Friday, November 30, 2018

Bonanza …

… Solzhenitsyn, Russian Nobelist and noblest Russian | Spectator USA. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In one of the great and inspiriting publishing events of recent years, the University of Notre Dame Press will be bringing out most of the previously untranslated works of the Russian Nobelist and noblest Russian, including the just-published Between Two Millstones: Sketches of Exile, 1974-1978.

Hmm …

… We Need to Destroy the Blurbing Industrial Complex - The Millions. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)



This just doesn't strike as a terribly pressing problem.

On the road …

… Tracy K. Smith, America's Poet Laureate, Travels the Country to Ignite Our Imaginations | Innovation | Smithsonian. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

Over her three-day trek across Alaska, Smith had marveled at all manner of taxidermy, from the stuffed moose standing sentry in the middle of the Anchorage airport to the buffalo head staring down at her as she read poems at an assisted-living facility in Palmer. But here was the real thing: a black bear, jaunty and unabashed, loping through a Mendenhall Valley subdivision at the edge of Glacier Highway in broad daylight.
“Oh, wow—wow,” said Smith, who considers her “spirit animal” to be her rescue dog, a chocolate Lab retriever named Coco. “I don’t know if I could live like this.”

Forgotten no more …

… Early Anne Sexton works rediscovered after 60 years | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

All five pieces appeared in the Christian Science Monitor between July 1958 and July 1959, which is where Zachary Turpin, assistant professor of American literature at the University of Idaho, discovered them while searching Sexton’s digital archive. Turpin, who has previously uncoveredlost writings by Walt Whitman, worked with Erin Singer, assistant professor of English at Louisiana Tech, to look for any mention of the works.

Something to think on …

Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.
— Jacques Barzun, born on this date in 1907

Edgar Allan Poe


I'd wanted to read the stories of Edgar Allan Poe for some time. But now, having finished a portion of those contained in the Oxford collection, I'm not certain they were worth the wait. 

For one, Poe's writing doesn't hold up well: certainly, he has a style; but his syntax is complex to the point of extremity. There are no simple sentences here; each paragraph reads as a rhetorical maze. For me, this distracted from the stories themselves: it was as if, having navigated Poe's prose, I found myself without sufficient energy to enjoy his stories. 

About those stories: there's a real element of the perverse here. Each of the tales I read made reference -- whether obliquely or otherwise -- to death, pain, and violence. I don't know enough to say whether those themes punctuated Poe's own life, but it's clear that he found them central to his fictional pursuits. 

For me, the stories stressed the power embedded in pain: indeed, each act of violence, each moment of darkness seemed to hint at an alternate universe, one through which Poe's characters must pass before returning to the familiar. But that return -- that longing to prove sanity -- is so often frustrated: violence cannot be overcome, because the world, Poe seems to argue, is bound by a perpetual state of conflict. 

Sometimes, that conflict manifests in the external world as violence between men. But more often, judging from these stories, it surfaces internally: characters cannot control themselves in the face of their demons. They wrestle with internal conflict to the point of perversion. In some sense, then, the violence here knows no bounds...

...Save in Poe's own writing, which, in its complication, limits the full expression of that violence. This was a dark, but ultimately impenetrable collection of stories.    

Thursday, November 29, 2018

Back and forth …

… Dwight Garner’s favourite quotations, in conversation with each other. (Hat tip, Dave  Lull.)



One of these quotes proves that Martin Amis doesn't know squat about American politics, except perhaps what he's heard others say.

Hmm …

 Imminent VictoriansThe American Spectator. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I expect to see the mainline churches convert to Islam — en masse— within my lifetime.
I don't. But the author of this piece does.

Landmark research …

… Cataloging Black Knowledge | Perspectives on History | AHA. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

As some librarians today contemplate ways to decolonize libraries—for example, to make them less reflective of Eurocentric ways of organizing knowledge—it is instructive to look to Porter as a progenitor of the movement. Starting with little, she used her tenacious curiosity to build one of the world’s leading repositories for Black history and culture: Howard’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. But she also brought critical acumen to bear on the way the center’s materials were cataloged, rejecting commonly taught methods as too reflective of the way whites thought of the world.

The way things were …

… Photography Iconic images from founding father of US social photography | Morning Star. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)



My mother got her first factory job at age 13. She was a good student, and had just won a statewide penmanship competition.

Anniversary and more …

… Beyond Eastrod : Louisa May Alcott — her birthday and my resolution.

There's a plaque on Germantown Avenue noting the site where she was born. I lived in Germantown, which is now a part of Philadelphia, for 20 years, and I was born in Germantown Hospital.

Something to think on …

The greatest evils in the world will not be carried out by men with guns, but by men in suits sitting behind desks.
— C. S. Lewis, born on this date in1898

She is who she is …

Inés Is Inés

By John Timpane


Inés is hiding in the basement with freedom and democracy,
Eighteen artificial-light months in Name of church in Name of town,
Name of state.
Freedom and democracy don’t come out
Or they’ll be snatched by law and order and cast so far
Away they’ll lose their names, their faces, lose all
The reasons Inés came here thirty years ago,
Worked, paid taxes, raised children, and thanked God for
Freedom and democracy. All that time Inés was
OK until Inés in a yank of levers, a swirl of robes, became
Not OK, until it became venal, lethal. Her
Children were born here stamped
Legal. But Inés hides in
Abasement. Outside
Where freedom and democracy live, a comedy:
The feds buzz the church, drive-by, drive-by; they know
All about Inés and look for a
Moment’s forgetting, a face outdoors,
And swoop. But
Look: the local cops stand guard in the parking lot:
No feds in our house. Inés is Inés
Long as she stays in the shadows
And the sun rises on freedom and democracy.
This is the morning the guardians turn stalkers.
This is the night a nation of children sundered from parents are smuggled into the desert.
This is the vault of vampires trading
Conscience for power,
This is the lab of tyrants creating crisis
Where there is none;
This is the scream of air rushing out of church, office, garden;
This is why there is no air or freedom or democracy as Inés cooks tamales beneath a church the night before Christmas, with her free children around her, not in a church, beneath us all.
This is the truth about sanctuary: there is no sanctuary except
For everyone the vote, prayer for those who pray.

Blogging note …

Once again, I must be out and about. Will resume blogging later on.

Just so you know …

… 2018’s Best Sports Cities.



Nice to know that Philly's even better at sports than at sinning.

In case you wondered …

… Is Literary Glory Worth Chasing? | by Tim Parks | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In 1824, the Italian poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi decided to take on the subject in a thirty-page essay, of kinds. In fact, he puts his reflections somewhat playfully in the mouth of Giuseppe Parini, perhaps the finest Italian poet of the eighteenth century, a man from a poor family who spent all his life seeking financial and political protection in the homes of the aristocracy. Leopardi imagines Parini—“one of the very few Italians of our times who combined literary excellence with depth of thought”—responding to an exceptionally talented and ambitious young writer seeking advice. What follows here is nothing more than a brief summary of what he says; I take no responsibility for the ideas expressed. Readers can decide for themselves how much of this rings true today.

A saintly monarch …

 Before 1066 and All That - CatholicCitizens.org. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

There’s probably no more realistic and insightful account of the life of a saintly king. Saintly rulers are a great rarity: after St. Edward there’s St. Louis and – who? Duggan’s novel raises a question: Can a saintly man also be a good ruler? To run the worldly city well requires worldly – not merely heavenly – virtues. Hence his title, which shuffles the Gospel verse so that the innocent dove (Edward) is as cunning as the serpent.
Well, in the wings, there's Blessed Karl of Austria.

Something to think on …

A novel must be a rich forest known at the start only by instinct.
— Dawn Powell, born on this date in1896

Fascinating …

… Here are the Biggest Fiction Bestsellers of the Last 100 Years | Literary Hub(Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In many cases, I knew the title, but not the author. And the further along one gets, the more the law of diminishing returns seems manifest.

Something to think on …

Seems as unfounded ... to say there isn't a God as to say there is.
— James Agee, born on this date in 1909

Blogging note …

I have to leave shortly to take a friend to the hospital for a procedure. Blogging will be at best spotty until later.

Indeed …

… Joseph Epstein: The Perfect Critic | Intercollegiate Studies Institute: Educating for Liberty. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

One might think that his emphasis on commentary makes Epstein’s talents relatively mundane and ordinary. That is not so, and a moment’s reflection suggests the reason. To rise above the mere status of reviewer to become a memorably skilled and accomplished commentator on an art or a discipline, one must have an excellent style and the added attributes of cultivation, background, and judgment. Since these are highly unusual qualities, it necessarily follows that good critics must be uncommon. To say something bold and original when there is no requirement that the remarks be true, well-reasoned, well-informed, or substantive is hardly effortless, but comparatively less difficult. It is easier to be John Rawls than John Ruskin.

Mencken on American …

 The Music of the Grand American Show. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Mencken claimed to be a bit of a fraud himself when The American Language became a commercial publishing success, for he had no formal training either as a philologist or in linguistic science. In fact, he never went to college. As he wrote in the preface to Newspaper Days: “At a time when the respectable bourgeois youngsters of my generation were college freshman, oppressed by simian sophomores and affronted with balderdash daily by chalky pedagogues, I was at large in a wicked seaport of half a million people, with a front seat at every public show, as free of the night as of the day, and getting earfuls and eyefuls of instruction in a hundred giddy arcana, none of them taught in schools.”

Monday, November 26, 2018

Selectively principled …

… Title IX: The Civil Rights the ACLU Won't Defend - The Atlantic. (Hat tip, Rich Lloret.)

One line in particular was shocking to civil libertarians: It promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused. Since when does the ACLU believe a process that favors the accused is inappropriate or unfair?

Hmm …

… ICU Stay Can Lead to Depression | Psych Congress.



I spent the greater part of a week in one last year, and I had what was described as a life-threatening condition, but I don’t remember feeling either alarmed or depressed, either while I was in the ICU or afterward. I was pleased that the problem was fixed, and the care I received was wonderful, and no great discomfort was involved. But then, I don’t tend to get bent out of shape over much. 

In medias res …

 Life in the Present Tense: “Like” by A. E. Stallings - Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Certain poems in Like exist as an extended meditation on the objects of domestic routine — a pair of scissors, a cast iron skillet, a wooden children’s toy, “[n]odding its wooden head” to the mechanical horse-and-dancer of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Cirque d’Hiver.” Don’t miss the “genuine horsehair,” either, rounding out “The Last Carousel,” which showcases the poet’s wit and metaphorical precision. The iron skillet, accidentally cleansed of its “black and lustrous skin” becomes “vulnerable and porous / As a hero stripped of his arms,” while her poem about pencils scratches steadily toward a blunt and darkly comic close, surrendering itself to Time, that “other implement / That sharpens and grows shorter.”

Listen in …

… Episode 297 – Shachar Pinsker – The Virtual Memories Show.

“This is the story of Jewish migration through the lens of coffeehouses.”

His father's keeper …

… Christopher Tolkien and the legacy of his father J.R.R. Tolkien: The Steward of Middle-earth. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… after more than 40 years, at the age of 94, Christopher Tolkien has laid down his editor’s pen, having completed a great labor of quiet, scholastic commitment to his father’s vision. It is the concluding public act of a gentleman and scholar, the last member of a club that became a pivotal part of 20th-century literature: the Inklings. It is the end of an era.

Something to think on …

It is a lesson we all need — to let alone the things that do not concern us. He has other ways for others to follow Him; all do not go by the same path. It is for each of us to learn the path by which He requires us to follow Him, and to follow Him in that path.
— Katharine Drexel, born on this date in 1858

Very interesting …

Last night, I came upon Van Wyck Brooks in conversation on television. I tried to embed one, but have discovered they can't be embedded. So here are the links (in order):

A Conversation with Van Wyck Brooks (1).

A Conversation with Van Wyck Brooks (2).

A Conversation with Van Wyck Brooks (3).

In case you wondered …

… Why American author Edward Gorey is more influential than ever, two decades after his death? (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)



… Gorey’s England was an island of the mind not to be found on any map. Recalling her friendship with Gorey in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the critic and novelist Alison Lurie observed, ‘[We shared] a love of British literature and poetry and films… Back then, when neither of us had been abroad, it was a kind of fantasy world.’

Poet at war …

 ‘Robert Graves’ Review: A Poet of Love and War - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Prose writing became a lucrative activity for Graves in the 1930s, resulting in some of his best-known works—“I, Claudius,” “Claudius the God,” “The White Goddess,” “The Greek Myths.” As pleased as Graves was by the proceeds, his great love, and unruly mistress, was poetry. “Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat,” he famously quipped. Although his love poems are acknowledged as among the 20th century’s finest, his war poems have languished by comparison. Blame may be laid on Graves himself, who, in his own words, “suppressed” all but a few, deeming them too redolent of “the war-poetry boom.” Now, 100 years after the armistice, Ms. Moorcroft Wilson capably restores Capt. Graves to the ranks of his friends Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, as well as Edmund Blunden, Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg and Rupert Brooke.

Inquirer review …

… ‘The Middle Ages in 50 Objects’: A cavalcade of astonishing things with stories to tell.



There are two other reviews in the print edition, but who the hell knows when the geniuses at Philly.com will notice?

Something to think on …

To have passed through life and never experienced solitude is to have never known oneself. To have never known oneself is to have never known anyone.
— Joseph Wood Krutch, born on this date in 1893

Taking care …

… It takes two | About Last Night.

I’m as eager for Mrs. T to return home as she is, but so long as she’s in the hospital, there’s nowhere else I want to be. It took us long enough to find one another, and now that we’re together, our plan is to spend as much time together as we can, even if I have to eat hospital food, watch movies with commercials, and drive through blizzards. As far as I’m concerned, when it comes to happiness, it takes two.

Something to think on

The most tyrannical of governments are those which make crimes of opinions, for everyone has an inalienable right to his thoughts.
— Baruch Spinoza, born on this date in 1632 

Friday, November 23, 2018

Hmm …

… Don’t Quit Your Day Job by Michael Fedo — Open Letters Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I spent a lot of time freelancing, mostly as an editor of books, but I had some writing gigs as well. There were some lean patches long the way, and my rule was to take any job that came along if need be. One of those was working on a construction crew building stores. Doing things like that gives you a wider range of experience than just sitting at your desk writing provides.

Finding the way …

… Where Do You Come From? by Meena Alexander | Poetry Foundation. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

Sad news:  Poet, essayist Meena Alexander dies at 67.

Rus mentioned this in his email linking to the poem yesterday, but I failed to notice.

Post bumped.

Sonnets and more …

That Formal Feeling. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
In a recent thread about sonnets on Twitter, the poet and critic Dana Levin remarked that traditional forms “have resurged.” She added, “Why is that? Is it the way it can hold all our screaming?” When we feel helpless, do metrical forms offer the illusion of control? Or are we drawn to tradition itself, because it’s familiar, and therefore comforting?

Not sure what to make of this …

… Food on a Mission - Alta Online(Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Such leaps of wishful thinking — in which a marketing pitch begins with making miso and ends with saving the planet — lead many foodies to embrace a flattering delusion that they can change the world by barely changing their diets. The trouble is that it frames the question of ethics as a choice to buy rather than a choice to act. But some changes can’t be bought. Is it rude to ask: Should society’s wealthiest members outsource the battle for a better world to the condiment aisle?

A new column …

In Bed: The Mattress as Art.
Larissa Pham’s new monthly column, Devil in the Details, will focus on single objects throughout art history. In this installment, she looks at beds through the lens of Sarah Lucass exhibition “Au Naturel,” currently on view at the New Museum in New York City. 

A reminder …

 First Known When Lost: Poetry.

 "If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present."  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Proposition 6.4311, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) (translated by C. K. Ogden).


I certainly think that any life after death there may be is dependent on the passion and attention we bring to the life we are blessed with  now.

Something to think on …

Art is the attention we pay to the wholeness of the world.
— Guy Davenport, born on this date in 1927

Thursday, November 22, 2018

Hmm …

… Food on a Mission - Alta Online(Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… there’s a sort of coping mechanism at work here: Affluent millennials reconciling the conflict between their aristocratic shopping habits and egalitarian ethics through “socially responsible” luxury food. More expensive equals more ethical. It is a radical reversal: costly gourmet food (the ultimate embodiment of wasteful spending) is conveniently repackaged as a symbol of fairness. Twelve-dollar cream cheese transforms from a symptom of economic inequality into the unlikely solution to it.

Fascinating and treasurable …

… All of Life Is Creation: Jack Kerouac’s Art - Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

Kerouac: Beat Painting is the catalog of an exhibition mounted, between December 2017 and April 2018, at the MAGA Gallery at Gallarate in northern Italy. While it was by no means the first show of visual art by the Beat writers, it did open a revelatory new door on the aspirations of Kerouac during a key period in his career. Having experienced some light training at Dody Muller’s studio in New York, he displays in many of the best works collected here an expressionist sensibility reminiscent of Willem de Kooning, as well as a Post-Impressionist recourse to vivid improbabilities of color. In short, Kerouac the painter turns out to be every bit as interesting as Kerouac the writer.

Good luck …

… Shawkan still in prison three months after completing five-year term | RSF. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

For some reason, I suspect the Egyptian government doesn't pay much heed to Reporters Without Borders.

No mere salon miniaturist …

… Fryderyk Chopin by Alan Walker review – romance, rage and swooning admirers | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

 Far from being a salon miniaturist, he was a major artist, a true heir to Bach and Mozart (as well as Beethoven, though he wouldn’t have liked it said), a creator of new forms, new modes of expression, and new keyboard techniques and sonorities. Walker rightly indicates Scriabin and Fauré as direct musical descendants, and Debussy as heir to Chopin’s discoveries about the piano; and since Debussy drew a new language partly from these findings, Walker might well have claimed (though he doesn’t) that Chopin lies behind a good deal of modern music, too. 

Save dogmas for theology …

… When Climate Change Consensus Becomes Dogma, Not Science.

A hard problem. The CEO of Google thinks that the question of whether or not to permit minority opinions on social media is a hard problem. Let’s hope Big Tech works that one out wisely because if the thumbs-down side of the debate wins, the likes of Nicholas Lewis and Climate Etc. would be lumped in with anti-vaxxers and banished from the digital public square. So when faulty, tendentious science appears in places like Nature, it will go uncorrected—by design. Pinchai’s understanding of climate-change skepticism as propaganda and misinformation is itself an example of the propaganda and misinformation that dominates public discourse.

The right question …

… ‘The Hard Problem’ Review: Goodness Has Everything to Do With It - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

“Who’s the you outside your brain? Where? The mind is extra….We’re dealing in mind-stuff that doesn’t show up in a [brain] scan—accountability, duty, free will, language, all the stuff that makes behavior unpredictable.”

Uh-oh …

… Jazz is dominated by men. So what? | Spectator USA. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

 Guitarist Mary Halvorson and saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, for example, are stellar. Yet I’d not say that Mary and Ingrid contribute some distinctive feminine sensibility, since I don’t buy the idea that there’s any such thing. They’re great musicians, full stop, and I doubt you’d know their sex if they played behind a curtain.
Just for the record:


Something to think on …

It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.
— George Eliot, born on this date in 1819

To one and all …

… Happy Thanksgiving – Beyond Eastrod.



As Meister Eckhart said, "If the only prayer you ever say is 'thank you,' it will be enough."

Have a look …



My blogpartner Jesse Freedman holding his daughter Noa at the Cafe Lutecia yesterday.
Wife and Mom Julia took the picture. The old guy is me. I would have taken the picture, but we wanted a good one. Noa is adorable.









Distinctions …

… What is great writing? Martin Amis on etiquette and arrogance. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

 …  when you visit a Nabokov novel it’s as if he has given you his best chair nearest the fire and given you his best wine and given you his full attention in the most tactful and sensitive way.

If you went around to Joyce’s house you’d find the address didn’t exist. And you would find some sort of outbuilding where Joyce lives, and that he wouldn’t be in, apparently. And then you would shout for him and eventually, a figure would appear, and he would talk to you in a language you’d never heard of before.

Literally, it would seem …

… Principles for Dummies - American Affairs Journal. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

It seems to have escaped Dalio’s notice and that of his editors—assuming he had any—that Leonardo left us thousands of pages of journals, some of them in museums, some privately owned by Dalio’s friend Bill Gates, all ably edited and available in fine bookstores everywhere. Churchill probably went further in the pursuit of documenting “what guided” him than any statesman in history; even at the height of the war his fellow cabinet officials complained that the essential man spent too much time turning workaday missives into the self-aggrandizing pastiches of Macaulay that he would later quote in his own books. Einstein wrote a great deal about his own life and views. Elsewhere Dalio says something similar about Vince Lombardi, apparently unaware not only of the coach’s best-selling memoir but of his role in the motivational training film Second Effort, one of the first things of its kind ever produced. 

Who knew?

 The Many Dangers of Lake Superior | CrimeReads. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

There are so many fascinating things about Lake Superior that fuel the imagination. Vicious storms can rise up suddenly and sink a ship or a pleasure boat out for an afternoon sail. In the winter there are ice volcanoes that look like an ordinary hill of snow, but inside is a hardened cone that erupts with a mixture of ice, water, and sleet. I once had my protagonist hiding from the killer in an ice cave, but the ice break starts before she can get out.
The only one of the Great Lakes I know is Lake Michigan. I used to live right next to it in Chicago. What I remember, of course, is the wind.

Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Well, yes …

… Psychology's Replication Crisis Is Real, Many Labs 2 Says - The Atlantic. (Hat tip, Rich Lloret.)

In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and ted Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the marshmallow test, where our ability to resist gratification in early childhood predicts our achievements in later life. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.


None of this would surprise Norbert Wiener.

Listen in …

… Episode 296 – Cathy B Graham – The Virtual Memories Show.

“The great thing about being heartbroken is I become very focused on my work.”

Blogging note …

I must be out and about very shortly. Blogging will resume sometime later.

Hmm …

… Why I Left...and Yet... | Commonweal Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Even as a boy, I never believed in an Iron Age Hebrew deity who gives a damn about our mammalian plight. When Orwell, writing about Waugh, remarked that one really can’t be Catholic and grown-up at the same time, he was getting at the wild implausibility at the hub of Christianity. But “God” and “Christ” are, above all, terms of poetry, of allegory and metaphor and myth. Flannery O’Connor once famously snapped at Mary McCarthy when McCarthy said that the Eucharist is only a symbol: “Well, if it’s only a symbol, to hell with it.” Reluctant as I normally am to dissent from O’Connor, I have to side with McCarthy there. Religion not only traffics in symbols, it survives by them, and to mistake the figurative for the factual or allegory for history is to mistake much indeed. But mouthy unbelievers who find, say, Original Sin barbaric and absurd are missing the point on purpose: whatever else it is, Original Sin is most potently a metaphor for the inherent psychological wackiness of our kind, all those pesky hormonal urges that make us batty. Of course we are born blighted: evolution by natural selection is a malfunctioning process. Never mind your soul: just look at all those problems with your teeth, your back, your knees.
Odd Catholic education he must have had. I don't ever remember believing in an Iron Age deity either, and I doubt if he thought of it in those terms when he was a child. As for O'Connor's remark, a symbol in the sense McCarthy was using the word is just a literary device. A real symbol does what it symbolizes, in this case the Eucharist, which for the faithful doesn't just represent the bread of life, but is the bread of life. A symbol, in other words, isn't just a high-falutin' metaphor. I wonder how deep into Aquinas's Summa he ever got.

Now anyone is free to doubt all of what I have just said, but it helps to take the time and trouble to understand these matters accurately and precisely.

Something to think on …

It is a strange thing to come home. While yet on the journey, you cannot at all realize how strange it will be.
— Selma Lagerlöf, born on this date in 1858

Monday, November 19, 2018

Tunings …

… Madness among the Woodwinds – Idlings.  (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I have also heard of the madness among oboeists. But oboist John de Lancie was the director of the Curtis Insitute, a job that would call for considerable clarity  of thought. My own experience of classical performers is that they’re very businesslike.  

Kingdom of imagination …

… 'King Lear,' Our Contemporary - Commentary. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Those commentators who argue that Shakespeare is best understood as a Christian artist find it hard to grapple with King Lear, whose “message” is more likely to strike today’s viewers as all but nihilistic. Yet it is in this very aspect that the play’s deepest appeal is to be found. For just as all of us fear that we will die with our minds occluded by senility, so are even the most steadfast of religious believers—Dr. Johnson among them—beset by periodic pangs of doubt. The genius of King Lear is that it stares down this doubt, even broaching the possibility that human life, far from being directed by what Shakespeare elsewhere calls “a divinity that shapes our ends,” is in fact entirely meaningless. As John Simon has written of Lear: “The point of Shakespeare’s work is not that everyone is equally dreary and culpable but, clearly, that some are deserving and even noble, while others are bad and even vicious, yet in the short run the bad may actually have a better time of it. An awe-inspiring vision, startling for its—or any—time.”


In the paper I wrote for my college Shakespeare course — for which I received an A+ — I argued that Lear was the most classical of Shakespeare's tragedies because it compressed into one play the whole range of the Greek dramatic trilogies, from tragic fall through suffering to redemption, which seems pretty Christian to me. Of course, I went to a Jesuit college. But I think I marshal my texts persuasively (the paper was a textual analysis). Obviously, my professor thought so.

Quite a hike …

… A Thousand Miles for Love - Crisis Magazine.

Then it hit me: I’d read about someone who’d lived the Proclaimers’ song, someone who did walk 1,000 miles for love. I’m talking about Hilaire Belloc, the curmudgeonly Edwardian writer, historian, and Catholic apologist, and one of G.K. Chesterton’s closest friends.
Ah, there were days when I would hike a good 20 miles just for the sheer pleasure of it.

Q&A …

… Building a Monument: An Interview with Natasha Trethewey. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I gave a reading years ago to a group of trustees. I was reading from Native Guard, from the poems in the third section that are about my own history growing up black and biracial, with my parents in an interracial marriage. Afterward, this woman looked at me with a morose expression on her face and she said, “Do you have any hope?” I wanted to say, “You just sat here and listened to me for thirty minutes reading poems I’ve written, based on this history—do you not understand that the making of a poem is one of the most hopeful acts?” People hear the trauma or they hear the despair and grief that lives still fully in me and yet they don’t see that it actually becomes a pathway to light. Rumi wrote, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.” That’s why I feel filled with it.

Something to think on …

In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem.
— Allen Tate, born on this date in 1899

Those were the days …

… The Complicated Legacy of Stewart Brand’s “Whole Earth Catalog” | The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Last month, on a brisk and blindingly sunny Saturday, over a hundred alumni of the “Whole Earth Catalog” network—Merry Pranksters, communards, hippies, hackers, entrepreneurs, journalists, and futurists—gathered to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication, and, per the invitation, to come together “one last time.” The event was held at the San Francisco Art Institute, a renovated wharf warehouse with vaulted ceilings, views of Alcatraz, and the cool sterility of an empty art gallery. A number of early-Internet architects, including Larry Brilliant, Lee Felsenstein, and Ted Nelson, floated around the room. Several alumni had scribbled their well usernames onto their badges. One man was wearing a red “Make Earth Cool Again” hat, swag from a recent climate-change-themed dinner co-hosted by Alice Waters; another wore a baseball cap advertising Tysabri, a prescription medication that treats multiple sclerosis. Hugh Romney, the activist and performance artist known as Wavy Gravy, wore a tie-dyed sweatsuit, a red foam nose, and a button that read “We must be in heaven, man!” He leaned on a thin opera cane; a small plastic pig dangled from the handle.

A closer look …

… Another social psychology classic bites the dust – meta-analysis finds little evidence for the Macbeth effect – Research Digest.

What’s perhaps most noteworthy here is that whereas the effect sizes found in the original three “Macbeth effect” studies were moderate-to-large, in all the 11 independent replication attempts  “there was no effect whatoseover”. In light of this, the authors argue, “the evidence suggests either that unethical primes do not generate a greater preference for cleansing-related stimuli than do ethical primes, or they generate a small one.” In other words it looks like the strength of the Macbeth Effect phenomenon has been overhyped, which won’t come as a surprise to those who have been following psychology’s replication crisis. (On the reverse question — of whether “cleansing alleviates moral threat” — the authors suggest there’s stronger evidence, in the form of several independent replications.)

Echo chamber …

… A Glimpse Into the Ideological Monoculture of Literary New York - Quillette.

This story ends with a win. My book is being published—even if, like most other writers, I would have liked a fatter contract with wider distribution. But despite that, there is something about my experience among New York’s literati that’s left a bad taste in my mouth. For all the predictable speechifying about “diversity” that I heard at cocktail parties and literary events, I became struck by just how politically monolithic this scene really is. It’s not just that writers and editors have to be PC when it comes to their books and their public pronouncements: There also seems to be a crushing uniformity in regard to their privately held viewpoints.

Hmm …

… Emily Dickinson on prayer as a little implement and simple apparatus – Beyond Eastrod.



The impulse to pray comes from God, who, as Jesus points out, “knows what you need before you ask him.” Miss Emily seems to understand this. It is the Presence that need, not that presents that we ask for.

Hmm …

 Poetry, Oblivion, and God | The Russell Kirk Center.  (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Wiman goal’s here, as he notes in a gloss on A. R. Ammons’s “Hymn,” is to point out that the self’s continuity (whatever form that continuity takes) requires the self’s death—and that poetry states this requirement again and again. “I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth,” Ammons begins the poem—a sentiment, Wiman argues, that despite Ammons’s pantheism is gospel truth. “There is no religious paradox here,” Wiman continues: “‘When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die,’ wrote Bonhoeffer famously, who was echoing Christ himself, who in all three of the synoptic Gospels says that salvation lies in, and only in, loss.”
The self that must die is the one we have created for ourselves, and its death does not bring about oblivion, but rather the fulfillment represented by the self God has intended for us.

Something to think on …

To philosophize man must put his whole soul into play, in much the same manner that to run he must use his heart and lungs.
Jacques Maritain, born on this date in 1882

The adventure that is faith …

Let’s Begin at the Beginning . . . - The Catholic Thing.

Believing in God is a collaboration. God doesn’t force us to do it. But that’s what makes faith an adventure. Emeritus Pope Benedict has said: we believe in someone, not something.

Q&A …

… Four books—and a flawed Everyman—that made John Updike’s name as a novelist | Library of America. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)



I got to know Updike professionally during the last years of his life, initially through our work together on The Golden West, a posthumous collection of Daniel Fuchs’s Hollywood stories that I assembled, in 2004, for the Boston publisher David R. Godine. Updike wrote the introduction to that book and took a strong interest in every aspect of its making, and we corresponded continuously throughout the book’s production and publication. Two years later we were again in touch when the Library of America brought out my edition of William Maxwell’s fiction, which Updike reviewed at length, and with great generosity, in The New Yorker. By that time I had joined LOA as a consulting editor, and by the spring of 2008 he and I were in conversation about his works being added to the LOA series.

Something to think on …

If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.
— Shelby Foote, born on this date in 1916

Friday, November 16, 2018

Milan Kundera


I in the middle of Edgar Allan Poe -- and I have to say, it's getting a bit heavy. So I've taken recourse to an old favorite: Milan Kundera.

At this point, I've read most of Kundera's work, but his most recent novel -- The Festival of Insignificance -- is not one I'd had a chance to enjoy. That is, until this week.  

As always with Kundera, I was not disappointed. Festival is a fast, easy read, and while it's not as complex, perhaps, as the novels before it, there's a glimmer of magic here, certainly. 

Two themes emerge: absurdity and individuality. These are topics, of course, that Kundera has explored in the past, but here, they're crystalized: as if the characters, finally, are meant as nothing more than vehicles to expound philosophical concepts. 

And when it comes with Kundera, that doesn't bother me. Reading Kundera has never, really, been about his characters: it's been, instead, about understanding how their actions represent larger ideas. The same holds true in Festival: characters laugh not because it makes them whole or three dimensional, but because the thing that makes them laugh is worthy of evaluation. 

The Festival of Insignificance is meant to be read in an afternoon: it's a reminder of the absurdity of it all; of the role of humor amidst sorrow; and of the process by which ideas transform into action. This isn't Kundera at his heights necessarily, but it's a reminder of the style and concepts that made him famous.  

In case you wondered …

… What Does It Mean To Be a Libertarian? - Reason.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Libertarians are commonly atheists. Probably that is because the independent-minded teenager who denies both left and right politically is also likely to have rebelled against all the silly stuff his parents told him about God at an even younger age. My preachment to my libertarian friends is not to rest at any arguments, commitments, or ways of life just because they seemed cool to a 14-year-old boy. (The girls, I find, are less dogmatic.) When I beg them to read a serious book about religion at age 30 or 50 they echo the New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris: "No, why would I do that? I already know it's rubbish. I decided it was at 14." Please, read and reflect as grown-ups.

Ballard and Bosch …

 BOOK REVIEW: 'Dark Sacred Night' by Michael Connelly - Washington Times.

In my review of “The Late Show” here, I noted that although I found Renee Ballard to be engaging and interesting, I missed his other, better known character, Harry Bosch.
So I was pleased that in his following crime novel, “Two Kinds of Truth,” Harry Bosch was once again front and center. Now, in Mr. Connelly’s current and 32nd crime novel, “Dark Sacred Night,” we see Harry Bosch and Renee Ballard team up.