Reviews and News:
When does the telephone first appear in literature? In Mark Twain’s short story for the Atlantic Monthly in March 1878, of course.
A short history of drunkenness: “It’s one of the more mysterious features of human history that people of every era and in almost every place have regularly striven to reduce their intelligence, impair their reflexes and generally ensure that everything about them functions far less well.”
In case you didn’t know: Charles Dickens did not “invent” Christmas. “In The Man Who Invented Christmas, hemmed in by debts, Dickens goes to his publishers, Chapman and Hall, and proposes writing a Christmas book. Their response is not encouraging. ‘Why Christmas?’ they ask. ‘Does anyone celebrate it anymore? Not much of a market for Christmas books.’ Later, when Dickens is having trouble with the book, his friend John Forster counsels him to give it up: ‘Why throw everything away for a minor holiday?’ And, of course, once A Christmas Carol is finished and judged a resounding success, England falls in love with what had formerly been a minor event. This belief, that Dickens created the English Christmas, or even that he ignited a moribund festivity, is humbug.”
Swedish lecturer refuses to teach feminist theorist Judith Butler: “There is not a course committee in the world which can force me to teach Judith Butler unless I want to.”
Ever wonder what was on the Commonwealth’s seal during Oliver Cromwell’s brief Protectorate? Inigo Thomas has a copy: “A member of the House has risen from the front row benches to the left – he has the floor. This is Oliver Cromwell. The Speaker, then William Lenthall, sits on his high-backed chair while clerks of the House sit at the desk before him – as they do now. The ornamental mace lies on their table, its presence indicating that the House is in session. The Speaker’s chair is on the spot where the altar once stood – this had been St Stephen’s Chapel – and behind it is the east-facing window. You can just make out that the windows on the bottom level have been opened.”
Thomas Pynchon and the hippies: “For Tom Wolfe (born 1931) in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, observing the hippies’ world produced a mocking disgust; for Joan Didion (born 1934) in Slouching Towards Bethlehem something more like bemused contempt, leavened by occasional moments of gentle envy. But for Thomas Pynchon and Pierce Moffett and, I think, John Crowley the feeling is more wonderment at a vast world of possibility — possibility for the hippies, but not, alas for those condemned by their age to watch the marvelous parade from the sidelines. Many readers of both Crowley and Pynchon find their obvious affection for the Sixties hard to swallow, but that’s because we know how it all turned out.”
Essay of the Day:
Slovenia is one of the richest and most beautiful countries in central Europe. “The streets are clean, crime is low and education good.” And no one is having children. Why?
“There is a happy land, not so far away: the EU’s least-known country, a place fit to be twinned with Nirvana and Shangri-La. When I said I was going to Slovenia, most people either stared blankly or swooned. The swooners were right. It is charming.
“How do I love thee, Slovenia? Let me count the ways. It is small, varied and pretty: a place of high Alps, but dominated by small, wooded hills. It has four proper, distinct seasons, as they do in New England and in story books. The food is good and the wine excellent. ‘On the sunny side of the Alps,’ says one tourist slogan. Even the winds blow softly (usually).
“There is a wonderful little sliver of Adriatic coast, somehow carved out in the post-1945 settlement as though by a child desperate to get a sight of the parade between the sprawling hulks of Croatia and Italy. And Ljubljana, the capital, is liveable, walkable, in places delightful, and surely the calmest capital in Europe. Even the motorists are unhurried, without malice: I never heard a horn.”
* * *
“The healthcare is good. The economy is growing fast, yet Ljubljana has been named the greenest capital in Europe; almost every street corner has six separate bins for different types of rubbish.
“All of the above is true, except perhaps my first sentence. Slovenians just don’t seem to be happy: more than anything they seem short of confidence – in their own abilities and the future. In 2017, Save the Children ranked Slovenia alongside Norway as the best country in the world in which to raise kids, a senior official told me proudly, before adding: ‘Unfortunately, we lack kids.’ The birth rate, short of 1 per cent, is the lowest in the EU, below even those notorious bambino-evaders next door in Italy.”
Photos: Ushuaia
Poem: Patrick Maddock, “Chalaza”
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