Wednesday, October 31, 2018
Hmm …
… Why the Mind–Body Problem Can't Have a Single, Objective Solution - Scientific American Blog Network. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
We will always have to rely on our flawed, subjective human judgments when we try to figure out who we really are and should be, as individuals and as a species.
There are time-honored techniques of introspection that seem capable of providing one with an expeience of who one is. But I suspect that an understanding of who one is cannot be arrived at by means of reason, which can only provide an idea of who one is, which is not at all the same thing.
The horror …
… Angry anthems of a doomed war poet | Standpoint. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
You know it was not the Bosche [sic] that worked me up, nor the explosives, but it was living so long by poor old Cock Robin (as we used to call 2/Lt Gaukroger), who lay not only near by, but in various places around and about, if you understand. I hope you don’t.
Hmm …
… What’s the Matter with Fiction Sales? (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The book column that I wrote was probably the most successful thing I ever did. Not because I am so brilliant, but simply because it was a column that recommended reading a book I had just finished. There are plenty of people who want to read book reviews. The only people who don't seem to know that are the people who run newspapers.
Something to think on …
A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.
— John Keats, born on this date in 1795
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
A life in culture …
… The Radical Moralist: On Lionel Trilling's Literary Criticism | Literary Hub. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
When Trilling died, his obituary was on the front page of The New York Times, and it spoke of him in reverential terms: his “criticism was a moral function, a search for those qualities by which every age in its turn measured the virtuous man and the virtuous society.”
Modest deities …
… First Known When Lost: Small Gods.
… I am well aware of the "progress" humanity has made in the intervening centuries. I can look around and see all that we have wrought. Which is why I do my best to look for Immanence in the beautiful particulars of the World. Which is why I am open to the possibility of small gods dwelling in vales, meadows, groves, springs, and rills.
Beyond the decorous …
… ‘Inventing New Ways to Be’ | by Mark Ford | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Rich’s occasional later attacks on the poetry that she had published in the 1950s can be seen as attacks on her own inherited restraint and caution, on her mannerly evasion of poetry’s mission to challenge and transform.
This world of wonder …
… There is one thing that unites science and faith. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Actually, a sense of doubt is also useful to both.
Listen in …
… Episode 293 – Michael Gerber – The Virtual Memories Show.
“We’re trying to collect and broadcast this specific type of culture before the people who know how to do it properly all pass away.”
Something to think on …
When I was young I pitied the old. Now old, it is the young I pity.
— Jean Rostand, born on this date in 1894
Monday, October 29, 2018
Q&A …
… John Ashbery's Visit with High School Students [by Andrew McCarron] - The Best American Poetry. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Well, I still don’t want to pursue the life of a poet. I started writing poetry when I was in high school actually. It happened when I first discovered modern poetry in an anthology of Louis Untermeyer. Up until then I thought I wanted to be a painter. I became gradually more interested in poetry and it was easier to do than paint. I didn’t have much talent then, surely, as a poet, but I ended up not having any talent as a painter, I think.
The drama of survival …
… His Own “Final Thing”: On Varlam Shalamov’s “Kolyma Stories” - Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
In the early 1980s, John Glad published two volumes of Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales in English, but supplied little context for Western readers. Because his work was often discussed in the context of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, Shalamov was judged a documentarian of Stalin’s camps. The new translation by Donald Rayfield, the first of two volumes, contains 86 stories and for the first time in the West offers a true picture of Shalamov’s artistic accomplishment. Chekhov’s most reliable biographer and the translator of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, Rayfield in his introduction extols the “relentless power of these works, in which the author refuses to soften or mitigate anything.” Readers should be warned: Kolyma Stories is not for the naïve or faint-hearted. The suffering, though artfully rendered, is unending.
Something to think on …
The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you've got it made.
— Jean Giraudoux, born on this date in 1882
Sunday, October 28, 2018
Missed opportunity …
… King Lear: a mesmerizing Hopkins in a disappearing script | The Book Haven.
In large measure, the problem is not the sword, but the scissors. Too much has been cut from this play to make it emotionally intelligible, to give it a rhythm and pacing and keep from reducing it to mere plot. Lear usually clocks in at more than three hours; this production has been pared to a skinny 115 minutes. There’s plenty of blood and punches, but little time for Lear’s humanity.Quite. One waited for lines that never arrived. Of course, I have been spoiled by having seen Paul Scofield do it on stage.
A guide to the oft-neglected …
… Orpheus Britannicus | The Russell Kirk Center. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… in the life of “Uncle Ralph” (as Vaughan Williams was unofficially but widely known), it is as well to be reminded of two features often overlooked: first, the sheer unfashionability of his work during his last decade—he died in 1958, aged 86—and second, the assiduity of his widow Ursula in promoting his cause amid these locust-years for his reputation. Of critics’ unfavorable responses to his Ninth Symphony, which appeared only four months before his death, Dr. Rayborn goes so far as to speak of “the vultures circling, awaiting the end.”I first heard the Ninth not long after its premiere, and I have always loved it.
Something to think on …
It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is.
— Desiderius Erasmus, born on this date in 1466
Saturday, October 27, 2018
In case you wondered …
… The Best Books on Nature of Reality | Five Books Expert Recommendations. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I'm sure it's one of them …
… The most intellectually exhilarating work of the year. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Here, by the way, is a review I wrote of Guy Davenport's Twelve Stories.
My own pick would be Cynthia Haven's Evolution of Desire.
Here, by the way, is a review I wrote of Guy Davenport's Twelve Stories.
Sound ones …
… Five Answers on Pragmatism (2018) | Susan Haack - Academia.edu. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Alarm at Rorty’s relativist excesses and defensiveness about the incursions of would-be philosophers from the literature departments seems to have led — not, as with the classical pragmatists, to a broader and deeper conception of the philosophical enterprise — but to a profound self-absorption. And, to the degree to which this hermeticism has taken hold in the profession, it has emboldened neo-analytic philosophers to aspire to colonize and domesticate previously outlaw territories. In consequence, we see new, blandly analytic styles of feminist philosophy, social epistemology, etc.; and, most to the present purpose, the kidnapping of the word “pragmatism” for projects in the pragmatics of language — as with Robert Brandom’s “analytic pragmatism,” premised on an idea of meaning-as-use and a Rorty-esque conception of justification-as-social-practice. Though Brandom occasionally alludes to Dewey, insofar as I understand this very confusingly expressed congeries of ideas, it seems to have no deep affinity with classical pragmatism …
Something to think on …
Life always offers you a second chance. It is called tomorrow.
— Dylan Thomas, born on this date in 1914
Friday, October 26, 2018
Blogging note …
I must be off and running. I have obligations to meet today and won't be blogging again until later.
The best reading …
… A spiritual reading of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’ | America Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I read them every year. And yes, those lines about exploring do stay with one.
Something to think on …
God changes appearances every second. Blessed is the man who can recognize him in all his disguises. One moment he is a glass of fresh water, the next, your son bouncing on your knees or an enchanting woman, or perhaps merely a morning walk.
— Nikos Kazantzakis, who died on this date in 1957
Thursday, October 25, 2018
Faith and art …
… The value of God-shaped art: A review of Anthony Domestico. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
These are matters that bear not only on the vocation of writers, painters, sculptors, and architects. The fundamental activity for all human beings is poeisis.
A misfit for God …
… Jack Kerouac: Conservative, Catholic | National Review. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
As Kerouac approached death, he sought the solace of his faith especially through his mother, and he attempted to end his mercurial lifestyle by settling in St. Petersburg, Fla. He tried to return to regularly praying in the months before he died, when he was especially vulnerable and his health was ailing.
Rather magical …
… Growing Up in the Library | The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Dave also sends along this: The Library Fire: An Interview [about The Library Book] with Susan Orlean.
It wasn’t that time stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured here, collected here, and in all libraries—and not only my time, my life, but all human time as well. In the library, time is dammed up—not just stopped but saved. The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.
Dave also sends along this: The Library Fire: An Interview [about The Library Book] with Susan Orlean.
Appreciation …
… The American Scholar: Bewitching Sounds of Bronze - Sudip Bose. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Here is an interview I did with Lou.
And here is some of his music:
Back in 1939, in the Dutch East Indies Pavilion of the Golden Gate Exposition, he had first encountered the Javanese percussion ensemble known as the gamelan. The sound of all those bronze metallophones and gongs stayed with him, and after settling in northern California in 1953, he continued to indulge his interest, exploring typically Asian instrumental tunings. While writing one experimental piece after another, Harrison worked a variety of jobs to pay the bills—how many other composers have made their living as, among other things, a fire lookout in the forest service and a veterinary assistant?
Here is an interview I did with Lou.
And here is some of his music:
Hmm …
… Can Catholic literature build on its rich heritage? | America Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
“… the Catholic understanding of freedom is distinct from the existentialist one….”That would come as news to Gabriel Marcel.
Of mice and men …
… Little Mouse - Guernica. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
I rather prefer e. e. cuumings’s more laconic take: me up at does.
I rather prefer e. e. cuumings’s more laconic take: me up at does.
But maybe not enough …
… Fiona Sampson ‘In Search of Mary Shelley’: New Biography Sheds Light on Genius Behind ‘Frankenstein’ | National Review. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Does this narrative do Mary a disservice, I wonder? Was she not a smart, strong woman — a genius, even — who knew what she wanted and wasn’t afraid to get it? And was she also not, perhaps, a bit cruel and cold-blooded in her treatment of others? Sometimes it’s hard to fathom the elasticity of some feminist readings that bend and break under the weight of their own excuses.
Something to think on …
Time and tide wait for no man.
— Geoffrey Chaucer, who died on this date in 1400
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
Literary landscape …
… ‘The streets are haunted’ – Colm Tóibín explores literary Dublin | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The street between Nora’s hotel and Oscar Wilde’s house is called Clare Street. Beckett’s father ran his quantity surveying business from No 6 but there is no plaque here. When their father died in 1933, Beckett’s brother took over the business while Beckett, who was idling at the time, took the attic room. Like all idlers, he made many promises; in this case, both to himself and to his mother. He promised himself that he would write and he promised his mother that he would give language lessons. But he did nothing much. It would look good on a plaque: “This is where Samuel Beckett did nothing much.”
Hmm …
… Beauty Does Not Equal Truth, in Physics or Elsewhere - Scientific American Blog Network. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Well, it depends on what you mean by truth. Historical or scientific fact may not be beautiful, and the former is often quite ugly, but if you accept Aquinas’s view that truth is the conformity of the mind to the nature of the thing, whether that thing is beautiful or not, then you could conclude that truth’s beauty lies in its clarity of vision. Facts may be true, but fact and truth are not identical terms. In the apprehension of being as being truth and beauty may well coincide.
Something to think on …
Both art and faith are dependent on imagination; both are ventures into the unknown.
— Denise Levertov, born on this date in 1923
A major voice …
… The Poetry of Helen Pinkerton | Literary Matters. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
As they say, read the whole thing.
When Helen Pinkerton died on December 28, 2017, she left behind a body of verse that, though modestly compact, has great grace and intelligence. However, while her poetry has never lacked for serious admirers, it has not received recognition commensurate with its excellence. In the following pages, I want to explain why she deserves new readers. She was wonderfully unusual—formidably thoughtful and direct, both in person and on the page. She also had a fascinating life, and to the extent that her life illuminates her poems, I hope to tell her story, blending, so to speak, biography with literary appreciation.
As they say, read the whole thing.
Listen in …
… Episode 292 – Eddie Campbell – The Virtual Memories Show.
“What if you could be employed just sitting in a pub telling stories? I think that’s where it began for me.”
Tuesday, October 23, 2018
Have a listen …
Why a piece like this is not heard in concert halls more often is beyond me. The final movement boasts an especially affecting melody. Today is Ned Rorem's 95th birthday.
Grief …
… A journalist’s death by a repressive government, remembered in verse | PBS NewsHour. (Hat tip, Dave lull.)
A need for quiet attention …
… TT: Never on Sunday | About Last Night.
Morandi is a difficult painter, one whose still lifes inevitably strike the casual viewer as both repetitive and plain. They require close, quiet attention in order to be appreciated. Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence is the apt title of a monograph about Morandi published a couple of years ago. It is inconceivable that anyone capable of talking in the presence of Morandi’s late watercolors, which are so concentrated and oblique as to border on outright abstraction, could possibly be appreciating them.
Something to think on …
The art of translation lies less in knowing the other language than in knowing your own.
— Ned Rorem, born on this date in 1923
Monday, October 22, 2018
Experientia docet …
… Dear Resistance, listen to my lived totalitarian experience - you have no effing idea what you're talking about.
… you really have no idea, and I mean it with the greatest possible respect. Actually, I don’t. Most of you are supposedly mature, rational adults but you seem to have at best the most superficial knowledge of history and a complete lack of self-awareness, any sense of perspective, and an ability to contextualise. Having spent your lives relatively free of hardship, deprivation and persecution on any remotely comparable scale to people in other, less fortunate corners of the world, you probably get some frisson from believing yourself to be big actors at a critical time in history, the last line of separating civilisation from the descent into new dark ages. You’re free to engage in whatever ideological cosplay you want, but don’t expect others to take you seriously.
Q&A …
… James Matthew Wilson: "The Hunger for the Depths of the Divine" - Benedict XVI Institute. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… as I came into maturity at a large state university, I saw the way in which so much of contemporary life was a parody, a substitute, a fraud for faith and its trappings. Everyone has their liturgy, but some are more ridiculous than others, as my kids always point out, on Sunday mornings, as we pass the crowded “barre” exercise studio on our way to Mass.
I saw that “local psychics” pullulated in college towns and knew them for what they were. And so, when I reflected on the Church in that setting it had almost the force of a conversion. First, to the Eucharist. Second, through Dante, to the emanations of the Eucharist in the stuff of culture. And, third, when I first read John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio, to the life of the mind lifted by faith and reason. That first encounter saved me; the second set me onto writing poems; and the third fed my eventual calling to the academy and my work in philosophy, theology, and aesthetics.
I'm shocked …
… The public is losing confidence in higher ed — here’s why | TheHill.
Ideology of any stripe stands opposed to the development of free minds. It represents a closed system of thought, beginning with formulated answers, rather than with the posing of questions, which is the true heart of education. To regain the trust of the public, we must affirm our commitment to authentic dialogue and free and open inquiry.
Something to think on …
Laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence.
— Kingsley Amis, who died on this date in 1995
Sunday, October 21, 2018
Indeed …
… Education is good, but formation is better. (Hat tip, Tim Davis)
Formation is the painstaking, earnest investment of an older generation of mentors in a younger generation of apprentices. At the root of formation is a trusting relationship that a mentor is wise, reliable and well-intended in passing on information to a humble, hard-working and discerning apprentice. Before they were introduced to the nuance of brushstrokes, the great artists first had mentors who taught them to sweep the studio, run errands and mix paints.I think of myself as having been mentored by Edward Gannon, S.J.
Tracking the decline …
… Not Our Kind: The Problem of Book Reviewing Through Tribal Identification. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I love this story—you should love this story—because it's a jewel, a perfect diamond, catching in its facets and unifying into a single brilliancy the light of many apparently different fires in our current cultural disputes. One thing the story shows, for example, is that we have no clear way back, no sufficiently defined penance, for those subjected to public shunning. Another aspect is the mimetic power, the increasing competition for outrage, that our Internet connections fuel—as though the Web had become a laboratory for testing René Girard's theories of social contagion.
Remembering …
… Samuel Taylor Coleridge; a birthday sonnet, and a book! | Malcolm Guite. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I remember my own teenage raptures over Kubla Khan.
A beautiful friendship …
… Tenn’s Best Friend | by Simon Callow | The New York Review of Books.
When it began, the patrician and strikingly handsome Laughlin, 6'6", twenty-eight years old, a champion and pioneering skier, intimate of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein and heir to a Pittsburgh steel fortune, had been running the firm he founded while still at Harvard for seven years, and it was already beginning to make waves: his first publication, New Directions in Prose and Poetry (1936), included contributions from William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, Henry Miller, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and E.E. Cummings. Williams, at thirty-one, had had some half-dozen plays produced by amateurs, with just one professional production, Battle of Angels, in Boston, a major flop that never came to New York. A compulsive scribbler since childhood, he had also written a number of stories and a great deal of verse. They met at Lincoln Kirstein’s apartment. “I saw off in an adjacent room this little man,” said Laughlin. “He was hunched over, wearing a sweater and dirty gray pants. And I said to myself, there’s someone who needs company.” And immediately they were off, talking about their favorite poets.
All-too-human …
… Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce – review | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Van Wyck Brooks, in his autobiography, provides an affecting portrait of John Butler Yeats.
Van Wyck Brooks, in his autobiography, provides an affecting portrait of John Butler Yeats.
Something to think on …
Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, born on this date in 1772
Saturday, October 20, 2018
Radical Catholic …
… The Artist and His Epoch | The Russell Kirk Center. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
In Jones’s mind, people are made in the image and likeness of a Creator, so their defining trait is an ability to subcreatively mirror divine creation in human poiesis. He found this theo-aesthetic anthropology’s belief in the “signum-making proclivity of man” affirmed by Roman Catholicism (to which he converted in 1921): “the Catholic religion took it for granted that this sign-making was not peripheral but central to man.” In turn, Jones argued, such artefacture is re-presentational, as art analogically and sacrament directly show forth an object under fresh forms: “all art re-presents” because it “strives to make in this or that medium an effectual re-calling of something other,” yet the “supreme ‘making’” is the Mass, for “signa and what is signified are one and the same.”
Maverick conservative …
… Letters from Piety Hill. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Libertarian individualism posed no challenge to the liberal or Marxist mindset, but merely played a variation on it. Kirk urged Buckley and the founders of the future Intercollegiate Studies Institute to recognize that the true source of resistance to those “totalist ideologues,” the Marxists of the modern American university, was to be found not in the defiant individual but in the “permanent things” of a civilizing and restraining tradition.
No one could put the case more crisply than Kirk himself—when he refused membership in the budding ISI. “I never call myself an individualist; and I wish that you people hadn’t clutched that dreary ideology to your bosom,” he wrote to ISI’s future president, Victor Milione, in 1954.
I know a bit about this personally. I was employed by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute when it was still the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists. I knew Vic Milione, a wonderful person and conservative in the best sense of the word. I was the first managing of the Intercollegiate Review. I helped design it, and my first professional book review (of Dag Hammarskjöld’s Markings) appeared therein. I was also around this time, briefly, eastern Pennsylvania chairman of Youth for Goldwater.
I first met Bill Buckley around this time and it was Buckley who was instrumental (with Vic’s full approval) of changing ISI’s name. I also met Russell Kirk around this time. Though I can’t say I ever got to know him well, I can say that he was — surprise, surprise — a wonderfully enlightening person to talk to. He seemed a kind man.
The fact is, the “conservative movement” at that time was anything but monolithic. ISI had been founded by Frank Chodorov, an anarchist. There was good reason to be chary of conservatism’s authoritarian adherents. And the individualism was on the order of E. E. Cummings’s. Cummings had been blackballed by left-leaning publishers after he published Eimi, his account of his trip to the Soviet Union. Cummings correctly observed that if Soviet communism was anything, it was hostile to the individual person. My own experience indicated that the individualism espoused by conservatives at the time was pretty much identical with the personalism of Max Scheler.
See also The Ghost of Russell Kirk.
See also The Ghost of Russell Kirk.
Rising star …
… Master of Intricate Forms | A. M. Juster | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Wilson’s verse treats readers with respect; his poems are accessible, but challenging upon further reflection. He can write supple free verse, but tends to favor formal verse—often, but not always, in iambic meters.
Family man …
… Philip Larkin: Letters Home 1936-1977 – review | London Evening Standard.
Eva Larkin emerges as exasperating: timid, tiresome, and dependent, incapable of being on her own or managing life competently, a constant bother.In one letter Larkin actually goes so far as to offer his depressed mother some eloquent life-advice: “Do not worry about the past: it is, after all, past, and fades daily in our memory & in the memories of everyone else. Further, it can’t touch the future unless we let it. Every day comes to us like a newly cellophaned present, a chance for an entirely fresh start… We are silly if we do not amble easily in the sun while we can, before time elbows us into everlasting night & frost.”
Something to think on …
Children know from a remarkably early age that things are being kept from them, that grown-ups participate in a world of mysteries.
— Anthony Hecht, who died on this date in 2004
Friday, October 19, 2018
More than just laughs …
… Review: Wit's End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
One big book …
… A History of the Novel in Two Hundred Essays. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Though he is remembered primarily for being one of the most prodigious and best-loved short-story writers of the twentieth century, Pritchett was a tireless book critic, contributing frequently to the pages of The New Statesman, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. His literary essays were once cherished by writers on both sides of the Atlantic, including Edmund Wilson, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Anthony Burgess. Susan Sontag discovered Pritchett’s reviews when she was a graduate student at Harvard, and later described the encounter as “a revelation”: “I didn’t know you could write about literature in such a way, that you could be lyrical and precise and not carry a huge burden of judgment.” Gore Vidal called Pritchett “our greatest English-language critic.”
Something to think on …
The ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it.
— Lewis Mumford, born on this date in 1895
Thursday, October 18, 2018
To be precise …
… Matters of Tolerance | by James Gleick | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
What makes precision a feature of the modern world is the transition from craftsmanship to mass production. The genius of machine tools—as opposed to mere machines—lies in their repeatability. Artisans of shoes or tables or even clocks can make things exquisite and precise, “but their precision was very much for the few,” Winchester writes. “It was only when precision was created for the many that precision as a concept began to have the profound impact on society as a whole that it does today.” That was John Wilkinson’s achievement in 1776: “the first construction possessed of a degree of real and reproducible mechanical precision—precision that was measurable, recordable, repeatable.”
A book that lives …
… Campus Week: The Brilliant French Catholic Literary Critic Who Revealed My Judaism – Tablet Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Haven’s lucid account of the theoretical throw-weight mustered by the symposium’s list of thinkers—not to mention the style points attributable to their egos and eccentricities—reveals a great deal of insight-in-hindsight, spiced occasionally with refreshing snark. (Jacques Lacan, for example, insisted that his silk underwear be hand laundered because “they were ‘fancy’ and ‘special,’” which elicited a gesture of scorn by the managers of the laundry, who were spotted “wadding them up and throwing them on the floor” by the graduate student who’d been charged with delivering said underwear.)
Hmm …
… Why America's Best Political Novelist Is Required Reading in 2018 | Literary Hub. (Hat tip, Virginia Kerr.)
I’ll just say it. Ward Just is not merely America’s best political novelist. He is America’s greatest living novelist. To our discredit, he’s also America’s Greatest Unknown Novelist.I guess maybe if politics is really important to you.
Something to think on …
Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.
— Henri Bergson, born on this date in 1859
Lots to see here …
… On the Seawall – New writing & commentary hosted by Ron Slate. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Have a look …
… Donald Hall, Former U.S. Poet Laureate, Short Film: 'Quiet Hours' - The Atlantic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Q&A
… Lisa Russ Spaar on Wuthering Heights, Ron Slate, and Canine Literary Critics | Book Marks. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
My hands-down favorite living critic is the poet and essayist Ron Slate, who for years has maintained an exciting on-line forum On the Seawall, a website which has not only featured reviews by a great many other reviewers, but which has allowed Ron himself to bring to light—through his own perspicacious, eloquent examinations of all manner of books (novels, poetry, hybrid texts, art books, cultural studies, history texts)—an aesthetically and demographically diverse array of writers, every one of them lucky to have been considered by this inimitable reviewer. Each of Ron’s essays is a treasure trove of information and illumination.Luckily for readers, On the Seawall is about to evolve into a full-fledged on-line magazine, what Ron himself has called “a community gallery for new writing, commentary and art during a time of emergency. (It is always a time of emergency.)” I try to read everything that Ron writes, and I encourage others to seek out On the Seawall in its new iteration (the launch is in October) and do the same.
Wednesday, October 17, 2018
The price of years …
… Vertigo by Les Murray | Poetry Magazine. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Today is Les Murray’s 80th birthday.
Today is Les Murray’s 80th birthday.
Her own woman …
… A Politically Incorrect Feminist | Frontpage Mag. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
From first to last, Chesler has been a New York girl – born in Brooklyn, now (78 years later) resident on the Upper East Side. “Like all firstborn Orthodox Jewish girls,” she dryly informs us, “I was supposed to be a boy.” Chesler bemoans the limited professional options available to American women in the 1950s, and is frank about the frequent instances of sexual abuse and romantic betrayal she experienced in her youth, during which she was, in turn, a secretary, a student at Bard (where the only “gentleman” among the professors was Ralph Ellison), a “copy boy” at the New York Post, a waitress at that uptown diner later made famous by Seinfeld, a welfare investigator, a scientific researcher, and, ultimately, a budding psychologist, writer, and activist.
Real people performing …
… Anthony Powell’s Secret Harmonies | The New Republic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Powell had, as Spurling has him say of Shakespeare, “an extraordinary grasp of what other people were like.” As a novelist, he had an unusual ability to portray large gatherings of people, and he made the phenomenon of “the party” one of his specialties. His women are particularly convincing, while his best male characters are the louche and slightly disreputable ones. He is not as acute as Evelyn Waugh, the writer to whom he is most often compared, and is certainly not his equal as a stylist, but Powell is a far more disinterested writer than Waugh, and lets his characters reveal themselves in a wholly natural way that Waugh would not have been capable of. Waugh’s fiction always bears the artist’s stamp, whereas Powell’s work appears self-generated.
Something to think on …
In writing if it takes over 30 minutes to write the first two paragraphs select another subject.
— Raymond Aron, who died on this date in 1983
Tuesday, October 16, 2018
Q&A …
… A Talk in the Woods: Barbara Kingsolver and Richard Powers | Poets & Writers. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Hmm …
… Defining the Thing | Dan Hitchens | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Sounds like what Potter Stewart said about pornography — you may not be able to define it, but you know it when you see it.
Sounds like what Potter Stewart said about pornography — you may not be able to define it, but you know it when you see it.
Warts and all …
… The Critic's Critic | National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
He was too much the moralizer and too little the moralist,” Epstein perceptively notes of Hazlitt. “Montaigne looked to himself to understand the world. Hazlitt looked at the world in puzzlement over why it did not understand him. Not quite the same thing.”
Sketches and notebooks …
… ‘The Flame’ burns up the poetry scene | The Daily Texan. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
“The Flame” is arranged in a way that keeps the reader engaged throughout the 288-page collection. With Cohen’s drawings appearing every few pages, the eight sections of poetry and lyrics flow seamlessly into one another. Some other poetry collections feel overwhelming with page upon page of text blocks that seem arranged without regard to topic. This isn’t the case with “The Flame.” The drawings, which are matched with poems of similar subject matters, serve as punctuation marks between the topics of the writing. Its arrangement allows the reader a sort of palate cleanser before moving onto the next selection, like a slice of ginger between courses.
The point of reading …
… The Bookish Life by Joseph Epstein | Articles | First Things. (hat tip, Dave Lull.)
What is the true point of a bookish life? Note I write “point,” not “goal.” The bookish life can have no goal: It is all means and no end. The point, I should say, is not to become immensely knowledgeable or clever, and certainly not to become learned. Montaigne, who more than five centuries ago established the modern essay, grasped the point when he wrote, “I may be a man of fairly wide reading, but I retain nothing.” Retention of everything one reads, along with being mentally impossible, would only crowd and ultimately cramp one’s mind. “I would very much love to grasp things with a complete understanding,” Montaigne wrote, “but I cannot bring myself to pay the high cost of doing so. . . . From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honorable pastime; or if I do study, I seek only that branch of learning which deals with knowing myself and which teaches me how to live and die well.” What Montaigne sought in his reading, as does anyone who has thought at all about it, is “to become more wise, not more learned or more eloquent.” As I put it elsewhere some years ago, I read for the pleasures of style and in the hope of “laughter, exaltation, insight, enhanced consciousness,” and, like Montaigne, on lucky days perhaps to pick up a touch of wisdom along the way.
Listen in …
… Episode 291 – David Small – The Virtual Memories Show.
“It takes a while to learn what you don’t need.”
Something to think on …
I need the binocular approach of science and religion if I am to do any sort of justice to the deep and rich reality of the world in which we live.
— John Polkinghorne, born on this date in 1930
Monday, October 15, 2018
Remembering …
… P. G. Wodehouse on the Eve of Eighty | The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
P. G. Wodehouse was born on this date in 1881.
Rugged individual …
… Moondog: The vagabond who became a countercultural icon. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Although many perceived him as just a homeless eccentric, the reality was that Moondog willingly lived rough for the sake of his art.
Out of many none …
… Divided we stand: identity politics and the threat to democracy. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
What if plural identities survive and thrive best not in modern nation states but in some of the antique institutions that preceded them? How curious if a cosmopolitan civilisation – Appiah’s 21st-century ideal and Fukuyama’s end of history – should turn out to be in the past.
Details, details …
… “Marlowe Would Be Proud”: On “The Annotated Big Sleep” - Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
No doubt the “semi-literate” public will not be rushing to read The Annotated Big Sleep, but for the rest of us, there’s a huge amount to enjoy in the book. I found myself more intrigued by the background information than by the editors’ close reading of the text, which sometimes feels like they’re breathing over your shoulder and making arch remarks, telling you how to read (for example, “Carmen is back to her default between the kitten and the tiger — for now”), but no doubt some readers will feel the opposite way.
In case you wondered …
… First Known When Lost: What The Leaves Say.
In the presence of autumn, anything other than silence is a diminishment.
Lovely …
… Once upon a time in New Orleans | About Last Night. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
A friend sent me a photo taken after Saturday’s show in which Barry Shabaka Henley, the star of this and two previous productions of Satchmo, is seen chatting with a group of audience members. They were, my friend said, members of the Karnofsky family. As I looked at their happy faces, my eyes filled with tears.
Something to think on …
The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves.
— Italo Calvino, born on this date in 1923
Sunday, October 14, 2018
My favorite contrarian …
… Christine Blasey Ford is a poor role model for young women | Spectator USA. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I ain’t no little bird.I can attest that Lionel, whom I very much like, is indeed no little bird.
Hmm …
… God in the Trash Fire: Thomas Traherne Endures - The Millions. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The line of reasoning throughout this piece eludes me. But this, from the concluding paragraph,
suggests, however slightly, that Traherne's thought (and experience) may have had something in common with that of the author of The Cloud of Unknowing.
Traherne’s magnum opus exists in the gaps, written in the lacunas, on a scroll kept inside the distance between that which is known and that which can never be found. Traherne describes this place as a “Temple of Majesty, yet no man regards it. It is a region of Light and Peace, did not man disquiet it. It is the Paradise of God.” Poetry of empty sepulchers and disembodied tombs, of empty rooms and cleared shelves; a liturgy of the Holy of Holies which contains no idol, but only a single, deafening, immaculate absence
The line of reasoning throughout this piece eludes me. But this, from the concluding paragraph,
suggests, however slightly, that Traherne's thought (and experience) may have had something in common with that of the author of The Cloud of Unknowing.
The mystery of charm …
… Life’s Little Luxury. (Hat tip, Dave Lull)
Charm will not feed the hungry, help end wars, or fight evil. I’m not sure that it qualifies as a virtue, and, as is well known, it can be used for devious ends. Yet charm does provide, among other things, a form of necessary relief from the doldrums, the drabness of everyday life. Sydney Smith, the 18th-century clergyman and himself an immensely charming man, wrote that “man could direct his ways by plain reason and support his life by tasteless food; but God has given us wit, and flavour, and brightness, and laughter, and perfumes to enliven the days of man’s pilgrimage and to charm his pained steps over the burning marle.” If your vocabulary is as limited as mine, you will have to look up marle, which turns out to be “unconsolidated sedimentary rock or soil consisting of clay and lime, formerly used as fertilizer.” What Sydney Smith was too charming to say straight out is that charm helps us to get over the crap in life, which, as anyone who has lived a respectable number of years knows, can be abundant.
Unfortunately …
… Spadaro Speaks! | The American Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
So Pope Francis accepted the pontificate in a spirit of penitence. So we must bear it as a penance, I guess.
Successful appropriation …
… "Miss Sherlock": Japan Takes On the Master | Bill Peschel.
Where the show really scores is in the casting of Sherlock and Watson. Yuko Takeuchi is just as mesmerizing as Sherlock as Benedict Cumberbatch. With her distinctive raven’s-wing hair style, her curt dismissal of everyone and their intelligence, her very un-Japanese walk and disregard for manners, she’s fun to watch as she blows through Japanese manners and polite talk. I would love to know how Japanese viewers look at her.
An important skill …
… On Reading 'On Reading Well'. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
As one reads more deeply into this book, it becomes clear Prior is addressing high school teachers and professors of introductory English classes at least as much as students. She implicitly recognizes that too many academics drag students through lowest-common-denominator exercises in postmodern drudgery and indoctrination. They simply lack the experience with which to light up a classroom with excitement about language or debate about the moral issues raised by the world’s greatest writers.