Reviews and News:
Denis Donoghue once hosted poet and critic William Empson for a reading. It was an odd visit by a sometimes misunderstood poet: “Introducing each poem, he indicated in a sentence or two the circumstances in which he wrote it: where, when, and in what mood. After the second poem, as I remember, Mrs. Empson called out: ‘William, you’re very boring.’ He let that pass. But after the next poem she called out more formally: ‘William, you are very boring.’ Empson stopped, looked at the audience, and said: ‘My wife tells me I am very boring.’ He then finished the poem, whereupon Mrs. Empson and Gareth de Brun got up and left.”
Speaking of strange, N. T. Wright reviews David Bentley Hart’s strange translation of the New Testament: “When a theologian of the stature of David Bentley Hart offers a ‘pitilessly literal translation’ of the New Testament that is ‘not shaped by later theological and doctrinal history’ and aims to make ‘the familiar strange, novel, and perhaps newly compelling,’ we are eager to see the result. He promises to bring out the ‘wildly indiscriminate polyphony’ of the writers’ styles and emphases, converging on their ‘vibrant certainty that history has been invaded by God in Christ in such a way that nothing can stay as it was.’ But his two main claims (to be ‘literal’ and ‘undogmatic’) are not borne out, and the promise of displaying the strangeness of early Christian life disappears behind different kinds of strangeness.”
Inside one of America’s last pencil factories.
Carl Trueman on how Christian universities can survive in an increasingly antagonistic culture: First, stop taking federal money. Second, cultivate good taste: “Laws that may be used to dismantle Christian educational institutions are already on the books. How they are to be applied will be determined by the dominant taste or cultural sentiment.”
Peter Thiel submits a bid to buy Gawker. May he win it.
Margaret Atwood supports due process in sexual misconduct case. #MeToo Twitter mob: May she burn in hell.
“In the decades after Hernán Cortés invaded Mexico, one of the worst epidemics in human history swept through the new Spanish colony. A mysterious disease called ‘cocolitzli’ appeared first in 1545 and then again in 1576, each time killing millions of the native population. ‘From morning to sunset,’ wrote a Franciscan friar who witness the epidemic, ‘the priests did nothing else but carry the dead bodies and throw them into the ditches.’” Researchers may now know what caused it.
Essay of the Day:
In Wired, Joe Veix tells the story of one of the first viral videos. It was a fake:
“You’ve seen the video. Everyone on the internet has. A man sits in a cubicle and pounds his keyboard in frustration. A few seconds later, the Angry Man picks up the keyboard and swings it like a baseball bat at his screen—it’s an old PC from the ’90s, with a big CRT monitor—whacking it off the desk. A frightened coworker’s head pops up over the cubicle wall, just in time to watch the Angry Man get up and kick the monitor across the floor. Cut to black.
“The clip began to circulate online, mostly via email, in 1997. Dubbed ‘badday.mpg,’ it’s likely one of the first internet videos ever to go viral. Sometimes GIFs of it still float across Twitter and Facebook feeds. (Most memes barely have a shelf life of 20 minutes, let alone 20 years.)
“Beyond its impressive resilience, it’s also unexpectedly significant as the prime mover of viral videos. In one clip, you can find everything that’s now standard in the genre, like a Lumière brothers film for the internet age: the surveillance footage aesthetic, the sub-30-second runtime, the angry freakout in a typically staid setting, the unhinged destruction of property.
“The clip also serves up prime conspiracy fodder. Freeze and enhance: The computer is unplugged. The supposed Angry Man, on closer inspection, is smiling. Was one of the first viral videos—and perhaps the most popular viral video of all time—also one of the first internet hoaxes?”
Photo: Storm
Poem: J. D. McClatchy, “My Plot”
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