Friday, July 11, 2014
Getting a grip …
… I learnt to survive like an 11th-century farmer – Keith Ferrell – Aeon. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The scythe I used had evolved since ancient times. By the Middle Ages, its sharpened blade would have been fashioned by a blacksmith, with his own long years of experience and skill. The addition of lateral grips to the scythe’s snathe (the long, wooden, often curved handle to which the blade is attached) improved the farmer’s ability to control the implement, and made its use more efficient. Until one attempts to use a scythe by holding on to the snathe, as one might a baseball or cricket bat, it’s difficult to appreciate just how innovative the grips were.
New direction …
… Rewriting is Redemption: Blue Highways’ Rich and Lonely Roads | Hazlitt. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
…Heat-Moon has written an account of the second journey, the one that ultimately gave purpose to his life and work. Writing Blue Highways: The Story of How a Book Happened, published this year by University of Missouri Press, is also a travel book of sorts. It took Heat-Moon four years to write Blue Highways, and the process was more self-actualizing than any road trip could possibly be. “The greatest gift of travel,” Heat-Moon writes now, “often the very point of it—is stumbling onto untutored masters.” Writing Blue Highways is a lovely little dispatch from just such a character, a guy who willed himself to literary greatness purely through desperation and psychotic perseverance.
Unsettled science …
… Scholarly journal retracts 60 articles, smashes ‘peer review ring’ – The Washington Post.
News flash: scientists as corruptible as anybody else.
News flash: scientists as corruptible as anybody else.
Updike's real self …
… the seventh letter down: Letters to the Editor – June 27, 2014 | TLS. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Story lines, not party lines …
… Tea Party Literature? | The American Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Everybody has sacred cows; if you don’t think you do, believe me, others have noticed them, and can probably tell you exactly what they are. The biggest and most menacing sacred cow that lives in newsrooms is the conviction among reporters that they see the world as it really is; they often have no idea how carefully constructed their worldviews are to hide things that they do not want to see. This is the fruit of the lack of ideological diversity. Again, though, you do not combat this by substituting right-wing blinders for left-wing blinders. Within most organizations — political, religious, journalistic — people tell themselves that they prize loyalty to the truth, but what they really prize is loyalty to the institution and its favored dogmas.My own view has been wonderfully articulated by Albert Jay Nock: A Little Conserva-tive .
Thursday, July 10, 2014
Stop, that hurts...
...my sentiments: You Are Triggering me! The Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger and Trauma
And so, while in the past, we turned to Freud’s mystic writing pad to think of memory as a palimpsest, burying material under layers of inscription, now we see a memory as a live wire sitting in the psyche waiting for a spark. Where once we saw traumatic recall as a set of enigmatic symptoms moving through the body, now people reduce the resurfacing of a painful memory to the catch all term of “trigger,” imagining that emotional pain is somehow similar to a pulled muscle –as something that hurts whenever it is deployed, and as an injury that requires protection.
Fond of startling …
… Michael Dirda reviews “The Informed Air: Essays by Muriel Spark” - The Washington Post. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
At her best, Spark possesses a sly, skewering style, as well as a profound interest in life’s mysteries, and an imagination that segues readily from the realistic to the supernatural. For example, her famous ghost story, “The Portobello Road,” is both macabre and funny, its unsettling mixture of tones building to a shocking, magnificently deadpan sentence that will take any reader’s breath away. But Spark always enjoys surprises: In one of her essays she recalls her childhood fascination with the Bible and her impression of God: “I thought him a charming and witty character with a ready answer, and with a lot of conflicting sides to his nature. I liked God.”
A thought for today …
It is as impossible for man to demonstrate the existence of God as it would be for even Sherlock Holmes to demonstrate the existence of Arthur Conan Doyle.
— Frederick Buechner, born on this date in 1927
A thought for today …
We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
— Marcel Proust, born on this date in 1871
Wednesday, July 09, 2014
Blogging note…
Another unexpected trip to the eye hospital and an actual doctor's visit for me will keep me from blogging for a bit. Back later.
Becoming?
… Media Ignorance Is Becoming A Serious Problem. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Who are these obscure authors of long-dormant ideas? [Zernike] points to Friedrich Hayek, for one. Yes, the same Hayek who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974 and died way, way back in … 1992. Whose Road To Serfdom was so obscure that it has never been out of print and was excerpted in Reader’s Digest, that obscure publication with only 17 million readers.
Period of adjustment …
… The New Yorker Alters Its Online Strategy — NYTimes.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
There is also the problem that the magazine simply isn't what it used to be. Even the cartoons are disappointing. I don't think the people in charge realize how parochial their New York has become.
There is also the problem that the magazine simply isn't what it used to be. Even the cartoons are disappointing. I don't think the people in charge realize how parochial their New York has become.
In the beginning …
… Samuel Beckett, the Early Years | Boston Review.
… Echo’s Bones … “plot,” is simple yet convoluted. Belacqua comes back to life, or awakens to realize that he was never exactly dead, perched on a fence smoking Romeo y Julieta cigars. He converses, in the desultory, mock-learned fashion of Irish folklore, with bizarre creatures such as the huge living-yet-impotent Lord Gall of Wormwood, who incites the dead-yet-fecund Belacqua to impregnate his wife. Belacqua also holds a rambling conversation with a flirtatious prostitute named Zabarovna Privet, to whom he remarks, in typical gnomic style, “Alas, Gnaeni, the pranic bleb, is far from being a mandrake. His leprechaun lets him out about this time every Sunday.” With appropriate finality, he meets Doyle, the groundskeeper and gravedigger who appeared anonymously in “Draff,” the final story in Pricks.
A thought for today …
So I have cultivated the vast garden of human experience which is history, without troubling myself overmuch about laws, essential first causes, or how it is all coming out.
— Samuel Eliot Morison, born on this date in 1887
Tuesday, July 08, 2014
Returning...
On the way out of town, I looked at the local peasants and thought that, if their forefathers had not burned down the houses of mine, mine wouldn’t have left. And I looked at what had happened to us in two generations, and looked at what hadn’t happened to them in two or three, and instead of feeling outraged by their history of aggression I felt privileged by it. Oppression sometimes benefits its victims more than its perpetrators. While those who are ravaging their neighbors’ lives exhaust their energy on that destruction, those whose lives are being shattered must expend their vigor on solutions—some of which can be exquisite. Hatred drove my family to the United States and its previously unimaginable freedoms.
The person who is loved …
… Quitting the Cancer Battle. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
If cancer patients are to be helped out of their despondency—if they are to face the reality of their condition, which to my mind is the only possible way to go on living with cancer—they must be helped to believe in themselves again.
A thought for today …
I have the ability to create and be in touch with God. I can't change bread and wine into body and blood, but I can take the scum or the slime of the earth and make it into a man or woman.
— J. F. Powers, born on this date in 1917
Monday, July 07, 2014
A great poet …
… First Known When Lost: "Now Is The All-Sufficing All Wherein To Love The Lovely Well".
Strange. I can still remember the short obituary in the paper when de la Mare died in 1956. I was 14, but "The Listeners" was — and remains — a favorite poem.
Strange. I can still remember the short obituary in the paper when de la Mare died in 1956. I was 14, but "The Listeners" was — and remains — a favorite poem.
The tale and Its telling …
… Tone control: ‘Give yourself permission to fail’. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
A final Soviet triumph …
… � The Hollowing of Gary Shteyngart Commentary Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
This is an interesting hodgepodge—Russian pride and Soviet nostalgia coming from a man whose family fled the institutional Jew-hatred of a totalitarian regime. Shteyngart’s list is carefully selective, to the exclusion of anything Jewish. The actual Soviet Jewish list would have been far more complex. What about the fact that along with BBC and the voice of America, the voice of Israel was also desperately sought out? What about the cultural resonances of Sholem Aleichem, whose six-volume collected writings in Russian were in practically every single Soviet Jewish household? What of the German Jewish writer Leon Feuchtwanger, whose historical novels about Josephus and medieval Spain practically constituted the Soviet Jewish Bible? There is much to excavate in how the traces of Jewish memory functioned in the Soviet context, but Shteyngart does not go near those sites.
Q&A …
… [Six Questions] | Arts and Entertainments, by Christopher Beha | Harper's Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Technological rapture …
… The sinister cult of the Singularity (and how it's shaping your future) � The Spectator. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Considered as a religion, this is very American. It is structurally similar to the fundamentalists’ belief in the Rapture — the moment when the elect are swept up to Heaven to avoid the ensuing Tribulation — which is also said to be imminent. And, indeed, in their subliterate way, Kurzweil’s books do read like fundamentalist tracts.
The good Doctor online …
… Yale Digital Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
A thought for today …
To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, who died on this date in 1930
The church in Poland...
...Bring back Wojtylian dialogue
“There is a deep hunger for spirituality here,” says Father Mateusz. People tend to go to church for prayer and meditation rather than for practical help. At the Dominican church in Krakow, a big brick basilica with three naves and many side chapels, six confessionals were in constant use from 6am to midnight in the days before Easter. Even at an evening Mass on Easter Monday, when many congregants had spent the better part of the previous four days in church, the basilica was packed with all generations.
Sunday, July 06, 2014
Hmm…
… The John Updike Society � NY Times Magazine essayist invokes Updike. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
“Five years after ‘Rabbit at Rest’ was published, my father also died of an unexpected heart attack. The day after that, Pete Sampras beat Andre Agassi in the finals of the U.S. Open. ‘You Are Not Alone’ by Michael Jackson was the No. 1 song on the radio. Orville Redenbacher died of a heart attack nine days later. Thirteen days after that, O. J. Simpson was proclaimed not guilty by a jury in Los Angeles. These news reports seemed to fly around my head, their frothy, excitable tone unbearably out of touch with my state of mourning.”This seems strange to me. I can't think of a single key event in my life that I associate with the news and hits of the day. And I was in the news business. And aren't all those pop references going to make novels seem period pieces?
It's still the weekend of the Fourth …
… Henry David Thoreau: “I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion.” | The Book Haven.
Toward his jailers, Thoreau expressed sadness: “They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are under-bred. In every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall. … I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it.”
For the record …
… A Commonplace Blog: An open condemnation of the murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
A thought for today …
If honor were profitable, everybody would be honorable.
— Sir Thomas More, who died on this date in 1535
Indeed...
...Leslie Jamison: confessional writing is not self-indulgent
There was a particular hypocrisy that attached to the fact that it was always empathy I was talking about. Empathy is all about otherness, but my relationship to empathy was largely about me – my book, my career. I usually passed the homeless man who stood near my subway stop without giving him anything, because I was always in a rush: heading to the airport, or a photo shoot, or some radio studio downtown; I needed to get somewhere and talk to someone about caring for everyone. At Newark airport, in New Jersey, snapping a photo of my book I'd found in the airport bookstore, I kept backing up to get a better crop and I nearly knocked over a woman with a cane. What would I have said? Excuse me while I injure you, I'm just trying to get a better angle on my empathy book vanity shot.
Saturday, July 05, 2014
Digging with an open mind...
...Déjà View | Writing new histories
Then there is the issue of the professor who wants to study the historical veracity of the great epics. I have many thoughts—mostly unkind, perhaps even a little Marxist—about the idea of religion. But there is no denying that religion played a huge role in the formation of societies. Much of what we know about the history of civilizations comes from investigations into the history of religions. And that trend is growing. A 2009 American Historical Association survey showed that the largest proportion of historians in the US (around 8%) were working on religion, ahead of cultural studies, women’s studies and even military history.
Blogging post …
By the time this post appears, Debbie and I will be back at Wills Eye Hospital in a unit where the wifi never works. So blogging will resume whenever.
A thought for today …
The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
— Jean Cocteau, born on this date in 1889
Friday, July 04, 2014
Together again …
… novel and essays: The Liminal Landscape of Valeria Luiselli | Reluctant Habits.
For Luiselli, it is that liminal space between the words (“pas pas paspaspas pas”) that reveals the human, uncovering territory closely tied in feel and form to a baby joyfully exclaiming “mama” or “papa” for the first time, anchoring us to some lifelong continuity, and becoming the ultimate measure of the silence we all endure to some degree while occupying this planet.
This is at once wildly roundabout and almost rudely to the point. Those who would like to reduce the world and life to something earlier and smaller than they seem to be should skip genes and molecules. So far as we humans are concerned the world and life are encapsulated in the awe and misunderstanding, confusion and frustration, we experienced before we could fluently speak.
Chronicle of the New Old …
… ‘Fridays at Enrico’s,’ by Don Carpenter - NYTimes.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Now at last, with the publication of “Fridays at Enrico’s” — a manuscript rescued and ably finished by the novelist Jonathan Lethem — [Don] Carpenter hits the bull’s-eye. Not since F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” has a posthumous work acted as the death knell for a generation with such assuredness.
Developing …
… Exclusive: ‘Clarence’ Creator Skyler Page Out of Cartoon Network After Sexual Assault Allegations [UPDATED] | Cartoon Brew.
… but see also Skyler Page.
Odd that someone should be fired solely on the basis of allegation and rumor. If, as the second piece indicates, the guy is bipolar, then we have something else altogether.
… but see also Skyler Page.
Odd that someone should be fired solely on the basis of allegation and rumor. If, as the second piece indicates, the guy is bipolar, then we have something else altogether.
A thought for the day …
Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, born on this date in 1804
From the archives...
...On Kafka
The lower I am, the more proper my place seems; and the higher I am, the stronger my suspicion is that there has been some mistake. And every step of the way, I feel what a great advantage it is for me as president to know that I can at any moment, and justifiably, be removed from the position.
Thursday, July 03, 2014
Interesting picks …
… beyond eastrod: Ratintg the books of the Bible.
The Book of Job is a favorite of mine, as is Ecclesiastes. Isaiah is quite beautiful.
The Book of Job is a favorite of mine, as is Ecclesiastes. Isaiah is quite beautiful.
Why not take both?
…. Taking Sides in the Great Literary Divide Between Nabokov and Roth - Joe Fassler - The Atlantic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
While the two are independent, they can form a partnership. The best thing you can do when you come to a divide is build a bridge across it.
While the two are independent, they can form a partnership. The best thing you can do when you come to a divide is build a bridge across it.
A thought for today …
Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.
— Tom Stoppard, born on this date in 1937
Faith as lived …
… Ink Desk — Paul Horgan Seeing Things As They Are | St. Austin Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Wednesday, July 02, 2014
Discovery …
… The Lost Poems of Ka-Tzetnik Are Found, In The Library – Tablet Magazine. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Then and now …
… beyond eastrod: Misogyny on campus? Really? Perhaps the problem is something else.
Really. How many men actually hate women? Genuine misogyny would have to be some kind of mental disorder. I was raised by two women. I consider that to have been great good luck.
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