Reviews and News:
Confession: I didn’t watch the President’s State of the Union address last night, and I honestly can’t remember the last time I watched one. The address isn’t insignificant, but making too much of it is like discussing Harold Bloom’s theory of the “daemon” instead of reading and talking about Hamlet. One is a bunch of words only tangentially related to reality. The other is a thing.
So, let’s talk about things: Did you know that Ursula K. Le Guin wrote the libretto for the space rock opera Rigel 9? “Rigel 9 tells a pretty classic space story. Three astronauts, named Anders, Kapper, and Lee, are sent to explore a strange world. After Anders goes off to collect plant samples and is kidnapped by extraterrestrials, Kapper and Lee argue over whether to rescue him or save themselves.” Listen here.
Also in the realm of reality: Andy Warhol went to several hours of Ruthenian Mass each weekend as a kid in Pittsburgh. Nick Ripatrazone: “The hours of devotion and spectacle introduced Warhol to a mystical world that was his first experience with the transformative capabilities of faith and art.”
Charlotte Higgins takes a deep dive into the cult of Mary Beard.
Noel Malcolm on the misremembered John Selden: “John Selden is famous, but not at all well known. His fame was earned as a lawyer (one of the cleverest, and absolutely the most learned, in 17th-century England), and as an MP who played a significant role in English political history from the 1620s to the 1640s. In the earlier period he helped to lead the House of Commons’s opposition to Charles I, being awarded several years of imprisonment in the Tower of London for his pains; but in the 1640s his energies turned more to opposing abuses of parliamentary power, such as the “Act of Attainder” against the Earl of Strafford — a kind of murder by legislative decree — or the exclusion of bishops from the Lords. He also earned a place in English religious history, through his decisive interventions in the Westminster Assembly. This was an advisory body, set up by Parliament in 1643 in order to work out how to convert an episcopal Church of England into a Presbyterian one. Again and again, Selden succeeded in blocking or overturning the arguments of the dominant Scottish Presbyterians, who had to go scurrying back to their studies to do more homework. The eventual changes to the system of Church government were, as a result, much weaker than they would otherwise have been. Yet at the same time Selden is not well known, at least not in the way that he would have wanted to be. He was a man of astonishing polymathic knowledge, equally at home with Greek calendar systems, Anglo-Saxon poems and Arabic chronicles. He acquired such an expertise in the study of Jewish texts, including the Talmud, the Aramaic Targums and many densely written rabbinical commentaries, that he was referred to, sardonically but also appreciatively, as England’s Chief Rabbi.”
Beck is less interested in making records than performing, he says: “I miss people. I have a longing for connection and human contact.” That wasn’t always the case.
The New York Times takes a closer look at the market for fake social media accounts: “These accounts are counterfeit coins in the booming economy of online influence, reaching into virtually any industry where a mass audience — or the illusion of it — can be monetized. Fake accounts, deployed by governments, criminals and entrepreneurs, now infest social media networks. By some calculations, as many as 48 million of Twitter’s reported active users — nearly 15 percent — are automated accounts designed to simulate real people, though the company claims that number is far lower. In November, Facebook disclosed to investors that it had at least twice as many fake users as it previously estimated, indicating that up to 60 million automated accounts may roam the world’s largest social media platform.”
Essay of the Day:
What did Lincoln really think of slavery? His “diary”— “an assortment of reflections and ruminations he wrote on little slips of paper, sometimes on the backs of envelopes”—provides an answer, Ronald C. White argues in Harper’s:
[H]e never made such categorical statements about the expansion of slavery in public. In private, however, his views kept evolving — spurred by events like the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Steered through the Senate by Lincoln’s old rival Stephen Douglas, the bill essentially allowed the inhabitants of US territories to make their own decisions about the spread of slavery. Lincoln jotted down his emotional response to the bill: ‘We were thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion.’ Yet he continued the conversation with himself, working through the sham logic of the ‘peculiar institution’ like the lawyer he was by training. In 1854, he wrote: If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B. — why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A.? — You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be a slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own.
You do not mean color exactly? — You mean whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own.
But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.
“Lincoln’s second law partner, Stephen T. Logan, encouraged him to see each case from the point of view of his opponent — not just intellectually but emotionally. And indeed, this fragment sounds like Lincoln pacing the floor of a courtroom, trying on opponents’ arguments before taking them apart.”
Photo: Altaï mountains
Poem: Jennifer Reeser, “Disaster Relief”
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