Reviews and News:
William H. Pritchard reviews a new book on the life and work of Richard Wilbur: “The poet Richard Wilbur is ninety-six, old enough that his poet-contemporaries—Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, James Merrill, Anthony Hecht—have been gone for decades. Wilbur’s most recent and probably final book of poems, Anterooms, appeared in 2007, an attractive completion to the Collected Poems published three years earlier. Altogether his career has yielded ten individual books of poems, five books of illustrated poems for children and adults, fifteen translations of classical French drama, and two collections of literary essays—an achievement to be wondered at. Now comes a biography by Robert Bagg and Mary Bagg, the former a poet and translator of distinction, the latter a freelance editor. Their book suits Wilbur’s kind of career: a ‘biographical study’ in which chapters focusing on the life alternate with ones devoted to some of his best poems and translation. A critical intelligence has been applied both to the man and to the reason we are interested in the man.”
A short history of rave: “The great era of illegal raves may have been over, but the genie was out of the bottle. Before 1988, a night out had been about what you wore and who you ended up punching. Acid house changed this forever, reorienting leisure around music, drugs and dancing. It spawned countless musical subgenres and established DJs as godlike shamans that now sell out stadiums around the world. Electronic dance music may have started in America, but Britain was the first country fully to embrace it.”
“Is Belle Turnbull, a nineteenth-century Colorado school teacher and prize-winning poet, a forgotten American master? Or is she, as former Colorado poet laureate David Mason has suggested, forgettable, except to those readers who primarily appreciate her poetry because of its focus on America’s far west? Turnbull has certainly been forgotten—her novel and three volumes of verse are out of print—and her poems are not generally included in masters’ anthologies. In Belle Turnbull: On the Life & Work of an American Master, David J. Rothman and Jeffrey R. Villines render an ambiguous verdict.”
No, Ayn Rand did not ruin the Internet.
Is cake art? The supreme court will decide this fall.
Michael Cromartie has died. Mona Charen remembers him in National Review: “Early in life, he had what must be the least likely stint of any Washington, DC think tank denizen: He worked as the mascot for the Philadelphia 76ers.”
Essay of the Day:
Everyone wants to be an activist these days, especially on university campuses, where activism has a long history. In Modern Age, Zena Hitz writes in defense of contemplation:
“Activism in this broad sense rules the day in contemporary higher education. The core purpose of the University of Texas, according to its mission statement, is ‘to transform lives for the benefit of society.’ Education is for the sake of ‘social transformation,’ says Harvard College—or ‘the improvement of the world today,’ according to Yale University. Activism reaches far beyond progressivism. Conservatives, too, use academic institutions to wield social and political influence, and activism is often nonpartisan. Partisan politics on campus generates strong emotions, but no one is outraged by the assumption that political and social goods are paramount.
“The agriculture school at a land-grant university is founded exclusively for economic and social goals, and this is surely appropriate. But the world is improved by many types of enterprise not learned at a university, and there is much taught at a university that is not socially transformative. What would the life-saving, society-transforming product be in history, philosophy, or English? For evolutionary biology, astrophysics, or mathematics? Many academic subjects are in a natural dialogue with social and political issues, but if they are bent toward social and political goals, they are used in a way that neither suits the disciplines nor serves the goals.
“Activism is crucial for social and political functioning, and some professional training is sometimes necessary for some forms of it. As such it has some place at institutions that provide training in the professions. But its conquest of the whole of intellectual life—and thus the whole enterprise of higher education—must be resisted.”
Video: One more thing to worry about in Houston following Harvey: floating fire ant colonies.
Poems: Micheal O’Siadhail, “Four Poems”
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