Reviews and News:
What Simon Heffer identifies as an age of decadence in Britain (from 1880 to 1914) was also a period of great progress. Which one is it? Both.
Varieties of form: “Poets, critics, and readers on both sides of the form/free verse divide are frequently guilty of the Manichean heresy. Stated bluntly: Free verse, the more unfettered the better, is good; meter and rhyme, bad. Or vice versa. The schema turns political and nasty when form is associated with conservatism and free verse with progressivism, as though Ronald Reagan commanded poets to compose villanelles. The label coined in 1985 by the late Ariel Dawson, ‘New Formalism,’ was intended as disparagement but adopted proudly by practitioners. To put the notion in context, the article in which the contentious phrase first appeared was titled ‘The Yuppie Poet.’ In his preface to Thirteen on Form: Conversations with Poets, poet and editor William Baer commonsensically parses ‘New Formalism’ without refighting old battles… New Formalists do not constitute a monolith. None is an ideologue. None believes a formal poem is automatically superior to its free verse cousin, and some write free verse themselves. But most agree that adherence to form enables them to express what they wish in the most efficient manner.”
Proust’s letters to be published online: “The first tranche of the letters, several hundred related to World War I, is expected to be published online by Nov. 11, 2018, to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the end of the war, according to Grenoble Alpes University, one of the French institutions collaborating on the project.”
Italian town will pay people to move to it: “We’ve seen Italian towns get creative with how they attract new residents, whether it’s using street art to bring in tourists or giving away free castles. But if that doesn’t catch your eye, how about a little cash? The southern Italian town of Candela is offering up just that—€2,000 (about $2,300) for anyone that takes up residence.”
Andrew Ferguson reviews Sally Quinn’s memoir Finding Magic: “Sally Quinn has been writing books and articles for more than 40 years, yet her prose retains a childlike, disarming artlessness that makes Finding Magic and its serial revelations all the more arresting. She buys a house, she switches jobs, she kills someone with a hex…the tone never changes. ‘During my college years I had occasional psychic moments,’ is how she begins one chapter, as if daring you to stop reading. Another chapter begins: ‘I love the Tarot.’ She talks to ghosts. On her first visit to the Middle East, she faces her own personal Arab–Israeli conflict: She is torn, she tells us, between sleeping with the Israeli defense minister and ‘the Palestinian leader, an incredible hunk wearing traditional robes.’ (She decides to stay faithful to her beau back home.) She reads minds and thinks you can, too: ‘It is just a matter of time before we don’t have to speak to one another anymore.’ She has sex frequently and ardently. It’s all here. She calls her book a spiritual memoir, though ‘spiritual’ is a word—‘faith,’ ‘magic,’ and ‘religion’ are others—that she never stops to define. Given her central place in the upper reaches of Washington’s ruling class over the last half-century, we are entitled to read the book as a generational document—an Apologia Pro Vita Sua for the Baby Boomer Georgetown set.”
Some license plate numbers can be sold for nearly a million dollars in Qatar: “Plates with repeated digits, digits in sequences, or those containing few numbers—only the royal family is rumored to have two-digit plates—go for the highest prices. Mr. Saad pointed to a Rolls Royce outside the Four Seasons with a plate reading 158. Because it’s only three digits, it’ll go for around QR 1.5 million (~$412,000 USD), or maybe more, he said.”
Essay of the Day:
Why are young Americans obsessed with identity? Could it be because of the breakdown of the family? Mary Eberstadt:
“Identity politics cannot be understood apart from the preceding and concomitant social fact of family implosion. The year before the Combahee document’s publication—1976—was a watershed of a sort. The out-of-wedlock birth rate for black Americans tipped over the 50-percent mark (the 1965 Moynihan Report worried over a rate half as high). This rate has kept climbing and exceeded 70 percent in 2016. At the same time, other measures indicating the splintering of the nuclear and extended family expanded too. By 2012, Millennial women—who were then under the age of 30—exhibited for the first time the out-of-wedlock birth rate of black women in 1976: i.e., more than 50 percent. Millennials, of course, are the demographic backbone of identity politics. “And the out-of-wedlock birth rate is just one measure of the unprecedented disruption of the family over the last half-century-plus. Consider, just in passing, the impact of abortion. In 2008, the Guttmacher Institute reported that 61 percent of women terminating pregnancies were already mothers of at least one child. Many children—and many grown children—have been deprived of potential siblings via pregnancy termination.
“Abortion, like single motherhood, is only one engine of a phenomenon that has come to characterize more and more American lives during the past half-century: what might be called the ‘family, interrupted.’ Many post-sexual revolutionary people now pass through life vaguely aware of family members who could have been but aren’t—whether via parental disruption in childhood or the long string of exes now typical in Western mating or abortion or childlessness by choice or other romantic and sexual habits that did not exist en masse until after the 1960s.
“Many of us now live in patterns of serial monogamy, for instance, in which one partner is followed by another. When children occur, this means a consistently shifting set of family members to whom one is sometimes biologically related and sometimes not: stepfathers, half-siblings, ‘uncles,’ and ‘cousins.’ As couples form and un-form, finding new partners and shedding old ones, these relations morph with them. The result for many people is the addition and subtraction of ‘family’ members on a scale that was unimaginable until reliable contraception for women—the FDA approved the first oral contraceptive in 1960—and the legalizing of abortion. Together they made the de-institutionalization of traditional marriage and family possible.”
* * *
“The result of all these shifting and swirling selves is that many people no longer know what almost all of humanity once knew, including in the great swath of history that was otherwise nastier, more brutish, and shorter than ours: a reliable circle of faces, many biologically related to oneself, present during early and adolescent life. That continuity helped to make possible the plank-by-plank construction of identity as son or daughter, cousin or grandfather, mother or aunt, and the rest of what’s called, tellingly, the family tree.”
Photo: Dumesti
Poem: Richard O’Connell, “In Plato’s Cave”
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