Reviews and News:
Exhibit on medieval Jerusalem at the Metropolitan Museum of Art “is a sophisticated exercise in historical revision and cultural proselytizing“: The catalog “conjures an Islam cleansed of imperialism, brutality, absolutism, and institutionalized inequality of non-Muslims. Here instead is an Islam shimmering with benignity and civilized taste, a light to the nations.”
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Revisiting Edwin O’Connor’s Last Hurrah–“a character study of a seemingly irreconcilable but entirely believable figure: a corrupt swindler, incorrigible liar, empathetic friend, mercurial genius, and veritable man of the people.”
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Dwight Garner reviews Marina Abramovic’s pretentious memoir: “I knew I was going to dislike Ms. Abramovic’s memoir on Page 10. That’s where she declares that, as a child growing up in postwar Yugoslavia, she didn’t play with dolls or toys. Instead, she writes, in a passage that sets this book’s tone of sleek, international, Bono-level pretentiousness, ‘I preferred to play with the shadows of passing cars on the wall.'”
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Max Boot reviews a new book on the founding of the S.A.S., Britain’s first special ops unit: “Given the ubiquity and importance of Special Operations today, it is a little startling to realize just how novel they are. While there have long been specialized units, like Rogers’ Rangers of the French and Indian War, professional Special Operations forces date back only to World War II. All of the combatants employed them, but it was the British who were most assiduous in creating small units of swashbucklers.”
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Freud and irrationality: “Élisabeth Roudinesco’s new biography, Freud: In His Time and Ours, is a welcome reminder of Freud’s considerable influence on 20th-century intellectual life. More important, she puts center stage Freud’s complex brand of rationalism and the full scope of his achievements, which went far beyond offering a cure for individuals. In particular, Roudinesco captures Freud’s recognition of the insurmountable ways in which our irrational desires and longings shape who we are and how we act. This correction is needed not only to give us a more accurate sense of Freud’s innovations, but also to contrast it against today’s more complacent assumptions about human rationality. Despite what economists and psychologists and political scientists insist, the rational self is not always master in its own house—whether in individual life or in collective experience.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The New Criterion, Neilson MacKay revisits the life and work of the South African poet William Plomer–a man of little pretension and great skill:
“Said William Plomer to his barber: ‘A little more off the back, please.’ ‘That’s right, sir,’ came the reply. ‘It wouldn’t do to have you looking like a poet.’ Apocryphal? Possibly. Yet such drollery has the ring of prophecy. In a letter to John Lehmann in 1931, Plomer confessed, waggishly, that he had ‘never pretended to be a poet,’ not even to himself. Ted Walker (who did look like a poet) observed that Plomer’s demeanor suggested not so much a writer as a magnanimous doctor. Walker was late to the party. As Plomer recalled it: ‘I have actually been congratulated [by a stranger] on my successful treatment of a difficult case of hydrocele’ (the accumulation of serous fluid in the testes). Farce followed him like a guided missile.
“‘Plomer . . . is emphatically of the minority, i.e. of the section of writers, the real intelligentsia, the unconventional, critical-minded literary artists whom the British public in general don’t like, and therefore only buy in restricted quantities.’ That was Edward Garnett in 1935. In 1972 several newspapers had tipped Plomer, like a horse, as the next Poet Laureate, a role Cecil Day-Lewis famously compared to being ‘put out to grass.’ To Plomer’s relief, the post went to John Betjeman, who hated the job so much he considered resigning. The timing, in any event, was off: Plomer died in 1973, just three days before the publication of The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast, a cheerful, Whitbread-winning exercise in whimsy which cruelly outstripped sales of his Collected Poems (also published in 1973)—the book upon which his poetic reputation mostly rests. At the time, Plomer looked ripe for canonization. His friends were the right ones: Leonard and Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, J. R. Ackerley, Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender, Edmund Blunden, the Sitwells. Today he is largely forgotten.
“A shame. His poems are a thing apart, or rather, a continent apart: Plomer shares—should share—with his once friend and collaborator Roy Campbell the plaudit “best South African poet.” Campbell, by all accounts, is more fun to remember (Plomer never suspended his wife from a balcony, not least because he never married), but his fire-in-the-belly pentameters look ill at ease against Plomer’s natural and shifting rhythms, his awkward, cool repose. Plomer “had the singular gift,” said Laurens van der Post, ‘of being angry in a classical sense . . . a vision that does not blur, but makes the vision clearer.’ Angry? Maybe. Classical? Yes—the poems are scrupulously crafted, delimited, self-effacing.”
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Image of the Day: Supercell
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Poem: Marie Ponsot, “Two Poems”
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