A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.
Richard Dawkins’ insanity has now become an English institution – like warm beer and rain. On Saturday morning, a tweet from his account asked why we don’t send lots of "erotic videos" to theocracies, adding that it should be “loving, gentle, woman-respecting” (I guess this involves the pizza delivery boy calling the next day)
Traditional rock 'n' roll, we're talking about that. It's all about rhythm. Johnny Cash said it best: "Get rhythm. Get rhythm when you get the blues." Very few rock 'n' roll bands today play with rhythm. They don't know what it is. Rock 'n' roll is a combination of blues, and it's a strange thing made up of two parts. A lot of people don't know this, but the blues, which is an American music, is not what you think it is. It's a combination of Arabic violins and Strauss waltzes working it out. But it's true.
The other half of rock 'n' roll has got to be hillbilly. And that's a derogatory term, but it ought not to be. That's a term that includes the Delmore Bros., Stanley Bros., Roscoe Holcomb, Clarence Ashley ... groups like that. Moonshiners gone berserk. Fast cars on dirt roads. That's the kind of combination that makes up rock 'n' roll, and it can't be cooked up in a science laboratory or a studio.
You have to have the right kind of rhythm to play this kind of music. If you can't hardly play the blues, how do you [inaudible] those other two kinds of music in there? You can fake it, but you can't really do it.
Critics have made a career out of accusing me of having a career of confounding expectations. Really? Because that's all I do. That's how I think about it. Confounding expectations.
"What do you do for a living, man?"
"Oh, I confound expectations."
...
"The Romantic theory assumes that literature is mainly or even purely an emotional experience, that man is naturally good, that man’s impulses are trustworthy, that the rational faculty is unreliable to the point of being dangerous or possibly evil. The Romantic theory of human nature teaches that if man will rely upon his impulses, he will achieve the good life."
To love someone means to see him as God intended him.
The Pope might go to the town of Wells because he will find that, in re-Christianizing Europe, he will need to understand beauty as science does. Science doesn’t have much to teach religion, but this is one thing it does have. In nature, beauty is a guide to truth, a sign that you are in the right neighborhood—a Geiger counter. There are deep truths about Christianity in the air at the most beautiful Christian places. The Cathedral of Wells is one of them, where the presence of God is most palpable within the beauty. He would go to Wells not to officiate (obviously it is not a Catholic Church) but just as a Christian, to pray.Sure would beat, well, pontificating about the state of the climate.
I learned lyrics and how to write them from listening to folk songs. And I played them, and I met other people that played them back when nobody was doing it. Sang nothing but these folk songs, and they gave me the code for everything that's fair game, that everything belongs to everyone.
To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.
Which leads to another benefit of the Traditional Mass: it helps the Church see herself as a whole, as the same always and everywhere, and it unites the Church on earth with the Church in heaven in a special way. Relics of the saints help us feel their presence and communion as a reality. The Traditional Mass is a relic of the saints whose images are in the niches and on the walls, and who surround us when it is celebrated, because so many of them worshiped through the same Mass or something close to it when they were visibly here among us.
In the past, defacing a museum wall or mounting canned feces on a pedestal in an exhibition would have caused scandal or outrage--or perhaps, among the more cynically minded, amusement; but lately, the ability of these things to shock has diminished to such a point that they evoke scarcely a shrug. The attitude of the public now ranges from mild annoyance and boredom to indifference, and so our would-be artists have resorted to religious desecration in order to regain active public attention. And regain it they have, but perhaps not quite in the way they intended. People are not reacting to the alleged works of art as art but rather to the blasphemy or sacrilege they engender. Thus, any effective existence as art that the works might have had is cancelled. But the gouge in the wall and the drop cloth have no such distractions: they simply replace art.
The TLS contributor David Collard put it like this in a comment on my first post on this subject the other week: "Is there such a thing as a novel without ideas? Tread carefully . . .". A fair point; terms need to be defined. Taylor writes: a novelist might not be, in anybody's eyes, including their own, a "novelist of ideas", but at the heart of their work there may nonetheless lie "some kind of behavioural proposition". And as in pages, so on stages – and on canvases, picture postcards etc.I have no problem with novels or plays of ideas, as long as the ideas are in dialogue as it were. What I can't stand is didactic art, in which the novel or play is just propaganda for one idea or another.
The justification for Gottschall’s “barbaric version of masculinity” comes by way of evolutionary psychology, whose tenets inform the larger portion of The Professor in the Cage. The simple truth, Gottschall tells readers, is that men are violent because it’s “etched in the DNA of our species.” But although Gottschall refers frequently to “studies” and “science,” these terms function more as talismans than signifiers; he never says which genes, chromosomes, or protein strings regulate the propensity for violence. Rather, he beads together a welter of anecdotes and factoids about a variety of bellicose behaviors in humans and other primates and, post hoc, ergo propter hoc, concludes that the human behaviors must be evolutionarily derived from animal forebears. From “duelly eyes” to “dominance hierarchies” to “nothing fights,” it’s all a version of “the monkey dance,” a sweeping term for “all of the wild and frequently ridiculous varieties of ritualized conflict in human males.” The monkey dance’s many forms, though cloaked in complex and often esoteric idioms across history and cultures, run “perfectly parallel to animal versions,” he insists.Anybody who thinks that women can't be every bit as violent and aggresive as men has lived an unusually sheltered life. It's also nice to learn that P. Z. Myers and I finally agree on something — in this case, in his area of expertise. Now if he could just understand that this gives him little expertise elsewhere …
I never saw a fool yet that thought himself other than wise.
In general, when a novel manipulates its material to conform to the pieties of the day, or alternatively to attack those pieties for no other reason than the visibility such an attack will generate, when its literary tropes are all too familiar, its clever prose reminiscent of other clever prose, then the compass needle is slipping away from true north. William Giraldi’s Busy Monsters, Andrés Neuman’s Traveler of the Century, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries are all recent examples. (James Walton, writing in The New York Review, speaks of the “feeling that The Luminaries is more a careful simulacrum of a great novel than the real thing.”) When, on the other hand, the author renounces some easy twist, some expected payoff, to take us into territory we didn’t expect but that nevertheless fits with the drift of the story, then the novel gains force and conviction. And when he or she does it again, telling quite a different story that is nevertheless driven by the same urgent tensions, then we are likely moving into the zone of authenticity.
When I was a student at Northwestern, Epstein taught a class in the English department on prose style and essay writing, aimed at the students who, like me, were getting degrees (foolish youth that we were) in either fiction or poetry writing. I came to his class at twenty, knowing so, so little--including who he was and what his politics were. What was most striking about him from the first moment of the first class was that he treated us as if we were adults--and, crucially, fellow participants in an ongoing conversation about books and literature. In reality, we were at best just starting to rehearse a few very limited, very cliched lines in that conversation. But the sense he gave that this was a possible way to be--unshowily erudite and fully engaged--was enticing. I remember distinctly that the letters of Elizabeth Bishop had just been published, and Epstein talked about the book as if 1) we would know who she was, 2) we would know her milieu, and 3) we would also be aware of the volume's publication and significance. That his conception of that world and that conversation itself had strict, possibly even unpalatable, political limits was something that wasn't evident, at least to my ignorant eyes, at that point.
A generation after Arnold, English philosopher and novelist John Cowper Powys2 penned The Meaning of Culture (1929), an updated version of Arnold’s spiced polemic, one that emphasized the redoubtable benefits and felicities of art among a bloated consumer and populist vulgarity. “The aim of culture,” Powys wrote, “is to nourish within us”—that word again, nourish—“a sturdy yet sensitive organism that shall be able to deal with the eternal recurrences of life and death.” In other words, art and culture are “equipment for living,” in Kenneth Burke’s unimprovable definition of literature, but also equipment for dying, for a dignified acquiescence to the fate of all flesh. Reconcile yourself to your own death and nothing in life can reduce you.Well, you have to have art that is more than soup cans, too. Oh, and the Internet is blame, eh? Then why is the article on the Internet? Isn't that sleeping with enemy. And if you think more public funding is what is needed, you haven't been watching PBS lately.
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
Saudi Arabian government officials faced extreme backlash after a leaked video showed the brutal public beheading of a woman, who proclaimed her innocence as a man chopped off her head. The video led to many comparisons to the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL), who also behead their victims in public.
Interior Ministry spokesman Major General Mansour al-Turki told NBC News the punishments are not similar, since the Islamic State “has no legitimate way to decide to kill people.”
Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.
… Sofiya pulls off a remarkable structural feat in mirroring Kreutzer’s wife-murder plot from the point of view of the murdered wife. And she does it with prose that (in English at least) comes across as graceful, emotionally intuitive, and heartbreaking.
A god who let us prove his existence would be an idol.
Reading Hope: Entertainer of the Century, one comes away with the suspicion that Zoglin felt obliged to inflate Hope’s place in American culture in order to persuade a younger generation of book editors to consider publishing a 576-page biography of a forgotten star. And while Hope offers an impressively detailed depiction of Hope’s life and work, it turns out that he was, like so many other entertainers, less interesting as a human being than as a performer. Moreover, nothing that Zoglin tells us about Hope’s private life is in any way revealing. It was an open secret that he was a compulsive philanderer, and none of his lovers seem to have gone on the record about their relationships with him. Beyond that, he was by most accounts a dull, opaque man who came alive only in front of an audience or a camer
The nine articles that became “Sakhalin Island” are each so long that they give Chekhov the space to build up characters and narrative arcs. Second, Chekhov’s articles are mostly about closely observed humanity. His sentences deliver news, but they are primarily concerned with how human beings live their lives. In Chekhov’s case, unlike that of his contemporaries, this observation of human behavior is lacking in self-censorship. He is willing to write about anything, and he is willing to see everything with compassion.
The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation.
As the researchers note, these findings are consistent with the idea that more creative people include more events/stimuli in their mental processes than less creative people. But crucially, they found that those scoring high in schizotypy showed a similar pattern of brain activations during creative thinking as the highly creative participants, supporting the idea that overlapping mental processes are implicated in both creativity and psychosis proneness.
It seems that the key to creative cognition is opening up the flood gates and letting in as much information as possible.
For Wittgenstein, logic and science are indeed powerless to address questions of life’s meaning. “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all,” Wittgenstein explains. But that does not mean these problems do not matter. It means that they must be addressed otherwise—for example, by literature.
A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
For that “human side” to prevail over mutual hatred and the will to kill, education, not legislation, is needed. It is not good that Jews cannot wear skullcaps in the street for fear of physical attack; nor is it good that Muslim women face arrest if they wear the burqa. Neither does anyone any harm. Both communities should know each other’s history, and without the burden of a victimisation competition. The rest of France should accept that those histories are theirs too. But in the end, the only school of tolerance will come from the academy of the everyday: the café, the street, the classroom, the workplace. For in those places, the precious, humdrum urge to live and let live will resist the hate-filled shrieking of blood-drunk executioners.
Goto has experienced the full horror of war. In Liberia, friends recall, he talked about seeing hundreds of bodies being bulldozed into a grave the size of a swimming pool. In Iraq, he said a soldier put a gun to his head. But he has sought to draw out lessons from his reporting that are uplifting, especially for children. His DVD and book, Welcome to Our School, brought out by NHK in 2003, featured children in countries including Iraq and Afghanistan introducing their schools, even those closed by conflict, and talking about their love of learning. He has also written books about AIDS, child soldiers in Sierra Leone, genocide in Rwanda, and schoolgirls in Afghanistan. On visits to schools, he has told children in Japan how privileged they are that school is such a "normal" part of life.
Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that's their order of importance.
