Reviews and News:
Samuel Johnson and the law: “Toward the end of his life, Samuel Johnson drew up a list of subjects that he would like to research. He projected forty-nine works in all; none was on any aspect of the law. According to James Boswell, Johnson’s celebrated biographer, almost the only subjects sure to distress Johnson when raised were mortality, particularly his own, and what might have transpired had he become a lawyer. Even when nearing seventy, he rounded on his friend William Scott, who had innocently commented, ‘What a pity it is, sir, that you did not follow the profession of the law. You might have been lord chancellor of Great Britain and attained to the dignity of the peerage.’ According to Boswell, ‘Johnson, upon this, seemed much agitated; and in an angry tone exclaimed, “Why will you vex me by suggesting this, when it is too late?”’ For here lay a curious paradox: of all great writers, in any language, Johnson was the one most consumed by the law, yet he never practiced it, and being relegated to the position of an outside observer brought him profound misery—even as he acknowledged his career could not have been otherwise.”
The final days of Stan Lee may not be pretty ones: “Months after losing his wife, the 95-year-old comic book legend is surrounded by charlatans and mountebanks.”
Revisiting the Royal Danish expedition to Arabia Felix (Yemen): “It was something of a miracle that the expedition happened at all. Commissioned and financed by Frederik V of Denmark to win glory and scientific acclaim for the Danish throne, the diversity of the participants presented an early obstacle.”
Richard J. Neuhaus, liberal: “There’s no avoiding it: Fr. Richard John Neuhaus called himself a liberal. He did so with an undisguised hint of mischief, but his sincerity was genuine and unmistakable.”
A developer painted over graffiti on a building he owned before demolishing it. Of course, he was sued.
Canadian amateurs discovered a new type of aurora borealis. They named it Steve.
Essay of the Day:
I highly recommend you set aside time to read Robert Boyers’s elegant essay on privilege in The American Scholar:
“Professor Stone’s office had been carved out of a warren of rooms in the fourth-floor attic of the English Department building, where I was greeted with a warm handshake and a ‘delighted you could come.’ Though the encounter took place almost 60 years ago, I remember everything about it—the few books scattered on a small wooden table, the neatly combed silver hair on the professor’s head, his amiable, ironic eyes. Most clearly I remember the surprising moment when another professor named Magalaner was called in and stood next to Professor Stone, both men smiling and looming ominously over me. It was then that I was asked to describe—in a few sentences, or more, don’t hesitate—the paper I’d written on Orwell.
“Which of course I did, picking up steam after the first few sentences of diffident preamble, until Professor Stone asked me to stop, that’s quite enough, and then turned to his colleague with the words ‘see what I mean?’ and Magalaner assented. The two men only now pulled over two chairs and sat down, close enough that our knees almost touched, and seemed to look me over, as if taking my measure. Both of them were smiling, so that again I speculated that I was to be offered a prize, a summer job, or who knew what else.
“‘I’ve a feeling,’ Professor Stone said, ‘that you may be the first person in your family to go to college.’ ‘It’s true,’ I replied. ‘You write very well,’ he offered. ‘Very well,’ said Magalaner, who had apparently also read my paper.
“‘But you know,’ Stone went on, edging his chair just a bit closer to mine, ‘I didn’t call you here to congratulate you, but to tell you something you need to hear, and of course I trust that you’ll listen carefully—with Professor Magalaner here to back me up—when I tell you, very plainly, that though you are a bright and gifted young fellow, your speech, I mean the sounds you make when you speak, are such that no one will ever take you seriously. I repeat, no one will ever take you seriously, if you don’t at once do something about this. Do you understand me?’
“I’ve told this story over the years, starting on that very first night with my teenage sister, explaining what I understood: namely, that a man I admired, who had reason to admire me, thought that when I opened my mouth I sounded like someone by no means admirable. It was easy to accept that no one close to me would have mentioned this before, given that, presumably, we all shared this grave disability, and failed to think it a disability at all. Professor Stone didn’t sound like anyone in our family, we may have thought, simply because, after all, he was an educated man and was not supposed to sound or think like us.
“In any event, my teacher moved at once to extract from me a promise that I would enroll in remedial speech courses for as long as I was in college, and not ‘so much as consider giving them up, not even if you find them tedious.’ The proposal left me feeling oddly consoled, if also somewhat ashamed. Consoled by the thought that there might be a cure for my coarse Brooklynese, as my teacher referred to it, and that the prescription was indisputably necessary. Unsure whether to thank my interlocutors or just stand up and slink ignominiously away, I agreed to enroll immediately in one of those speech courses, ending the meeting with an awkward, ‘Is that all?’
“A former student, hearing my story a few years ago at our dinner table, after telling her own tale of a recent humiliation, asked, ‘Who the f—k did that guy think he was?’ and added that he was ‘lucky you didn’t just kick his teeth out.’ She was concerned, clearly, that even after so many years, my sense of self might still be at risk, the injury still alive within me. And yet, though I’ve often played out the whole encounter in my head, I had decided within hours of my escape that I had been offered a gift. An insult as well, to be sure, but delivered not with an intention to hurt but to save and uplift. It would have been easy to be offended by the attempt to impress upon someone so young the idea that he would undoubtedly want to become the sort of person whose class origins would henceforth be undetectable. But I had not been programmed to be offended, and was, in my innocent way, ambitious to be taken seriously, and though I rapidly came to loathe the speech exercises to which I was soon subjected, I thought it my duty and my privilege to be subjected to them. Night after night, standing before the mirror in my parents’ bathroom, I shaped the sounds I was taught to shape, and I imagined that one day Professor Stone would beam with satisfaction at the impeccably beautiful grace notes I would produce.
“A long story, perhaps, for opening an essay on privilege. But the idea of privilege has moved many people to say things both nonsensical and appalling, and it is worth pointing out what is often ignored or willfully obscured: that privilege is by no means easy to describe or understand. Say, if you like, that privilege is an advantage, earned or unearned, and you will be apt to ask several important questions. Earned according to whom? Unearned signifying shameful or immoral? The advantage to be renounced or held onto? To what end? Whose? Privilege, the name of an endowment without which we would all be miraculously released from what exactly? Is there evidence, anywhere, that the attention directed at privilege in recent years has resulted in a reduction in inequality or a more generous public discourse? Say privilege and you may well believe you have said something meaningful, leveled a resounding charge, when perhaps you have not begun to think about what is entailed in so loaded a term. What may once have been an elementary descriptor—‘he has the privilege of studying the violin with a first-rate music instructor’—is at present promiscuously and often punitively deployed to imply a wide range of advantages or deficits against which no one can be adequately defended.”
Photo: Bled
Poem: Doug Ramspeck, “Old World Prayers”
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