Reviews and News:
Anthony Esolen is leaving Providence College. Carol Swain retired early from Vanderbilt. Both are Christians, and both were ostracized for expressing unacceptable ideas.
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The campus cauldron: “Whereas previous generations of student activists ‘typically fought to remove administrative rules and restrictions on campus… today’s students often demand more of them’.”
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Amedeo Modigliani’s paintings are more popular than ever. Too bad some of them are fake. In fact, Modigliani may be the world’s most forged artist. There are even “fakes of fakes.”
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A history of the Giro d’Italia and what makes it so different from the Tour de France. “If you have a champion…why not protect him?”
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The curious friendship of Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound.
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The ethics of Flaubert’s apathy? “In the final chapter of Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education (1869), Frederic Moreau and his old school chum Deslauriers reminisce by the fireside. They trade news about mutual acquaintances, many of whom have featured vividly throughout the previous 400 pages. ‘And as they exhumed their youth,’ Flaubert writes, ‘at every sentence they kept saying: “Do you remember?”‘ We take leave of the two as they recall an event predating the novel: a doomed trip to a brothel. ‘”Ah, that was our best time!” said Frederic. ‘Could be? Yes, that was our best time!” said Deslauriers.’ As literary historian Peter Brooks describes it in his persuasive new book, Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris, that scene captures much of what contemporary critics found so baffling and distasteful in Flaubert’s novel. The protagonist, somewhat of a rake and a social climber to begin with, has just withstood a series of personal and political upheavals. He has seen his romantic hopes dashed, pursued affairs anyhow, taken part in a duel, run for public office and witnessed mass insurgency and bloodshed — the Revolution of 1848, which forms the backdrop of Frederic’s vacillations. And yet, by ending on the brothel episode, Flaubert implies that ‘everything we have read in this long novel has been somehow off target, mere sequel to the important but unrecorded event,’ Brooks writes. He argues that the deflationary tendency so marked in Sentimental Education proceeded from Flaubert’s scorn for most political movements and the chronic delusions that enable them. Especially now, when our political rhetoric is so overheated — not to say overblown — readers can find sanctuary in Flaubert’s oblique humor, his deadpan narration.”
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Essay of the Day:
Is Shakespeare over-lauded, over-performed, and over-taught? Probably, Emma Smith argues in The Times Literary Supplement, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing:
“In the great food chain of being, Shakespeare is the apex predator in a cultural ecosystem where he has no rivals, only prey. The literary rabbits and deer and mice need to watch out. But the ecological model actually requires such a dominant figure – a keystone species – for the healthy functioning of the whole system. Alpha predators keep other animals in check, an effect that cascades down to encourage biodiversity and maintain the conditions for a flourishing ecology. Perhaps if we didn’t have Shakespeare, we’d be making plans to reintroduce him.”
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Photo: Asciano
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Poem: Mario Petrucci, “Lovechild”
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