Updike himself admitted that the book, which was published in 1984, was an attempt to "make things right with my, what shall we call them, feminist detractors." Whether or not he did that remains to be seen, but the novel became one of his most commercially successful titles and added a more playful shade to his public reputation. He even wrote a sequel in 2008, The Widows of Eastwick, which would be his final novel before his death the following year.
Thursday, November 12, 2020
A life of its own …
… The enduring story of the Witches of Eastwick and their horny little Devil. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The world and life in nine lines …
… Beyond the Lines: Frost's "Fire and Ice". (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The poem encompasses the universe and the forces behind the world’s undoing and at the same time peers into the depths of the human soul. Indeed, it is a poem of stark contrasts: fire against ice, the cosmic against the personal, the theoretical against the real, desire against hate. Frost achieves a marvelous juxtaposition of many polar opposites and renders them inseparable, as both are essential to the poem’s central metaphor.
This is an outstanding example of graceful writing and sound explication.
Something to think on …
A thought should not expand symmetrically like a formula, but disorderly like a shrub.
— Don Colacho
Wednesday, November 11, 2020
Appreciation …
… Remembering Jim Quinn, Chronicler of Philadelphia’s Restaurant Renaissance. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Tracking the decline …
… Philosopher Revealed as Serial Plagiarist (updated) - Daily Nous.
I hope people are noticing that our colleges and universities increasingly are laughing stocks. And that’s the best you can say of them.
Hmm …
… Maverick Philosopher: In the Absence of Knowledge, May one Believe? Critique of Bryan Magee. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I happen not to think that unaided reason is the only way to arrive at truth. Reason is a wonderful faculty, but you cannot use it to prove that reason is the gold standard for determining truth, since that would involve invoking a petitio that sound reasoning does not permit. I think that experience is the soundest ground for truth and there is plenty of evidence that people have had experiences of the transcendent. By that standard, the only way to know that there is life after death is to die and find out. (Of course, if your late mother walks into your room one night, I suppose you could take that as prima facie evidence.)
My own view is that the human faculty best designed for arriving at truth is the imagination, which, when soundest, tends to be grounded in experience. The problem with rationalism is that it tends to come up short on imagination. I myself have had experiences that have convinced me that if anything is true it is that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt in most philosophies.
Something to think on …
… It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, born on this date in 1881
Tuesday, November 10, 2020
Just so you know …
… It's Not Over - The Catholic Thing.
Laws and procedures exist for the good reason that they are, at times, indispensable. Now seems such a time. Let’s rely on them, then, and say: The media does not “call” elections, and the people have not spoken until their Electors and Representatives have. Reasonable persons with sound criteria have a good reason to be at least wary about the vote tabulation so far, while major players in our society seem so unconcerned with truth, and so invested in a partisan political result, that they can have no claim to a general trust in their fairness and judgments.
Something to think on …
It is difficult to discriminate the voice of truth from amid the clamor raised by heated partisans.
— Friedrich Schiller, born on this date in 1759
Monday, November 09, 2020
Appreciation …
… Archie Leach’s Greatest Character. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Part of the fascination that Grant exerted on moviegoers lay in the fact that he made no secret of having created his “sophisticated characteristics” out of whole cloth. Whenever fans told him, “I always wanted to be Cary Grant,” his reply was: “So did I.” Even his not-quite-English accent was a fabrication: Everyone knew that he was an Englishman whose real name was Archie Leach and that he had grown up in a working-class neighborhood, apprenticing himself to a troupe of acrobats and coming to America to tour in vaudeville. After a successful screen test, he moved to Hollywood in 1931 and signed with Paramount, changing his name to do so. By 1937, he was a full-fledged movie star, one whose fans never tired of trying to figure out.
Hmm …
… Oscar Levant and Oscar Wilde: Masters of Staving Off Melancholy with Wit | Literary Hub. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I'm old enough to have watched Jack Paar's version of the Tonight show just about every night. It was by far the best version of that oft-reinicarnated program.
Something to think on …
The people who bind themselves to systems are those who are unable to encompass the whole truth and try to catch it by the tail; a system is like the tail of truth, but truth is like a lizard; it leaves its tail in your fingers and runs away knowing full well that it will grow a new one in a twinkling.
— Ivan Turgenev, born on this date in 1818
Bearing witness …
… Naomi Long Madgett poem Alabama Centennial. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Naomi Long Madgett passed away on Nov. 4 at age 97.
Sunday, November 08, 2020
Anthony Burgess, the poet …
… ‘Don’t read Clockwork Orange – it’s a foul farrago,’ wrote Burgess. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Andrew Biswell, Burgess’s biographer and the foundation’s director, said of the unpublished material: “What excites me is the range and variety of his work, ranging from epic poetry to occasional verses, political, satirical… We can see Burgess working in all the available poetic forms and styles.”
Something to think on …
A garden isn't meant to be useful. It's for joy.
— Rumer Godden, who died on this date in 1998
Saturday, November 07, 2020
Appreciation …
… A Historian Explains Perhaps the Biggest Lesson of the 20th Century - Foundation for Economic Education.
Johnson’s perspective is often described as “conservative,” but I find his work simply good, factual reporting of history, unvarnished by ideology. He doesn’t cherry-pick the evidence to support a preconception, let alone a misconception,
Autumn perennials …
… First Known When Lost: Leaves.
Just a few weeks ago, when the day was windy the trees still made the sound of the sea, green billows and swells swaying overhead. Now, a strong breeze brings only a dry rustling, a rattling and scraping of individual leaves, each hold-out with its own voice. In a dwindling choir.
Credentialed fools …
… UW ‘surprised’ to find that most students aren’t racist.
What a problem it must be these days to find even half-decent college or university, what with dimwits like these running so many of them.
Let it all go …
… First Known When Lost: Elections.
Yes, it all becomes quite tiresome. Best to let it go. The soul's home is in other places.
Something to think on …
The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.
— Albert Camus, born on this date in 1913
Very interesting …
… The Well-Tempered Neurologist.
… during a neurology fellowship in movement disorders, Pantelyat witnessed a more intriguing effect music seemed to have. He attended a West African drumming session in which Parkinson’s disease patients followed the rhythmic lead of an instructor. Afterward, Pantelyat heard the patients say they saw an improvement in their symptoms. This inspired him to conduct a six-week pilot study involving 10 Parkinson’s patients who took drumming lessons twice a week. At the conclusion, the patients reported an increase in mobility and greater quality of life compared to a control group. His paper on the study, published in the online journal Movement Disorders Clinical Practice, bore the title “DRUM-PD: The Use of a Drum Circle to Improve the Symptoms and Signs of Parkinson’s Disease.”
Hmm …
… A comedian has just solved "the world's most difficult literary puzzle." | Literary Hub. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Well, this article says that he solved it, but what exactly is the proof?
Friday, November 06, 2020
Booth Tarkington
The Magnificent Ambersons -- Booth Tarkington's portrait of the American midwest at the turn of the twentieth century -- is just that: magnificent. I have to say, I can't remember the last novel I read that felt so complete, that contained equal measures of humor and profundity.
Ambersons is a novel in the tradition of The Rise and Fall of Silas Lapham, William Dean Howells's later nineteenth century account of one family's ascent -- followed by its decline. But Tarkington's book, I think, is more lasting: first, as I say, because it includes an effective degree of humor; and second, because it feels decidedly more modern. Ambersons takes us from the Civil War, to industrialism, and eventually to urbanism. The family which climbed the ladder, and which established itself in the 1870s, is different from the one which fell from that same ladder in the years before the First World War.
All of that said, there's a considerable space between Tarkington and Fitzgerald, say: the former is most certainly a product of the nineteenth century, and his prose, despite its ease, seems only recently to have been freed from the formality of that time. Tarkington's content, too, is of the later nineteenth century: automobiles, for instance, are regarded as the Internet was in 1990: something shiny and sinister, something with the potential to overwhelm. And overwhelm, of course, it does: the Amberson family is replaced by a revolution in economics, in development, and, most importantly, in technology. The landed aristocracy is no more.
When Eugene Morgan -- one of the novel's secondary characters -- communes with the ghost of his lost love, Isabel Amberson, he does so on behalf of a generation: he reaches back in time using telepathy and emotion. How quaint, Tarkington seems to imply: how powerless against the automobile. That scene -- of remembrance, but also of resolution -- is quite poignant: it's the end of one era, and the beginning of another. Tarkington presents it perfectly, and the result is a novel positioned just on the edge of modernity: just on the cusp of that shift in both life and literature.
Interesting mix …
… Looking for a spooky read? Here are Catholic horror books to keep you up at night. | America Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I just ordered the Kindle version of the Muriel Spark novel. I am very fond of Spark's writing.
Getting it across …
… Reflections on the Translation of Poetry > Samuel Hux. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… my easy-to-say (but hard-to-exemplify) Poetry Translation Manifesto: While doing no violation to the intellectual and emotional content of the original, the translator should make the linguistic imitation sound as close to the original as possible any way he or she can even if the imitation might look alien on the page; anything else is treason.
Something to think on …
The religious life begins when we discover that God is not a postulate of ethics, but the only adventure in which it is worth the trouble to risk ourselves.
— Don Colacho
Thursday, November 05, 2020
Cats’ meows …
… Kathryn Hughes - Hooked on a Feline | Literary Review | Issue 491. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Gee, I loved my cat Pandora (she’s buried in our garden, having made it to 22), but I wouldn’t base a metaphysic on her.
Phonies at play …
… Crime beat - Philadelphia Weekly.
Stories and images of looters in Philadelphia running out of stores with boxes of sneakers, electronics and other stolen items are getting national and international press and social media coverage. This is e mbarrassing.
Stories and images of police officers being punched, kicked, pelted with bricks and bottles, and even struck with a speeding vehicle, are also getting national and international press and social media coverage. This is infuriating.
Yes or no?
… Photography as an Art > Theodore Dalrymple. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I was drawn recently to the question of whether photography was truly an art by the purchase of rather a beautiful book of photographs of Mexico taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Paul Strand in the 1930s. It was the catalogue of an exhibition held in Paris in 2012 which had obviously failed to sell as many as were printed, because the price at which I bought it was much reduced. Irrespective of whether photography is truly an art, I shall return to it regularly for what remains of my life. I regret now that it is only comparatively recently that I have take an interest in photography, having in the past rather looked down on it as an activity or endeavour. By doing so, I wilfully denied myself a way of responding to the world: perhaps not the most important way, but valuable all the same.
Sounds like required reading …
… America’s past as metaphor for today and tomorrow.
'It's a disjointed world, Liberty. No snug fit to the parts anymore. We are tumbling and tumbling into a great abyss, I fear, one with no bottom.'
Appreciation …
… Mariana Yampolsky: photographer, expat pioneer of road-tripping in Mexico. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
While we might not think of ourselves as such, we foreigners living and exploring Mexico are part of an inter-generational phenomenon, which has a long history and even unsung heroes.
One of these heroes is U.S.-born photographer Mariana Yampolsky, perhaps the most important documenter of folkloric Mexico of the mid and latter 20th century.
Take a look at these …
… Incredible Winners of 2020 Siena International Photography Awards. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Anniversary …
… Solitude by Ella Wheeler Wilcox | Poetry Foundation. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Ella Wheeler Wilcox was born on this date in 1850.
Something to think on …
The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.
— Will Durant, born on this date in 1885
Wednesday, November 04, 2020
Not as we have been told …
… The Fall of a Sparrow by Ann Pasternak Slater, review — in defence of TS Eliot’s maligned wife, Vivien. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
This book is a forensic and often ruthless — Eliot biographers are quoted mainly to be dismissed as rank fabulists — attempt to understand Vivien. It is the first time so much light has been thrown on this troubled character. Everybody has heard of Eliot’s “problem” wife, but few have tried to understand her in this depth and with such sympathetic insight into her impact on Eliot’s greatest poetry.
Scholarship and ghosts …
… NO THINKING. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
It is the fundamental unity between James the well-known writer of what we now call “horror” fiction and the reticent Cambridge don that is the starting point of Patrick J. Murphy’s fascinating study. For far too long, scholarship on James has been bifurcated between enthusiasts for all things spooky and professional medievalists and biblical scholars. This is why even in the beautifully produced and immaculately edited selection of his tales from Oxford University Press one searches in vain for the endnote informing the reader that the monster glimpsed by Dennison, first in an illustration and later in the flesh, in “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook” is not a fanciful product of James’s imagination but a description lifted wholesale from a Zoology of the Invertebrata, a textbook published by his friend and colleague Arthur Shipley, with whom he had actually visited Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges
Something to think on …
Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.
— Michael Crichton, who died on this date in 2008
Tuesday, November 03, 2020
Teller of truth …
… John Leo: A Journalist's Call to Accountability —Maureen Mullarkey. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
In July the Spectator.US ran a polished reflection on the slide of the F-word from curse to commonplace. A latecomer, I thought. Surely someone had detected this slippage long before now. Sure enough, a quick check into Two Steps Ahead turned up “The F-Word Flows Like Ketchup.” In the early Nineties, Leo declared it “all around us now, like air pollution.” His perp-walk of F-addicts included even the The New Yorker, once “a hotbed of decorum and taste” but now “a victim of fashion, a breathless dowager slipping into her first punk miniskirt.”
For election day …
… Column: What Mark Twain said in the Buffalo Express about running for governor | Columnists | buffalonews.com. (Hat tip, Tim Davis.)
“Running for Governor” is barely known in the United States. Samuel Clemens was editor of the Buffalo Express when it was published. It is the story of his run for governor, as Mark Twain, in 1870 — well, fictional run, of course.
The dialogue’s the thing …
… THE BRITISH INTELLIGENCE BOOK CLUB IVY-COMPTON-BURNETT AN INTRODUCTION.
(Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
No one, I think, would describe reading Ivy Compton-Burnett as easy. However, once you have plunged in, you gradually begin to get your bearings, and then the fun begins. For these novels are indeed – for all the seething tensions, vicious power struggles and murderous resentments – comedies. Comedies of the darkest hue – featuring all manner of dastardly deeds, up to and including murder – but comedies none the less. They might even make you laugh (they do me) – more with a shocked gasp than a hearty chuckle, but it’s laughter all the same. The comedy comes partly from the contrast between all that endlessly refined dialogue and the baseness and dark emotions that drive it, and partly from the author’s shameless use of the creakiest plot contrivances. But of course it’s pointless trying to analyse comedy – far better to dive in and read.
Together at last …
… Crime, Politics, and History: An Election Day 2020 Reader | CrimeReads. (Hat tip, Tim Davis.)
Monday, November 02, 2020
Anniversary …
… Unquiet Adulthood: On John Updike's Rabbit, Run | Book Marks. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The book was published 60 years ago today. This is one of the first reviews. Can't say I liked the book very much myself. Which is not to say I wouldn't have given it a good review. Updike writes well and brings "Rabbit" very much to life. My problem was I couldn't stand "Rabbit."
November Reviews at North of Oxford …
… What Are the Chances? By Robert Scotellaro.
… I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood By Tiana Clark.
… Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed The World by Jonathan Bates.
… Lying Like Presidents, New & Selected Poems 2001-2019. Djelloul Marbrook.
… Inculpatory Evidence: The Covid 19 Poems by Eileen R. Tabios.
Something to think on …
Nothing appeals to intellectuals more than the feeling that they represent 'the people'. Nothing, as a rule, is further from the truth.
— Paul Johnson, born on this date in 1928
Sunday, November 01, 2020
Worth noting …
… The shame of the press | Media Myth Alert.
Matt Taibbi, who is perhaps the most searching critic these days of contemporary American media and their failings, noted recently that the “least curious people in the country right now appear to be the credentialed news media, a situation normally unique to tinpot authoritarian societies.”
Reporting is hard. Opining is easy, especially if you already subscribe to a point. Opinion grounded in reporting can actually prove worthwhile.
Our Athens …
…Miscellaneous Musings: Revisiting American Bloomsbury.
In a period of about twenty-five years in the middle of the nineteenth century, the American character was given its special shape and voice …
On the other hand …
… Weimar America's Journalistic Elites | The American Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
It is time — it is past time — for the non-woke among us to take these people seriously when they say that words that hurt people’s feelings (well, certain people’s feelings) are equivalent to violence. The logical endpoint is to criminalize speech, and beyond that, criminalize the people who think the Bad Thoughts.
Much in what he says …
… American Weimar or American Hapsburg? | Spectator USA.
The bureaucracy in Washington DC — our Vienna, only without the boulevards, salons, musicians and writers — is a depraved and incompetent patronage system. The Hapsburg-style education system encourages its subjects to see themselves as members of national collectives, and also to resent the metropolis for not giving them their hyphenated rights. This too is a recipe for violent breakdown.
As the center gives way, anti-Judaism, which is the racialized inversion of Christian morality, emerges as the only common language of politics. Once, the intellectuals, clergymen and the mob told the Jews to go to Palestine. Now, the children of our semi-educated ruling caste gang up with black nationalists and Islamists tell the Jews to get out of Palestine. This is called progress.
Something to think on …
Our main conclusions about the state are that a minimal state, limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on, is justified, but any more extensive state will violate persons' rights not to be forced to do certain things, and is unjustified; and that the minimal state is inspiring as well as right.
— Robert Nozick, born on this date in 1938
As it happens, a good question …
… Why should The Strand survive?
As it happened, on my last trip The Strand had none of the books I was looking for. I wasn’t searching for any viciously right-wing tracts. The store had simply decided to go big and long on the ‘improving’ literature that it seeks to push on New Yorkers (Kendi, Coates, DiAngelo and all the rest) and it had done so at the expense of the variety and pluralism it once displayed. For instance near the front entrance on my last visit there stood a considerable quantity of the book (notorious to the readers of this publication) titled In Defense of Looting. Were I not on a guest in the country I should have picked up that whole steaming pile, walked out of the door and dumped them on the kerbside. For aside from believing that the author of that book should be taken at their word, it is quite something for a shop in a town that recently suffered an outbreak of looting to be prominently promoting a book which explains not only why ‘all cops are bastards’ but why the looting of other people’s businesses – businesses sometimes just as old and venerable as The Strand, incidentally – is not just fine but justified. Of course a store should stock a book. But what they push tells you where they stand.
Saturday, October 31, 2020
Hmm …
… Maverick Philosopher: Jack Kerouac: Religious Writer? (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I, too, am a Kerouac fan, and think it best in the case to let him speak for himself.
In Satori in Paris he say thar what was needed was "a tale that's told for companionship and to teach something religious, of religious reverence, about real life, in this real world," not the "silence in the yards.” Specifically, as he says in but The Dharma Bums, "the roar of silence itself, which is a great Shhhh reminding you of something you've seemed to have forgotten in the stress of your days since birth."
Sounds pretty religious to me.
Immortal authors …
… All the Famous Writers Who Have Reportedly Come Back as Ghosts | CrimeReads. (Hat tip, Tim Davis.)
Fo and life …
… Zealotry of Guerin: Fog Run II (Alice Guerin), Sonnet #536.
Lovely photo. It reminds of times when I would walk through the woods to grade school and fog had turned the woods into a living mystery.
See also: The Julia and Alice Guerin Suite.
Something to think on …
If poetry does not come as naturally as leaves to a tree, then it better not come at all.
— John Keats, born on this date in 1795
Friday, October 30, 2020
Killer D. A.…
…Meet Larry Krasner, the Rogue Prosecutor Wreaking Havoc in Philadelphia.
Krasner was sworn in in January 2018. In 2018, there were 351 murders; 2019 there were 347 murders; and as of Oct. 28, there have been a whopping 404 murders, for a total of 1,102 murders, an average of 367 murders a year and counting.Oh, and there’s this:
Krasner, a career criminal defense and civil rights attorney, who had sued the Philadelphia Police Department dozens of times over the decades, ran to be Philadelphia’s district attorney and received almost $1.45 million in campaign spending from George Soros in the process.
Sweet …
… An Exercise in Love by Diane di Prima | Poetry Foundation. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.
Diane di Prima died on October 25 at 86.
Something to think on …
An attitude of permanent indignation signifies great mental poverty. Politics compels it votaries to take that line and you can see their minds growing more impoverished every day, from one burst of righteous indignation to the next.
— Paul Valery, born on this date in 1871
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