Reviews and News:
Neuroscientist David Poeppel has noted that we still don’t understand “how the brain recognizes something as basic as a straight line.” This hasn’t stopped writers of popular books from using fMRI scans in arguments on all sorts of things—from empathy to economics to Shakespeare. The result is neuromush: “Stephen Poole described this phenomenon as ‘an intellectual pestilence’, and observed how putting the prefix ‘neuro’ to whatever you are talking about gives a pseudo-scientific respectability to all sorts of meretricious rubbish.”
In defense of moderation: “Unmoored from the moderate tradition grounded in natural right, contemporary democracy tends toward a faction beyond political parties, that of ‘sects or schools’ advancing visions of justice sundered from human nature. For Carrese, moderation’s true achievement is to order and discipline politics on the basis of natural right and law. To do this, moderates must recognize that their political moderation is ‘necessary while not sufficient,’ without being elbowed aside by ideologues. How best to return the body politic to both liberal moderation and classical natural right is the puzzle that defines American conservatives’ central challenge.”
David Cannadine’s new account of 19th-century Britain is an “amazing achievement”: “So much has been written about 19th-century Britain that a new interpretation seems almost impossible. But in this magnificent Penguin history, Cannadine pulls it off. At first sight the book seems conventional enough. This is a narrative history. It is also a political history. As Cannadine explains, the vital feature of 19th-century Britain was the extraordinary importance of Parliament. Other countries had parliaments, but none were as enduring or as prestigious as Westminster. Most histories of 19th-century Britain begin in 1815 and end in 1914. Cannadine’s account, by contrast, starts in 1800 with the Act of Union with Ireland, which created the United Kingdom, and ends with the Liberal landslide election of 1906; both dates are landmarks in Britain’s parliamentary history. But this is not a clichéd textbook story of the triumph of democracy and reform. Nor is it an insular, inward-looking narrative of Westminster high politics. There is something else going on here. Cannadine begins his history in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars with France. Throughout the book the story of Britain’s relations with Europe and with its expanding empire is integrated into the narrative of domestic politics. This is a global history, a spellbinding account of Britain’s rise and fall as a great power.”
David Bentley Hart and public theology in America: “Hart’s public perception, insofar as he has one, is as a kind of curiosity, a unicorn emerging now and again, a character who cannot be ignored but can quickly be forgotten. In that way Hart is a type, a stand-in for what he stands for: robust Christian faith, articulated in the most learned, intellectually challenging, and culturally engaged manner possible, yet as unapologetic in rhetoric as in substance.”
A knowledgeable biography of Montaigne that lacks insight: “It is part of Desan’s purpose to ‘liberate’ us from this universalizing way of reading Montaigne, to make Montaigne more a man of his own time than a man for all time, by demonstrating how important was his involvement in the political life of his turbulent times to the creation of his literary work. If Montaigne wrote in his tower, it was certainly not an ivory one, at any rate not until late in life…To say that a man is affected by his surroundings and the times in which he lives is to say nothing more than that he is a man—for a man without any particular circumstances could not exist and is literally unimaginable (this is one of the reasons why heaven is so difficult to imagine and hell so easy, because the latter at least has events). But not every man who takes part in public events and writes about them is read more than four hundred years after his death.”
Fauré, Verlaine and La bonne chanson: “For me, the most remarkable song is the sixth, ‘Avant que tu ne t’en ailles’ (‘Before You Vanish’). The text consists of two contrasting interwoven parts, the first an entreaty to the morning star to allow the speaker entry into the dreams of his beloved, the second a depiction of nature during the expectant moments before sunrise. Fauré gives both strands a different texture and mood, beginning with the simple piano introduction and the tranquil entrance of the singer. The character of the song then shifts—the line flickering, the tempo fleeter, the dotted rhythmic figures mimicking the singing quails—before the quiet mood is felt again. There’s a wonderful tension, with the music alternating between meditation and movement, until the two styles begin to merge and the song reaches its climax on the final line, Car voici le soleil d’or! (‘for here is the golden sun!’)—bright, ecstatic, and bold.”
Essay of the Day:
In the Times Literary Supplement, Eric J. Iannelli takes a closer look at the insanity of addiction:
“A lifetime spent in my own ambivalent company and more than two decades alongside others in recovery has shown me that the addictive mind is naturally busy and likes to stay that way, even (or especially) when repeated attempts are made to switch it off. When the illness is running full tilt, with all the strategizing, debating, rationalizing, formulating and cajoling that entails, the mind finally has enough activity to keep itself occupied. But what makes addiction so all-consuming – ‘a species of madness’, in Coleridge’s words – is its physical component. The addict’s body and brain, at once diplomats and double agents, work both collaboratively and antagonistically to create an unwavering impetus towards a single self-destructive end. When the brain can no longer justify pursuing the addictive release, the body positively yearns for it; and when the body declares itself utterly spent, the brain obsesses until it has no choice but to oblige.
“This insidious phenomenon and the escape from it – the latter being, sadly, rarely as permanent as one might think; relapse rates can be as high as 90 per cent depending on the drug – is a tale often told in twelve-step meetings in church basements, private counselling sessions and, that most public catharsis of them all, the addiction memoir. Of this wonderfully varied genre, Jack Sutherland’s Stars, Cars and Crystal Meth can count itself among the most straightforward but not necessarily the most insightful, charming or relatable.”
Photo: Rumkale
Poem: Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, “Flannery’s Confession”
Forthcoming:
Reed Tucker, Slugfest: Inside the Epic, 50-year Battle between Marvel and DC (Da Capo, October 3): “Slugfest, the first book to chronicle the history of this epic rivalry into a single, in-depth narrative, is the story of the greatest corporate rivalry never told. Complete with interviews with the major names in the industry, Slugfest reveals the arsenal of schemes the two companies have employed in their attempts to outmaneuver the competition, whether it be stealing ideas, poaching employees, planting spies, or launching price wars. The feud has never completely disappeared, and it simmers on a low boil to this day. With DC and Marvel characters becoming global icons worth billions, if anything, the stakes are higher now than ever before.”
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