What truly comes across in this book is that the essay may well be a sally against the subject, but what is tried, in the final reckoning, are the authors themselves. And, of course, found wanting, in both senses of the word.Dave sends along this also, by John Banville — Essayism review: Its own kind of self-made masterpiece.
The view which regards man as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical.
— T. E. Hulme, born on this date in 1883
Therein lay Benny’s triumph: He won total acceptance from the American public and did so by embodying a Jewish stereotype from which the sting of prejudice had been leached. Far from being a self-hating whipping boy for anti-Semites, he turned himself into WASP America’s Jewish uncle, preposterous yet lovable.
The book’s publisher at Simon & Schuster, Jonathan Karp, told the Associated Press: “It seems highly unlikely that approximately 1,500 people read Hillary Clinton’s book overnight and came to the stark conclusion that it is either brilliant or awful.”Then we ought to be suspicious of both. I wonder how many other books Amazon has done this for.
Re-reading these diaries to write A Little Learning, Waugh wrote, but did not publish, this paragraph, now included in the notes of the new edition and quoted by Alexander Waugh in his introduction: “If what I wrote was a true account of myself, I was [cold-hearted, supercilious arrogant and callous] conceited, heartless & cautiously malevolent. I should like to believe that even in this private journal I was [showing off] dissembling a more generous nature; that I absurdly thought cynicism and cruelty the marks of maturity. I pray it may be so. But the evidence is there, in sentence after sentence, on page after page, of consistent caddishness.”
Whereas Hammett’s Sam Spade and Chandler’s Philip Marlowe stride through worlds that exist as their own spotlit stages, the new-type detective looks outward, tries to locate flickers of meaning in the vast gloom around him. These are stories where the detective doesn’t just discover what happened to a missing person. He reveals what makes a person feel lost—the perverse and tawdry elements that define people as castoffs in a skewed American landscape.
I am pretty sure that, if you will be quite honest, you will admit that a good rousing sneeze, one that tears open your collar and throws your hair into your eyes, is really one of life's sensational pleasures.
— Robert Benchley, born on this date in 1889
Being smart may not solve all of your problems, but being a nagging dimwit is sure to create unnecessary problems for yourself and others. Everybody should heed Fred Allen's advice and leave everybody else the hell alone.
A very good interview. Not surpisingly, I don't agree with everything that's said (the interviewer seems happier with political correctness than I am), but one does get a good idea of who Cleese is. Like many smart people, he tends to overvalue smartness, which sometimes is not as smart as it seems. Take his remarks about coastal vs. heartland audiences. Those coastal audiences were also the ones who laughed at David Letterman's remarks, not because they were funny — they weren't — but because they thought that if they didn't laugh they would expose themselves as unhip.
When people are serving, life is no longer meaningless.
— John Gardner, who died on this date in 1982
Waugh does not deny that the Catholic Church has aesthetic splendors to offer; what he denies is that such splendors provide a reliable basis for accepting the Church’s claims as true. The feelings such splendors produce are sporadic and transitory, and those who wallow most deeply in them will feel cheated and distraught on the day their magic fails. Rather it is the ordinary daily Mass, the opus operatum, performed and assisted at out of duty rather than desire, that points to the objective reality of a universal immutable faith: Your preferences have not been considered.
Write as often as possible, not with the idea at once of getting into print, but as if you were learning an instrument.
— J. B. Priestley, born on this date in 1894
… one crucial thing “The Prisoner” reminds us of is that the only chance we might have, collectively, is going to be based on how strong we are individually. It’s that idea that is, in a certain sense, the Village’s undoing, even as it comes close to breaking Number Six. Think of how many people you know who talk the same way, use the same exact phrases (“at the end of the day”), like the same TV shows, cite their fondness for Netflix, virtue signal their existences away in public forms, but screw you over privately, and on and on.There are still individuals around, but I think they tend to be thought of as cranks or amiable eccentrics.
“I think of a collector as a gardener, rather than someone who just buys books. Like gardeners, they do a lot of murdering. They cull books.”
“If you write something and you think it’s not that good, you should throw it away. If you write something and you think it’s really good, you should throw half of it away.”
O’Hara writes about ambition and the things it makes us do. His business people drive hard bargains and his married couples obsess about how they might move themselves up in the social pecking order. Worse, his young people, observing this behavior in their parents, are so jaundiced that they don’t seem to harbor much ambition at all. In the posthumously published story “Family Evening” (1972), a daughter refers to her elders as “the B.D.’s” or “Better Deads.”
Wilbur’s reliance on nature, and thus God’s creation, does affirm his eternal hope and perspective. As Wilbur narrates the puzzle of why four great rock maples [are] seemingly aligned in “In Trackless Woods,” it becomes apparent that his or man’s conjecture is incapable of deciphering the issue.
I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
— H. L. Mencken, born on this date in 1880
… in many ways poets have traded reliance on an aristocratic elite for a technocratic one — the patron for the administrator.And those administrators are less cultured today than their predecessors. And the academy — at least its liberal arts branches — has become too much in thrall to hare-brained fashions.
The claim to be based in science is one of the defining features of modern myths. After the collapse of European imperial power, the pseudo-Darwinian mythology that propped up colonialism fell into disrepute. But it was soon followed by other myths claiming a basis in social science. A progressive mythology developed that viewed racism and imperialism as exclusively Western vices and the flaws and conflicts of post-colonial states entirely as consequences of colonial rule. These myths were channelled through theories of modernisation, which posited a future fundamentally different from anything that existed in the past.
Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.
—D. H. Lawrence, born on this date in 1885
'Washington as general and president was both father to his nation and {as plantation and slave owner} father to his slaves.(Emphasis added) So, as the author argues, 'the Washington mythology opened a space for the incorporation of slaves into this national family, with slaves, like white Americans, united in bonds of affection and gratitude {and consent?} to Washington ... {Thus, the} paternalist ideology of nationalism blended into and eventually authorized a paternalist {and acceptable} ideology of slaveholding as these texts promoted both nationalism and slavery in the name of the father.'I think the former Colonists already had some idea of themselves as a nation, and while the contradictions are evident, there's no reason to assume that any of what he is talking about was intentional.
Indeed, today we have the perverse situation where to criticise Islam’s repression of women is treated virtually as a speechcrime, as Islamophobia. So not only does the chattering class hold back on criticising Islam – it pressures everyone else to do likewise. How about we have a truly equal and secular form of freedom that allows all religion to be criticised, and all people to hold whatever religious beliefs they choose?Fine by me.
Overshadowed in the male-dominated canon during her lifetime, Doolittle has been rediscovered by academics in recent decades as they study her work through the lens of feminism.
Religion is the everlasting dialogue between humanity and God. Art is its soliloquy.
— Franz Werfel, born on this date in 1890
As embarrassing as it was for me to realize this, I respect his lack of hubris. He was a deeply religious, lifelong Republican, and he loathed the counterculture that arose in response to his writing. But he was also a broken and remorseful alcoholic undeserving of his role as a moralist, and he freely admitted it: “I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another ‘til I drop. This is the nigh
… it’s when we read what Wyeth said—to his wife, to Thomas Hoving (in Andrew Wyeth: Autobiography), to Meryman, to Edward Hopper, to anyone who could persuade Wyeth to step, for a moment, out of the shadows he preferred and into the concentrated light of reminisce and explanation—that we discover the painter who might have offered a master class on the asterisk arts of literature. The necessary unseens. The rites of passage. The principled purpose.
Surely there comes a time when counting the cost and paying the price aren't things to think about any more. All that matters is value - the ultimate value of what one does.
— James Hilton, born on this date in 1900
… The Continuing Enterprise of the Poem | Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Although his translations of Vergil’s Ecologues and Horace’s Odes have been widely praised, it is Ferry’s original poetry for which he has been more widely recognized. In 2012 he won the National Book Award for his collection of poems entitled Bewilderment. His discussion in the preface about his choice to use iambic pentameter for this translation of The Aeneid further underscores his talent as a poet who recognizes the importance of choosing an appropriate meter whether it be for an original piece of work or for a translation. Like generations of English translators of ancient epic that have come before him, Ferry agrees that this meter works best in the language in which he is working: “In my view, the forward-propulsive character of English speech favors iambic pentameter, in which iambic events naturally dominate, with anapestic events as naturally occurring.”
The battle for the world is the battle for definitions.
— Thomas Szasz, who died on this date in 2012
I was hugely into Blake when I was in college. Later, I was thrilled by Kathleen Raine's William Blake. But as I have grown older, my interest in him has waned for some reason.
"Could you have said the bluejay suddenly/Would swoop to earth?" (Wallace Stevens, "The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man.") This is how the World reveals itself to us: in an unending series of miraculous and beautiful commonplaces. (By the way, I never use the word "commonplace" in a pejorative sense.)
If God had been a liberal, we wouldn't have had the Ten Commandments — we'd have the Ten Suggestions.
— Malcolm Bradbury, born on this date in 1932
Some good books, even some great books. Some pretty lousy ones, too, especially among the more contemporary ones. But these sorts of things are mostly a waste of time.
The tension between form and feeling in Dickinson seems in retrospect essential to her New England Protestantism, for which nature was at once a sign of God’s determinations and a wild emblem of the devil’s temptations. Chandler’s poems, in contrast, suggest the complementarity of nature and grace, of faith and reason, proper to Catholicism.
You cannot imagine at all how much you interest God; He is interested in you as if there were no one else on earth.
— Julien Green, born on this date in 1900
The article seems to run counter to the headline. It very quickly makes plain their appeal, which has much in common with Edward Gorey's The Gashlycrumb Tinies. Also, Amazon certainly has enough titles of Belloc's books. I remember reading his religious poems in my Catholic grade school, and even remember seeing his obituary in the paper.
