Reviews and News:
Yes, colleges are liberal bubbles. Here’s the data.
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If you can’t go to the Sistine Chapel, bring the Sistine Chapel to you.
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Joseph Bottum on higher education today: “If you can’t read Chaucer without a translation, or puzzle your way through a page of Cicero’s Latin, you aren’t educated. If you don’t have a few dozen tags of Homer within easy reach in your mind, or a few hundred lines of Shakespeare, you lack part of what high schools and colleges were created to teach. If you can’t name the books of the Bible, or the circles of Dante’s Hell, there are pieces missing from what we once assumed learned people should know. For that matter, if you can’t say how the Romans lost at Cannae, or how the Ten Thousand marched from Persia, or how Troy was defeated, then what was all your schooling for?”
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Cuban science fiction: “Originally published in 2001, A Planet for Rent is a dark allegory of life in Cuba in the early 1990s, while Super Extra Grande (originally published in 2012) serves as a breezy fable. Read together, they offer a different view of Cuba’s journey from the crisis of the post-Soviet era to the expectant, yet uncertain moment of transition in which it finds itself today, on the cusp of a possible end to the US embargo and an opening of the island to its giant neighbor to the north.”
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Late medieval book illustrations.
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Jack London’s individuality: “Philosophically, London shares much with Joseph Conrad, whom he venerated. Their literary themes overlap: the sea, the primitive in human nature, political insurrection. The assertive romanticism of London’s life and work recalls the character Stein in Lord Jim. When a man is born, says Stein, he falls into a dream as into the sea. If he tries to climb out, he drowns. ‘The way,’ Stein insists, ‘is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.’ This code of individualist bravura echoes through London’s work, often clashing with his socialist avowals.”
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Essay of the Day:
Book reviews used to draw blood. Now they are as well behaved as the Queen’s corgis. What happened?
“Twenty years ago, I published a novel called English Settlement. It attracted what is known in the trade as “mixed reviews”, which is to say that a handful of people remarked that clearly a new star had risen in the cultural firmament, while a rather larger number declared themselves surprised that a fine old firm like Chatto & Windus should waste its money on such talentless dreck. Absolute nadir among the detractors was plumbed by the gallant ornament of the Sunday Times’s books section – a chap named Stephen Amidon who concluded, after much incidental savagery, that the book was ‘about as much use as a one-legged man in a butt-kicking competition’.
“If this sounds bad – and it was no fun at all to sit at the kitchen table reading the review while one’s three-year-old romped around wondering why Daddy was looking so glum – then I should point out that this was an era in which wounding disparagement was, if not absolutely routine, then a frequent feature of newspaper books pages. Comparable highlights from the period include Philip Hensher’s dismissal of James Thackara’s The Book of Kings in the Observer (‘could not write “Bum” on a wall’) and, a little later, Tibor Fischer noting of a below-par Martin Amis that being seen reading it would be like your uncle getting caught masturbating in the school playground. Even I once submitted, to this very magazine, a review of a collection of journalism by Jon Savage called Time Travel, which the then literary editor ran under the headline ‘All the young pseuds’.
“There are several questions worth asking about these outpourings of bygone critical spleen, in which the pretence of objective criticism very often disappears beneath a tide of ad hominem bitchiness. One of them is: would anyone be prepared to print this kind of thing on a magazine or newspaper in Britain in 2016? Another is: would anyone – writer, publisher, reader – or literary culture, in general, benefit in any way if they were? The answer to the first question, as the merest glance at a modern-day newspaper arts section suffices to demonstrate, is no.”
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Image of the Day: Clouds over the Grand Canyon
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Poem: Stephen Kampa, “Last Stab at Goodness”
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