Reviews and News:
Johnny Cash’s visit to Folsom prison at 50: “When Cash sang the words, ‘I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die,’ the inmates can be heard cheering wildly. In reality, those cheers were added post-recording by producer Bob Johnston because the inmates were too afraid to show emotion lest they suffer reprisals by the guards.
Some writing advice from Mark Bauerlein: “If you teach high school or college students, or have kids who are passing through those places, and if your duties include grading papers, or you watch your kids struggle with writing assignments, I have a piece of advice. Tell them to try composing by hand, with pen and paper, not on the keyboard.”
Andrew Cohen explains why Judge Rosemarie Aquilina’s demeanor and final words in the Larry Nassar sexual abuse case were inappropriate: “I followed the case. I followed the hearing. The impression I got was that the judge was using the forum to strive for some sort of cathartic awakening on behalf of Nassar’s victims and victims of sexual assault more broadly. There is nothing wrong with that. It’s a noble cause. But there is no place for that in an American courtroom, no matter how much we acknowledge that victims should have a significant role in sentencing. No judge in America should play the role of advocate for victims or prosecutors. No judge in America can play that role if we are to respect our rule of law.”
Violent mobs protest a Bollywood film for the portrayal of legendary queen Rani Padmini and a love scene that doesn’t exist: “The film crew has been attacked, sets have been vandalised, hardliners have threatened to mutilate the lead actor and Indian states have pleaded with the supreme court and prime minister to ban the film…In Mumbai, mobs have set fire to cars. In Gurgaon, a satellite city south of Delhi, people set fire to a bus and pelted stones. A school bus in Haryana state was attacked on Wednesday, while riot police clashed with hundreds of protesters in Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat states.”
In praise of Evan S. Connell’s 1959 novel Mrs. Bridge: “If you have already read it, that’s wonderful, for chances are you love it too, and know how brilliant it is. And if you haven’t read it, or perhaps have never even heard of it, well, that’s wonderful too, because you are still lucky enough to be able to read it for the first time.”
B. D. McClay reviews Dara Horn’s Eternal Life: “Eternal Life doesn’t quite have the magic of Dara Horn’s previous books. The mechanisms of its plot can be clunky, too much has to be elaborately explained, and in the end it reads more like an overlong short story than a complete novel. As an attempt to turn the drama of mortality inside out, it’s ambitious, but not entirely successful. And the drama of Elazar’s irresistible force to Rachel’s immovable wall gets tiresome. Despite these flaws, Eternal Life is frequently moving, especially in its early chapters as Rachel remembers her long life, the sorrows that cut deeply even after centuries. ‘What reasons,’ she wonders, ‘are there for being alive?’”
Essay of the Day:
Has Donald Trump been good for conservative magazines? T. A. Frank thinks so and explains why in the Washington Post:
“Sometime in December 2015 — well after Donald Trump had vented his dislike of mixed martial artist Ronda Rousey (‘not a nice person’) but before he’d attacked the New Hampshire Union Leader (‘pile of garbage’) and its publisher (‘Stinky’) — Rich Lowry decided it was time to make it stop. Or at least try. Lowry is the editor of National Review, the country’s preeminent conservative magazine, and Trump, in the view of Lowry and most of his colleagues, had neither the character nor the qualifications to be president. ‘We have a voice, and we’ve always used it, and it’s been most effective in opposition,’ Lowry recalled to me recently. ‘And this’ — Trump — ‘was a uniquely powerful threat.’
“Lowry reached out to a wide range of conservatives, hoping to hit Trump from as many angles as possible. The eventual collection, titled ‘Against Trump,’ featured essays by 22 contributors — many of them editors of other conservative publications, including William Kristol, then editor of the Weekly Standard; John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary; R.R. Reno, editor of First Things; Yuval Levin, editor of National Affairs; and Ben Domenech, co-founder of the conservative website the Federalist. The issue came out on Jan. 21, 2016, 11 days before the Iowa caucuses, and it generated enough notice that Trump himself felt compelled to respond. ‘National Review is a failing publication that has lost it’s way,’ he tweeted. ‘It’s circulation is way down w its influence being at an all time low. Sad!’
“The following Monday, late-night host Stephen Colbert propped the ‘Against Trump’ issue on his desk. ‘Last week, a conservative journal, the National Review, came out with an entire issue against Trump,’ Colbert explained, to laughter. ‘It’s filled with anti-Trump essays by conservatives across the political spectrum — Bill Kristol, Michael Medved, Erick Erickson, the Dowager Countess, the Monopoly guy.’
“Sitting in the front rows of Colbert’s taping that night, by coincidence, was Domenech, who watched as Colbert lampooned Trump for his antics and conservatives for their desperation. ‘I think back to that sometimes when I see the latest Stephen-Colbert-sets-aside-the-jokes-to-give-impassioned-monologue kind of thing,’ says Domenech. ‘It’s like, Stephen, you should have listened to us then!’
“Trump survived, of course, and won, big-league. For perhaps the first time in modern conservative politics, National Review and many of its peers looked completely ineffectual. Today, a man who calls himself ‘really very conservative’ occupies the Oval Office, but he pays these magazines no apparent heed. Meanwhile, beyond D.C., all the power on the right seems to have migrated to outlets like Fox News and Breitbart News as well as polemicists like Ann Coulter — at the expense of National Review and its bookish cousins. (Recently, Fox dropped Lowry as a commentator.)
“Such exile can feel like death to small political magazines, which even in the best of times frequently ask themselves if anyone cares what they have to say. In 2012, reflecting on the 10th anniversary of the American Conservative — an anti-interventionist magazine that he had bankrolled for its first couple of years, in part to try to prevent the invasion of Iraq — Greek multimillionaire Taki Theodoracopulos declared that he wished he’d bought a yacht instead. ‘A boat,’ he wrote, ‘will at least get you some attention from the fairer sex — if it’s large and vulgar enough, that is — whereas a political fortnightly might attract some bores with lotsa dandruff on their collars.’
“And yet, these struggling, money-losing, quarrelsome, small-circulation constructions of pixels and paper do, sometimes, manage to affect the course of history.”
Photos: Mount Mayon
Poem: Heinrich Heine, “The Tea” (translated by Terese Coe)
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