I read Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes long before I read The Catcher in the Rye. The former is the only book I have ever read with a character — the narrator, François Seurel — whose outlook was so nearly identical to my own. The latter, when I read it in college, exerted no positive impression on me at all. Holden Caulfield struck me as a whining pain in the ass.
Democrats are now defined by Trump the way that antimatter is defined by matter, with each particle of matter corresponding to an antiparticle. Take the secrecy. Democrats once were the party that fought against the misuse of secret classification laws by the FBI and other agencies. They demanded greater transparency from the executive branch, which is a position that I have readily supported. Yet, when oversight committees sought documents related to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation of Trump associates, Democrats denounced the very thought that Republicans would question the judgment of the FBI that any such disclosures would be tantamount to jeopardizing national security.
In ancient Rome, an estimated 20 percent to 40 percent of infants were “exposed,” a nice term for kicking your newborn to the curb. “Romans actually expressed surprise when a woman did not expose any of her children,” writes Traig.Some families left children out in the elements where they were eaten by wild animals; others sold their children as slaves or prostitutes. Some were even adopted as pets. “We treat our dogs like children; Romans were known to do the opposite,” Traig writes.
I think I'm too self-centered to much care about this sort of thing and the nuns taught us to say a prayer for anyone's misfortune, but especially for the misfortune of those we do not like. It's a good rule. I do confess to liking it when some bloviating politician gets a bit of well-deserved comeuppance.
When a thing is done, it's done. Don't look back. Look forward to your next objective.
— George C. Marshall, born on this date in 1880
This “Big Sleep” isn’t just annotated. It’s illustrated with covers of Chandler’s first editions, movie posters from the Marlowe books, the only known photo of Chandler with the man who created and perfected the hard-boiled school of crime fiction, Dashiell Hammett (you will spot them immediately: the only writers in the photo not looking into the camera), and photos of real locations that serve as crime scenes in the book. My favorite is of Malibu Pier—to paraphrase Burt Lancaster in “Atlantic City,” the Pacific Ocean was really something back then.
And then there are the romans durs, as Simenon called them, the “hard novels”, Maigret-less, bleak, unheimlich meditations on the folly and essential pettiness of human beings, whose strongest driving force, in Simenon’s estimation, is boredom, and the fear of being bored.
The minute a man is convinced he is interesting, he isn't.
— Stephen Leacock, born on this date in 1869
To judge all previous thought in terms of contemporary viewpoints is astoundingly presumptuous. Bear in mind that it could well happen to those contemporary viewpoints, when seen as no longer contemporary. The point of studying history is to find out how things were, not opine on how they ought to have been. How can we be certain that today's fashionable views are necessarily correct? As Oliver Cromwell put it, "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”
It’s absolutely not clear if Jesus had a universalist message.Well, there's this bit in Matthew: "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost."
“Late-Life Love” is an easier read than “Memoir of a Debulked Woman,” although there are moments when pain sears through. One night Gubar has an “accident” — her excrement-containing ostomy bag, girdled to her stomach, oozes with messy seepage. Cleaning up, she catches sight of herself in the bathroom mirror. There’s “every mark of an old crock: a tall scarecrow with a balding head, no eyebrows or eyelashes, a bump on my chest where a port was embedded, abdominal surgical scars, no pubic hair, a plastic bag hanging from my belly, what little flesh there is hanging downward too. I don’t look like the person I used to be; I am not the person I used to be.”Well, as Bette Davis said, growing old ain't for sissies.There is also, as for life in general, no one-size-fits-all.
That C. G. Jung pops up in only one passage might suggest that Edmundson has no great liking for him, yet he is deeply relevant to the argument in Self and Soul. In 1933, Jung published Modern Man in Search of a Soul, a collection of lectures and essays. As this collection attests, he believed in the soul, believed perhaps too much, particularly for Freudians. Jung’s absence seems a missed opportunity, given that he nominally shared Edmundson’s goal of resurrecting the soul.
In his declining years he lamented, "my father has never forgiven me for Main Street . . . He can't comprehend the book, much less grasp that it's the greatest tribute I knew how to pay him . . . Main Street condemned me in his eyes as a traitor to my heritage—whereas the truth is, I shall never shed the little, indelible 'Sauk-centricities' that enabled me to write it."
This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, who died on this date in 1926
No good purpose is served by calling atheism a religion. It is a cheap piece of journalistic sloppiness too often maintained, too infrequently reflected upon.
I’m surprised when I read in Sylvia Plath’s journals (February 27, 1956): “Meanwhile, read Hopkins for solace.” And again (March 6, 1956): “... all the despair, coming at me when I am most weak. I will read Hopkins: and, when our lives crack, and the loveliest mirror cracks, is it not right to rest, to step aside and heal.” Plath places Hopkins in the exalted company of Eliot, Yeats, Dunbar, Ransom, Shakespeare, Blake, and Dylan Thomas, as one of those who “made of the moment, of the hustle and jostle of grey, anonymous and sliding words a vocabulary to staunch wounds, to bind up broken limbs” (March 1, 1958). But Hopkins the healer doesn’t indulge complacencies: he draws attention to the wound and the fracture in his own body, in Christ’s, and therefore in the reader’s. His healing hurts.I can’t say I’ve ever thought of Felix Randall as a beautuful boy.
A poem is about its language, as much as it is about anything else. A novel is about its narrative, which its language must serve. The Sea, the Sea works because Iris Murdoch never forgets this.
… we ought to be working on discovering new technologies for removing carbon from the atmosphere or for lowering temperatures by other means. Fringe research in these areas currently involve: encouraging aquatic life to consume more carbon, generating clouds as a means to minimise warming, and placing mirrors in space in order to reflect sunlight, but “neither supercomputers nor international treaties nor vast sums are devoted to them”.
The physical world is entirely abstract and without actuality apart from its linkage to consciousness.
— Arthur Eddington, born on this date in 1882
There’s also a bracing feeling of independence that attends piloting my own van, a tingle of anticipation before finding out my route for the day. Will I be in the hills above El Cerrito with astounding views of the bay, but narrow roads, difficult parking, and lots of steps? Or will my itinerary take me to gritty Richmond, which, despite its profusion of pit bulls, I’m starting to prefer to the oppressive traffic of Berkeley, where I deliver to the brightest young people in the state, some of whom may wonder, if they give me even a passing thought: What hard luck has befallen this man, who appears to be my father’s age but is performing this menial task?
My mother got her first factory job at age 13.
I would suggest David Yezzi's Black Sea.
The response to Kipling was much the same as it is to the president today, though of course on a smaller scale. Trilling wrote that the writer’s maddening affect on liberals allowed the left “to be content with easy victories of right feeling and with moral self-congratulation.” Trilling allowed that Kipling was an honest man who “loved the national virtues.” Yet he observed that “no man ever did more harm to the national virtues than Kipling did.”
Censors will try to censor a little bit more each year (because, like editors and other officious people, censors don't feel they are getting anywhere unless they are up and doing).
— Wilfrid Sheed, born on this date in 1930
I wouldn’t say that Professor Taleb is right in the case of Pinker or Murray (who called Taleb’s tweet storm “willfully stupid”), but no, my IQ isn’t as high as his. I’m not as smart as Taleb, so the only way I can out-argue him is to use better facts and logic.
Modern science, for all its numerous advantages, has distracted us from the sacred pulse that runs through the cosmos. It has reduced the living dynamic that ancient peoples called the Logos to mechanical laws of nature. We have eyes that barely see it, ears that barely hear it, and so mouths that rarely speak of it. It’s led to the odd situation in which the more we learn about the workings of the universe, the less we feel its meaning.
When followers give up their capacity to think for themselves, a herd mentality can become a threat, not just to social justice movements but to democracy itself. Unthinking tribalism has become a defining feature of our era, fueled from the top by Trump, with his demagogic appeals to racist, misogynist, and xenophobic currents in the populace. But tribalism is not just a right-wing phenomenon. It is present also in the left-wing PC police who inhibit and silence dissent on campuses and make it difficult to have a rational discussion about hot-button issues such as racism, transgender identity, violence against women in Islamic countries, the politics of Israel/Palestine, and so on, without being shouted down, shunned, and even subjected to death threats.
I once scored 140 on a Wechsler-Bellevue IQ test (which translates into 150 on the Stanford-Binet). While taking the test I polished off most of a bottle of Johnny Walker Red (I was taking it for a friend who was getting his Ph.D in psychology and needed someone to give the test to.) Whether this means I have a high IQ in general or just when I polish off a bottle of scotch is anybody's guess.
When honest and eloquent language in general is not valued, poetry with its insistence on le mot juste, verbal resonance and cultural memory -- including the need for concentration in an Internet/Facebook/Twitter world awash in facile verbiage -- must obviously sink into decline. After all, in an age of fake everything, why should poetry be an exception? The true poet would have to be a prodigy of monastic virtue, eschewing the apocrypha of his nominal peers.
… there is something thrilling about Parfit’s thoughts and photographs. The whole becomes a work of art, a vision rather than a proof of meaning in a godless world.Well, the photos are compelling, but the philosophy strikes me as so much wishful thinking. And, if identity and self don't really matter that much, what's the big deal about morality?
Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.
— Henry Miller, born on this date in 1891
I have lately been reading Christina Rossetti's poems. She is a favorite of mine.
More than ever, I am convinced that history has meaning — and that its meaning is terrifying.
— René Girard, born on this date in 1923
I also like that the abbreviation for Benevolent Sexism is BS.
Do I deserve anything? I don’t know. What I do know right now is that a number of people believe that I am deserving of hatred and humiliation and condemnation and, in one case, even death, and I have to listen to that while also looking out for my mental health and wellbeing.
… in historian Nathaniel Philbrick’s outstanding book, “In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory of Yorktown,” he describes vividly the Battle of the Chesapeake, a sea battle devised by Gen. Washington but fought entirely by the French, that occurred prior to the definitive win at Yorktown.
It would be as foolish to attempt to draw up rules about what constitutes a good parody as it would be to attempt to draw up rules about what constitutes a good joke. Beerbohm owes much of his superiority to other parodists to qualities which resist analysis —to greater precision, finer inspiration, keener wit. But his work also exemplifies two sound general principles. First, true parody, at any but the most rudimentary level, mimics substance no less than style; if it fastens on mannerisms, it also embraces choice of subject matter and habits of mind. Second, a successful parody must be interesting or satisfying on its own account. If it is a story, we want to know what happens next; if it is an essay, we must be caught up in its argument. Either way, we must feel that the imagined author—G. K. Ch*st*rt*n or Arn*ld B*nn*tt or G**rge B*rn*rd Sh*w —has taken as much (or as little) trouble to shape his material as the real Chesterton or Bennett or Shaw would have done.
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
— Matthew Arnold, born on this date in 182
No matter the form his music takes—from sparkling, quicksilver piano pieces to grand orchestral essays—there is across Debussy’s entire oeuvre an extraordinary unity of texture. Its essential quality is a spacious beauty, a lushness without thickness, which Walsh intelligently ascribes in part to Debussy’s preference for whole tones. Music whose basic interval is the whole tone—an interval of two half-steps, that is, two piano keys—is inherently spacious; there is more room for light to filter through. In Walsh’s words, “whole-tone harmony…lacks that onward push that we associate with tonal music.” This is another essential quality of Debussy’s music: late-Romantic harmonies that tend, in Wagner’s hands, to strain sweatily toward a climax are transformed through Debussy’s alchemy into mysterious floating oases, worth luxuriating in for their own sake. In Wagner—at least until Parsifal, which Debussy loved—the music seems constantly to be asking itself what its destination is, and how it can get there. Debussy, much like the faun of his Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, wants to find somewhere beautiful in the shade and stay awhile.
[Feynman ] demanded a standard of honesty in science that is seldom obtained: in which the claims in every paper are so rigorously qualified, and experimental mistakes so freely confessed, that another observer can reproduce a result, precisely not approximately.
The idea that biblical religion has always proposed is emphatically not that you can tell whether a people is chosen by the virtue of their leaders. It’s that the divine chooses to act constantly amid not just ordinary fallibility but real depravity — that strong temptations as well as great sanctity are concentrated where God wants to work — and that the graces that define a chosen people are improbable resilience and unlooked-for renewal, with saints and prophets and reformers carrying things forward despite corruptions that seem like they should extinguish the whole thing.
Nothing is more painful to me than the disdain with which people treat second-rate authors, as if there were room only for the first-raters.
— Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, born on this date in 1804
Alter told me about his decision to reject one of the oldest traditions in English translation and remove the word “soul” from the text. That word, which translates the Hebrew word nefesh, has been a favorite in English-language Bibles since the 1611 King James Version. … “Well,” Alter said, speaking in the unrushed, amused tone of a veteran footnoter. “That Hebrew word, nefesh, can mean many things. It can be ‘breath’ or ‘life-breath.’ It can mean ‘throat’ or ‘neck’ or ‘gullet.’ Sometimes it can suggest ‘blood.’ It can mean ‘person’ or even a ‘dead person,’ ‘corpse.’ Or it can be ‘appetite’ or something more general: ‘life’ or even ‘the essential self.’ But it’s not quite ‘soul.’ ”
What follows is a small Christmas setting, as perfectly judged as anything in The Wind in the Willows. The caroling field-mice appear at the door, ale is mulled, Ratty takes charge of laying out a meal for the visitors. "And Mole, as he took the head of the table in a sort of a dream, saw a lately barren board set thick with savory comforts; saw his little friends' faces brighten and beam as they fell to without delay; and then let himself loose—for he was famished indeed—on the provender so magically provided, thinking what a happy homecoming this had turned out, after all."
Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.
— Samuel Beckett, who died on this date in 1989
Did Bach turn to parody because he was running out of ideas? Fully new works from the 1740s such as the “Goldberg” Variations, Musical Offering, and The Art of Fugue show that he could still draw on robust creative powers when necessary. But the parody process provided him the opportunity to revisit earlier music, distill and revise its contents, and lift it to an even higher level of refinement. It offered Bach the chance to give free rein to his relentless drive for self-improvement.
The shift from metaphors to mechanisms of the inflamed mind begins by acknowledging the overwhelming evidence for a strong association between inflammation and depression. Simply recognizing this association, which is sometimes hiding in plain sight, is the right place to start. But the crucial questions are about causality. For a new, post-dualist way of thinking to take root, it must be scientifically established that inflammation is not merely associated or linked with depression, but that it can directly cause depression.
But, as Shakespeare noted: “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose."
Bukoski has done for Superior’s East End what Ray Carver did for the down and out of the Puget Sound or Pete Hamill did when annexing New York for the Irish. He has brought back to life Superior’s Polish Americans and the blue-collar community from its boom days in the post-WWII era to its decline and near disappearance in recent times.One of Superior's distinguished citizens is, of course, Dave Lull.
The affair cast doubt on the effectiveness of Der Spiegel’s renowned fact-checking department, once described as the largest in the world by the Columbia Journalism Review. The magazine, which said it employs around 70 fact-checkers, said its system had failed.
History is no criminal court.
— Leopold von Ranke, born on this date in 1795
There are so many lies here, that my friend Jake and I had to narrow them down to top 11 most absurd lies (we couldn’t do just 10) for the purpose of this article. We’ve been working on it since the article came out in spring of 2017, but had to set it aside to attend to our lives (raising a family, managing a nonprofit organization, etc.) before coming back to it this fall, and finally wrapped things up a few weeks ago, just in time to hear today that Relotius was fired when he was exposed for fabricating many of his articles.
With Steinbeck, the unexpected was the norm. When his New York house was burgled in 1963, for example, the police report listed the stolen items as “a television set and six rifles”. The writer enjoyed the idiosyncrasy of humans. When he was asked for his “rules for life” by a friend in Vietnam, Steinbeck replied with his four mottos: “Never make excuses. Never let them see you bleed. Never get separated from your luggage. Always find out when the bar opens.”
No one who accepts the sovereignty of truth can be a foot soldier in a party or movement. He will always find himself out of step.
— Sidney Hook, born on this date in 1902
Momentarily setting aside Watts’s diatribe, I didn’t read Kaur’s book for its mastery of the arts of language and poetry. On that count, I think, a two or three line instaresumé would suffice. But she does have one skill set shared by other “masters”, and I use that term loosely, of the instapoem. Take the instapoem above. What’s clever about it is what makes it memorable. It’s a species of rhetoric, what’s called a figure of repetition. It’s an example of isocolon. Possibly also scesis onomaton and some other less pronouncable rhetorical figures I’m too rusty to recall. Isocolon is defined as “a rhetorical device that involves a succession of sentences, phrases, and clauses of grammatically equal length.” Strictly speaking, the two phrases aren’t of equal length, but close enough.
An American friend, a sober observer of these matters, cautions that, because of the concentration of Catholicism in particular areas of the US, the intensity I’ve noted is inevitable but not likely to spread. His caution is well advised. This is, in so far as it is a revolution at all, very much an intellectual one, thus far confined to elites and small numbers. The grassroots American faithful still tend to be recent immigrants from still deeply Catholic countries – Vietnam and the Philippines, for example – who are regular mass-goers and also firm holdouts on things like abortion and gay marriage. Since a disproportionate number of seminarians in the US come from these communities also, there is a strong possibility that the immediate future of the church may be ostensibly healthy but shrinking within the overall picture. And, as one priest I questioned about this put it: ‘Sadly, the children of these immigrants who enter the universities and seminaries tend to get chewed up in the wood-chipper of liberalism and iPhone sexual anarchy and are spat out spiritually indistinguishable from 4th generation suburbanites. In the main, only those whom penury rescues from assimilation manage to hold on to Catholic doctrine and morals.’
Friedman’s channeling of E. A. Robinson (if the poems of this book were less skillful I might invoke Edgar Lee Masters) is an exercise in retro-transgression. In a time when egos and agendas relentlessly insert themselves into lyric poetry, he adopts techniques from earlier eras and stands back as a neutral observer. “Show don’t tell” may be the workshop cliché, but most millennial poets find ways to make their standard ideological points brutally clear, so it is refreshing to be moved but not pushed; Robinson never tells us why Richard Cory ended his idyllic life and Friedman never tells us what is going through Jim’s mind as he awaits the 6:03. This type of poetry challenges readers to fill in cavernous blank spaces in the way that classical Chinese shih poets usually asked their readers to do.
The English word translate comes from the Latin transferre, to carry across, and Stallings’s best poems continually cross borders, ferrying us from one world to the next and back again.For what it's worth, here's what the Online Etymology Dictionary has to say:
As I understand it, John Quinn's neice sold the manuscript to the New York Library. And Faber & Faber later published a facsimile of it.
Everyone tends to remember the past with greater fervor as the present gains greater importance.
— Italo Svevo, born on this date in 1861
Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, by Cynthia L. Haven (Michigan State University Press; 317 pages; $29.95). At a time when religious fundamentalism, violent extremism and societal division dominate the headlines, this first full-length biography of the acclaimed French thinker is a call to revisit one of the 20th century’s most important thinkers, who taught at Stanford.
