow Entirely. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Sometimes Najarian reaches those moments of lyricism by employing an abrupt, almost impatient tone that contains within it helplessness, frustration, and longing. It recognizes the need to let go and believe in unseen things. In “First Kidding,” the narrator, helping a doe in labor, says, “Now go./Go home. A doe will recognize her own.” And in “With the Herd,” this same insistent voice says, “Stop calling them. Stand still. They will not stir/until you turn the light on your known face.”
The wait is over …
… Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2018 Book Preview - The Millions. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Faith as lived …
… Dana Gioia on Timothy Murphy - Benedict XVI Institute. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Timothy Murphy’s Devotions revives this major but neglected poetic genre with variety and amplitude. In over two hundred short poems, Murphy explores the vicissitudes of modern spiritual life. Some of the poems are inspirational, celebrating the joyous mysteries of faith. Others confront the sorrows and failures of contemporary life—presenting unvarnished the painful dramas of sin, despair, repentance, and redemption. Murphy celebrates the saints, but he has not forgotten “the battered, the drunkards, the sinners,” among whom the poet still numbers himself. In these poems the drama of redemption is not abstract but personal.
Something to think on …
Life is no straight and easy corridor along which we travel free and unhampered, but a maze of passages, through which we must seek our way, lost and confused, now and again checked in a blind alley. But always, if we have faith, a door will open for us, not perhaps one that we ourselves would ever have thought of, but one that will ultimately prove good for us.
— A. J. Cronin, born on this date in 1896
Omega-3 ain't all that ...
Omega-3 no protection against heart attack or strokes, say scientists
Supplements do not offer cardiovascular benefits
Wednesday, July 18, 2018
Usages …
… Uncensored John Simon: Cultured Person. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I guess I'm not old enough to remember when exquisite was accented on the first syllable.
Reticent drama …
… Ted Kooser's 'Kindest Regards: New and Selected Poems' Review | National Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
What remains unspoken behind Kooser’s lines creates drama. The mystery of “Abandoned Farmhouse” is downright arresting. In this fractured home, a “Bible with a broken back” rests, “dusty with sun.” A large man once lived here, but he was “not a man for farming, say the fields / cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn.” He had a wife and child, and they struggled: “Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves / and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar hole.” They survived harsh winters, rags stuffed into window frames, but “something went wrong.” Cellar jars, sealed and filled, suggest a quick exit — and so do the child’s toys “strewn in the yard / like branches after a storm.”
Something to think on …
Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.
— Jessamyn West, born on this date in 1902
Tuesday, July 17, 2018
Q&A …
… Staying Nimble with a Diet of Jokes and a Pinch of Stephen Hawking: A Conversation with Leonard Mlodinow - Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… Mlodinow doesn’t simply explore the awe-inspiring complexity of the brain (there’s plenty to be awed by) but also what “thought” really means at a time when technology is speeding up our daily experiences of everything, especially the flow of information.That acceleration challenges the brain’s top-down, analytical thinking abilities. One result is that the brain’s bottom-up thinking structures — nonlinear, highly elastic — must compensate and pick up more of the slack. That is not a bad thing, though, because elastic thinking has frequently been the source of innovation.
Hmm …
… 50 Must-Read Fiction And Nonfiction Books About Music. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Speaking of the last, here is my review of Pops. And here is an example of what I mean:
Post bumped.
How about Jacques Barzun or David Cairns on Berlioz? Or Michael Kennedy on Richard Strauss. Or Terry Teachout on Louis Armstrong?
Speaking of the last, here is my review of Pops. And here is an example of what I mean:
The thread running through this “epic journey from squalor to immortality” is the music — and the marvel of Teachout’s book is the way in which his descriptions of that music illuminate the life. Here’s what he has to say about Armstrong’s 1933 recording of Harold Arlen’s “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues”:… Armstrong, in a departure from his customary practice on ballads, dispenses almost entirely with Arlen’s melody, substituting instead a series of rhythmically free phrases that lead upward to a high B-flat. Four times he falls off from that shining note — and then comes the fifth fall, at the bottom of which he changes course and swoops gracefully upward to a full-throated D … Armstrong seems to have broken through to a realm of abstract lyricism that transcends ordinary human emotion. Only then does he condescend to ease back into the vicinity of the tune, returning the bedazzled listener to the everyday world.
Post bumped.
Something to think on …
Labour was the first price, the original purchase - money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased.
— Adam Smith, who died on this date in 1790
Fake but accurate
[S]ince 2011, the psychology field has been giving itself an intensive background check, redoing more than 100 well-known studies. Often the original results cannot be reproduced ...
Psychology has millions of amateur theorists who test the findings against their own experience. The public’s judgments matter to the field, too.
It is one thing to frisk the studies appearing almost daily in journals that form the current back-and-forth of behavior research. It is somewhat different to call out experiments that became classics — and world-famous outside of psychology — because they dramatized something people recognized in themselves and in others.
They live in the common culture as powerful metaphors ...
Nature and memory …
… Deep Water: 'A field by a river' by Pam Burr Smith - Portland Press Herald. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Listen in times two …
… Episode 277 – Nathaniel Popkin – The Virtual Memories Show.
… Episode 278 – Dmitry Samarov – The Virtual Memories Show.
“A city, like a book, can be read.”
… Episode 278 – Dmitry Samarov – The Virtual Memories Show.
“The curse of knowing more is that you see more.”
Monday, July 16, 2018
Family man …
… Seamus Heaney’s family on life with the great poet: ‘He was always just Dad at home' | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
While the Heaney children grew up with his work, by a quirk of the curriculum they didn’t study him at school. It was only when in the US for a semester that Catherine had the bizarre experience of having to answer an exam question about a poem written by her father about her grandmother.
In case you wondered …
… How Donald Hall changed Ox-Cart Man from the poem to the children’s book. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Hall is often described as a poet of rural life and New Hampshire’s natural world, or, better, as the plain-spoken chronicler of daily life and its blisses and heartbreaks. (He lived for decades, before and after the death of his wife, poet Jane Kenyon, in the 1803 New Hampshire farmhouse that had been Hall’s grandfather’s home.) Ox-Cart Man could be dismissed as patriarchal, capitalist, and nationalist in its celebration of a New England yeoman farmer—Hall is not usually thought of as a political or particularly progressive poet—but instead, this book assures me that all our work holds good, even if we can’t see the long-term effects from here.
Anatomy of a masterpiece …
… A Multi-Layered Drama - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The sun in Leonardo’s conception is crucial to communicating the most important aspect of the entire fresco: Jesus’ impending death as a consequence of the betrayal he announces. Leonardo uses the relatively new technique of linear perspective, placing the vanishing point such that if Jesus turned to look out at us it would be between his eyes. More than a pictorial device, it reinforces the Renaissance idea that linear perspective, with its basis in mathematical reason and the principles of vision, leads one toward God.
Listen in …
… The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale: Heloise d'Ormesson on Book Publishing in France.
Héloïse d'Ormesson is a French publisher who founded a publishing house that bears her name. She studied comparative literature at Yale Univeristy in the United States, where she landed her first job in publishing, and then returned to France to work at Flammarion as director of foreign literature, and subsequently as an editor at Denoël, Laffont, and within the Gallimard group of companies.In 2004, she founded Editions Héloïse d'Ormesson with her partner Gilles Cohen-Solal. She is the daughter of famed French writer Jean d'Ormesson
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