I was microwaving some green curry Thai noodles in my red microwave yesterday when a colleague stopped by my office to ask me about a residency we run for our doctoral students. Will we serve them lunch? I don’t know. Should I ask so-and-so about that? Yes, ask so-and-so. I found the minor coincidence of someone asking about lunch while I happened to be making it (rather late in the day, I should add) mildly amusing and thought afterwards that there is something innately enjoyable about coincidences in the way that there is something innately enjoyable about rhyme and parallelism. It’s not just the surprise that’s enjoyable. It’s the sense of something being “fitting,” for lack of a better term, of being “right” simply because of the repetition or reflection, however banal it might be. Last week I recommended Chris Beha’s review of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. If you haven’t read it, you should. In it, Beha writes that “A novel simply does not have the luxury of meaninglessness.” I think that’s true. I also think that life doesn’t have that luxury either. We can’t help but notice “rightness” or its absence. Project a bunch of brain scans on the wall and point your laser at the area that produced this momentary feeling, but it won’t get you any closer to understanding it. And yet, it’s there.
Anthony Madrid explains why Guy Davenport’s translation of a Chairman Mao poem is so wrong … and so right.
A “snappy” history of Rome: “How to condense 3,000 years of the city’s history into 648 pages? Addis is not lacking in chutzpah. He first arrived in Rome as a teenager in ‘too-big jeans’ and remembers picnicking in traffic fumes by the Baths of Caracalla. He presents himself as just another tourist and his project as a labour of love and curiosity rather than scholarly expertise, let alone original research. But this is an energetic attempt to bring Rome’s history alive through grand narrative; the florid flights and snappy paragraphs are underpinned by serious reading.”
List: Flannery O’Connor’s reading: “Do you read the National Geographic or do you smell it? I smell it … It has a distinct unforgettable transcendent apotheotic (?) and very grave odor. Like no other mere magazine. If Time smelled like the Nat’l Geo. there would be some excuse for it being printed.”
A Reader Recommends: Stephen Miller recommends Walter Kempowski and Patrick Leigh Fermor: “I recommend Walter Kempowski’s All For Nothing—a brilliant novel, one of the best I’ve read in years. I also recommend Patrick Leigh Fermor’s trilogy: A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water, and The Broken Road. Fermor—as many critics have noted—is a fascinating guy. He is also one of the best English prose writers. His weakness is in plotting, but the trilogy has a simple plot—his walk from Rotterdam to Istanbul in the mid-1930s, though he doesn’t write about Istanbul.”
Ron Charles comes out against Banned Books Week. I think I’ll send him a pie of appreciation. Key lime or rhubarb strawberry, Ron? “Are we winning any converts with this annual orgy of self-righteousness? The rhetoric of Banned Books Week is pitched at such a fervent level that crucial distinctions are burned away by the fire of our moral certainty, which is an ill that wide reading should cure not exacerbate. And what books are actually, effectively ‘banned’ in the United States nowadays? The titles on the Top 10 Most Challenged list, in fact, sell hundreds of thousands of copies every year. How many authors would kill to be ‘challenged’ like that?”
Essay of the Day:
What do students learn about thinking historically by reading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States? Not much worthwhile Sam Wineburg argues in Slate:
“In the 38 years since its original publication, A People’s History has gone from a book that buzzed about the ear of the dominant narrative to its current status, where in many circles it has become the dominant narrative. It shows up on college reading lists for economics, political science, anthropology, cultural studies, women’s studies, ethnic studies, Chicano studies, and African American studies courses, along with history. A People’s History (in its various editions and adaptations) remains a perennial favorite in courses for future teachers, and in some of these classes, it is the only history book on the syllabus.
“In many ways, A People’s History and traditional textbooks are mirror images that relegate students to roles as absorbers, not analysts, of information—only at different points on the political spectrum. In a study that examined features of historical writing, linguist Avon Crismore found that historians frequently use qualifying language to signal the soft underbelly of historical certainty. However, when she looked at historians’ writing in textbooks, such linguistic markers disappeared. A search through A People’s History for qualifiers mostly comes up short. Instead, the seams of history are concealed by the presence of an author who speaks with thunderous certainty.
“To be sure, A People’s History brings together material from movements that rocked the discipline during the 1960s and 1970s: working-class history, feminist history, black history, and various ethnic histories. Together, these perspectives blew apart the consensus school of the 1950s by showing the squishiness of interpretations that arose from varied “positionalities” toward historical events. However, while A People’s History draws liberally from such work, the book resolutely strikes a traditional pose toward historical knowledge. It substitutes one monolithic reading of the past for another, albeit one that claims to be morally superior and promises to better position students to take action in the present.”
Photo: Oia
Poem: Ange Mlinko, “La Casa del Diavolo”
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