Epstein is a generalist in the finest sense. In his many collections, still available and worth the reading time, readers are likely to find a thoughtful essay on Joseph Conrad or Marcel Proust followed by a take on Michael Jordan, a putdown of Philip Roth followed by an affectionate Memory Lane treatment of his hometown, Chicago.
Tuesday, October 13, 2020
The latest from a master …
… The Best Way to Take a Break From the Current Chaos | The American Spectator | USA News and Politics. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Critic’s choices …
… The best recent poetry collections – review roundup | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Sieg heil, professor …
… CSUN professor runs 'Boycott Israel Resource Page' on university website.
The page calls Israel “The most racist state in the world” accusing them of “Crimes against humanity” including “ethnic cleansing.”
Tracking the decline …
… Update: St. John’s limits academic freedom of history department in ongoing effort to punish professor for asking question.
St. John's appears to be advocating the wrong religion.
The writer as star …
… Musings and Reviews: “You shall know the truth ... “
You know how John Wayne movies give you the feeling that you’re watching John Wayne play himself? In a similar (but good) way, Flannery O’Connor’s literary voice is always front and center in her stories and novels. And what a unique voice it is—a brilliant mind, a fierce tendency to call bull**** on hypocrisy, and a skillful rendering of regional characters and places, all delivered in low country dialect. Underestimate her—or her characters—at your peril.That's because Wayne — Like Cary Grant — created a persona for himself that proved adapatble to a wide variety of roles.
The genuine article …
… Alternative Journalism, Indeed | City Journal. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
“We have always been the alternative voice in Philadelphia,” says McDonough now, regarding his decision to rebrand the paper. “That audience has changed over the years, and, in 2020, conservatives and people who are angry and fed up with an inept city government don’t really have a voice here. To continue our mission, we had to change.” PW’s chief revenue officer, Ed Lynes, told Philadelphia Magazine that, in the city, it is “conservatives who no longer have a voice. If you oppose a socialist and intrusive government, your views are rejected by the city’s mainstream media.”Anything that provides relief from The Inquirer’s Will Bunch and his Johnny-one-note rants can be thought a blessing.
Something to think on …
In proportion as you give the state power to do things for you, you give it power to do things to you.
— Albert Jay Nock, born on this date in 1870
Confident cosmopolitan …
… Complex, Simple: On Robert Conquest’s “Collected Poems” - Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Among his recurrent themes are love and sex, science and poetry. The verse — Conquest’s preferred usage — in Collected Poems, edited by his widow Elizabeth Conquest, some 60 years of it, is vast and various in every sense. Conquest is that rare sort of poet who might take anything as his subject matter. Without being shrill or resorting to bumper sticker message-mongering, Conquest is a poet of the people, or at least of that portion who read poems for pleasure. In The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History (2004), he writes:
Ignoramuses …
… Why are woke idiots attacking Gal Gadot? - spiked.
The main problem with this criticism is that Cleopatra herself was actually from Europe. The briefest Google search would have revealed to these furious tweeters that she was, in fact, a Macedonian Greek.
Monday, October 12, 2020
Poet and p[hotographer …
… Philip Larkin: a way of seeing - spiked. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Motion has skilfully juxtaposed his 13 photographic selections alongside related poems.
A lifelong pilgrim …
… Remembering Malcolm Muggeridge: Marked by Mobility and a Search for Morality | National Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Among Muggeridge’s contemporaries it was the idealistic, impecunious writer Hugh Kingsmill (1889–1949) who meant most to him. The Poisoned Crown (1944), in which Kingsmill criticized the corruption and cruelty of power-worshipers, was central to his vision of things, and he wrote an introduction to Michael Holroyd’s 1964 biography of Kingsmill. Kingsmill argued a mystical Shakespearean-Blakean view that there were perennial human conflicts between lovingkindness and power and between imagination and will, and that the modern era particularly had seen the satanic hunger for Blake’s “poisoned crown,” the lust for amoral power, in humankind’s technological rape of nature and in totalitarian power maniacs such as Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung, and that against this post-moral Nietzschean will-to-power—Saint Augustine’s libido dominandi—only lovingkindness and imagination could ultimately triumph, though not necessarily visibly or in this life. Kingsmill was a fellow traveler with Christians, as was Muggeridge for the first part of his life; and Muggeridge took Simone Weil to be making the same argument in her reflections on gravity and grace.
Something to think on …
Man is a rational animal. He can think up a reason for anything he wants to believe.
— Anatole France, who died on this date in 1924
Happy Columbus Day …
… The left created a fictional version of Christopher Columbus to erase his holiday | The College Fix.
Slavery was not introduced to the New World by Columbus. Rather, slavery was common even among native people in the Caribbean.
Columbus sought to be kind to the natives because he knew that they would be an essential component in not only his survival, but the survival of the men that accompanied him as well. When Columbus left Spain in 1492, in search of a faster and safer route to Asia, slavery was permissible. Spain did not formally ban the slave trade to its colonies until 1817 – more than 300 years after Columbus’ death.
See also this, about Samuel Eliot Morison’s Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Always good to be informed.
Sunday, October 11, 2020
Appreciation …
… Le Mot Juste | Harper's Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Hazzard’s fiction takes much from her life, but the temptation to read her work autobiographically never clouds the experience. “I think there is a tendency now to write jottings about one’s own psyche and call it a novel,” Hazzard told Kakutani after The Transit of Venus was published. “My book, though, is really a story—and that might have contributed to its success.”
In case you wondered …
…. How Elmore Leonard Really Wrote His Novels—According to His Characters | CrimeReads.(Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
This gives you a chance to see and hear him. Very worthwhile
I was once chatting with Leonard at Philadelphia’s Central Library, prior to introducing him onstage, and he kept asking me about Philadelphia. I asked him why he was so curious about Philly. He said you never know. What I was telling him might come in handy sometime while writing.
Hmm …
… The Idol Worshiper – Idlings. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Sacrificing Wordsworth on the altar of De Quincey seems odd to me. Whatever his personal shortcomings, Wordsworth is undoubtedly the greater literary figure. And even in this account, De Quincey seems to have been a person best kept at a safe distance.
Something to think on …
That is the mystery of grace: it never comes too late.
— François Mauriac, born on this date in 1885
Saturday, October 10, 2020
The original …
… ‘Twelve Angry Men’: First Deliberations - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… it is now possible to watch the live-TV version of “Twelve Angry Men” on YouTube, meticulously restored from a surviving kinescope film of the original 1954 telecast—and you know what? It’s better than the movie. A lot better.
Dangerous conformists …
… The Tyranny of the ‘Tolerant’ - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
One of the plummiest targets for attack by intellectuals in the 1950s was conformity. Conformists in those days were thought to reside in American suburbs; they were judged unimaginative, thinking dull thoughts, living out lives of quiet desperation. How it would pain the officially tolerant of our day to think themselves conformists. Yet to be tolerant today entails a strict conformity of opinion. They might wear rococo beards, ponytails and tennis shoes with tuxedos, have had 20 affairs and three abortions, and attended what the world thinks are the best schools. But they all know that, should they depart the deep grooves of locked-in opinion that is the source of their virtue, they risk social excommunication. Few are willing to risk that.
Something to think on …
Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them.
— Ludwig von Mises, who died on this date in 1973
Friday, October 09, 2020
Getting cancelled …
… The Artist Formerly Known as Guston - Tablet Magazine. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
The decision to postpone Guston’s exhibit is a regrettable mistake: At the heart of Guston’s work are the very personal questions of responsibility and complicity, of fear and even self-hatred. Trying to avoid any controversy, the directors prevented the public from engaging in difficult conversations, precisely when they’re most needed, in this fraught moment when both racism and anti-Semitism are on the rise, and many of the large cultural institutions are reckoning with their own history.Revising, editing, and even deleting the past seems to make some people — often those with letters attached to their names — feel quite happy about themselves. Merely proving once again that being schooled doesn't necessarily make one educated.
Debating a decision …
… Weigel's Terrible Arguments - Catholic Herald. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Here is Weigel's article: Truman's Terrible Choice. And here is Paul Fussell's classic — and thoroughly informed — discussion of the matter, which Dave just sent: “Thank God for the Atom Bomb.”
I would suggest that philosophy that does not thoroughly engage reality — which is often messy and irrational — is not worth pondering.
Here is Weigel's article: Truman's Terrible Choice. And here is Paul Fussell's classic — and thoroughly informed — discussion of the matter, which Dave just sent: “Thank God for the Atom Bomb.”
Understanding the past requires pretending that you don’t know the present.Feser notes that "Catholic just war teaching holds that directly and intentionally killing non-combatants is intrinsically evil." Well, in that case, World War II was an unjust war straight across the board, since both sides targeted civilian populations — remember the Blitz and Dresden and Hamburg, etc. So I guess bad guys were bound to win. I presume Feser is happy that the bad guys who did win were the Allies and not the Axis.
It requires feeling its own pressure on your pulses without any ex post facto
illumination.
I would suggest that philosophy that does not thoroughly engage reality — which is often messy and irrational — is not worth pondering.
Something to think on …
A certain combination of incompetence and indifference can cause almost as much suffering as the most acute malevolence.
— Bruce Catton, born on this date in 1899
Thursday, October 08, 2020
And the winner is …
… American Poet Louise Glück Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Something to think on …
The ones that measure up are not always the ones you expect.
— Walter Lord, born on this date in 1918
Wednesday, October 07, 2020
Expect more stories like this …
… A Failed Experiment | City Journal.
In a comparison of 50 countries, a team led by Rabail Chaudhry of the University of Toronto found that Covid was deadlier in places with older populations and higher rates of obesity, but the mortality rate was no lower in countries that closed their borders or enforced full lockdowns. After analyzing 23 countries and 25 U.S. states with widely varying policies, Andrew Atkeson of UCLA and fellow economists found that the mortality trend was similar everywhere once the disease took hold: the number of daily deaths rose rapidly for 20 to 30 days, and then fell rapidly.
Appreciation …
… Giving Hoagy His Due - Terry Teachout, Commentary Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
To this day, though, Carmichael’s art resists easy categorization. As a friend wrote in the epilogue to The Stardust Road, his 1946 memoir: “You made your greatest success as a composer by not writing songs about love. You gained popularity in radio and records by singing; yet you have no voice….You got interested in movie acting about a year ago and now you are in that. Every time you put your mind to something you really get on the outside of it before you let go.”I am lifelong Carmichael fan.
Good …
… Gun-Rights Group Sues Philly Over Massive Permit Backlog - Washington Free Beacon.
This city is currently a poorly managed as ever in my lifetime. The mayor is an idiot. The DA still thinks he’s a defense attorney.
Something to think on …
Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion.
— Allan Bloom, who died on this date in 1992
Sounds familiar …
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
— George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Tuesday, October 06, 2020
Hmm …
… I Don't Remember the Last Time I Enjoyed a Book | Book Riot. (Hat tip, Jon Caroulis.)
I have reviewed books that I didn’t enjoy, but usually, if I’m not enjoying a book, I stop reading it.
It's about time …
… Great Barrington Declaration. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Signed by:
Medical & Public
Health Scientists
Health Scientists
1,604
Medical
Practitioners
Practitioners
1,803
General
Public
Public
27,378
I just signed it.
Simenon without Maigret …
… Musings and Reviews: Georges Simenon “makes me think of Chekhov".
I reviewed this novel. It is quite disturbing.
… Godforsaken: religion is vanishing from American politics. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The crucial point is that these millions of Christian voters can no longer find churches that reflect their attitudes and anxieties. They can’t identify with the evangelicals’ obsession with sexual purity, and the mainstream Protestant churches just strike them as spineless, especially right now. Conservative Catholics feel the same way about their own bishops. They had nothing inspiring to say during the COVID pandemic and retreated into cowardly platitudes when antifa mobs moved from defacing statues to trying to burn down whole cities.
But, as Charles Williams observed, "The Divine Thing that made itself the foundation of the Church does not seem, to judge by his comments on the religious leadership of his day, to have hoped much from officers of a church."
Appreciation …
… Discovering Whitney Balliett, the True Poet of Jazz | City Journal. (Hat tp, Dave Lull.)
I have never read a jazz writer with a more assured command of the English language. It’s a testimony to his precision of expression that the Merriam-Webster dictionary changed its definition of that ineffable jazz word “swing,” based on Balliett’s feedback. But you didn’t need to be a lexicographer to appreciate his virtuosity. Oral historian Studs Terkel, another master of the journalistic profile, lauded him as “one of our most trustworthy guides.” Taking a different tack, poet extraordinaire (and fellow jazz critic) Philip Larkin declared that “Balliett is a master of language” who brought “jazz journalism to the verge of poetry.” In fact, the surest way to assess Balliett’s stature was to gauge the stature of those who praised his work. He was the artisan whom other artisans admired.
Something to think on …
To philosophize is not to solve problems but to live them at a certain level.
— Don Colacho
Monday, October 05, 2020
Ave atque vale …
… First Known When Lost: Farewell, September. Welcome, October.
I am October child. In a short while I will turn 79. And the next day will begin my 80th year.
I am October child. In a short while I will turn 79. And the next day will begin my 80th year.
Maybe …
… Review: “The Listeners and other poems” by Walter de la Mare | Form in Formless Times. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
For all the grief I have given with words
May now a few clear flowers blow,
In the dust, and the heat, and the silence of birds,
Where the lonely go.
For the thing unsaid that heart asked of me
Be a dark, cool water calling - calling
To the footsore, benighted, solitary,
When the shadows are falling.
O, be beauty for all my blindness,
A moon in the air where the weary wend,
And dews burdened with loving-kindness
In the dark of the end.
I see no diminution of quality in that.
My fellow de la Mare fan, Stephen Pentz, in a recent post had much to say of de la Mare (it's what prompted me to get Whistler's biography.) Here is that post: Awake. And here is something from it:
But, as they say, read the whole thing.
Those poems are all at the beginning of the book, and after them the poems degenerate into unequal attempts to catch the evocative spirit.Well, I have just started reading Imagination of the Heart, Theresa Whistler's biography of de la Mare. I have also been reading the Collected Poems, just dipping into it at random. I just came upon this one, far into the book:
For All The Grief
For all the grief I have given with words
May now a few clear flowers blow,
In the dust, and the heat, and the silence of birds,
Where the lonely go.
For the thing unsaid that heart asked of me
Be a dark, cool water calling - calling
To the footsore, benighted, solitary,
When the shadows are falling.
O, be beauty for all my blindness,
A moon in the air where the weary wend,
And dews burdened with loving-kindness
In the dark of the end.
I see no diminution of quality in that.
My fellow de la Mare fan, Stephen Pentz, in a recent post had much to say of de la Mare (it's what prompted me to get Whistler's biography.) Here is that post: Awake. And here is something from it:
In the year prior to his death, he said to a visitor: "My days are getting shorter. But there is more and more magic. More than in all poetry. Everything is increasingly wonderful and beautiful."
But, as they say, read the whole thing.
Something to think on …
The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.
— Václav Havel, born on this date in 1936
Sunday, October 04, 2020
Have a listen …
… Ty Segall Releases New Harry Nilsson Covers EP: Listen | Pitchfork. (Hat tip, Gwen Hansell Hendry.)
Appreciation …
… The Poetry of the Prosaic - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Quinn believed that the caucasian men causing damage were white supremacist supporters of President Donald Trump, who were attempting to make Black Lives Matter protests appear in a negative light. In an effort to expose the alleged racist Trump supporters, Quinn went undercover and infiltrated the groups. Instead, he found that these destructive forces were "true believers in insurrectionary anarchism."One of the luckiest days of my life was when, in grad school, I suddenly realized I did not want to spend the rest of my in the faculty lounge (and I gather it was a more interesting place then than it is now).
Journalist does journalism …
… Photojournalist discovers left-wing anarchists cause riots - TheBlaze.
Quinn believed that the caucasian men causing damage were white supremacist supporters of President Donald Trump, who were attempting to make Black Lives Matter protests appear in a negative light. In an effort to expose the alleged racist Trump supporters, Quinn went undercover and infiltrated the groups. Instead, he found that these destructive forces were "true believers in insurrectionary anarchism."
Progress …
… Deep Water: ‘Independence,’ by Robert Petrillo - Portland Press Herald. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
In case you wondered …
… How to Generate Fake News by Frank J. Fleming – According To Hoyt. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
A great poet’s great editor …
… New beginnings for John Berryman and Robert Giroux | America Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… Giroux would remain a loyal friend, never backing away from his commitments to Berryman; his strength of character helped him to accept Berryman’s overwhelming personal difficulties of severe alcoholism and dependency on a variety of drugs. He encouraged Berryman to write poetry during both good periods and difficult ones—even when Berryman went through prolonged periods of hospitalization, which tended to become more and more frequent, creating for him a disturbing series of mentally uninhabitable spaces.
Something to think on …
The journey is essential to the dream.
— Francis of Assisi, who died on this date in 1226
Saturday, October 03, 2020
Something to think on …
Man is born to live, to suffer, and to die, and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the final end. But we must deny it all along the way.
— Thomas Wolfe, born on this date in 1900
Friday, October 02, 2020
Hmm …
… Pandemic Memories and Mortalities - IEEE Spectrum.
Though many of us lived through the flu pandemics of 1957 and 1968, almost nobody can dredge up personal memories of those times. And that's interesting.I sure in hell can’t.
… the worldwide death toll attributable to SARS CoV-2 was about 865,000 by the end of August 2020. Given the global population of about 7.8 billion, this translates to an interim pandemic mortality of about 11 deaths per 100,000 people. Even if the total number of deaths were to triple, the mortality rate would be comparable to that of the 1968 pandemic, and it would be about two-thirds of the 1957 rate.But people today seem more timorous, credulous, and servile. Certainly more manipulable.
RIP …
… Derek Mahon, one of Ireland’s leading poets, has died, aged 78. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
His poem, Everything is Going to be All Right, captured the national mood during the pandemic.
Something to think on …
Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.
— Wallace Stevens, born on this date in 1879
Thursday, October 01, 2020
Fabulous …
… British Wildlife Photography Awards Celebrates Ten Years with a Show. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Keeping busy ¬
… Simon Armitage on Ted Hughes, trying to write during the lockdown and drive-in poetry | Yorkshire Post. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
“Hughes was this person from the next valley and as well as finding his work inspiring I found his journey inspiring, too. This idea that if he could do it then coming from a similar background and in a similar-looking house, then I might be able to do it as well.”
As the city once was …
… A Side Street by Louis Untermeyer | Poetry Foundation. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Louis Untermeyer was born on this date in 1885.
Louis Untermeyer was born on this date in 1885.
Something to think on …
The history of Western science confirms the aphorism that the great menace to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.
— Daniel J. Boorstin, born on this date in 1914
A contest of kindness …
… Jeremy Treglown - The Long Road to Leopoldstadt | Literary Review | Issue 490. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
It’s the book itself, though, that made me most happily jealous. The research couldn’t be more thorough. Stoppard’s decade in provincial journalism in Bristol is perfectly evoked, for example: jazz clubs, coffee bars, kids chain-smoking in polo-necked black jerseys. I was one of them and went to some of the productions at the Old Vic that Stoppard reviewed …
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