Reviews and News:
Beneath T. S. Eliot’s “ultra-civilized” exterior: “Eliot struck many of his contemporaries as a person not unlike J. Alfred Prufrock, ‘politic, cautious, and meticulous.’ Virginia Woolf mentioned him in a letter to her brother-in-law: ‘Come to lunch. Eliot will be there in a four-piece suit.’ With his fine manners and noble bearing, Eliot was all too restrained by his own sense of decorum and propriety. The novelist Aldous Huxley even called him ‘the most bank-clerky of all bank clerks’ after visiting Eliot at his office at Lloyd’s in London, reporting that he ‘was not on the ground floor nor even on the floor under that, but in a sub-sub-basement sitting at a desk which was in a row of desks with other bank clerks.’ Many years later, the poet was still fostering this bloodless caricature of himself, preferring to pretend that he was just ‘a mild-mannered man safely entrenched behind his typewriter.’ Not everyone believed the story as presented.”
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Young England and Deepdene House: “There are references to woodland at ‘le Depedene’ from as early as 1401, and to a cottage and 20 acres at ‘Dibdene’ in the Elizabethan period. This month, Deepdene reopens after a dramatic restoration that takes its landscapes back to how they looked in the 19th century. As Alexander Bagnall, who managed the project explains, ‘We wanted to gently peel back to the point at which the garden was at its most significant.’ These, one may now trill, were the hills that inspired Young England, Disraeli’s decidedly bucolic movement for social change. There, the garden John Aubrey described as the ‘ingeniously contriv’d long Hope . . . cast into the Form of a Theatre’, first designed for Lord Charles Howard in the 17th century…How the members of Young England achieved anything during their meetings at Deepdene is a mystery. Bear cubs tumbled through the house and one day broke into the dining-room, trampling the china. The estate was so mesmerising that one ‘might have been gazing upon the Alhambra, or the Taj’. Among ‘the dusky cedars, the stately palace, the strange fragrance, the far noise of running waters,’ George Smythe, son of Viscount Strangford and one of the movement’s leading members, dreamed that Deepdene’s statues had come to life. In Smythe’s descriptions of the estate, his biographer detects the hallucinatory influence of opium.”
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A Catholic defense of free markets: “Supporting markets as the economic arrangements most likely to help promote human flourishing doesn’t necessarily mean you accept libertarian philosophical premises.”
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Charles Marsh slams Eric Metaxas’s Bonhoeffer: “With a literary background that includes a popular biography of the abolitionist William Wilberforce and the VeggieTales children’s series, Metaxas said that his purpose in writing the book was to save Bonhoeffer from the liberals, from the globalists, the humanists, and the pacifists. His Bonhoeffer was a born-again Christian who espoused traditional family values. This is complete nonsense.” (HT: Adam Keiper)
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“Oxford University Press has announced that its new edition of the complete works of William Shakespeare will credit Christopher Marlowe as a co-author on the three Henry VI plays.”
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The first known depiction of a witch on a broomstick: “Two women in marginal illustrations of the 1451 edition of French poet Martin Le Franc’s Le Champion des Dames (The Defender of Ladies), a manuscript now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France(BNF), are soaring, one on a stick, the other on a broom.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The New York Times Magazine, Melanie Thermstorm writes about the anti-helicopter parent par excellence, Mike Lanza, a Silicon Valley dad who wants his boys to learn to take risks:
“Through the glass doors of the kitchen, I could see Mike opening a bottle of wine for some guests. Mike is a well-known, if polarizing, figure in our community. An entrepreneur in his early 50s, he has a boyish grin, large hazel eyes and curly salt-and-pepper hair, and wears jeans and sneakers, like all the other middle-aged tech guys. After acquiring three Stanford degrees (a B.A., an M.B.A. and a master’s in education) and selling a handful of modestly successful start-ups, Mike decided to focus on his ideas about parenting. He began writing a blog and giving talks and eventually self-published a book entitled ‘Playborhood,’ a phrase he coined to describe the environment he wanted for his kids. (He kept a hand in the tech world as well — an app he created, a map-based photo-sharing service called Streetography, is being released next week.)
“Mike is a deep believer in the idea that ‘kids have to find their own balance of power.’ He wants his boys to create their own society governed by its own rules. He consciously transformed his family’s house into a kid hangout, spreading the word that local children were welcome to play in the yard anytime, even when the family wasn’t home. Discontented with the expensive, highly structured summer camps typical of the area, Mike started one of his own: Camp Yale, named after his street, where the kids make their own games and get to roam the neighborhood.
“‘Think about your own 10 best memories of childhood, and chances are most of them involve free play outdoors,’ Mike is fond of saying. ‘How many of them took place with a grown-up around? I remember that when the grown-ups came over, we stopped playing and waited for them to go away. But moms nowadays never go away.’
“In Mike’s worldview, boys today (his focus is on boys) are being deprived of masculine experiences by overprotective moms, who are allowed to dominate passive dads. Central to Mike’s philosophy is the importance of physical danger: of encouraging boys to take risks and play rough and tumble and get — or inflict — a scrape or two. Central to what he calls mom philosophy (which could just be described as contemporary parenting philosophy) is just the opposite: to play safe, play nice and not hurt other kids or yourself. Most moms are not inclined to leave their children’s safety up to chance. I certainly am not.”
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Image of the Day: Satellite photographs
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Poem: Les Murray, “Exile”
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