Reviews and News:
The end of deference: “In recent decades it has been suggested that the era of deference is over. We are told that people are far too critical to defer to the superior wisdom of others. In this context, the idea of deference has acquired negative connotations, and is often identified with uncritical thinking. However, in practice, deference is still demanded by elites. But it is demanded in the form of calls to respect the authority of the expert, because he speaks the truth. So, in almost every domain of human experience, the expert is presented as the producer not just of facts, but also of the truth. Those who fail to defer to experts risk being denounced as irrational, superstitious or just plain stupid. Hence, in 2001, the consummate cynic, Michael Moore, could ask his educated American readers: ‘Do you feel like you live in a nation of idiots?’ Moore knew that his readers would share his contempt for their moral inferiors. Today, many sections of the commentariat share Moore’s disdain, and portray people’s rejection of their values, and with it their cultural authority, as something other than it is – that is, as a rejection of facts and truth.”
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Looking for the real Audubon: “The real Audubon, contends Patterson, wasn’t really a conservationist—which is not exactly shocking news for anyone who has, like this reviewer, tried to explain Audubon’s industrial-style killings to schoolchildren. But Patterson does have a consolation prize for us, and for support he turns to Audubon’s 3,000-page collection of bird essays, finished years before his Western trip, Ornithological Biography (1831-39). Instead of paying attention to what Audubon did, Patterson wants us to listen more closely to what he wrote. Patterson calls this the difference between a ‘lived’ and a ‘written’ ethic, and he traces the evolution of the latter—a beautiful vision of a partnership between animals and humans—through the five volumes of Ornithological Biography. The only problem with this rather academic argument is that Audubon’s essays, wonderful as they are, were written in close collaboration with the Scottish ornithologist William MacGillivray, who (as Audubon himself said) ‘smoothed down the asperities’ of his style and, as surviving drafts show, made a lot of other changes as well.
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Iron Age chariot and horse skeleton found in Yorkshire.
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William Logan on reading Elizabeth Custer’s copy of Tennyson’s poems: “A decade ago, I chanced to purchase Elizabeth Custer’s copy of Tennyson’s poems, a small duodecimo volume (3 1/2″ x 5 1/2”) bound in blue buckram, front and rear boards blindstamped, page edges gilt, with gilt decoration to a spine that bore the title Alfred Tennyson’s Poems. The title page, facing a portrait of the clean-shaven young author, read The Poetical Words of Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate, Etc. The book was published in 1859 by Ticknor and Fields, the most famous Boston house of the day, publishers of Dickens, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Stowe, Longfellow, and later Twain. On the front flyleaf, in faint pencil, was inscribed ‘Libbie Bacon/ Monroe/ Mich/ March 1860,’ the earliest marginal note dated September of that year. In the upper corner of the leaf she had written in bold blunt pencil, some years after, ‘E. B. Custer.’… Apart from the last stanza of ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade,’ dated soon after she acquired the volume, the earliest lines to receive Libbie’s pencil are ‘Come/ With all good things, and war shall be no more’ (‘Morte d’Arthur’). In the margin she wrote, ‘May 8, 1863,’ a month after Custer had returned east.”
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Two Idiots: “Titles are delicate and often vexing work for writers. Hats off, then, to Elif Batuman, who has discovered an ingenious method for avoiding all that suffering: just take the ones whose reputations have already been made. Her first book, a collection of essays focusing on Russian literature, is called The Possessed, and her new novel, out last month with Penguin Press, is The Idiot. Neither is a retelling of its namesake, and so the question arises straightaway: why choose these titles, besides the ease of choosing? What is the effect of this—to use a Dostoevskyean concept—doubling?”
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The problem with feminism today: “Our fight was ostensibly about respecting women’s choices, whatever they may be. But the women’s movement doesn’t live up to that idea. If women choose to be chief executives and officeholders and columnists and doctors and partners in law firms, great! If they choose, however, to be moms and wives and attend Bible study or bake cookies, they are ‘bitter clingers’ and ‘deplorable.’ And if they happen to be conservative professional women, they are invisible.”
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In praise of slowness.
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Tolkien’s shoes: “Ducker and Son was a shoemaker in Oxford’s Turl Street whose shopfront invited passers-by to retreat at least fifty years and enter a better world, where shoes were handmade and higher education prospered.” Its ledger books show “the buying habits of J. R. R. Tolkien and Evelyn Waugh, one of Ducker and Son’s most loyal customers. With only eight pages visible, comparative analysis is doomed to be glib, especially as the ledgers are chronological; a serial customer’s appetites can’t be seen in their entirety on one page. From what was on view, though, Tolkien appears relatively abstemious, whereas Waugh bought shoes prodigiously.”
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Essay of the Day:
In Lapham’s Quarterly, Susan Brind Morrow writes about the difficulty of translating the Pyramid Texts:
“This complex body of minute hieroglyphic writing, deliberately sealed away over four thousand years ago, was brought to light when European archaeologists opened the small Old Kingdom pyramids at Saqqâra in the winter of 1880. Great minds over the ages, among them Plato and Newton, believed that hidden within the pyramids was a treasured body of knowledge, long sought for the scientific and philosophical insight it contained. Yet the actual discovery of the Pyramid Texts made barely a cultural ripple in the world. In the intellectual climate of imperial Europe, the newly created academic discipline of Egyptology dismissed the hieroglyphic text as a disconnected collection of magic spells about snakes mixed into an incoherent myth involving the dead pharaoh with various animals and gods. The translations made no sense at all, and it is obvious that the original had not been understood.”
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Photo: Anchorage
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Poem: Les Murray, “The Invention of Pigs”
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