Ta-Nehisi Coates has left The Atlantic. Why? “I became the public face of the magazine in many ways, and I don’t really want to be that. I want to be a writer,” he said. “I’m not a symbol of what The Atlantic wants to do or whatever.”
From the department of vacuous activism on university campuses: University of Manchester students painted over a mural of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” a few days ago because it is “deeply inappropriate.” They replaced it with Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise.” Stephen Bush gets it mostly right: “Almost everything about the Rudyard Kipling row is stupid”—from the jarring choice of “If” to the witless protest.
In praise of email: “Remember a decade or two ago when it was our national pastime to complain about email? I’ve come to realize just how much the email system got right…”
The town in Vermont that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called home—sort of: “Apart from addressing his new neighbors at the town meeting soon after his arrival—where he apologized for the need to build a fence around his property—Solzhenitsyn didn’t spend much time interacting with the people of Cavendish. He instead focused on writing The Red Wheel, his multivolume novel of the Russian Revolution. The rest of his family actively participated in town life. Natalia and Ekaterina became enthusiastic Boston Celtics fans. And Solzhenitsyn’s sons attended the Cavendish schools. For their part, the locals accepted Solzhenitsyn with a grace and flinty protectiveness befitting their Yankee ancestors. Concerned for the family’s privacy, the owner of the Cavendish general store posted a sign that read: ‘No Restrooms, No Bare Feet, No Directions to the Solzhenitsyn Home.’ When out-of-towners asked local children the way to Solzhenitsyn’s house, they intentionally gave them directions that led the visitors away from the property.”
Christopher Shinn reviews Cynthia Haven’s biography of René Girard: “The world that literary critic René Girard described and explored—one of runaway desire, obsession with taboo and scandal, and an overwhelming instinct to blame outsiders for our problems—is remarkably like the world we live in today. That Girard, who died in 2015, seems to be writing about our current moment is all the more notable given that his theoretical speculations were an attempt to explain the founding of functional human societies thousands of years ago. In a series of books spanning decades and disciplines, Girard put forward ideas about culture — linking envy, sacrifice, myth, and religion — that came to him all at once, ‘a single, extremely dense insight,’ as he put it, which he spent a lifetime teasing out. Evolution of Desire is Cynthia Haven’s elegant attempt to introduce the general reader to Girard’s ideas by combining them with the story of his life. Her approach suggests that Girard’s contributions remain underappreciated because, when summarized, they lose something essential. It’s not just what he thought that had power, but how he articulated it—who he was.”
Is Kyoto the last traditional Japanese city? “Another Kyoto is a celebration of what this city has helped Japan to hang on to, in architectural terms especially. But it is an indirect sort of celebration. This is not an introduction to Kyoto, more an initiation, bordering on a recruitment attempt, into the ways of seeing—of looking and questioning and pondering—that have deepened Kerr’s love of the place across decades.”
Essay of the Day:
Did the Duke of Buckingham conspire to kill King James I? James M. Banner Jr. reviews the arguments in Benjamin Woolley’s The King’s Assassin: The Secret Plot to Murder King James I and finds them lacking:
“The King’s Assassin is more than a narrative. It’s also a set of arguments. The principal one is embodied in the book’s title: ‘The King’s Assassin,’ we are boldly told, is the book’s subject—as if the assassination is a proven fact and the murderer was Buckingham. But this, it turns out, is another of the author’s unsupported contentions. It’s not at all certain that Britain’s first Stuart monarch was murdered.
“A well-received scholarly work by Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell, The Murder of King James I, concludes, despite its similarly misleading title, that James died of natural causes from an illness and wasn’t assassinated. There is no indisputable evidence that James was assassinated by purposeful poisoning instead of dying of poor medical treatment, the general historical view. There is scant evidence, too—to use the words of the book’s subtitle—that there was a ‘secret plot’ against the king. Yet, even though he waffles a bit, Woolley has no doubt of Buckingham’s complicity. ‘It seems more than likely,’ he writes, ‘that George Villiers, assisted by his mother, was James’s killer if not his murderer. His insistence on interfering with the king’s treatment at a vital point in the patient’s recovery from a familiar disease seems to have helped the king into his grave, whether intentionally or not.’ Woolley goes on, in light of ‘recent medical research conducted in Asia,’ to identify aconite as the poison Buckingham used. He then ventures to suggest, even more wildly and without supporting evidence, that Buckingham conspired with the throne’s inheritor, Charles I, to hasten James’s death.
“To further compound the problems with The King’s Assassin, the book does in fact hang on an indisputable assassination—but not of James. Instead, it was Buckingham himself who was murdered by an aggrieved army officer on suspicion of being a regicide.
“This is not to redeem Buckingham from historians’ condescension. It can’t be done, and Woolley doesn’t try to do so. James, however, has had better recent luck at historians’ hands. He is of course recognized as the patron of the celebrated eponymous edition of the Bible that so many people in the English-speaking world were reared on for centuries. The age of Jacobean—that is, Jamesian—literature and arts is scarcely less notable than the Elizabethan age that preceded it; Shakespeare was still writing his great works and James himself has been recognized as a serious scholar and decent poet. And perhaps most notably, James succeeded in keeping his realm out of continental wars despite Buckingham’s efforts to embroil Protestant Britain in conflict with Habsburg Spain and Catholic France.”
Photo: Omis
Poem: Maryann Corbett, “Sleep, Loss”
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