Reviews and News:
Michael Dirda on the novel that inspired C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.
Linguistics is a relatively scientific social science. This wasn’t always the case: “Scholars of yore, when reflecting upon language, would wonder things such as: which of the contemporary languages was spoken by the first man? Which one is superior to the rest? And which of the human tongues deserves the label ‘divine’? Modern linguists will not touch those with a 10-foot pole.”
Amazon redacts one-star reviews of Hillary Clinton’s campaign memoir What Happened.
Remembering John Gardner’s stand against literary “tricksiness”: “Most contemporary literature, he claimed, was ‘either trivial or false.’ On Moral Fiction’s tone was perceived as deeply conservative—so much so that the American Nazi Party sent Gardner an invitation for membership…Gardner’s publisher, Knopf, refused to print the manuscript, but Basic Books eventually did. In an essay published fifteen years after his death, Gardner’s second wife, Liz Rosenberg wrote, ‘Nearly overnight, he turned from darling of the literary establishment to its pariah.’ She says she thinks Gardner named names in On Moral Fiction to prove to himself he wasn’t afraid. ‘Perhaps,’ she wrote, ‘he should have been.’”
The real Maroons: “Much romantic nonsense has been written about the runaway slaves or Maroons of the West Indies. In 1970s Jamaica, during President Michael Manley’s socialist experiment, Maroons were hailed as forerunners of Black Power. Rastafari militants and back-to-Africa ideologues saw a nobility in Maroon descent. The Jamaican black nationalist Marcus Garvey had claimed Maroon ancestry for himself; as has, more recently, the British Jamaican hip-hop singer Ms. Dynamite… In Jamaica, at any rate, Maroons fought exclusively for their own liberty, not for the overall liberty of the island’s enslaved Africans. As a condition of their freedom (and in return for land and other privileges), they were obliged to return other fugitive slaves to the imperial British and even help put down slave revolts. The Maroons of Jamaica thus inherited an ambivalent legacy: they are both heroes of, and traitors to, black freedom.”
What changing meaning of marriage changes: “Any change to the definition of marriage affects all existing marriages. We thought we were entering one sort of covenant, now it turns out that we have actually entered into something quite different…Forcing people to call a variety of types of relationships by one word will not alter the fact that they are different. This is not a religious judgement. It does not suggest that gay relationships are less loving or noble. They are just different. Those who oppose the redefinition of marriage are not trying to stop anyone doing what they want. SSM activists are the ones who want force others to change their behaviour.”
Essay of the Day:
In 1992, the cartoon editor for The New Yorker started the Cartoon Bank—a database of all the unused cartoons submitted to The New Yorker that could be licensed for personal or commercial use. The cartoonists received one half of all payments. One made as much as $8,000 a month. Then Condé Nast took it over. Seth Simons tells the story in Paste:
“In 2008, Mankoff handed off leadership of the Cartoon Bank to Condé Nast, who, it quickly became apparent, planned to operate the business with a lighter touch. “I consulted with them for many years after I left, urging them to support this business and commit to this business,” Mankoff said. ‘For their own reasons they decided that they’re not supporting it. There aren’t really any employees left. And those people who used to do those things’—licensing, custom books, original art sales—‘have been let go. The people there are absolutely well-meaning, but they have no real idea of what this business is, who the cartoonists are, how you might leverage and maximize it.’
“Over the following years, the well dried up. The cartoonist who described an $8,000 check he received early on said he now sees at most a few hundred a month. Gregory said the same, as did several other cartoonists who I spoke too.
“Nobody I spoke to for this article, however, believes Condé Nast has willfully stripped away their residual income. What they see instead is a typical story of corporate mismanagement and neglect.”
Photo: White giraffe
Poem: Krystyna Dabrowska, “Wooden Figure of a Hunchbacked Dignitary”
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