Reviews and News:
Barton Swaim on why using male pronouns makes for better writing: “The obsession over gendered pronouns is part of a general tendency in recent decades to treat social and political questions as fundamentally about signs and symbols rather than actual men and women. I do not believe that using ‘he’ or ‘him’ to refer to ‘everyone’ or ‘a writer’ or ‘a physician’ in any way implies that men are superior to women, or that the language of power, whatever that is, is somehow intrinsically masculine. I think the whole silly controversy arises from the conflation of reality and signifier. Those are my views. I don’t apologize for them. But I would be willing to put them to one side, or just forget about them, if there were an easy way to avoid generic masculine pronouns and still make my sentences clip along without giving the reader any trouble.”
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Andrew Ferguson reviews Tom Wolfe’s Kingdom of Speech.
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Frank Furedi on collecting books: “The book has always been a sign of status and refinement; a declaration of self-worth – even for those who hate to read.”
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Dickens’s curse words.
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England’s oldest cookbook was published in 1387 at the commission of King Richard II. It contains 196 recipes: “In 1300, a French cookbook had been produced, Le Viandier of Taillevent, that quickly became the standard of fine Medieval dining. The Forme of Cury was intended to compete with the French cookbook.”
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The gun that Verlaine used to shoot Rimbuad to go on the block. Christie’s estimates that it will sell for between €50,000 to €70,000.
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Why university libraries still need books.
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Revisiting the poetry of the late Wilmer Mills.
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Essay of the Day:
In The Washington Free Beacon, Matthew Continetti argues that the marriage of conservatism and populism was always precarious and is now over:
“Since founding National Review in 1955, Buckley and his colleagues had been the spokesmen of an intellectual and philosophical critique of democratic mass society as well as the domestic and foreign policies of American liberalism. Beginning with the Republican nomination of Barry Goldwater (whom Buckley supported) in 1964, however, and accelerating in the tumultuous 1970s, the National Review crowd found itself challenged by a group of activists, journalists, and politicians whose criticism of the elite was populist, vehement, bipartisan, and anti-corporate. The question of how these anti-Establishment newcomers from the south and West fit into the conservative movement and the Republican Party, the question of where to strike the balance between populism and conservatism, has bedeviled conservative intellectuals and pro-business GOP officials ever since.
“It is noteworthy, for example, that Reagan sided with Buchanan and the populists in the debate over the Panama Canal. If he hadn’t done so he would have alienated an increasingly important Republican constituency. ‘I think, ironically, that Reagan would not have been nominated [in 1980] if he had favored the Panama Canal Treaty, and that he wouldn’t have been elected if it hadn’t passed,’ Buckley wrote in Overdrive. ‘He’d have lost the conservatives if he had backed the treaty, and lost the election if we’d subsequently faced, in Panama, insurrection, as in my opinion we would have.’
“Republicans have walked this tightrope for decades. When the party has integrated the issues, goals, and tactics of the New Right into its campaigns, it has been remarkably successful. Think 1968, 1972, 1980, 1984, 1994, 2010, and 2014. But there also have been signs, on the presidential level most clearly, that the alliance with populism is bringing diminishing returns. The GOP is on the brink of losing the popular vote in six out of seven presidential elections despite its current nominee running precisely the type of campaign the New Right has wanted to see for years. And this election is likely to return to office a Republican House majority that is more anti-Establishment, more hostile to compromise, more suspicious of institutions and elites than the one we have today.
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“From the Panama Canal to the Tea Party, from Phyllis Schlafly to Sarah Palin, the conservative intellectual has viewed the New Right as a sometimes annoying but ultimately worthy friend. New Right activists supplied the institutions, dollars and votes that helped the conservative intellectual reform tax, crime, welfare, and legal policy. But that is no longer the case. Donald Trump was the vehicle by which the New Right went from one part of the conservative coalition to the dominant ideological tendency of the Grand Old Party.”
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Image of the Day: Fall
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Poem: Les Murray, “The Physical Diaspora of William Wallace”
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