Reviews and News:
A history of Europe’s four winds: The “first and smallest wind, one I have never heard of before, blows across a northwestern corner of England. It is called Helm, and its headquarters, it seems, is a desolate plateau called Cross Fell in a particularly uninviting stretch of the Pennines. Helm is the only named wind blowing across Britain. It sounds perfectly awful and its reputation is frightful: it howled for fifteen days in 1843, it demolished a castle tower once, everybody complains about its psychological and temperamental effects and for centuries the countryside it rules was plagued by vendettas, pillagings, rapes, cattle-rustlings and murders.”
The real Gus Grissom: “Of the ‘Original Seven’ Mercury astronauts, Gus Grissom, the runt of the litter, has also gotten the shortest shrift in the public mind. Regarded at the time of his death in the January 1967 Apollo 1 fire as a prime candidate to be the first man to walk on the Moon, Grissom was posthumously eviscerated by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff, as Wolfe created a foil for his heroic portrait of all-star test-pilot Chuck Yeager. There, and in the movie made from Wolfe’s bestseller, Grissom was transformed in the public mind into ‘Little Gus’ or ‘Gruff Gus,’ the plodding, Hoosier-dull, slightly incompetent antithesis of superhero Yeager. Wolfe’s caricature did both history and the memory of Gus Grissom a terrible disservice. Thus the best thing to be said about George Leopold’s book Calculated Risk is that it corrects Wolfe’s numerous historical errors and, in doing so, restores Grissom to where he belongs: in the first rank of the pantheon of heroes of manned space exploration.”
The day Sweden moved to the right—the right side of the road, that is.
“Forensics tests have confirmed that the person buried in H.H. Holmes’ Philadelphia-area tomb is in fact ‘America’s first serial killer’ whose murder spree was documented in the book Devil in the White City.”
A short history of psychological trauma: “In the 1920s and 1930s, trauma still refers to physical trauma – its emergence as a psychological concept happens during the Vietnam War.”
Bill McMorris visits the international headquarters of Philip Morris in Neuchâtel to get a glimpse of the future of smoking.
Who was Jonathan Robbins, and why is he mentioned so frequently in early American congressional debates and newspapers? “The story begins in 1797, when, in a world gone topsy-turvy in the wake of American independence, the French Revolution, and unrest in Great Britain’s maritime ranks and adjacent Ireland, the British experienced the most violent naval mutiny in their history. In a bloody rampage, crew members of HMS Hermione took over their frigate off Puerto Rico’s coast, murdered its officers, and eventually sailed it into safe harbor in a Spanish port in what’s now Venezuela. From there they scattered to the winds.”
Essay of the Day:
In The New Criterion, Bruce Bawer surveys the career of literary historian Stephen Greenblatt. Fraud or clever critic?
“Now seventy-three years old, Greenblatt has served as the President of the Modern Language Association; he’s currently the general editor of both The Norton Shakespeare and The Norton Anthology of English Literature; and in addition to being perhaps the most celebrated humanities professor in America, he’s also parlayed his academic celebrity into success with the general public, receiving (reportedly) at least one million-dollar advance, making the bestseller list, and winning the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and last year’s Holberg Prize from the Norwegian government (which included $735,000 in taxpayer funds). Yet throughout his career, he’s been dogged by questions about his basic competence in several of the areas into which he’s wandered. Camille Paglia said it plainly in a 2005 interview in which she lamented the supplanting of the New Criticism by the New Historicism: ‘the people practicing it, people like Stephen Greenblatt, they’re not good historians. They’re not erudite.’ To be sure, one point that should be made about the damage Greenblatt has done to literary studies is that he has done almost all of it indirectly: while his own work has certain merits and he writes in a style that is unquestionably more lucid than that of his theory-besotted contemporaries, the same cannot be said of most of his New Historicist protégés: as Miller has observed, Greenblatt’s followers ‘employ dull, tautological abstractions—“the textuality of history and the history of textuality” for example’ (that’s a quote from the New Historicist Louis Montrose)—while ‘Greenblatt’s own prose style is sinuous and lively.’ Sir Jonathan Bate, a Shakespearean at Oxford who considers Greenblatt a ‘clever critic’ and gifted writer with ‘enormous panache’ (yes, ‘panache’) and an interest ‘in the diversity and oddity of historical forces,’ argues that Greenblatt’s influence ‘is in a curious way at odds with what he really is himself. He’s been followed by second-rate Marxists offering a crude model of literature being in the service of ideology.’
“Another point to be made about Greenblatt’s influence is that it has spread beyond those who identify themselves as New Historicists and has helped shape—if that’s the right word to describe something almost entirely shapeless—what is now known as Cultural Studies.”
Photo: World-record sand castle
Poem: Ryan Wilson, “Yo La Tengo”
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