A couple of old things were found last week. Well, not found. They were the topics of a news release and a newspaper article, but close enough: A “whitish mass” discovered in an Egyptian tomb in 2010 was determined to be cheese dating from the 13th century BC. The lost city of Etzanoa has been discovered in a field in Kansas.
In her latest book—Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World—Maryanne Wolf worries about how the Internet changes the way we read. But, Laura Miller writes, she “seems to be responding to the digital culture of nearly a decade ago, when parents still thought it was cutting-edge for schools to issue tablets to students, not the 2018 in which parents worry that their kids have become ‘addicted’ to digital devices. She views online reading as if it mostly consists of news consumption, decrying the way the medium pressures writers to condense their work into snackable content and makes readers impatient with anything long and chewy. But ‘reading’ doesn’t necessarily describe what many people are doing online anymore, whether they’re teenagers checking Instagram, seniors debating politics on Facebook, 10-year-olds playing video games, or toddlers being lulled into docility by robotically disturbing YouTube videos. Sure, we read Twitter and Facebook, but not in the way we read even so fragmented a text as a newspaper.”
Speaking of online reading, Jeremy Gordon says we should ditch Twitter and go back to Tumblr. “The ethos of Tumblr is more easily recognizable in a platform like Tinyletter, where people craft small batch blogs for a curated following, the downside being that they’re entirely siloed in their own worlds with no chance of outside interaction. But considering how hectic and intrusive the modern internet can feel, this isolation feels like an asset, not a bug.”
John MacArthur’s Master’s University has been put on probation: “Among the issues cited in the WASC report are allegations of conflicts of interest regarding student financial aid, institutional leaders being hired who lack qualifications for the higher education positions they hold, and what the WSCUC described as ‘a disturbing climate of fear, intimidation and bullying’ at the university.”
David Jones’s politics. The poet and artist supported Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler’s Germany in 1938 and toyed with fascism. He came to regret the former and reject the latter: “Like many Roman Catholics, he championed Franco in the Spanish civil war due to his opposition to communism, and even as Jones criticized Hitler in 1939, he claimed that ‘I back him still against all this currish, leftish, money thing.’ This sympathy dovetailed with Jones’s disdain for plutocracy, communism’s allegedly ethical twin. He shared the fascist notion that the military and its virtues, which his war service had made central to his outlook, were being degraded by fighting for money-interests instead of national ideals and heritages.”
Poet and editor Tom Clark has died after he was hit by a car in Berkeley on Friday.
Essay of the Day:
Cathy Young writes about the “remarkable” life and “extraordinary” satires of Vladimir Voinovich:
“Never meet your heroes in person, the old saying goes, because they are bound to disappoint. It’s often true. But there also the rare occasions when you meet your heroes and discover them to be more admirable than you expected. That was the case for me with Vladimir Voinovich, the great Russian writer and fearless dissident who died in late July, just a few weeks shy of his 86th birthday.
“When, as a teenager in the Soviet Union, I first read Voinovich some 40 years ago, his work was forbidden fruit: A friend with access to banned books lent my parents a Paris edition of The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin. The story of a simpleminded, bumbling soldier who finds himself stranded in a village on the eve of the German invasion of the USSR in the summer of 1941, it was an uproariously funny book on some very unfunny subjects—from the war to the everyday terror and absurdity of life in Stalin-era Russia. Then came a smuggled copy of The Ivankiad, a brilliant, take-no-prisoners short epic of Voinovich’s battle for a new apartment that was rightfully his but was coveted by Soviet ‘literary’ bigshot Sergei Ivanko, seeking to expand his own apartment next door.
“After my family emigrated in 1980—just a few months before Voinovich himself was forced to leave the Soviet Union—one of the first books we read in the West was the Chonkin sequel, Pretender to the Throne.
“Like the other Soviet dissidents, Voinovich was a larger-than-life heroic figure in my eyes. I could not have imagined that some 35 years later, I would be at a New Year’s Eve celebration in New Jersey with Voinovich and just a few of his intimate friends.”
Photo: Turtmanntal
Poem: A. M. Juster, “Heirloom”
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