Reviews and News:
The learning style myth: “Teaching someone to memorize something according to their preferred learning style, for example, does not result in a significant improvement in their ability to recall that information later. Still, much to the annoyance of psychologists like Christian Jarrett — who included learning styles in his 2014 book Great Myths of the Brain (which Science of Us excerpted here) — this idea refuses to die. A new study, summarized by Jarrett on BPS Research Digest today, helps explain why: Even if learning styles are actually nonsense, it sure doesn’t feel that way.”
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Can literature make us moral? Gary Saul Morson: “The more a culture wants to protect its citizens from potentially harmful viewpoints, the more it will de-literize the literary.”
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Craig Oliver’s Unleashing the Demons: The Inside Story of Brexit “is actually the inside story of how a press officer went to meetings with other press officers (and some very important politicians) and talked, often bitterly, about the minutiae of daily media coverage of the referendum. Before you conclude that means it’s of interest solely to Westminster insiders and political hacks, let me assure you that as a political hack of 15 years’ standing, I found it almost painfully tedious.”
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Hundreds of unpublished letters and photographs by and of T. S. Eliot from the collection of his late wife Valerie have been posted online. “Many of the letters have not been included in the volumes of Eliot’s letters in print…Rare material including the first and last editions of the Criterion, the journal that Eliot founded in 1922 and edited until its closure in 1939, are also made available, as is his 1952 essay from The Bookseller on publishing poetry.”
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Lenin’s train ride: “In 1917, Lenin was living in exile in Switzerland, acutely aware that history was in danger of overtaking him. The February revolution had come as something of a surprise; even after decades of plotting the Tsar’s demise, Russia’s revolutionaries were presented with Nicholas II’s swift abdication after a popular revolt. Worse, political moderates had seized power; moderate, that is, from the Bolshevik point of view, which held that anyone debating or negotiating was weak at best and criminally deluded at worst. Lenin was furious about his remove from the fray. He simply had to get back to Russia, to eradicate the last vestiges of autocracy and the relatively democratic socialism on the rise, led by Alexander Kerensky. In Lenin on the Train, Catherine Merridale gives us a detailed look at the famous train journey from Zurich to Petrograd. We read that Lenin’s ‘sealed truck’ was actually no more than a series of carriages with locked doors; the Bolshevik and his wife, along with a handful of other exiled socialists, travelled through Germany eagerly looking out of the windows. The carriages were far from being hermetically sealed, even though the lawyerly Lenin had insisted on the train being granted extraterritorial rights, heightening its estrangement in popular imagination.”
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The November/December issue of Books & Culture will be its last.
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Essay of the Day:
In First Things, Benjamin Myers examines why American evangelicals are often drawn to sentimentality:
“Sentimentality is a defect in the quality, not the quantity, of feeling in a poem. But how is a reader to recognize this defect in feeling that we are calling sentimentality? The best guide is wide experience of the art. Reading those poets we have, by an election lasting generations, inducted into the canon, one finds very little that is sentimental. The great tradition is a highly reliable guide in this matter. Millennia before sentimentality was given a name in the eighteenth century and elevated to prominence in popular literature, the imbalance between emotion and its object was resisted in the sober wisdom of Homer and the frank self-evaluation of Donne. Gerard Manley Hopkins, working in an age in which sentimentality enjoyed a great vogue, often approaches the sentimental but stops short of indulging in it, as in the stark and restrained closing lines of the “terrible sonnet” usually referred to as ‘Carrion Comfort’: ‘Cheer whom though? The hero whose heaven-handling flung me, foot trod / Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year / Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.’ There is here none of the pharisaical self-righteousness that one finds in so much Christian sentimentality. Rather, Hopkins gives a frank, unflinching, and unexaggerated account of his spiritual struggles. The poet’s restraint puts parentheses around the exclamation, a device that prevents the awe from disproportionately ruling the line. With the emotion in proper proportion, we do not lose sight of the physical reality behind the poem, a reality subtly conveyed in the verb lay. The specificity of the verb gives us a glimpse of a real man passing sleepless nights upon his cot. The poem, though focused on spiritual struggle, is far from abstract sentimentality.
“Sentimentality offers us the dubious chance to feel while bypassing the messiness of any real human engagement: not too much feeling but too thin an experience…Sentimentality abounds in American Christian culture and saturates the reading done by American Christians. Prominent Christian publishers such as Thomas Nelson and Zondervan offer extensive lines of novels in the ‘Amish romance’ genre but little in terms of Christian classics and no poetry in a contemporary vein. Christian bookselling giant Mardel publishes the poetry of Amy Carmichael, whose life and work may inspire but whose verse is flat and sugary, but nothing from contemporary poetry’s most prominent Christian poets, such as Richard Wilbur and Mark Jarman. As Todd Brenneman argues in his recent book, Homespun Gospel: The Triumph of Sentimentality in Contemporary American Evangelicalism, sentimentality may be a defining characteristic of religious life for many Americans, and so most readers in the dominant Evangelical culture, outside a few hip and urban churches, are more likely to encounter the treacly poetry of Ruth Bell Graham than the spiritually searing work of R. S. Thomas or T. S. Eliot.
“Why are so many Christian writers and readers drawn to sentimentality? Why is it that if one googles the phrase ‘Christian poetry’ one has to wade through pages of results with titles like ‘Grandma’s Praying Hands’ and ‘Childhood Smiles’ before getting to Dante, George Herbert, and Paul Mariani? I suspect it has to do with a misguided interpretation of Philippians 4:8, which says, ‘Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are honest, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.’ This verse is often evoked in admonition to avoid the garbage of popular entertainment, and rightly so. It is, also, alas, taken to mean that we should model our mental and emotional lives on those three monkeys who hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil. Forgetting the direction toward honesty, many Christians seem to believe that what Scripture means by ‘pure’ and by ‘lovely’ is merely the pleasant and the naive, the Hallmark Channel, not the reality of a world in need of redemption.”
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Image of the Day: Lago di Braies
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Poem: Jan Wagner, “Lamentation with a Yak”
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