Reviews and News:
William H. Pritchard on A.E. Housman: “Housman Country spurred me to think about how continuing a presence Housman is in my own reading life, going back at least to 1988 and Kingsley Amis’s assertion, in The Amis Anthology, that he was a great English poet. Amis included more poems by Housman than by any other poet, and placed his friend Philip Larkin’s exquisite brief poem ‘Cut Grass’ squarely in the Housman tradition of stoic lamentation on the beauty and transience of nature.”
* *
Heinrich Heine and German techno.
* *
The achievement of Chinua Achebe: “Achebe found an African voice in English that is so natural its artifice eludes us.”
* *
Dana Trilling’s combative life.
* *
Roger Kimball reviews Alan Taylor’s American Revolutions: “Taylor’s new book specializes in looking behind the lofty rhetoric of the American Revolution (‘We hold these truths,’ ‘We the People’) to a less edifying reality that informs, motivates, and complicates the rhetoric. Taylor knows an immense amount about the period and is an entertaining and informative writer. But I closed the book thinking about Hegel’s response to the old saw that no man is a hero to his valet. ‘Possibly,’ said Hegel, ‘but not because the man is not a hero but because the valet is a valet.'”
* *
As many of you may know, Peter Augustine Lawler has died. I only knew Peter for a brief seven years, but it felt like a lifetime. I’m sure many feel the same. He will be sorely missed.
* *
Essay of the Day:
In Aeon, Laura Spinney examines the World Health Organization’s new guidelines for naming infectious diseases. Will they improve public health?
“Under the 2015 guidelines, infectious disease names would no longer single out places, species or human groups defined by their sexual, religious or cultural identity. Nor would they include alarming terms such as ‘unknown’ or ‘fatal’…Instead, according to the WHO, disease names would thenceforth make use of generic descriptive terms. These could include symptoms – respiratory disease, for instance, or watery diarrhoea. The name might designate an affected group, but in neutral terms – juvenile for a childhood disease, say, or maternal when mothers are involved. It might refer to a season of the year or a bodily system – cardiac or nervous, to name but two. And it would include the name of the agent – streptococcus A, coronavirus, influenza virus and salmonella come to mind. Diseases that lay equal claim to a set of terms might be differentiated by numbers.
“The WHO hoped that by halting politically inspired names, it would enhance public health. After all, the fallout from misnaming a disease can be devastating. The 2009 flu pandemic was initially dubbed swine flu. It was actually spread by humans, not pigs, but the Egyptian government still ordered the slaughter of the country’s pig population – some 300,000 animals, mostly belonging to the Coptic minority – in a misguided attempt to halt the contagion.”
* * *
“The WHO wanted place information removed from disease names on the grounds that it was often misleading, and always unhelpful. ‘No country controls where a disease emerges,’ a WHO spokesperson told me. ‘Shaming does no good whatsoever.’ This might be true in a globalised industry increasingly dominated by large, multinational corporations. But geographical labels still contain useful information, and replacing them with biomedical ones relieves all countries of taking responsibility for a problem they helped to create. It probably isn’t a coincidence that both H5N1 bird flu and the human disease severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) emerged in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong at a time when its farming sector was undergoing major changes, including the intensification of poultry farming.”
* *
Image: Water spout
* *
Poem: Timothy Murphy, “The Failures of Promise”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
