Reviews and News:
The letters of T. S. Eliot continue to be published. We are now in the seventh volume, covering the years 1933 and 1934, and his disastrous marriage takes center stage: “Most touching are Vivien Eliot’s deluded and heartbroken letters, which burst in upon her husband’s stolid monologues. Imagining a sinister conspiracy of ‘enemies’ behind his refusal to meet her, she wrote plaintively on Valentine’s Day 1935: ‘Tom. The front door of this flat is opened every night at 10.30 until 11 for T S Eliot. […] You MUST come home now. Before anyone else dies.’ They would meet for the last time later that year, when she came to a public lecture dressed in fascist ‘Blackshirt’ uniform (a political movement he abhorred). ‘I cannot talk to you now,’ he said, although she believed he had ‘claimed me in public’.”
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What happened to the literary Midwest? “For Lauck, the story begins when the critic Carl Van Doren wrote a small review essay for The Nation linking the publication of such works as Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1915), Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), and Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920). Van Doren would have a significant influence on American literary perception through the success of his 1921 study The American Novel, and by the 1950s, his account of Midwestern writers turning against their homeland—‘The Revolt from the Village,’ with its exposing of small-town life’s ‘abundant feast of scandal’—had became the received way to understand the American literary rejection of the Midwest. The received way to understand the American cultural rejection of the Midwest, for that matter. A more accurate reading of Masters, Anderson, and Lewis shows that none of them was correctly understood by Van Doren, but the damage had been done. ‘Vocal intellectuals,’ writes Lauck, ‘recast the Midwest as a repressive and sterile backwater filled with small-town snoops, redneck farmers, and zealous theocrats.’”
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Does drinking help creativity? Maybe.
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Yesterday, we linked to a report on the first edited embryos in America and some of the problems with the research. Here’s more: “Experiments like Mitalipov’s are unlikely to lead directly to either the alleviation of the burden of genetic disease or to the creation of designer babies. But they will contribute to an ongoing and cruel instrumentalization of life, as more and more human lives are made, tinkered with, and discarded in scientific laboratories in the United States and around the world.”
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In Case You Missed It:
In Aeon, Sam Haselby writes about the 19th-century interest in the beauty of the soul and what it can teach us today.
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Robert R. Reilly writes about the return of the sacred in classical music for Future Symphony Institute. The “tyranny” of atonality is “gone.”
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Siegfried Sassoon’s niece, now a nun, remembers her late relationship with her uncle.
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Should we be reading the flamboyant, forgotten novelist John Lodwick?
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Interview: Ben Domenech talks to Graham Allison, former Director of Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, about Thucydides and war with China.
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Classic Essay: Penelope Lively revisits Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy in her wonderful essay for The Atlantic, “A Maverick Historian”.
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