Reviews and News:
A Dead Sea scroll, which was recently deciphered by researchers at the University of Haifa, contains an ancient calendar.
Ali Smith writes about Muriel Spark at 100: “Spark was always a poet, she said, in her ‘outlook on life and her perception of events’. Her understanding of time, for instance, has little to do with chronology. Long ago in 1951. Long ago in 1945. One day in the middle of the 20th century. Spark lovers will be familiar with this kind of construction in her work, this ability she has of revealing a century as, you know, just another century among lots of centuries, or our own times as the stuff of ancient legend.”
The real Charles I: “What most of us know about the reign of Charles I we know by way of myth. From Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers we know of the warmongering Duke of Buckingham and the English enchantress Milady de Winter. By way of political myth, Americans remember Charles’s reign as the one that drove dissenters seeking religious freedom to the shores of New England. Modern liberals on both sides of the Atlantic remember the English Civil War as a heroic struggle for democracy against superstition and tyranny. InThe White King, Leanda de Lisle masterfully shows that the true story of Charles I is far more interesting than any myth.”
Bill Kauffman reads H.L. Mencken’s newspaper columns: “He is, within the boundaries of his time and place, a free speech absolutist. Prohibitionists of all stripes—‘snouters’ and ‘absurd fanatics’ who would ban alcohol, tobacco, prostitution, vivisection, and Sunday baseball—are pilloried with an outrage that is always anchored in an amused appreciation of the human condition, and never in hatred. No one defends fallen women, the ‘ladies of vermilion,’ with quite as much verve as Henry Mencken.”
In The Public Discourse, Timothy Hsiao attempts to make a libertarian case against the legalization of recreational drugs. I don’t think he succeeds, but it’s an interesting essai: “[S]ince the government has a responsibility to protect personal freedom, it must also protect and promote a culture that is conducive to clear thinking and discourages impaired thinking. The government, therefore, has a responsibility to restrict activities that impair, destroy, or otherwise undermine clear thinking.”
Charles Fain Lehman reviews Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education: “I have met Bryan Caplan, libertarian extraordinaire and professor of economics at George Mason University, exactly once. I was an intern; he, a speaker to my intern class. Afterwards, at lunch, I found myself in a 45-minute argument with the good professor, which ended with his insistence that the American Revolution was unjustifiable on utilitarian grounds. Caplan is undoubtedly brilliant. Like most prominent libertarian thinkers, he is also frequently infuriating. But when he is right, he is very right. The Case Against Education, a book 10 years in the making, is a case of Caplan being right.”
Thomas Mallon reviews Martin Amis’s latest collection of nonfiction: “The Rub of Time (Knopf) collects two decades’ worth of Amis’s journalism, including a good deal of what he would call the ‘ludic’ Amis—middle-aged Martin playing tennis or poker, watching football or its hooligans. The reporting pieces have a fair share of old chestnuts (the book-tour essay) and barrelled fish (a Republican Convention), but none is without its stinging pleasures…”
Philip Terzian wonders how a book he once owned that was seemingly inscribed by Idi Amin ended up at Israel’s National Library: “I’ve never stuffed a note in a bottle, and tossed it into the ocean. But I seem to have done the bibliographical equivalent, and the evidence has washed up on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean.”
Essay of the Day:
In Garden and Gun, Monte Burke has a short but wonderful piece about a large collection of rare turkey calls:
“One morning in March 2016, Danny Ellis, a Charlotte real estate developer, was headed into a business meeting when he received a text from a friend: ‘Danny, did you just buy the Jordan yelper that showed up on eBay?’ What might seem like gibberish to most people stopped Ellis in his tracks. No, he hadn’t bought it. ‘But I immediately thought, “This could be the one,”’ he says. ‘I was so excited.’
“Ellis, who is sixty-six, collects turkey calls. And in that small but obsessive world, there has long been one call considered the Holy Grail: an eight-inch wing-bone-and-cane yelper call (which resembles a small trumpet) made in 1898 by the famous Louisiana turkey hunter and writer Charles L. Jordan. Though there are countless replicas of the call, no one knew for sure if an original even existed. After doing some quick research, Ellis believed the one that had shown up on eBay might be it. The only problem: The listing suddenly disappeared.”
Photo: Piran
Poem: Patricia Smith, “And He Stays Dead”
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