Reviews and News:
Patricia Nelson Limerick reviews Caroline Fraser’s “absorbing” biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder: “‘Several farmers,’ a Missouri newspaper noted around 1910, ‘and particularly those interested in poultry, have inquired who Mrs. A. J. Wilder is.’ Though not a well-traveled path to literary success, writing columns for farm journals gave Wilder a source of income that would, in an arrangement still followed by many rural families, supplement the finances of the struggling farm where she lived with her husband, Almanzo, while also providing repeated opportunities to practice the craft of writing. Those little-known columns, drawn from the experience of raising chickens in Missouri, were the unlikely prelude to her books, mining the memories of a childhood of restless homesteading in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kansas and South Dakota. But it wasn’t until 1929 — when she was 62 years old, and the stock market crash had decimated her family’s small investments — that Wilder settled in to write ‘that “story of my life” thing,’ as her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, called it. And then, in an arrangement both she and her daughter seemed to understand and embrace, Wilder would pass these drafts on to Lane, who would tear into them, editing, adding and deleting. Tracking this process, Fraser puts an end to the persistent assumption that Lane was the ghostwriter of her mother’s books.”
Everyone thinks that Amazon’s production of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings material for television will be terrible, but maybe it won’t be.
Francis O’Gorman’s new book about forgetfulness could use a little more evidence: “This is not a book about memory and forgetting, and what those things show us about life. (For that, go to Charles Fernyhough’s excellent Pieces of Light: The New Science of Memory, 2012.) It ‘isn’t primarily about an individual forgetting so much as about groups, communities, and societies failing to remember’, O’Gorman says. His idea is that modernity is making us forget history, and on this thesis he hangs opinions about the novel, shopping malls, smartphones and immigration, without ever really examining his foundational proposition…The argument is full of abstract nouns and complex sentences that don’t convey much meaning. Unless the reader swallows the central premiss, the rest of the book doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
The multidimensional Martin Luther: “Brilliant, tormented, passionate, scatological, superstitious, devious, loyal, bitter—pick an adjective, good or bad, and it invariably applies to the German reformer Martin Luther at one time or another in his turbulent life.”
The human element of time: How “‘we’ perceive time is always going to depend upon the sort of people ‘we’ are.”
Essay of the Day:
In First Things, Ron Austin writes against popular culture:
“One of the most deleterious effects of pop culture was the loss of generational relationships and thus shared beliefs. Cultural memory suggests a continuity of meaning, goals, and criteria for evaluation. Pop culture offers confected experiences designed to meet the present demand. It accepts no responsibility for the past, which it uses to get a laugh or evoke a tear, but does not venerate. The loss of this memory has resulted in a loss of external authority and credibility; even the desire for such authority has gone largely missing. This has eroded the basic beliefs that give substance to our lives and future continuity.
“The emerging cultural vacuum produced not just increasingly arbitrary standards for art, morality, and simply civil behavior, but an abuse of language that obscured these losses. By arbitrarily redefining terms such as culture, community, morality—and, in time, family and marriage—Americans have maintained an illusion of continuity and deceived themselves by denying the reality and consequences of these deprivations.”
* * *
“At the end of the seventies, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre concluded that what passed for public morality in contemporary America was a form of emotivism, a judgment based almost solely on deep emotion. This subjectivity, however, is often disguised by the use or misuse of traditional language and moral categories.
“Emotion is, of course, the chief product of the mass media. Whether comedy, quiz shows, sports, or breaking news, what is sold is raw emotion. Even commercials have thunderous soundtracks. The fact that we are all inured to it by years of exposure doesn’t mean that the emotional conditioning is lessened. Again, we were warned. Hannah Arendt had observed in the fifties that no genuine culture could survive for long if subsumed into the marketplace, which degrades all works into commodities with price tags, including art and people. In the media market, emotion became a packaged product.
“Finally, yet equally as definitive, pop culture provides endless conflicts, whether soap operas or news stories. They invariably seek resolutions and an attempt at catharsis based on scapegoating, that is, the blaming of others for our own limits and defects. This is not unique to pop culture but is essential to it.
“We are awash in entertainment, which loses its appeal if it becomes complicated by too many particulars or confounding contexts. Analysis is not just boring; it is fatal to entertainment. Our current society, including its politics, is indecipherable if we fail to see this.”
Photos: Winners of the 2017 Epson International Pano Awards
Poem: Julie Kane, “Second Time Around”
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