Reviews and News:
Mick Jagger needs to get a grip: “Two songs in which Sir Michael informs us that he is distressed by both Brexit and Donald Trump. Released with, according to the 70-year-old singer, ‘urgency’: he can see that we are in trouble and was naturally anxious to help us out. The first, ‘England Lost’, is at least redeemed by a soupçon of wit. Jagger explains that he went to see England play football but that they lost, and he got wet in the rain. But it then turns into a sort of state of the nation thing, by the simple addition of an apostrophe and the letter ‘s’. England’s lost, he bemoans, and chucks in an incoherent allusion regarding our preoccupation with immigration. Then there’s ‘Gotta Get A Grip’, unburdened by any kind of wit at all.”
A. M. Juster reviews Kay Redfield Jamison’s “psychological account” of Robert Lowell. According to Juster, she is too quick to blame Lowell’s “erratic and violent behavior” on mental illness and is a poor reader of his work.
Is it unhealthy to be fat? Well, that depends on how fat: “Most researchers agree that it’s unhealthy for the average person to be, say, 300 pounds. They don’t really know why being very overweight is bad for you, but the thinking is that all those fat cells disrupt how the body produces and uses insulin, leading to elevated glucose in the blood and, eventually, diabetes. Extra weight also increases blood pressure, which can ultimately damage the heart. But whether just a few extra pounds raise the risk of death is a surprisingly controversial and polarizing issue.”
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s childhood home is for sale on eBay. The catch: You’ll need to rebuild it yourself. “Just the pieces of the house, which can be reassembled, are for sale.”
Writers on writing: “My greatest achievement as a writer is undoubtedly the highly refined autocorrect settings on my laptop.”
The new aesthetics is all about cash: “Today artists are advised that their art requires a price tag of at least £50,000. Below that price, the work is simply not an investment. Prices in the auction houses are so high that museums can no longer afford to purchase the works of acknowledged masters… Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull is surely the Mona Lisa of our time.”
Essay of the Day:
Sohrab Ahmari will be moving back to the States after four years in London. In Commentary, he takes stock of the future of Europe:
“In 2001, the European Union set about framing a constitution for itself. The Brussels mandarins had seen the future, and it looked transnationalist and technocratic—which is to say, it looked like the EU. The document was to usher in a new European century. But decisive ‘No’ votes in France and the Netherlands in 2005 meant that it was never adopted. Today the EU constitutional treaty is memorable for occasioning one of Pope John Paul II’s final, and most prophetic, political interventions. It had to do with the constitution’s preamble.
“Since Christianity had shaped the ‘humanism of which Europe feels legitimately proud,’ the ailing pontiff argued, the constitution should make some reference to Europe’s Christian patrimony. His appeal was met with accusations of bigotry. The pope had inflamed the post-9/11 atmosphere of ‘Islamophobia,’ one ‘anti-racism’ outfit said. Another group asked: What about the contributions made by the ‘tolerant Islam of al-Andalus’? Former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing spoke for the political class: ‘Europeans live in a purely secular political system, where religion does not play an important role.’
“Douglas Murray recounts this episode early on in his fiery, lucid, and essential polemic. It epitomized the folly of European elites who would sooner discard the Continent’s civilizational heritage than show partiality for their own culture over others’. To Murray, this tendency is quite literally suicidal—hence the ‘death’ in his title.
“The book deals mainly with Western Europe’s disastrous experiment in admitting huge numbers of Muslim immigrants without bothering to assimilate them. These immigrants now inhabit parallel communities on the outskirts of most major cities. They reject mainstream values and not infrequently go boom. Murray’s account ranges from the postwar guest-worker programs to the 2015 crisis that brought more than a million people from the Middle East and Africa.
“This is dark-night-of-the-soul stuff. The author, a director at London’s Henry Jackson Society (where I was briefly a nonresident fellow), has for more than a decade been among Europe’s more pessimistic voices on immigration. My classically liberal instincts primed me to oppose him at every turn. Time and again, I found myself conceding that, indeed, he has a point. This is in large part because I have been living in and reporting on Europe for nearly four years. Events of the period have vindicated Murray’s bleak vision and confounded his critics.”
Photo: One-ton cardboard tower
Poem: Annie Woodford, “Flying Kites with Elizabeth Bishop”
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