Reviews and News:
I’ve never understood the occasional conservative prejudice against bikes—specifically, the riding of bikes on roads, which, according to the historically myopic argument, were built exclusively for cars and trucks. I get it that some cyclists are entitled jackasses, who seem to go out of their way to slow traffic down by riding three abreast. But blaming a group or a machine instead of an individual for stupidity (or anything else) is a very un-conservative thing to do. People slow traffic down, not cyclists or bikes.
Plus (yes, I’m going to be a bore, but I’m almost done!), bikes are wonderful machines. Cars are great, too, mind you. Like bikes, they can be both elegant and efficient. But in a car, everything except the sun and speed is an abstraction. On a bike, you feel all the particulars of travel: the sun, speed, hills, wind, and biting cold. Also, without bikes, we probably wouldn’t have motorcycles, which every freedom-loving person knows is the most metaphysical form of ground transportation.
All this to say that I have enjoyed Grant Wishard’s dispatches from his bike trip along the U.S.-Mexican border and found it entirely fitting that they should be published at the preeminent conservative publication in America (if you’ll allow me a prejudice of my own). In one of his latest, Grant writes about sleeping in a ranger station and losing one of his biking companions.
Since we’re on the topic of travel, let me also recommend Michael J. Coren’s report on how the Industrial Revolution changed sailing: “Economists have long seen the Industrial Revolution as a transformation of belching coal stacks and fiery furnaces. That’s not wrong, but it misses the sweeping changes that occurred across the British economy, setting the stage for our modern world. Two economists from the University College Dublin wanted to see how 18th century British advancements were finding their way into other sectors.”
The always discerning John Wilson lauds a new book on Muriel Spark: “I think that over the years I have read all (or almost all) the books on Spark published in English—biographical, critical, etc., including collections of academic essays (some of which, as it happens, are excellent). Appointment at Arezzo is the best of the lot, hands-down.”
Mike Cernovich (yes, that Mike Cernovich) has offered to buy Gawker for $500,000 to continue his “journalistic work.”
Will Harrison considers Henry Green’s ear: “Once hailed by W. H. Auden as ‘the best English novelist alive,’ Henry Green—who is having a moment thanks to a series of reissues from NYRB Classics and others—may have also been the greatest listener in the history of British letters, and an unlikely one at that. Born Henry Vincent Yorke, he assumed a nom de plume that thinly concealed his aristocratic upbringing as a self-proclaimed ‘mouthbreather with a silver spoon.’ He wrote his precocious and largely autobiographical debut novel, Blindness (1926), while attending Eton. At Oxford his contemporaries included Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, and he repeatedly blew off his tutor C. S. Lewis either to catch movies or go out drinking. Yet Green shunted this life of privilege after a few semesters, heading off to work on the floor of his father’s iron foundry in Birmingham. One academic novel was enough. It was time ‘to meet as many pedestrian people as possible and to listen to the most pedestrian conversation.’”
Kenneth Roy writes about the other gender gap in Scotland and the rest of the UK: “The university admissions body, UCAS, warns that the gap between rich and poor at university entrance ‘may soon be eclipsed by the gap between males and females.’ Its chief executive adds bluntly: ‘If the differential growth carries on unchecked, then girls born this year will be 75% more likely to go to university than their male peers.’ UCAS has concluded that simply being male could soon be seen as ‘a new form of social disadvantage.’”
Paris as reviewed on TripAdvisor.com: On Notre Dame: “All church’s were free to see in Italy but not in France. You pay 10 euro to see house of God. What a business? Over priced!!” On Les Deux Magots: “Hemingway ate here all the time. Hemingway also shot himself. Draw your own conclusions.”
Essay of the Day:
Bee Wilson’s review essay of The Littlehampton Libels in the London Review of Books, is, except for the superfluous penultimate paragraph, a pleasure:
“In July 1923 at the Lewes assizes, Mr. Justice Avory handed an anonymous letter containing some ‘improper words’ to a respectable-looking woman. He asked her if she had ever used such foul language. ‘Never during the whole of my life, either in writing or talking, never,’ she replied. The woman’s father, a retired house painter with a grey beard, was asked whether he had ever heard his daughter use indecent language. ‘Never,’ he said. ‘She was brought up quite differently. I have never heard such language from her or any others of my family of nine children.’
“Edith Swan, a 30-year-old laundress from the seaside town of Littlehampton in Sussex, was accused of sending a letter to a sanitary inspector called Charles Gardner that contained words of ‘an indecent, obscene and grossly offensive character’. The full letter has not survived, but the gist of it was that Mr. Gardner would be very sorry that he had ever called Swan’s ‘dust boxes’ a nuisance. Three witnesses had seen Swan post this letter. Offensive letters had been circulating in Littlehampton for several years, and the police had taken the unusual step of installing a periscopic mirror in the post office’s mail drop. Whenever anyone posted anything, it was retrieved by post office staff and examined by two clerks from the Special Investigation Branch. Looking through the periscope, Edwin Baker, one of the clerks, saw Miss Swan’s hand posting the letter to the sanitary inspector along with a letter addressed to her sister in Woking. The stamps on both letters had been marked with invisible ink, and had been sold to Swan at the request of the police, who had long suspected her of being behind the rash of anonymous letters.
“Despite all of this, Mr. Justice Avory was not convinced that the slender, self-possessed woman in front of him was capable of writing such a letter. The Brighton Argusreported that he directed the jury to ‘consider whether it was conceivable that she could have written this document’ given that her ‘demeanour in the witness box was that of a respectable, clean-mouthed woman’. The judge said that the jury must ask themselves ‘whether there might possibly be some mistake’.
“The Littlehampton Libels by Christopher Hilliard is a short but dazzling work of microhistory. It uses the story of some poison pen letters in a small town to illuminate wider questions of social life in Britain between the wars, from ordinary people’s experience of the legal system to the way people washed their sheets, and is a far more exciting book than either the title or the rather dull cover would suggest. For a short period, the mystery of these letters became a national news story that generated four separate trials and, as Hilliard writes, ‘demanded more from the police and the lawyers than most murders’.”
Photos: 2,000 Days on Mars with the Curiosity Rover
Poem: X.J. Kennedy, “Literacy”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
