The problem with Mrs. White was not her silly view, but her insistence that something be done about it. You want to think Robin Hood was a proto-communist, go ahead. But you might want to keep that view to yourself. Alas, there are still plenty of Mrs. Whites around today, and there probably always be Mrs. Whites around.
Thursday, November 13, 2014
The poet at work …
… New Statesman | Visions before midnight: the inimitable voice of Clive James. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… James was – and remains – far more than a clever boy laughing at muddied oafs. He is a scholar who has preferred wearing his scholarship lightly. His keynote as a pundit has been a certain enchantment with disenchantment, so the intense seriousness of his essays here, collected from various magazines, is always leavened by anecdotal self-mockery. Beyond that, more vitally – especially now, as he considers his terminal cancer – is the desire to understand and possess poems. James’s wish to articulate every last presentable perception, whether that be about Pound or Pope or Porter, constitutes the fierce under-drive of the book.
A thought for today …
The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.
— Robert Louis Stevenson, born on this date in 1850
Marvellous men...
...Ebola: Doctors Without Borders Shows How to Manage a Plague
Despite MSF’s appeals all summer long to the WHO, the United Nations, Unicef, and foreign governments, only in the last few weeks has the international community, led by the U.S., the U.K., France, and Cuba, begun to act in West Africa. For the last seven months the world’s first, best—and in Guinea, only—defense against Ebola has been a 43-year-old, idealistic, impatient, and often imperious group of doctors in midcareer, with a higher-than-average threshold for risk and a tendency to extend their middle finger.
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
Hmm …
… Frieze Magazine | Seriously? — In defense of irony. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Maybe it's time to give irony a rest and just speak your mind clearly and succinctly.
Maybe it's time to give irony a rest and just speak your mind clearly and succinctly.
Grim indeed …
… Grimm brothers’ fairytales have blood and horror restored in new translation | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
How the Children Played at Slaughtering, for example, stays true to its title, seeing a group of children playing at being a butcher and a pig. It ends direly: a boy cuts the throat of his little brother, only to be stabbed in the heart by his enraged mother. Unfortunately, the stabbing meant she left her other child alone in the bath, where he drowned. Unable to be cheered up by the neighbours, she hangs herself; when her husband gets home, “he became so despondent that he died soon thereafter”.
Master of small spaces …
… James Booth’s biography of Philip Larkin, reviewed. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
What might have been …
… Bob Dylan Was Almost The Star Of A ‘Slapstick’ HBO Comedy. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
A thought for today …
The rosary was said every evening. I always liked that sentence about the medieval Churches, that they were the Bibles of the poor. The Church was my first book and I would think it is still my most important book.
— John McGahern, born on this date in 1934
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
When so many old ones go unread...
...Why read new books?
In fact what becomes suspicious in a new novel is when it merely pastiches the effects of past novels, when it takes us back to a past the author doesn’t know except through books, so as to be able to repeat the pleasures of the books of the time. Which never are quite repeated. The pleasure of reading Nievo has to do with the fact that he really was in the fray of the Risorgimento and seeking to establish a position that made sense in the changed world he lived in. That gives the book its immediacy. To read Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, written in the 1950s, is to read a charming and effective pastiche. It seems to spring mainly from the author’s determination to write a stylish and sophisticated novel, imagining the upheavals of the Risorgimento safe in the knowledge of hindsight, safe in the knowledge of how good traditional novels are written.I dont think that's a fair assessment of the writer's imagination, or skill.
Aside from that …
… 'Not That Kind of Girl' Review: Lena Dunham's Callow, Grating Memoir | New Republic.
This is priceless:
This is priceless:
The author, critic, and hackles-tamer Sam Adams, wrote, “It’s worth pointing out that at 28, which is Dunham’s age now, Woody Allen was a successful but not widely known comedy writer and standup comic who had yet to release his first album, and J. D. Salinger was still four years away from publishing The Catcher in the Rye.” The article neglects to note that perhaps the reason Salinger didn’t match Dunham’s precocious output was because his early twenties were interrupted by something known as World War II (it was in all the papers), during which the future novelist was drafted, landed ashore at Utah Beach on D-Day, took part in the Battle of the Bulge and the Battle of Hurtgen Forest, interrogated prisoners of war as a member of the counter-intelligence division, and bore witness to one of the newly liberated concentration camps, a sub-camp of Dachau; after the war, Salinger entered a mental hospital, suffering from what today would be designated post-traumatic stress disorder. So the guy was busy.
Well, maybe …
… You Can Ditch Your PC Now - WSJ.
Not if you're having to put up with the iPad's shitful new operating system.
Not if you're having to put up with the iPad's shitful new operating system.
Appreciation …
… GR Sydney Lead — The Poetic Confidence of Robert Frost. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I was … a young man in graduate school, far too concerned about the judgments not only of my teachers but also of my peers to offer risky opinion in public. I recall one agonized evening, however, as I sat trying to decipher a passage from Pound, when suddenly, if privately, I concluded, “I don’t care what the smart people think. I can’t stand anything about this guy!” Pound, I concluded, was not complex; he was complicated, and that distinction struck me as crucial. It does even now.My problem with Pound has always been that, to my mind, he had a tin ear.
Real cause for concern …
… Dave Eggers, Tobias Wolff on “privacy, and whether it’s possible to have it anymore” | The Book Haven.
Maybe we should have a general Internet strike some day, when we all turn off the computer, iPad, cell phone, buy nothing online, etc. Keep that up for a few days and the people making money might want to settle — and join in the pushback against the government's intrusions.
Maybe we should have a general Internet strike some day, when we all turn off the computer, iPad, cell phone, buy nothing online, etc. Keep that up for a few days and the people making money might want to settle — and join in the pushback against the government's intrusions.
A thought for today …
To love someone means to see him as God intended him.
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, born on this date in 1821
Monday, November 10, 2014
Just a thought …
If nothing else, God is a most intriguing hypothesis, very likely the most intriguing of all. The hypothesis asserts that the nature of being is fundamentally personal, not mechanical, or chemical, or material. The hypothesis does not deny the reality of mechanics or chemistry or matter. It simply posits that personality is a prior reality.
The hypothesis, in other words, has to do with the nature of being itself, and it can only be investigated by means of individual introspection, by exploring the parcel of being one is most familiar with, namely, oneself. That is why, in the best book about God that I know of, What Can You Say About God* — *(Except "God"), author William A. Luijpen says that "when the believer calls, shouts or whispers the name 'God,' he expresses the mystery of his existence."
And here too...
Consider what happened after Smith College held a panel for alumnae titled “Challenging the Ideological Echo Chamber: Free Speech, Civil Discourse and the Liberal Arts.” Moderated by Smith President Kathleen McCartney in late September, the panel was an apparent effort to address the intolerance of diverse opinions that prevails on many campuses.
One panelist was Smith alumna Wendy Kaminer—an author, lawyer, social critic, feminist, First Amendment near-absolutist and former board member of the American Civil Liberties Union. She delivered precisely the spirited challenge to the echo chamber that the panel’s title seemed to invite. But Ms. Kaminer emerged from the discussion of free speech labeled a racist—for defending free speech.
The panel started innocuously enough with Ms. Kaminer criticizing the proliferation of campus speech codes that restrict supposedly offensive language. She urged the audience to defend the free exchange of ideas over parochial notions of “civility.” In response to a question about teaching materials that contain “hate speech,” she raised the example of Mark Twain ’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” arguing that students should take it as a whole. The student member of the panel, Jaime Estrada, resisted that notion, saying, “But it has the n-word, and some people are sensitive to that.”
Ms. Kaminer responded: “Well let’s talk about n-words. Let’s talk about the growing lexicon of words that can only be known by their initials. I mean, when I say, ‘n-word’ or when Jaime says ‘n-word,’ what word do you all hear in your head? You hear the word . . . ”
And then Ms. Kaminer crossed the Rubicon of political correctness and uttered the forbidden word, observing that having uttered it, “nothing horrible happened.” She then compared the trend of replacing potentially offensive words with an initial to being “characters in a Harry Potter book who are afraid to say the word ‘Voldemort.’ ” There’s an important difference, she pointed out, between hurling an epithet and uttering a forbidden word during an academic discussion of our attitudes toward language and law.
...
The contretemps prompted articles in the newspapers of Smith College and neighboring Mount Holyoke College, condemning Ms. Kaminer’s remarks as examples of institutionalized racism. Smith president Ms. McCartney was criticized for not immediately denouncing Ms. Kaminer. In a Sept. 29 letter responding to the Smith community, she apologized to students and faculty who were “hurt” and made to feel “unsafe” by Ms. Kaminer’s comments in defense of free speech.Liberals Are Killing the Liberal Arts
One can only hope …
… Can Concerts in Bars and Cafés Save Classical Music? | Mother Jones. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
If the only music you know is pop music, you really don't know music. I say this as someone who can still remember the Sunday afternoon I first heard Elvis Presley sing "Heartbreak Hotel."
If the only music you know is pop music, you really don't know music. I say this as someone who can still remember the Sunday afternoon I first heard Elvis Presley sing "Heartbreak Hotel."
Language and experience …
… The American Scholar: The Art of the Sentence - Stanley Plumly. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
A thought for today …
There is a certain phase in the life of the aged when the warmth of the heart seems to increase in direct proportion with the years.
— J. P. Marquand, born on this date in 1893
Sunday, November 09, 2014
Almost too realistic …
… The Neglected Books Page — Sweet Adversity, by Donald Newlove (1978). (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Environmentalism...For the Rich Only?
...the cost of climate policies is already falling most heavily on today’s poor. Subsidies for renewable energy have raised costs of heating and transport disproportionately for the poor. Subsidies for biofuels have raised food prices by diverting food into fuel, tipping millions into malnutrition and killing about 190,000 people a year. The refusal of many rich countries to fund aid for coal-fired electricity in Africa and Asia rather than renewable projects (and in passing I declare a financial interest in coal mining) leaves more than a billion people without access to electricity and contributes to 3.5 million deaths a year from indoor air pollution caused by cooking over open fires of wood and dung.Matt Ridley, in The Times (firewalled) and his blog here
Greens think these harms are a price worth paying to stop the warming. They want (other) people to bear such sacrifices today so that the people of 2100, who will be up to seven times as rich, do not have to face the prospect of living in a world that is perhaps 0.8 - 1.2 degrees warmer. And this is the moral high ground?
It is not just climate change. The opposition to genetically modified food is mostly a middle and upper class obsession, but the people who would benefit from such foods are often poor people. Golden rice, for example, could prevent the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people a year from vitamin A deficiency, but has been stymied for 15 years by opposition organized by western green groups, especially Greenpeace. They are entitled to think that this philanthropic project is a bad idea, but they are buying their reassurance at the expense of the poor’s health.
Other examples are organic farming and renewable energy, both of which require more land than the conventional alternatives. Most conservationists now recognize that “sustainable intensification” is a key ingredient of environmental protection – that is, using as little land as possible to grow crops and make energy, so as to spare more land for nature. Fortunately, this plan also means cheaper food and cheaper energy so it helps the poor. By all means go organic and use wind power if you insist, but don’t pretend there is anything morally superior about it.
A thought for today …
To desire and expect nothing for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness.
— Ivan Turgenev, born on this date in 1818
Saturday, November 08, 2014
Anniversary …
On this date in 1883, the composer Arnold Bax was born, another of those symphonists whose music should be heard more often.
This book has been brought to you by …
… The Future of Writing — Annoyed Librarian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
A thought for today …
The greatest honor we can give Almighty God is to live gladly because of the knowledge of his love.
— Julian of Norwich, born on this date in 1342
FYI …
… About OpenSciences.org — Campaign for Open Science. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Well, this ought to stir things up.
Some materialistically inclined scientists and philosophers refuse to acknowledge these phenomena because they are not consistent with their exclusive conception of the world. Rejection of post-materialist investigation of nature or refusal to publish strong science findings supporting a post-materialist framework are antithetical to the true spirit of scientific inquiry, which is that empirical data must always be adequately dealt with. Data which do not fit favored theories and beliefs cannot be dismissed a priori. Such dismissal is the realm of ideology, not science.
Well, this ought to stir things up.
Friday, November 07, 2014
Hen of the woods and more …
… A vegan goes stalking wild mushrooms in the Pine Barrens.
I know Felix Giordano, and he does indeed know his mushrooms. He is also among the most imaginative and skillful contemporary painters, quite unlike anyone else.
I know Felix Giordano, and he does indeed know his mushrooms. He is also among the most imaginative and skillful contemporary painters, quite unlike anyone else.
Getting on with life …
… Bryan Appleyard — Religion Rising, Atheism Sinking. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Explicitly religious artists are, therefore, the true dissidents in a culture of repudiation. “It is quite odd, really,” says Roger Wagner, “when one thinks that a lot of what one actually enjoys in art is celebrating or affirmative, not simply undermining, subverting or questioning.”John Henry Newman said that faith meant "being capable of bearing doubt."
A thought for today …
I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as if there isn't and to die to find out that there is.
— Albert Camus, born on this date in 1913
The Power of a sentence...
Breaking ranks with a wide array of other federal courts, and coming close to setting up almost certain review by the Supreme Court, a divided federal appeals court in Cincinnati on Thursday upheld bans on same-sex marriage in four states. Dividing two to one, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit overturned lower-court rulings in cases from Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee.
It ruled that the Supreme Court’s one-line decision in the 1972 case of Baker v. Nelson, saying that a challenge to a state ban on same-sex marriage did not raise “a substantial federal question,” is a still intact precedent, and it binds the lower courts.
Thursday, November 06, 2014
Puncturing a gas bag …
… Steven Pinker’s Bad Grammar — The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
It’s for grammatical consistency, not beauty or gentilesse, for example, that correct English has us say “It was he” instead of “It was him.” Pinker calls this offense “a schoolteacher rule” that is “a product of the usual three confusions: English with Latin, informal style with incorrect grammar, and syntax with semantics.” He’s done crucial research on language acquisition, and he offers an admirable account of syntax in his book, but it is unclear what he’s talking about here. As he knows, the nominative and accusative cases are the reason that we don’t say gibberish like “Her gave it to he and then sat by we here!” No idea is more basic to English syntax and grammar. In the phrase “It was he,” “it” and “he” are the same thing: they’re both the subject, and thus nominative. This is not “Latin.” (Our modern cases had their roots in tribal Germanic.) The same is true of “who” and “whom,” another nominative-accusative pair to which Pinker objects, sort of. He writes, “The best advice to writers is to calibrate their use of ‘whom’ to the complexity of the construction and the degree of formality they desire.” Yet who wants to undertake that calibration all the time? The glorious thing about the “who” and “whom” distinction is that it’s simple.Pinker is overrated, especially by himself.
Wednesday, November 05, 2014
Reforming Christianity...and the Church
As we note earlier here, Church royalty such as Philadelphia's own Cardinal Chaput, have taken to criticizing the Pope for attempting reform of the Church and its teachings, most recently for sowing confusion -- confusion is the work of the devil, said Chaput, which is pretty strong criticism of a Pope, and ignores the fact that Chaput himself is sowing discord with the statement.
Reforms of the Church have been tried and tried and tried, and in "Erasmus and his God," (contained in his book Is God Happy?) philosopher/theologian/etc. Leszek Kolakowski wrote about Erasmus, the reformer (and Luther contemporary):
Reforms of the Church have been tried and tried and tried, and in "Erasmus and his God," (contained in his book Is God Happy?) philosopher/theologian/etc. Leszek Kolakowski wrote about Erasmus, the reformer (and Luther contemporary):
All genuinely ecumenical currents within Catholicism, all attempts to find a way of freeing Christianity, at least to some degree, from its confessional exclusivity, are a continuation of Erasmus’s thought, and all are to some degree conscious of this....
Erasmus’s thought was grounded in two fundamental principles. The first was the belief in the innate goodness and value of human nature (including natural reason); the second attributed salvation to Grace as the efficient cause and enjoined us to put our trust in God instead of trying to gain favour with Him....
For Erasmus the Church was not a goal in itself, to which all other values must be subordinated; on the contrary , it was an instrument, useful only in so far as it was able to transmit the pure and undistorted values of the Gospels to the faithful. Religiosity focused on what was beneficial to the Church, conceived as an organization and a system of power, was entirely alien to him. It was not his aim to destroy the Church; he wanted only to deprive it of the ideological instruments which allowed it to maintain its system of power. He could, accordingly, speak of his loyalty to Christian ideals, declare that he wanted only ‘to build, not to destroy’, go on repeating that he was not a rebel and wished only to teach the wisdom of the Gospels. But for his opponents the destructive influence of his gentle moral teaching was clear. There was no escaping the fact that his ideas, if followed to their logical conclusion, ultimately compelled a choice: either Christianity or the Church; either the Gospels or organized religion. Erasmus himself never spelled out this alternative and perhaps was not entirely conscious of its unavoidability; perhaps he really did believe in the possibility of reforming the Church in the spirit of the Gospels. But later generations of reformers knew that such an alternative was unavoidable and that it was Erasmus who implicitly formulated it.
Erasmus’s work was not fruitless, although it might, on the face of it, appear so: after all, his ideal of Christianity remained unrealized, one of the many utopias which have appeared and then vanished throughout the history of the Church, leaving no visible mark on the Church system. Of course his propaganda did not destroy the system which was its target. But it did have an effect : it put certain basic principles of the Christian faith back into circulation, with the result that they were incorporated into the language of the Church, becoming a natural part of it; and this made it difficult to violate them too blatantly. All internal criticism of the Catholic Church made since Erasmus’s time, all attempts to reform it from within, have relied on the same sources and drawn, more or less consciously, on his work. Everything that has been done to repair, even in part, its ossified rigidity, was inspired by those ideas – ideas which go through a regular cycle of being condemned by the orthodox and then, after a time, taken up again, in a weaker and simplified form. Modern attempts at repairing and renewing the Church are also part of the Erasmian heritage; whatever succeeds in loosening its rigid exclusivity and weakening the system of intolerance is a continuation of Erasmus’s ideas.
Kolakowski, Leszek (2013-02-05). Is God Happy?: Selected Essays (p. 173). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.
Q&A …
… Borges and God by Jorge Luis Borges and Osvaldo Ferrari | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tips to Vikram and Dave.)
Borges: I do think that it’s safer not to call it God. If we call it God, then we are thinking of an individual and that individual is mysteriously three, according to the doctrine of the Trinity, which to me is quite inconceivable. On the other hand, if we employ other words, perhaps less precise or vivid ones, then we could approach the truth, if an approach to truth is possible. Or it could be something that we ignore.
But just because something is inconceivable does not mean it is untrue. One would expect an infinite Someone to be inconceivable by a finite someone. On the other hand, there is much to be said for the idea that "God means something in us that strives for good." That may very well be how God presents himself to us. And yes, God is not an individual. He is a singularity, the singularity.
Who would've thought?
...Lionel Shriver: I was poor but I was happy
Maybe she feels this way today, after getting the success she longed for. Had she never achieved success, she may not have looked back on her past with nostalgia. "Happiness isn't a position," she says. "It's a trajectory." So too for dissatisfaction.
Culture and sorcery …
… Touchstone Archives: Post Mortem. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… there is a good reason to take note of them. Postmodern cultural history is a fashionable genre of writing, and you pay a price if you choose to tune out what is currently being said and thought. Oddly enough, it is readers, rather than abstainers, who are better armed against writing fads. Readers know what's on offer and get a chance to think about it. Abstainers absorb it second-hand, without thinking, and often without limit. Just the other day I heard a man mention his friend's misfortune in opening a bottled water business "just when plastic bottles became bad." It awoke in me a vision of those plastic bottles, clear, clean, and functional, jiggling in never-ending line down some conveyer belt to be filled with wholesome spring water . . . when, all at once, they turned bad.
Bravo...
...This year, I became the first scientist to judge the Man Booker
This step was greeted with some anxiety. The chasm between science and the arts seems, to some, to be unbridgeable. Although Richard Dawkins argues that science enhances rather than destroying the beauty of the world (and I agree), unfairly or not, Dawkins has become associated with a kind of extreme scientism – the notion that only a scientific account of the world is valid. This view has also characterised some of the recent incursions of, for example, neuroscience into aesthetics where, at its worst, the knowledge and practice of thousands of years of culture and hundreds of years of critical thought can be swept away by a “killer experiment” that reduces beauty, love or memory to an activity pattern on a brain scan.
Holier than thou …
… Joseph Epstein: After the Midterms, Virtucrats Still Rule - WSJ - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Virtucrats sometimes seem to predominate on the left—the left is the side of the heart, the old political aphorism has it, the right that of the spleen—but they do so far from exclusively. Virtucrats are plentiful on both sides of the political spectrum. The liberal virtucrat is for social justice, security, innovation; the conservative virtucrat for liberty, enterprise, tradition. The former considers the latter heartless, the latter considers the former na�ve.
A thought for today …
If man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.
— Will Durant, born on this date in 1885
Tuesday, November 04, 2014
In mind and heart …
… The Joy of the Memorized Poem - The Atlantic. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Odd no mention is made of Thoreau's Walden, which was in part the poem's inspiration.
Odd no mention is made of Thoreau's Walden, which was in part the poem's inspiration.
A thought for today …
A great artist is always before his time or behind it.
— G. E. Moore, born on this date in 1873
Monday, November 03, 2014
Much in what he says …
… Reading a Poem: 20 Strategies - The Atlantic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I am not in accord with all 20 — though I do see the point of them — but I am in agreement with the gist: Read a poem as you would anything else. In the case of a poem, it is the immediate recognition of the peculiar and the familiar in consort that sucks you in.
Who might you nominate?
… Wordsmith Bingo – Lingua Franca - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I don't have any. I think that when it comes to any art, you can reach a plateau of excellence, but the plateau is always occupied by others as well.
I don't have any. I think that when it comes to any art, you can reach a plateau of excellence, but the plateau is always occupied by others as well.
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