A thought for today …

It is useless to contend with the irresistible power of Time, which goes on continually creating by a process of constant destruction.

— E. T. A. Hoffman, born on this date in 1776

The search for closure...

...THIS IS DANNY PEARL’SFINAL STORY

Hear, hear...

...Science, economics cant answer on meaningful life — spiritualism can: Michael Sandel

Beowulf

It's true what they say about Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf: he turned a masterpiece into a masterpiece.

I just finished the book last night and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. To begin, it's an eminently readable story - or at least as Heaney's presented it. 

And it's exciting - quite frankly - to read the modern English alongside the old. For me, that was one of the most rewarding parts of the translation: discovering where the language we speak and read today came from. (I know it's not a direct line, but still...)

Also, I enjoyed the imagined qualities of the book: the idea of a hero battling ancient dragons, sea monsters, and spirits...all of that transported me to another time, when allegory and metaphor worked, and when authors used those sorts of tools without apologizing or masking a sense of embarrassment. 

This is a book that I'd been meaning to read for a long time, and I'm glad that I got around to it. Heaney was a talented poet indeed, and he's done justice to the work of the original poet - that individual who remains nameless, but who composed one of the first successful epics of the English language.

Speaking of Ben Franklin ...

For all his human frailties, we do not think of Franklin as a man with enemies, as a man who was deeply hated and capable of deep hatreds of his own. But Robert Middlekauff's short, well-written study changes that.

First sentence ...

The moth locked up all
winter in the strongbox.

Laura Kasischke about the beginning lines of her poem ‘The first resurrection’.  From Granta

But it brought us Mrs. Silence Dogood ...

Allowing commenters on newspaper websites to keep their names secret leads to significantly more hateful comments on online newspaper stories, according to a new research study.

Twilight roundup …

… Courtesy of Dave Lull:



… Crossing literary borders:  Small presses growing translated fiction's readership.


… The top 10 crime novels in translation | Books | theguardian.com.


… Movies and books again: THE ALLURE OF THE MAP.

Writers love maps: collecting them, creating them, and describing them. Literary cartography includes not only the literal maps that authors commission or make themselves but also the geographies they describe. The visual display of quantitative information in the digital age has made charts and maps more popular than ever, though every graphic, like every story, has a point of view.

… Up to her neck in self: What lies beneath Samuel Beckett's half-buried woman in Happy Days?

… Those were the days: Cynthia Ozick on W. H. Auden at the 92nd Street Y.

… behold, on this selfsame platform, T. S. Eliot—a sacerdotal figure, the era’s reigning literary pope, fake-Brit sonorities reverberating like a cathedral organ, grim and tragic, and as funereal as a marble tomb. And then W. H. Auden, capaciously contrapuntal, though they lived in consonance, Eliot born in 1888, Auden in 1907, Eliot an American who chose England, Auden an Englishman turned American. They died eight years apart and knew the same world, the same political dooms, and the same return to the metaphysics of Christianity. On that broad stage, Auden seemed at the time a lesser god: only Eliot could fill, as he once did, a football stadium. The public Eliot was a venerated monument that loomed unforgivingly, while Auden, even in public, had an air of plainness. Auden’s reading was spoken; it had almost a kind of casualness, a flatness, a matter-of-factness. He read poetry as if he were reading prose.

Ozick offers the commonplace disparagement of the '50s. But she is 13 years older than I. Guess it would have looked different if she had been a teenager.

… A look at Ravelstein by Saul Bellow.

John Updike said that an author’s successful late works are often characterized by a “translucent thinness.” Relatively speaking, Ravelstein would be a decent example of that thesis. In it, we’re no longer dished up the thick, rich liver pâté of Bellow’s heartiest writing, but rather something smoother, a little less heart-clogging.

Just a thought …

If there be a Supreme Someone to Whom we are bound in some way to some degree whether we like it or not, it may well be sound policy to acknowledge that and act accordingly (whatever that may entail). If a theist dies and there is no God, the theist will never know he was wrong. But if an atheist dies and there is a God, the atheist will know precisely that. This, like Pascal's wager, may be thought of as an argument from prudence.

Noontime roundup …

Courtesy of Dave Lull:





… Janus and "The Snow Man" by Thomas O. Rover - The New Criterion.



I didn't know that snowstorms now have names. They never did before. Janus is a good name for a storm.



… Screeds, or Essays for the Near Future?

… the history of literature is “littered” with vanished journals along the lines of Image, which publish work for a time, often framed in terms of ideals and agendas, and then fold or disappear, only to be remembered, if at all, for a work or two or three published there.

My unsolicited suggestion for the next step in this discussion is to determine what the participants definitively agree on and then for each to determine why that is so.



… By the numbers: What Does the Owlet Say? On the competitive squabbles of barn owl siblings.



… Sunk into Being: What lies beneath Samuel Beckett's half-buried woman in Happy Days?



… An unpleasant job, but somebody's got to it — pointing out The pointlessness of Jerry Coyne.

As is typical of the New Atheist genre, we are confronted with a blizzard of sweeping and tendentious assertions, straw men, begged questions, missed points, well-poisoning, and other evidence that the writer has read a book about logical fallacies and mistaken it for a “How-To” guide. 

… The envelope, please — Based on a True Story: The Fiction-Free Finalists for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar.


… Dialogue: Other Places: Teachout And Iverson On Ellington.

The trouble with experts …

… The British amateur who debunked the mathematics of happiness | Science | The Observer. (Hat tip, Lee Lowe.)

Following much negotiation, Brown, Sokal and Friedman had their paper accepted by American Psychologist and it was published online last July under the only slightly less provocative title of The Complex Dynamics of Wishful Thinking. Referring to the bizarrely precise tipping point ratio of 2.9013 that Fredrickson and Losada trumpeted applied to all humans regardless of age, gender, race or culture, the authors – in fact Brown, in this sentence – wrote: "The idea that any aspect of human behaviour or experience should be universally and reproducibly constant to five significant digits would, if proven, constitute a unique moment in the history of the social sciences."

A thought for today …

'Soon the sun will set' — is that prophecy? No, it's merely an assertion of faith in the consistency of events.

— Walter M. Miller Jr., born on this date in 1923

Ch-ch-changes …

… O.E.D.’s New Chief Editor Speaks of Its Future - NYTimes.com.

BOOKSINQ.'s 40,000 post celebration!!! Prizes, Awards, Party!!!

The 40,000th post in BooksInq is the very next post!!! (This is the pentiultimate.)  (And there are no prizes, awards, party I am afraid, that was clickbait.)

BUT BEFORE YOU GO AWAY, I want to acknowledge the wonderful blog Frank has put together, and the thoughtful, creative and hard work he has put into the blog for these many years.

May God bless you and yours Frank, and thank you so much for such a wonderful creation.

More science: the shortest scientific paper ever had no words!

In 1974, clinical psychologist Dennis Upper found himself stricken with writer's block. Though pen was to paper, no words would flow. He decided to solve his problem with a scientific experiment. Yet, as is frequently the case in science, his experiment didn't work as intended, and that's putting it euphemistically. Despite the failure, his work, "The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “writer's block,” was published in the prestigious Journal of Applied Behavioral Analysis. It is reproduced in its entirety below:

 From RealClearScience

In case you wondered …

… The 75 Greatest Living Female Authors | AbeBooks' Reading Copy.

Reading on phones, or how the scientific method works on the Internet ...

Earlier this month, Buzzfeed published a piece called "Why I Bought a House in Detroit for $500." The story ended up getting more than a million pageviews, which is notable because it is also more than 6,000 words long. The other notable thing: 47 percent of those views came from people accessing the story on mobile devices. And while people who read the piece on tablets spent an average of more than 12 minutes with the story, those doing so on phones  spent more than 25 minutes—a small eternity, in Internet time.

I can barely see my phone, much less read 6,000 word articles.

Observations: 1) People are reading longform on smartphones; 2) that is not healthy.

Hypothesis/Prediction:  Stories to come on medical ailments caused by smartphones.

Experimentation: Google search: "medical ailments caused by smartphone"

Results:  Many hits including recent story here: "Expert reveals the 21st century ailments caused by smartphones and tablet" 

Hypothesis proven.

Afternoon roundup …

… Courtesy of Rus Bowden:

… Angel Taboada Villanueva Arrested: Murderer of Mexican Poet Javier Sicilia's Son Taken Into Custody.

… Most writers earn less than £600 a year, survey reveals.

"Most authors write because they want to share something with the world or gain recognition of some sort," Greenfield said. "There are, of course, outliers. The top 2% or so of authors make a good living and the most successful authors – including self-published authors – make a tremendous amount of money."

… Intently haphazard: Casual Opulence — Denise Levertov’s Collected Poems.

Even with her feet on the ground, she seemed to have her heart in the clouds. She saw her life as a spiritual quest and cast herself as a pilgrim, not a visionary—as someone who sees for herself and not for others. This faithfulness to herself can seem like self-absorption, but in reading her voluminous and deeply uneven Collected Poems, one can trace the integrity in the life of her work. It is major work played in a minor key, with her quest sometimes going astray in the maze of her wanderings.

I'll take her work over a good many others' any day.

… After 3 years house arrest China writer Ms. Liu Xia shares poems of isolation.

And many happy returns …

… Paul Davis On Crime: Happy Birthday To Joseph Wambaugh.

Just a thought …

Broadly understood, theism means thinking that there’s a Someone behind reality as well as things and actions underlying it.   A Christian further believes that the Someone in question speaks the world into being by means of a living Word who took on flesh and was grievously put to death as a propitiation for some grand wrongdoing  committed by the first man and woman. In doing so He overcame death, which was the consequence of the grand wrongdoing. Though he has since returned to the realm of being from whence He came, eventually, He will return and bring the world to its fulfilling cadence.

This is obviously not a scientific thesis. It represents an altogether different manner of thinking. It postulates that the nature of reality is moral, and not simply mechanical. Its methods are symbol, myth, and drama. Its medium is character. 

At a loss with himself …

… on Drafts for a Third Sketchbook, by Max Frisch, tr. by Mike Mitchell (Seagull Books) | On the Seawall: A Literary Website by Ron Slate (GD).

In general I envy anyone who has been through a school of thought, no matter which; whether as a Jesuit or a Protestant or a Marxist or a Cabbalist; even if such a person later changes their position, they remain within a system of coordinates. 

Enter now …

… Eli Stein's Cartoon Caption Contest. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Library as Paradise …

… Seven Essays I Meet in My Literary Heaven. 

Morning roundup …

… Courtesy of Dave Lull:

… the envelope, please: The Edgar® Nominees.

… Taking stock: That’s Material: An Interview with Daniel Menaker.

Most of the blunders recounted by Menaker aren’t too dire, but he remains haunted by the inadvertent role he played in his only sibling’s untimely death. During a game of touch football in 1967, he challenged his older brother, Mike, to play backfield despite Mike’s bad knees, and from there everything went horribly amiss: Mike, then twenty-nine, sustained an injury that led to knee surgery, and this surgery led to a fatal blood infection called septicemia.

…  Local, local, local: The Dictionary of American Regional English: Recent Developments.

… 28 Beautiful Quotes About Libraries.

I like the Jorge Luis Borges quote best: "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."

… The Marriage of Celluloid and Ink: Oscar nominations: Many films came from the page (+video).

… Speaking of movies: Zero Dollar Movies — watch movies online for free.

… Language, Truth, and Literature: A Defense of Literary Humanism.

The "world is the transcendental creation of language.  . . . composed of entities which are in some sense meanings."

This must in some way hold true for anyone who assents to the proposition that a Creator is speaking the world into being, by means of a single Word that took on flesh in order to effect a fundamental adjustment in the nature of reality.  

A thought for today …

Death doesn't bargain.

— August Strindberg, born on this date in 1849

Like a rock concert...

...Doing “Justice” at Jaipur

Link baits...

...The six things that makestories go viral will amaze, and maybe infuriate, you

How prophetic …

… George Orwell Anniversary of Death | New Republic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Huxley and Orwell do not say gloomily, like Wells and Koestler and Shaw, “Humanity is done for, unless a miracle lifts it towards the heavens.” Rather they suggest that, if certain tendencies towards regimentation which have appeared throughout the world are allowed to develop without hindrance, then we may within a foreseeable future find ourselves trapped in a world where freedom, and all the values that go with it, have withered and been forgotten. Huxley puts the argument well when he says:

Unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms…or else one supranational totalitarianism … developing, under the need for efficiency and stability, into the welfare tyranny of Utopia.

Get well, soon …

… Poet Kay Ryan recovering after her bicycle was hit by a car - latimes.com. ups of the hat to dvd Lull. and Rus Bowden.)

Blog picks …

… Taking a look at the opening scenes of Marlowe's strange play . . .

… Dreams, memory, ghosts: `Do You Ever Think of Me?'

… Jaipur Literature Festival.

… This and That.

… "The Hidden Law".

… Dieudonné and the limits of free speech.

… Rumi & Issa: Across Cultures, Across Worlds.

The Top Ten Books People Lie About Reading

One person's take.

I remember years and years ago arguing about a book with my partner's best friend.  We went to and fro, got quite annoyed about each other because the other just wasn't seeing what we saw in the book,  till my partner, somehow sensing something wasn't quite right, asked us both, "Wait a minute, have either of you actually read the book?"  And we both admitted we hadn't...(but we had both read a review, which sort of counts right?)

What do book editors want?

What do editors really want? Why are they putting one thing in the rejection pile and preparing for an auction for another? The difficulty in answering these questions is that every editor opens every proposal the same way you open presents from relatives: with hope but trepidation. They never know when it’s going to be great, but great is exactly what they’re looking for.
Whenever I come back from a lunch with a book editor, my agency colleagues always ask, “What are they looking for over there these days?

This Sunday …

… Miller and Sweeney in Fox Chase January 26th | Fox Chase Review.

Listen in …

… Podcast: The Consolation of Poetry.

Rachel Hadas, author of Strange Relation: A Memoir of Marriage, Dementia and Poetry (Paul Dry Books), lost her husband to early onset dementia. We talk about how poetry — hers and others’ — gave her solace during this years-long process. We also talk about poetry is a way for the poet to both release and identify emotions, why it was easier to publish collections of poetry in the 1980s and 1990s, the benefits of poetry memorization, and why the Furies looked the other way when Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia.

I reviewed Strange Relation. It's an extraordinary and moving book.

Morning roundup …

… Courtesy of Dave Lull.

… The drama of doubt —The University Bookman: Unamuno: No Evangelist, No Secularist.

… More than always at their best: In Praise of Mediocrity.

 To perpetuate a traditional practice enriches the storehouse of being while also stitching together the eternal society of the dead, living, and those still unborn in such a way that past, present, and future remain habitable places, where human voice can still hear and answer human voice.  It keeps words, habits, and techniques in common, it cultivates, tempers, and preserves a climate of opinion, whatever the other storms of history.

… Diagnostics: Psychos and Psychopaths of the Silver Screen.

… FAN FRICTION: “Sherlock” and its audiences.

The new season reunites Holmes with his primal fan: that love addict Dr. John Watson, played by Martin Freeman. Watson has been grieving Sherlock’s suicide for two years, but he’s now dating a nurse, Mary (played by Freeman’s partner, Amanda Abbington, for added intertextuality), and he’s bought an engagement ring. When Sherlock shows up, the men’s intimacy reignites, and the game is on.

… The talented Ms. Oates: Joyce Carol Oates interview: portrait of a literary powerhouse.

Her parents were “very nice people, lovely people” but “they didn’t have any great ambition for me”. She believes this lack of parental pressure was liberating. She sees the children of Princeton academics wilting under their parents’ expectations. “The children of professors feel, I think, in most cases that they have to emulate [their parents]. You can’t go work on a farm or whatever. Whereas I come from a different era, a different world, where no one expected anybody even to get a high-school diploma.”

… Master of harmonics: His Blues to Be Somebody: Charlie Parker’s Early Years.

… Giddins and Scott DeVeaux write that, in his intensive study, Parker discovered that “any note, no matter how dissonant, could be made to resolve in a chord.” This realization opened unexplored avenues for soloists and led to a new, higher degree of complexity in the art form. While many older musicians rebelled against Parker’s use of dissonant harmonies and complex chromatics, those who did embrace it, and him, discovered that, in DeVeaux’s words, Parker “had the knack of making the most radical innovations seem instantly understandable, masking both the bristling complexity of the musical language and the disciplined intellect behind it.”

… Literary nationalism and part-time love fest: Writers attack 'overrated' Anglo-American literature at Jaipur festival.

"I love your work, Jonathan," [award-winning author and film-maker Xiaolu Guo] told [Jonathan] Franzen, "but in a way you are smeared by English American literature … I think certain American literature is overrated, massively overrated, and I really hate to read them," she said.

Then don't.

Surprisingly tasty …

… How Hipster Toast Made My Week | BREVITY's Nonfiction Blog.

A thought for today …

I do not know whether there is Truth or Not. But I instinctively feel that I cannot be without It. And I know that if It is, then It is everything for me: reason, and good, and strength, and life, and happiness. Perhaps It is not; but I love It – Love is more than everything that exists. I already count It as existing, and I love It - though perhaps non-existent – with all my soul and all my thinking and dreaming. I renounce everything for it -Even my questions and my doubts.

— Pavel Florensky, born on this date in 1882 

Family connection...

...BETWEEN THE LINES | Cyrus Mistry says he hopes to get back to writing soon

Journalism, Ethics, and Trans people ...

What began as a story about a brilliant woman with a new invention had turned into the tale of a troubled man who had invented a new life for himself. Yet the biggest question remained unanswered: Had Dr. V created a great golf club or merely a great story?

The quote above is from this article, a longform participatory journalism article by Caleb Hannah published by Grantland; a bizarre story about an inventor ("Dr. V"), her putter, and the lies she told.

Shortly after Hannah discovered Dr. V's trans past (and after he discovered other lies she told), Dr. V killed herself.   That tragedy has created a controversy (you can read about some of it in a Slate article here): was the trans aspect of Dr. V's life part of the story?  From the Slate article:

As much as we try to understand other people’s emotions, this is what empathy looks like in real life: It’s easier to relate to people who are just like us.
That’s not how journalism is supposed to work, though. Yes, every reporter strives to uncover the truth. But we’re also supposed to call on our reserves of emotional intelligence to comprehend the people we’re writing about. When someone like the New York Times’ David Carr, who is very much attuned to questions of journalistic ethics, tweets out Hannan’s story approvingly with no hint about the moral dilemmas it raises, it’s clear there’s a cavernous empathy gap between mainstream writers and trans people. Hannan’s story, and the writer’s defenders, show the dangers of privileging fact-finding and the quest for a great story over compassion and humanity.

 As a patent lawyer for 26 years, all too familiar with inventors, I am not surprised by Dr. V's inventions -- the putter or her life.  As a trans person active in the community, all too familiar with trans people, I am not surprised by Dr. V's history and actions.  What I don't know, and no one can say, is if there is any need for empathy.  Trans people's lives suck, most of them.  Does that give any of us the right to demand we be treated with kid gloves?  That is, we have little protection against trans prejudice, the disgust of others, losing our family, our job, our friends and our lives if we transition and become known as trans...should we have the right to demand even greater protection against being "outed"?   Even if we solicited the situation that might lead to outing in the first place?

Interesting.  I kind of think -- while being fearful of judging another -- if one is going to make stuff up, one risks.  And I think if one is going to make stuff up and then solicit attention as well, one risks alot. 

According to The Onion ...

THE HEAVENS—Calling into question centuries of religious dogma and commonly held beliefs, the Lord Our God, Creator and Supreme Ruler of the Universe, admitted Tuesday that in actuality it is “extremely rare” for Him to ever forgive an individual.

 Darn.  I was really counting on forgiveness...

Blogging and life …

I have much to do today that will take me away from my desk and even my iPad. So blogging will have to wait until later.

Morning roundup …

… courtesy of Dave Lull.

… A God That Grounds All Things, Ctd —  The Dish.

I think it's a waste of time trying to engage with someone like Coyne, who is just another true believer (just not in God).  I know quite a few people, by the way, who are not theologians, but have a far more sophisticated understanding of what the term God means than Coyne does. He really should get out more.

… A monument of humanism: Time Stood Still: My Internment in England 1914-1918, by Paul Cohen-Portheim.

… A good writer remembered.

Almost 45 years after his death, O'Hara has a loyal, but small, following, which includes the journalist Gay Talese and essayist Fran Leibowitz. His influence is detected as early as Irwin Shaw's '"Girls in their Summer Dresses," a 1930s short tale of smoldering marital strife; mid-century with Talese's "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," a legendary Esquire profile, and in the 1990s with Philip Roth's numbing "American Pastoral." And yet O'Hara remains untaught in most English departments. He never received the posthumous idolatry of Hemingway or Fitzgerald. O'Hara's notoriously thin skin spoiled his legacy, but the editor William Maxwell said it best: "Good writers deserve to be remembered."

… Call Me Burroughs: A Life by Barry Miles.

It was in Tangier that Burroughs discovered his talent for transforming into el hombre invisible. This was a projection of anonymity so total it bordered on pseudocide. Miles speculates that invisibility was Burroughs's way to negotiate his "fear of exposure and his horror of being the object of contempt and ridicule" due to his homosexuality. This is a bold claim to make on behalf of one of America's most unapologetically gay writers, but sexuality was never a prerogative for Burroughs—it was, in his opinion, a control agent to which he was preconditioned.

… THE PRISONER OF STRESS.

… anxiety of the kind [Scott Stossel]  is afflicted with is not a riddle. It’s an illness. There is therefore nothing, except in the medical sense, to solve. That’s not what Stossel wants to believe, though. He has an idea that more is at stake. He thinks that there is a metaphysics of anxiety. “To grapple with and understand anxiety,” he says, “is, in some sense, to grapple with and understand the human condition.”

… Complete interview series —  GOOD TIME CRIME: TALKING WITH ELMORE LEONARD.

Farewell opus …

… Paul Davis On Crime: Command Authority: Tom Clancy's Last Thriller.

A thought for today …

Let every dawn be to you as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its close.

— John Ruskin, who died on this date in 1900

About time...

...Book Review: The New Middle East

On the Caribbean trail...

...Knowing your own history is armour—and catharsis: Gaiutra Bahadur

Morning roundup …

… courtesy of Dave Lull.

… Good to know: 'Jane Austen, Game Theorist' by Michael Suk-Young Chwe Is a Joke | New Republic.

One would think, given its title, that Chwe’s book offers an in-depth game-theoretical analysis of the ways that Austen’s characters (specifically, her heroines and heroes) work through their choices (specifically, the ones they make in relation to one another)—why Elizabeth Bennet, to take the most obvious example, rejects Mr. Darcy the first time he proposes but accepts him on the next go-round.
No such luck. What we really get, once we fight through Chwe’s meandering, ponderous, frequently self-contradictory argument, is only the claim that Austenwants her characters to think in game-theoretic ways: to reflect upon the likely consequences of their choices, to plan out how to reach their goals, to try to intuit what the people around them are thinking and how they in turn are likely to act.

… Rude new world: The new intolerance: will we regret pushing Christians out of public life?

… not only Christians, but also Muslims and Jews, increasingly feel they are no longer free to express any belief, no matter how deeply felt, that runs counter to the prevailing fashions for superficial “tolerance” and “equality” (terms which no longer bear their dictionary meaning but are part of a political jargon in which only certain views, and certain groups, count as legitimate).

I think these "liberals" will find that trying to suppress religion is not as easy as they may think. Religion has been around a lot longer than this "liberalism".

… APPRECIATIONS: REMEMBERING BRUCE CHATWIN.

Chatwin is less widely read a quarter-century after his passing but for no good reason. He was a superb storyteller, even if storytelling meant departing from the literal truth—a standard to which we do not hold many other literary travelers, it should be said, from Herodotus to Mark Twain. And, that said, most of his books, which were too few to begin with, remain in print.

… And the winners are : The 5 Best Punctuation Marks in Literature.

… Moments to remember: Ralph Fiennes: Dickens and the Grand Budapest.

The point he is in the process of making is that there is one big difference between cinema and theatre: the close-up. The cinematic close-up brings something new into the world, an intense intimacy. Istvan Szabo explained this to him when he was directing Fiennes in Sunshine (1999). “For me,” says Fiennes, lapsing into a Hungarian accent, “cinema iz about ze cloze-up — to zee thoughtz and emotionz born in the faze for the firzt time

Inquirer reviews …

… 'Orfeo,' richly told, details our culture of fear.

… Two on the road into nothingness.

… In Doctorow's new novel, scientist faces lots of loss.

A thought for today …

When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.

— Julian Barnes, born on this date in 1946

In case you wondered …

… Why Representative Democracies Can't Write Off Transparency — Alexander Furnas — The Atlantic.

The simplistic dichotomy between direct and representative democracy that Etzioni presents discounts other meaningful forms of political participation and undervalues the role that intermediary institutions and interest-group pluralism play in making transparency work. The United States is not just a representative democracy; it is a society marked by interest-group participation, with a robust ecosystem of advocacy organizations, trade associations, and other groups representing an extremely diverse set of interests.

See also: NOTE THAT HE WASN’T CAUGHT VIA EMAIL-INTERCEPTS.

On the science front …

… BBC News - Has the Sun gone to sleep?

Don't tell Al Gore

… Mmm mmm good: What if natural products came with a list of ingredients?

Indeed …

… Paul Davis On Crime: Happy Birthday To Cary Grant.

Grant once said that "Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant." And I've known quite a few a guys for whom Grant was a kind of ideal. I quite understand that. But if I were to a chose someone to model myself on, it would be Ronald Colman.

Morning roundup …

… courtesy of Dave Lull.

… The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography, by Alan Jacobs | Books | Times Higher Education.

Alan Jacobs calls The Book of Common Prayer “an instrument of social and political control”, but underplays its political dimensions in favour of an elaborate account of its reception as a religious text. Evangelical contemporaries objected to Cranmer countenancing kneeling at Communion. For John Knox this was tantamount to idolatry. Cranmer’s own equating of transubstantiation with idolatry was one of the “doctrinal errors” for which he was executed.

… on Permission, poems by Katie Peterson (New Issues).

[Peterson] is a poet of necessary disequilibrium. With stubborn persistence, each poem struggles for balance, usually resulting in a draw between the limitations of personal comprehension and a vast naturalness of automatic being in the surround, often depicted in minutiae. A yearning for expansion of spirit ends up (almost) settling for the yearning itself. Remarkably, her poem-endings often echo this compromise yet strike the reader as quite various in what they notice or their manner of insistence.

… From Muse to amusement: Absinthe: How the Green Fairy became literature’s drink.

… Reprise: Benny Goodman 1938 concert revived.

… Size counts. From Bryan Appleyard: The long tail cut short: the economics of blockbuster capitalism.

…  the general point is credible: that big companies have tamed the market anarchy of the internet. When we think of the web now, we don’t think of a bustling marketplace of small traders; we think of Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook. The gold rush has turned into the same old land-grab.

… Q&A: A Strange Composition: Classical Music Meets Bioterror In 'Orfeo'.

[Richard] Powers says he identifies with composers who are struggling to make complex, compelling works. "This balancing act between wanting to make it new and wanting to make it loved and beautiful is familiar to me," he tells NPR's Audie Cornish. "It's something that I've been wrestling with over the course of 11 novels and close to 30 years now. You write the kind of book that you wish you could find on the shelf somewhere, and you wait for someone who has the time and the focus and the desire to go deeper and to read a new story."

Earthbound …

… Zealotry of Guerin: The Fall of the Rebel Angels (Bruegel), Sonnet #157.

A thought for today …

No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.

— J. Bronowski, born on this date in 1908

The quaintness of Ancient Rome …

… Ancient skulls discovered in London speak of Roman headhunters.

Q&A …

… 10 Questions for Philip Dacey | Fox Chase Review.

Ordinary beauty …

… The 28 Days of Beautiful Things Project | BREVITY's Nonfiction Blog.

Hmm …

… The Best Arguments for God's Existence Don't Challenge Atheists | New Republic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Anyone who claims that regular monotheists view God like Karen Armstrong’s Apophatic Entity or Tillich’s Ground of Being simply hasn’t gotten out enough.

A good many people who are not scientists assent to the truth of Darwin's take on evolution. Does Coyne think their understanding of it is as sophisticated as scientists'?

Further, it’s obvious that the bulk of harm committed in the name of religion is done by those not who see god as a Ground of Being, but rather as an anthropomorphic entity who has a personal relationship with his minions and supplies them with a moral system.

 No small amount of harm was done in the name of something called the dictatorship of the proletariat, advanced by an atheist of some note. The crimes committed in the name of religion say more about the nature of man than they do about the nature of religion. Man is capable of putting almost anything to evil use. Talk about not getting out enough. 

Coyne's comment on ontological proofs is interesting. As this article reports, a computer seems to have verified Gödel's version, at least in the realm of mathematics. And we all know how important mathematics is to science and scientists.

 Given that arguments in the first two categories are now untenable, people like Hart have proposed conceptions of God that are so nebulous that we can’t figure out what they mean.

Has Coyne read up on any quantum physics lately?

Morning roundup …

… Courtesy of Dave Lull.


… Bruce Charlton's Miscellany: Subversion and blog comments.

… Poetry as Liturgy: Review of Sounding The Seasons: Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year, by Malcolm Guite.

… True Detective' could be the next 'Breaking Bad'.

… The "Soul Is a Stranger in This World" — Loneliness in the poetry of Franz Wright.

Block after block text can be off-putting. When I first received the volume from the publisher, I skimmed it and put it to the side. I was wrong to do so.Kindertotenwald is a pleasure. The poems themselves are some of Wright's most varied in terms of subject matter. We have folk tales, vignettes of Nietzsche, Verlaine, Basho, Saint Teresa, Kierkegaard, and other unidentified voices.

… And the winner is: The German non-word of the year: Sozialtourismus.

… Elberry reads Alan Furst: "for they were no longer to be had”.

A thought for today …

Wise sayings often fall on barren ground, but a kind word is never thrown away.

—Compton MacKenzie, born on this date in 1883

A political book festival...

...Jaipur Lit Fest: Words with heat

RIP...

...Poet Laureate of Golpitha

Watch out...

...Hilary Mantel to publish new short story collection

Busy day ahead …

… back later on.

Just a thought …

We are said to be made in the image and likeness of God. But God has no image to make a likeness of. And yet …. 

The essence of a thing is that which makes it what it is. But what makes this particular thing what it is in particular is precisely what it does not have in common with anything else. The deeper one looks into oneself, the more elusive our self becomes. The mystery of the self opens onto the mystery of God. 

This can perhaps serve as an oblique answer to the questions posed here: My quest continues, and a 2nd century gnostic offers a challenge.

Morning roundup …

… Courtesy of Dave Lull.

… Uh-oh: Joyce Carol Oates, At It Again.

I tend to agree that Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth ares " minor artists whose work lacks the sort of insight and nuance we expect from major painters." Regarding realism, all involved should consult Stephen Pentz.

… Inside the Angsty, Affirming World of Whisper -- Daily Intelligencer.

If you're older than 25, you may not have heard of Whisper. But the app — already popular among high-school and college students across the country — is quickly becoming the most interesting social network around. It allows people to post anonymous Whispers (photos with a line or two of text overlaid on them, in the style of a Reddit image macro) which can then be "hearted" or replied to by other users. Users can view popular Whispers, Whispers with a common keyword, or Whispers posted from a nearby location.

… ON TRANSLATING KAFKA’S “THE METAMORPHOSIS”.

… Gregor has only himself to blame for the wretchedness of his situation, since he has willingly accepted wretchedness as it was thrust upon him. Like other of Kafka’s doomed protagonists, he errs by failing to act, instead allowing himself to be acted upon. Gregor Samsa, giant bug, is a cartoon of the subaltern, a human being turned inside out. He has traded in his spine for an exoskeleton, but even this armorlike shell (“carapace” and “armor” are the same word in German, Panzer) is no defense once his suddenly powerful father starts pelting him with apples—an ironically biblical choice of weapon.

… The motley Muses: Clio and Her Sisters.

Clio, the demi-goddess in charge of history, is traditionally depicted with a scroll or a book. But as portrayed by [Peter Charles] Hoffer -- a professor of history at the University of Georgia – she is in regular communication with her peers in philosophy, law, the social sciences, and policy studies. I picture her juggling tablet, laptop and cellphone, in the contemporary manner.

… Rowles on Tatum. 

Among Art Tatum's fans was a fellow named Sergei Rachmaninoff.

… Healing and art: WHERE POETRY LIVES: WRITING WORKSHOP FOR MEDICAL STUDENTS.

… A STRANGE UNIVERSALISM Finding the Spiritual in a Murder Mystery.

… I’ve come to realize when I read mysteries there is something of the spiritual running right through it, whether or not there is an explicit religious theme or figure.

A thought for today …

If you find something to tell, tell it to your truest, though that make little to tell; the truer you speak, the more you will know to tell.

— Laura Riding, born on this date in 1901

Rearranged in translation...

...An interview with Adam Thirlwell

Redemptive repurposing …

… Thomas Larson’s Heart and Soul | BREVITY's Nonfiction Blog.

Canon fodder …

… A Commonplace Blog: Reply to critics of “Academe Quits Me”. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In light of the comments to my essay yesterday, I’d go one step farther now. The canon is the name by which calls for the restoration of order and coherence to literary study are misunderstood in advance and rejected out of hand without additional examination.

Just a thought …

St. Paul urged the Thessalonians to "pray without ceasing." This is not as odd as it sounds. Just about anything we do can be turned into a prayer — except thinking. Prayer definitely interferes with that. Anyway, given that we really don't know for sure what is going on in life, prayer may be our best bet. There have been, of course, lots of explanations offered to explain things, but no ironclad proof for any of them. And that includes those I subscribe to and whatever others you may subscribe to. The one thing certain is the eventuality of death, itself a threshold to further uncertainty. We really do see things "as through a glass darkly."  We have every reason to be wary. We might even want to pray

Blog picks …

… The art of gas stations: `Those Stationary Trivialities'.

… Fess up: My quest continues, and a 2nd century gnostic offers a challenge.

… RIP Larry Richette.

… Styles and Languages.

… No mean feat: Ivy Low Litvinov: surviving Stalin … and D.H. Lawrence, too.

… Endless traveling and leave-taking: "A Gull Between Earth And Sky".

… Good question: What ever happened to Nelson Algren, and why?

Afternoon roundup …

Courtesy of Rus Bowden.

… John Timpane on  Amiri Baraka, 79, poet, playwright, activist.

… See also: Remembering Amiri Baraka.

… Jazz Musician Herbie Hancock Will Deliver 2014 Norton Lectures.

… Emily online: Infamy or Urn?

…  even if all, or most, of Dickinson’s manuscripts end up online, would we be any closer to the real thing? In a material sense, undoubtedly so: with the tools we already use to zoom in on maps (to find the location of a new restaurant) or shopping websites (to see the detail on a jacket), we can get as close as we want to examine how Dickinson formed her c’s or how little paper she required to write a quatrain in her own hand. 

… Tyranny alert:  New Year's Resolution: China Blocks the Guardian Newspaper's Website.

… Remembering Natalya Gorbanevskaya.

… The first resurrection ---a poem by Laura Kasischke.

… Dylan Thomas centenary: South Wales gets ready to welcome the world.

… Thomas's reputation has not always been as solid in Wales as in other parts of the world. One theory is that as a non-native speaker he was considered not Welsh enough in Wales – but was regarded as too Welsh by the English. Towns also believes that his reputation as a womaniser and drinker upset the puritanical element in Wales.

… Poetry Pairing: 'Ode'. 

The joy and peril...

...ON TRANSLATING KAFKA’S “THE METAMORPHOSIS”

How to do it...

...Fame maintenance

Blogging your book …

… On Being an Inept Blogger | BREVITY's Nonfiction Blog.

Voices besides the still and small …

… Everything That Rises — Nothing Less Than Phenomenal. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

  That so few of the contemporary American novels with a religious dimension deal with the stuff right at the center of religion, and the cultural conversation about religion – matters of assent or dissent, of truth and falsehood, of calls heard and lives saved or lost – seems to me striking; and it seems to me awfully  narrow, not worthy of the long tradition we share, for Greg or anybody else to suggest that our postmodern time is different from the past and that in our time only the “still, small voice” can register authentically.

If you practice your faith, your faith will inform your work, and find its own voice.

 

Morning roundup …

… courtesy of Dave Lull.

… Peter Geach - obituary.

Geach’s interest in the thought of both Wittgenstein and Aquinas made him an honorary founder of the philosophical school that called itself “analytical Thomism”. But while Geach was a philosopher and Catholic, his philosophy went wherever the force of logic demanded, rather than being tailored to a religious conclusion. “To me it appears blasphemous to say God is 'above’ logic,” he wrote. “Logic is not partisan, and knows nothing but to strike straight; but the sword is invincible, bearing the Maker’s name.”

… Conor McPherson: 'TV is where the creative work happens now'.

I'll take his word for it.

… FOR WORLD LITERATURE.

Learn the literature of your native language first, and learn it reasonably well. Then you have something to bring to the literature of other languages.

… In case you ordered: What people talk about when they talk about Robert Frost: A Few Notes on Indexing.

… What Is It About Middlemarch?

Harold Bloom … was right to note the weirdness of this part of Eliot’s ­project—or rather, the weirdness of it working. She was, he wrote, the only “major novelist, before or since, whose overt ­moralizings constitute an aesthetic virtue rather than a disaster.” Which raises a question: How does she get away with it? And, beyond the basic exhortation to be good, what exactly is it that she wants us to do?

… And the winner is: John Poch wins 2014 New Criterion Poetry Prize.

… Life imitates art: “PERSON OF INTEREST”: THE TV SHOW THAT PREDICTED EDWARD SNOWDEN.

A thought for today …

Love is often the fruit of marriage.

— Moliere, born on this date in 1622

Staying stranded...

...“You Turn Yourself into an Outsider”: An interview with Anita Desai

Just a thought …

"The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones." This may be so for individuals.  But  history is different.  "The glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome" still flourish in memory, conveniently omitting the jury that sentenced Socrates to death and the crowds cheering as wild beasts tore apart their fellow humans in the Coliseum. When we think of the Middle Ages, the beauty of cathedrals distracts from the squalor and stench. Could we be transported to any of those earlier times, we would find them suffocating and terrifying. Yet we seem to miss something we imagine they had that gave life savor and tang.

Life as a Jewish Ghost...

...in modern Germany

Treading with caution …

… Madness and Survival in the Memoir | BREVITY's Nonfiction Blog.

Something else from Dave …

 I'll pass on Duluth in winter.

Morning roundup …

… courtesy of Dave Lull:

… Richard Powers’ novel Orfeo, reviewed.

In Orfeo, the specter of the music is different. “God,” Els says, nonplussed, to the feds. “You think I nerve-gassed my dog.” Sensing this, his mind trains on threats of the security state: electronic surveillance, Patriot Act provisions such as “hold until cleared” like endless fermatas, a vivid memory of the Waco siege with “Innocent children … burnt to death by American law enforcement agents.” All of this, and a whole life in music, come to the surface while he runs.

… The Last Word Goes to Scribblers in the Margins.

Flyleaf and title-page signatures are comforting but they don't compare with the battles for and in the margins: "Pure b.s. if you think abt it," for instance, likely from a student unimpressed by a Pulitzer winner's (truly dull, in fact) poetry. Or "Does anybody actually know wtf this means?" (written beside the words "objective correlative").

… An Appreciation of Ian G. Barbour (1923-2013).

Ian was instrumental in taking questions from the long-standing relationship between science and religion -- questions about the origin and future of the universe, the age of the Earth, the unfolding of life, or the nature of science -- and reframing these in the language of modern science and in the idiom of contemporary theology.

… A Conversation with Verlyn Klinkenborg on the Craft of Academic Writing.

There's craft involved in academic writing?

Listen in …

… Podcast: A Place To Rest | Virtual Memories.

Imagining space travel …

(Hat tip, Benjamin Knox.)

What do you bid?

… Inky Lawyers Huddle With Judge As Auction Block Looms | Big Trial | Philadelphia Trial Blog.

A thought for today …

Somewhere in the world there is an epigram for every dilemma.

— Hendrik Willem van Loon, born on this date in 1882

Congratulations...

...TS Eliot poetry prize goes to Sinéad Morrissey's Parallax

More pushing back …

… Nothing More Timeless Than Ignorance by Heather Mac Donald - City Journal. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

This year’s [MLA] conference theme is “Vulnerable Times.” MLA president Marianne Hirsch explained the concept a few months ago: “The Presidential Forum [one among many panels on the topic] will theorize vulnerability’s complex temporalities. Discussing embodiment, poverty, climate, activism, reparation, and the condition of being unequally governed, forum participants will expose key sites of vulnerability and assess possibilities for change.” 

How can anyone take someone who writes this sort of drivel seriously? And why would anyone think that persons trafficking in this sort of pseudo- discourse could even address let alone solve any of the world's  problems?