Reviews and News:
Gary Saul Morson considers the history and meaning of St. Petersburg: “When Raskolnikov, the antihero of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, meditates on the brutal murders he has committed, he wonders whether the city in which he lives, St. Petersburg, was somehow responsible. Perhaps, without realizing it, he served as the inhuman city’s agent? In much the same spirit, the repulsive hero of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground attributes his psychology to it as ‘the most intentional city in the world.’ From Pushkin to the present, Petersburg has been a symbol as much as a place.”
Who was Isaac Deutscher? One of those “slippery sorts who could not quite decide if mass murder in the right hands serves the interests of humanity.”
Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa has spent most of the past 500 years in Paris. But it may soon go on tour.
The epic after Homer.
Why we admire Churchill and Orwell: Yes, they courageously defended individual liberty, but they also—and this may be more important—took “ordinary people seriously.”
Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa talks to El País about liberalism, political correctness, and democracy: “Fascism and communism have attacked liberalism strongly, mainly by caricaturing it and linking it to conservatism. In its early stages, liberalism was besieged primarily by the right. There were papal encyclicals – attacks from pulpits everywhere on a doctrine that was considered the enemy of religion and of moral values. I believe that these adversaries define the close relationship that exists between liberalism and democracy. Democracy has moved forward and human rights have been recognized basically thanks to liberal thinkers.”
The strange world of Clark Ashton Smith: “An only child raised by elderly parents (both were more than 40 years old when he was born), Smith grew up isolated, financially insecure, and surrounded by books: The Arabian Nights, Gulliver’s Travels, Beckford’s Vathek, and the nightmarish stories and fables composed by those authors who proved his most enduring influences: Hans Christian Andersen and Edgar Allan Poe. Smith quit school at a young age and set out to educate himself with complete editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Oxford English Dictionary, reading through each volume several times until he was armed with one of the most formidable (and sometimes annoying) vocabularies in modern literature. While he lived his entire life on the edge of poverty, in a log cabin without electricity or running water, he always found room (and money) for more books…”
The problem with algorithms: If “we read past the occasional politics and occasional dead ends of tautology, conservatives and liberals alike will find that Automating Inequality is the best book we have thus far about the ways in which governments at nearly every level of authority are using computer algorithms as essentially magic: easy technological substitutes for the difficult balance of sympathy and intelligence needed to govern the messy thing that is human society.”
Essay of the Day:
In the latest issue of the Standard, Martyn Wendell Jones writes about the history of religious enthusiasm in America and Jim and Tammy Bakker:
“To appreciate fully the Bakkers’ significance requires locating them in a spiritual lineage that extends back to early American history. A post-Reformation phenomenon in religious culture—referred to as ‘religious enthusiasm’ in the combative literature of the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe—came to have an enormous influence on American Christianity. For religious enthusiasts, the doctrines and traditions of Christianity are sometimes less important than individual intuition and personal experience. A grasp of the main themes of American religious enthusiasm as it developed historically will help to shed light on the particular appeal of the Bakkers—as well as the appeal of those who have come after them.
“The American continent, wrote Monsignor Ronald Knox in 1950, ‘is the last refuge of the enthusiast.’ Knox, a Catholic writer and friend of Evelyn Waugh’s, considered the 600-page study Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion his life’s work. The primary emphasis in religious enthusiasm, he wrote, ‘lies on a direct personal access to the Author of our salvation, with little of intellectual background or of liturgical expression.’
“In both Catholic and Protestant variations, enthusiasm knocked established Christianity off the rails. This personal spirituality was often accompanied, Knox wrote, by ‘a conviction that the Second Coming of our Lord is shortly to be expected’ and ‘ecstasy, under which heading I include a mass of abnormal phenomena, the by-products, it would seem, of prophecy.’ Then, too, there were the tremors and shakes, the falling into trances, and the glossolalia—outbreaks of ‘unintelligible utterance’ believed by the utterers to be a private means of direct communication with the Lord.”
Photo: Church of Saint Nikolas
Poem: Adam Zagajewski, “The Self”
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