Reviews and News:
Willa Cather’s prairie: “The Nebraskan was first a Virginian. She was born in 1873, in Back Creek Valley, near Winchester, on the north end of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her background was deeply Southern. Three of her uncles had fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, and several of the family’s African-American servants had been enslaved in her great-grandparents’ household—histories that Cather brought to life in her final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, published in 1940. Cather’s father, Charles, managed a sheep farm; when the barn burned, in 1883, the family moved to Nebraska, following other members of the wider Cather clan. They first lived on a homestead north of Red Cloud, then in town, where Charles Cather made a respectable living selling farm loans and insurance. Less than fifteen years earlier, only a few white families had occupied the area; now a community of twenty-five hundred people had sprung up. The transfer west came as an enormous shock: Cather felt as if she had been cast out of civilization.”
“Around 1817, George Moses Horton, an enslaved young man from Chatham County, N.C., began walking to the town of Chapel Hill on weekends to sell his owner’s fruit. Horton, who had taught himself to read but could not yet write, also offered more unusual goods: poems. He started with acrostic love poems, which he would create for verse-challenged undergraduate swains at the University of North Carolina, at 25 cents a pop and up. He also began publishing more serious poems, like ‘On Liberty and Slavery,’ in newspapers, and in 1829 became the first African-American in the South to publish a book.” Now a short essay by Horton has been discovered in the archives at the New York Public Library.
The Tate Modern used to shock audiences. Now it’s preoccupied with political correctness.
Why do orchestras play behind the conductor’s beat?
Paul Lakeland’s theology of the imagination: “Reading is salvific if pursued in good faith.”
Rodin’s craftsmanship: “Rodin was a child of the working class. (His father was a police clerk.) I think that this explains a lot about him—and about his reception, to this day—as it does about his close friend Pierre-Auguste Renoir (the son of a tailor). Both men came to art by way of tradecraft: architectural ornament in Rodin’s case, decoration of ceramics in Renoir’s. Their training in commercial aesthetics, aimed to please, distinguished them from their more privileged and urbane Impressionist and Post-Impressionist contemporaries. They loved flesh, which Rodin sensualized and Renoir prettified.”
Essay of the Day:
In Spectator Life, Tim Lott profiles Canadian psychology professor Jordan Peterson:
“After Google employee James Damore was sacked for suggesting that inborn differences in likes and dislikes (such as preferring people to things) might explain why there were fewer female employees working in technology than men, the first person he gave an interview to was a relatively unknown Canadian professor, Jordan Peterson.
“To some it might seem like an odd choice. It’s true that Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, has a substantial online presence — his videos have had 150 million views — but all the same, Damore had the world’s media knocking on his door. Why choose Peterson?
“To those who follow Peterson, the reason will be apparent. Damore clearly picked up much of his information about innate gender differences from one of Peterson’s many lectures on the subject of psychometrics, an academic discipline that mainly focuses on empirically measuring the variations in different psychological traits between human beings, including across the axis of gender.
“Peterson has been in similar trouble to Damore for posting his supposedly controversial lectures online. In August, he was briefly suspended from YouTube and Google without explanation, although he was quickly reinstated after a furore in the Canadian media.
“At the University of Toronto, after receiving two written warnings, he has been in danger of losing his job following his announcement that he would refuse to use the preferred gender pronouns of students and faculty who don’t identify with their biological gender, to the fury of radical transgender activists. The use of such pronouns is mandatory under a recently instituted Canadian law, Bill C-16. Peterson rejects the injunction on free speech grounds. ‘I’m not going to cede linguistic territory to post-modernist neo-Marxists,’ he says. He has expressed the view that he might use the preferred gender pronoun of a particular person, if asked by that individual, rather than having the decision foisted on him by the state.
“I first came across Peterson not in any of his political manifestations but because as a novelist and writing teacher I stumbled across his deconstructions of classic stories and myths, which for any storyteller are extraordinarily instructive. He has turned his mind to popular classics like Disney’s Pinocchio and The Lion King, and he is currently giving a series of lectures (viewable online) on the psychological meaning of the most popular story of all, The Bible.”
Photo: Mittelland im Nebel
Text: Kurt Vonnegut, “The Drone King”
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