Reviews and News:
Cynthia Ozick on Saul Bellow’s letters: “The mandarin-poolroom link, elevated riffs married to street vernacular, has become Bellow’s signature, and attracts lovestruck imitators. Yet brilliant flourishes alone, even when embedded in galloping ambition, will not make a second Bellow. (A second Bellow? Not for a hundred years!) There is instead something else, beyond the heated braininess and lavish command of ideas: call it feeling.”
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Michel Houellebecq’s obsessions: “For an artist not known as a photographer, Houellebecq’s competence is a pleasant discovery. He has, for example, a sensitivity to framing. As with his novels, though, his attitude to the subject is difficult to judge.”
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Allen C. Guelzo reviews a new biography of the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams: “Vaughan Williams has long had the reputation of being a late bloomer, and it is not undeserved. The catalyst that propelled him to fame was the modest invitation of Percy Dearmer in 1904 to join the editorial staff of Dearmer’s new project, The English Hymnal. Vaughan Williams’ work on the Hymnal not only plunged him into the long history of English church music—from Tallis and Byrd to the Victorians—but into English folk-song and the use of modes as an alternative to keys. Modality intrigued Vaughan Williams as both fresh and naturally ‘English,’ and it put him on the track not only of Tudor polyphony but also of folk-song collection.”
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David Yezzi on the late Geoffrey Hill: “His poems are moral without being religious in any conventional sense, skeptical of power and the duplicity of language, and tonally fluent in ways that recall both the Jeremiad and the Psalm.”
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Hubert Robert’s sublime ruins.
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Essay of the Day:
In The Spectator, Roger Scruton examines the language and hypocrisy of inclusivism:
“Young people today are very reluctant to assume that anything is certain, and this reluctance is revealed in their language. In any matter where there might be disagreement, they will put a question mark at the end of the sentence. And to reinforce the posture of neutrality they will insert words that function as disclaimers, among which the favourite is ‘like’. You might be adamant that the Earth is spherical, but they will suggest instead that the Earth is, ‘like, spherical?’
“Whence came this ubiquitous hesitation? As I understand the matter, it has much to do with the new ideology of non-discrimination. Modern education aims to be ‘inclusive’, and that means not sounding too certain about anything in case you make people who don’t share your beliefs feel uncomfortable. Indeed, even calling them ‘beliefs’ is slightly suspect. The correct word is ‘opinions’. If you try to express your certainties in a classroom today you are apt to be looked at askance, not because you are wrong, but because of the strangeness of being certain about anything and the even greater strangeness of wanting to impart your certainties to others. The person with certainties is the excluder, the one who disrespects the right we all have to form our own ‘opinions’ about what matters.
“However, as soon as inclusiveness itself is questioned, freedom is cast aside. Students seem to be as prepared as they ever were to demand that ‘no platform’ be given to people who speak or think in the wrong way. Speaking or thinking in the wrong way does not mean disagreeing with the beliefs of the students — for they have no beliefs. It means thinking as though there really is something to think — as though there really is a truth that we are trying to reach, and that it is right, having reached it, to speak with certainty. What we might have taken to be open-mindedness turns out to be no-mindedness: the absence of beliefs, and a negative reaction to all those who have them. The greatest sin is a refusal to end each sentence with a question mark.
“As with so many changes in our language and culture in the past 25 years, the aim is to discover, and also to forbid, the hidden forms of discrimination. Almost every belief system that in the past seemed objective and important is now dismissed as an ‘ism’ or a ‘phobia’ so that those who stand by it are made to look like ideological fanatics.”
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Image of the Day: Grass roofs
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Poem: Anonymous, “East African Proverbs.” Translated by A. M. Juster
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