Reviews and News:
John Simon reviews two biographies of the late critic and provocateur, Gore Vidal, in this month’s New Criterion. His take on the man: “Vidal was at best a snob, at worst a snot, depending on how you assess his patronizing demeanor…He was, however, a lot of other things…both smart and often irrational, egocentric but curious about others, and genuinely, though not selflessly, concerned with America’s present and future in a state of steady love-hate.”
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Remembering the first day of the Somme: “Seeing the pre-battle bombardment from the air, in which 1,627,824 shells were fired, Cecil Lewis, the famous ace, and, later, author of Sagittarius Rising (1936) was convinced that ‘Nothing could live under that rain of splintering steel.'”
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Marxism’s scientist: The “usual way to tell the story of Trofim Lysenko is to claim that something in his Lamarckism spoke to Russian sensibility. The Soviets wanted to be scientific. Marxism is a dialectical materialism, after all. But they also wanted science to confirm Marxism. The rise of what would come to be called Social Darwinism in the 1870s had left Darwin’s theories with a tinge of unconstrained capitalism about them, and the communists needed an untainted theory of biology. Even more, they needed a biology that suggested human nature could be transformed—with generations of New Socialist Men created in the future by the behavior of Soviet revolutionaries in the present. And Lysenko’s grand biological theories seemed to give them what they needed, just as his smaller ideas about agriculture had seemed the way to solve famine in the Soviet Union.”
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Winston Churchill once owed his wine merchant the equivalent of $75,000 in today’s money. He liked to start the day with whiskey and finish it with champagne.
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Thomas De Quincey’s obsessions were opium, murder, and Wordsworth: “Both Coleridge and De Quincey were fascinated by what grisly killings revealed about a murderer’s mind – a topic Wordsworth also explored when writing of his own role in the French Revolution. ‘There must be some great storm of passion, jealousy, ambition, vengeance, hatred’, De Quincey said. The murderer must also, like Robespierre, have the transgressive power to ‘rid himself of fear’. In later years, De Quincey would revisit the Ratcliffe Highway killings in a series of three essays ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’. The first of these, Wilson contends, designedly targets Wordsworth in its darkly delicious speculation that at some point in the past ‘the poet was a murderer’.
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Why knowledge matters: “In universities, the inability to defend teaching knowledge for its own sake has resulted in the introduction of modularised programmes and predetermined ‘learning outcomes’. Now, pressure to ‘internationalise the curriculum’ is leading to ever more generic and values-laden curricular goals.”
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Essay of the Day:
Is male athletic superiority a “vestige of patriarchy”? No, argues Scott Yenor in today’s Public Discourse:
“Eileen McConagh and Laura Pappano, authors of the 2009 book Playing with the Boys: Why Separate is not Equal in Sports, argue that segregation in sports is based on the false assumption that women and girls are unable to compete with men and boys. This segregation, they argue, perpetuates social inferiority.
“Sports in our culture actively construct and reinforce stereotypes about sex differences, they argue. And the dozens of inspiring feminist examples of girls successfully competing in hockey, football or golf seem to show that girls can do anything that guys do. Much of our government policy and popular culture adheres to the principle of equality, so that girls are expected to compete on a level comparable to boys.
“But these social trends run up against certain limits. Research, history, and plain common sense show that men are consistently superior to women in the realm of sports.”
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Image of the Day: Pavlof Volcano
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Poem: George Green, “Shakespeare Studies”
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