Reviews and News:
The pleasures and secrets of library archives: “The New York Public Library’s Schwarzman building is most famous for the ornate and cavernous Rose Reading Room, now reopened after two years of restoration. The stacks under the library can hold 4 million books (the actual number in storage is lower, though no one is quite sure), which are delivered to the reading room by 950 feet of miniature rail running at 75 feet per minute. But the real gem of the library, in Lannon’s view, is the stuff that you can find only in boxes like the ones now strewn across the table. ‘You can get a book anywhere,’ he said. ‘An archive exists in one location.’ The room we’re standing in is the only place that you can read, say, the week’s worth of journal entries in which New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal contemplates publishing the Pentagon Papers. It’s the only place where you can read the collected papers of Robert Moses, or a letter T.S. Eliot wrote about Ulysses to James Joyce’s Paris publisher, Sylvia Beach.”
What’s wrong with Catholic fiction today? It’s not that it’s bad. It’s nostalgic: “Alice McDermott’s books win literary awards like prizes at a church raffle, and The Ninth Hour will undoubtedly prove no exception. The book certainly deserves recognition as one of the year’s great artistic accomplishments. But it is, like so much of her work, a tale of a world gone by: a looking backward at what we no longer have, good and bad, rather than an account of the present or a promise of the future.”
The novel that influenced Jonathan Franzen’s writing the most? C. S. Lewis’s Narnia.
The foundational myth of Alfred the Great’s victory over the Vikings.
In Case You Missed It:
In Quarterly Conversation, Adam Kosan revisits The Peregrine at 50 and the hermitic life of the man who wrote it.
The problem with teaching today: “We have allowed the classroom to devolve from the pursuit of knowledge to the pursuit of ‘cures’ for social problems.”
Neuroscientist David Poeppel has noted that we still don’t understand “how the brain recognizes something as basic as a straight line.” This hasn’t stopped writers of popular books from using fMRI scans in arguments on all sorts of things—from empathy to economics to Shakespeare. The result is neuromush: “Stephen Poole described this phenomenon as ‘an intellectual pestilence’, and observed how putting the prefix ‘neuro’ to whatever you are talking about gives a pseudo-scientific respectability to all sorts of meretricious rubbish.”
The consolations of Latin: “My class meets for an hour at ten thirty every morning, and as I labor to decipher our daily Wheelockian pronouncements, I remember why I loved Latin to begin with. Each sentence is a little puzzle, a Rubik’s Cube of words to be rearranged into their proper order based on arcane rules and hidden clues. There’s a creative thrill, too, in the task of transforming Latin into English…More than anything, though, I love Latin because it has nothing to do with me. It has nothing to do with anything in my life. Classics evangelists who argue for the practical utility of Latin, its historical significance and English vocabulary-building potential, are profoundly missing the point: Latin is fun because all its native speakers are dead and will never have to meet you.”
Interview: Sam Leith talks to Anne Applebaum about her new book, Red Famine. “The early 1930s in Ukraine saw a famine that killed around five million people. But fierce arguments continue to this day whether the ‘Holodomor’ was a natural disaster, or a genocide perpetrated by Stalin against the people and culture of Ukraine.”
Classic Essay: Pierre Manent, “City, Empire, Church, Nation: How the West Created Modernity”
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