Reviews and News:
Can TV be great art? “There certainly are excellent TV shows, especially relative to other TV shows. There are TV shows that are produced with artistic genius and beauty and that shed light on timeless truths about the human condition. But given the nature of the medium, will these achievements last? So many great shows will slip into oblivion unloved and unmourned. For instance, I would love to share my appreciation of The Shield with more people. But I’m a realist. I am fully aware that asking most people to sit down and watch 88 episodes of a cop drama, albeit a very good cop drama with one of the few great endings of this era of narrative television, is pointless. There’s not enough time. Even if we had a surfeit of seconds—even ‘if we were literally immortal,’ as Bloom wrote—it’s worth considering whether any television from today will be watched for entertainment by future generations.”
The National Book Critics Circle announces its 2017 award winners.
Michael Dirda recommends St. Patrick’s Day reading: “As St. Patrick’s Day approaches, what could be better than a book about Ireland, and what book about Ireland is more delightful than James Stephens’s 1912 classic, The Crock of Gold?”
Terry Teachout on the art of directing: “It follows that directing should be as hard to teach as it is to define. Despite the profusion of academic programs aimed at preparing young stage directors for a professional career, the English director Tyrone Guthrie was largely right when he claimed that ‘the only way to learn how to direct a play is to get a play, get a group of actors who are simple enough to allow you to direct them, and direct.’ Like Guthrie, I learned how to direct by watching other directors work, talking to them about what they did, and then doing it myself. In the process, I learned countless things about the mysterious art of staging a play that I could not have learned in any other way.”
Tracy Lee Simmons reviews Leon Kass’s Leading a Worthy Life.
Essay of the Day:
“If the trans movement is right that transgender people are trapped in the wrong bodies,” Sohrab Ahmari writes in Commentary, “then transitioning socially and surgically should bring them clarity and confidence.” It hasn’t:
“For transgender people, the human body remains the ultimate barrier. The obstinate husk, with its intricately connected organs and systems, refuses to give in…Try as they might, the trans men are haunted by the femininity of their bodies, and the women by the masculinity of theirs. Mind cannot overcome matter—at least, not in these cases.
“As for the rest of us, the collapse, or near collapse, of the gender binary has wrought confusion and repression. Mayer and McHugh, the Johns Hopkins researchers, describe the state of affairs well. As gender is unmoored from its natural roots, they warn, it ‘could come to refer to any distinctions in behavior, biological attributes, or psychological traits, and each person could have a gender defined by the unique combination of characteristics the person possesses.’ Just so.”
Photos: Surfing in Norway
Poem: Rachel Hadas, “Stars Shine in the Window”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
