Reviews and News:
Italy’s art police: “In 1969, Italy created the world’s first specialized police force to combat art crime. It now numbers 280 investigators who also safeguard artworks in regions struck by floods and earthquakes. The unit also combats antiquities trafficking fueled by conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan.”
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Michel Houellebecq’s gaseous poems: His “agonies and ecstasies pass off like bubbles in a martini, transient and lacking in intoxicating aftereffect… Cliched anomie reigns. Poems peter out rather than conclude.”
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Not all so-called Nazi art was bad: “The conventional wisdom is that everything Hitler approved was rubbish, and everything he vetoed was superb. It’s convenient and comforting to believe that tyrants have no taste, but the truth is a bit more complicated — and a lot more interesting — than that.”
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The beauty of books: “In 1891 William Morris – a pioneer of the Arts & Crafts movement, and advocate of beauty in everyday objects – established a printing press in the Oxfordshire village of Kelmscott. Here he spent the last years of his life creating books that demonstrated his belief in the superiority of traditional craft to the speed and convenience of mechanized industrial production.”
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Balancing clarity and depth in Bible translations: “The lesson of the liturgical and biblical fidgets of the 1960s and ’70s is that literacy, an essential part of what Edmund Burke called ‘the unbought grace of life,’ may be damaged, even lost, by eager revisionists who miss the deeper mysteries of life and faith.”
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“St. Mark’s Basilica…is now scaffold-free for the first time since 1994—and should remain so for at least a few months.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The New Criterion, Dominic Green takes apart the BDS campaign against Israel at American universities:
“Over the last decade, the numbers of Chinese and Indian students at American universities have substantially increased. At the same time, faculty and students have campaigned to boycott China and India over the status of Tibet and Kashmir, to reject Chinese and Indian funding, and to shun collaboration with individual Chinese and Indian researchers. There have been organized assaults upon Chinese guest speakers and propaganda campaigns inciting students to purge universities of Chinese or Indian ‘influence,’ including that of American citizens with a Chinese or Indian background. When students of Indian background object, they are informed that, wittingly or not, they are part of a global Hindu conspiracy.
“Of course, none of this has happened. It is almost inconceivable that any of it would happen. All of this, however, has been directed against the State of Israel, and against American Jewish students, since the inception of BDS, the campaign for ‘Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions’ against the Jewish state. This dubious selectivity is one unique aspect of bds. Another is the scale of its ambition. Generally, the introversions of Social Justice stop well before the water’s edge. There are global issues, most notably and vaguely the environment, but BDS is the only form of campus activism to attack a single state internationally—and a single group domestically.
“BDS seeks to transform the atmosphere of university intellectual and social life, in order to effect changes in government and business policy. BDS activists seek to control the intellectual environment, to create a ‘safe space’ for the indoctrination of a biased and often false view of Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Thus, the practice of BDS tends towards the abuse of free speech, in that BDS activists frequently seek to curtail the freedom of others.
“BDS uses strategies of exemplary stigmatization, intended to demonize the State of Israel and its supporters. Inevitably, and often by design, such intimidatory strategies include charging American Jews as complicit with the ‘racist’ and ‘colonialist’ Israeli state, or with ‘neoconservative’ policies at home. While the freedom of speech of Jewish and pro-Israel students is BDS’s primary target, its strategies aim to curtail the freedom of speech of all students and faculty.”
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Image of the Day: Stari Grad
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Poem: Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, “A Catholic Kid Considers Her Options”
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