Reviews and News:
The moral case for high-tech weapons.
Helen Andrews examines the competing visions of space travel and commune living in America: “In one sense, most communes were a failure while the space program was a success. Considered from another angle, however, the commune movement may have exercised a stronger influence on American culture. NASA stopped sending people into space in 2011. Yet you can buy organic yogurt at every supermarket.”
Maggie Smith’s poem “Good Bones” went viral in 2016. A. M. Juster reviews the poem and Smith’s latest collection: “Smith’s use of the cliché ‘I keep it from the children’ as a refrain flags the moral dimension of her meditation. ‘Good Bones’ is not a sentimental or predictable piece about a mother’s worries but a complex poem about responsibility and the ethics of honesty when candor could worsen a situation.”
Valentine Cunningham reviews Helen Smith’s biography of editor Edward Garnett: “Edward Garnett, radical, pacifist, freethinker, Russophile man of letters, was from the 1890s onwards for many years the pre-eminent fixer of English literature. D.H. Lawrence’s widow Frieda hailed him as ‘the midwife’ of Lawrence’s ‘genius’. And so he was; while he also nurtured Joseph Conrad, T.E. Lawrence, Edward Thomas, Liam O’Flaherty, H.E. Bates and Henry Green. He presided as ‘reader’ over the shoals of expectant manuscripts piling up daily at the publishers—starting out at Fisher Unwin, doing the business for Heinemann and Duckworth, putting in long stints at Dent and ending up at Cape. Jonathan Cape headhunted Garnett for his new firm in 1921 as ‘the best reader’ in the land. Garnett was by then famous as the main man with an eye and a nose for literary promise and — even more valuable for publishers — for promise’s opposite. ‘Hurl away’, he’d scribble on duds; ‘Reject … sarcastically.’ But his ‘cubs’, as they came to be known, got the fullest care and attention: copious badgering, cutting, rewriting, and unforgiving rudeness about characters, ideas, irrealisms — and endings. Above all, endings.”
The life and paint of Johannes Vermeer: “Before he laid down even a dot of paint, Vermeer would have weighed, ground, burned, sifted, heated, cooled, kneaded, washed, filtered, dried and oiled his colours. Some pigments – the rare ultramarine blue made from lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, for example – had to be plunged into cold vinegar. Others – such as lead white – needed to be kept in a hut filled with horse manure. The fumes caused the lead to corrode, creating flakes of white carbonate that were scraped off by hand.”
Patrick Leigh Fermor’s life in letters.
Essay of the Day:
In 1966, René Girard helped organize “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” symposium at Johns Hopkins University. He immediately regretted it. Cynthia L. Haven in The Quarterly Conversation:
“In my conversations with him, Girard was consistently contemptuous about ‘la peste,’ describing it as a kind of star thistle that had taken root across the United States and proved impossible to eradicate.
“‘When Freud came to the USA, he said, as he approached New York: “I’m bringing the plague to them”; but he was wrong. Americans digested and Americanized psychoanalysis easily and quickly. But in 1966 we really brought the plague with Lacan and deconstructionism, at least to the universities!’ What Girard called ‘the beginning of the great merry-go-round Americans call “theory”’ started on those few autumn days at Johns Hopkins. It’s worthwhile to take a little time to unpack the conference and what it represented, for while Girard is often portrayed as standing alone in a field, he was, in fact, part of this intellectual generation. He was often responding to that cohort and contributing to its thinking, and he was alternately dismayed or inspired by his fellow players over a long lifetime. Does this French invasion sound like ancient history? Let us consider the effects of the symposium on our thinking today, at half a century’s distance.”
Photo: Takabocchi plateau
Poem: James Matthew Wilson, “The Fourth Sunday of Advent”
Forthcoming:
A.N. Wilson, Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker (Harper, December 12): “With the publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin—hailed as the man who ‘discovered evolution’—was propelled into the pantheon of great scientific thinkers, alongside Galileo, Copernicus, and Newton. Eminent writer A. N. Wilson challenges this long-held assumption. Contextualizing Darwin and his ideas, he offers a groundbreaking critical look at this revered figure in modern science.”
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