Reviews and News:
Margaret Atwood on Ray Bradbury’s otherworldly fiction: “Any writer who delves as deeply into ‘horror’ writing as Bradbury did has a complex relationship with mortality, and it’s not surprising to learn that as a child Ray Bradbury was worried he would die at any moment, as he tells us in ‘Take Me Home,’ a sidebar in the June 2012 New Yorker science-fiction issue. ‘When I look back now,’ he says—in what, ironically, was going to be his last published piece—‘I realize what a trial I must have been to my friends and relatives. It was one frenzy after one enthusiasm after one hysteria after another. I was always yelling and running somewhere, because I was afraid life was going to be over that very afternoon.’ But the flip side of the mortality coin is immortality, and that interested him as well. At the age of twelve—as he told us on his website—he had a definitive encounter with a stage magician called Mr. Electrico. This was in the age of traveling circuses and the like, and Mr. Electrico had a unique act: he sat in an electrified chair, thus in turn electrifying a sword he held, with which he in turn electrified the spectators, making their hair stand on end and sparks come out of their ears. He electrified young Bradbury in this manner, while shouting, ‘Live forever!’”
Mark Lilla talks with Rod Dreher about how identity politics went off the rails: “We are an evangelical people. How we ever got a reputation for practicality and common sense is a mystery historians will one day have to unravel. Facing up to problems, gauging their significance, gathering evidence, consulting with others, and testing out new approaches is not our thing…Identity politics on the left was at first about large classes of people – African Americans, women – seeking to redress major historical wrongs by mobilizing and then working through our political institutions to secure their rights. It was about enfranchisement, a practical political goal reached by persuading others of the rightness of your cause. But by the 1980s this approach had given way to a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow self-definition. The new identity politics is expressive rather than persuasive. Even the slogans changed, from We shall overcome – a call to action – to I’m here, I’m queer – a call to nothing in particular. Identitarians became self-righteous, hypersensitive, denunciatory, and obsessed with trivial issues that have made them a national laughing stock (drawing up long lists of gender pronouns, condemning spaghetti and meatballs as cultural appropriation,…). This was politically disastrous.”
Louis C. K.’s surprise film: “C.K. has quietly shot a black-and-white movie titled I Love You, Daddy and will unveil it at the Toronto International Film Festival, organizers are expected to announce.”
106-year-old fruitcake from Robert Scott expedition discovered: “In one of the most hostile regions known to humankind, conservationists unearthed an ice-covered fruitcake they believe once belonged to the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott, the New Zealand-based Antarctic Heritage Trust said this past week… A program manager said it was in ‘excellent condition.’ And the trust said it smelled ‘almost’ edible.”
London garden bridge nixed: “It was intended to be a ‘floating paradise’ for London but instead Joanna Lumley’s vision of a Thames garden bridge has collapsed amid acrimony, with the city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, and his predecessor Boris Johnson arguing over how £37m of public money had been spent on a project without a brick being laid.”
Politics overtake the Met: “Nominally, Theater of the Resist is presented by The Met’s performance division, MetLiveArts, in collaboration with Kali Holloway, the senior writer and associate editor of AlterNet, a left-wing ‘progressive’ online news magazine. Holloway’s involvement exposes and explains the unabashedly political tenor of the series: the writer has next to no experience or credentials in art, having instead made a career writing for various governmental initiatives in New York City.”
Essay of the Day:
Free college is a popular idea, at least among students. Bernie Sanders promised to make college free during last year’s Democratic primary. Labour’s Jeremy Corban recently pledged to abolition university fees by the end of this year. But it’s a bad idea, as Mark Damazer argues in the left-leaning New Statesman:
“The idea that education – all education – should be free is intoxicating and liberating. It is intoxicating because one’s Enlightenment reflexes are happily triggered: the pursuit of knowledge is wonderful; knowledge leads to individual self-fulfilment and should be made available to the largest possible number. We all benefit from a better-educated population, not least by the spread of liberal values. Utilitarians rejoice – the country becomes economically more prosperous, though the evidence for this is irritatingly murky.
“It is liberating because it is a beautifully simple proposition, and thus the complexity of nasty trade-offs – between those who go to university and those who don’t, between generations, between different sorts of universities, between disciplines and courses, between funding higher education and funding a zillion other priorities – is washed away by the dazzling premise. Free.
“Alas, there is a problem. Once upon a time, a British university education was for the very few. The state, in the form of the general taxpayer, footed the bill. Now, around 40 per cent of 18- to 19-year-olds are at university and nobody in front-line politics is keen on hauling down the number, notwithstanding the occasional hyperventilating headline about useless degrees in golf course management or surfing studies.”
* * *
“It would require a lot of extra taxation if we were to go down that route – and there are many other competing demands beyond deficit reduction… Asking students to pay something is not in itself an outrage. The massive social and economic privileges that my generation accrued from our gloriously free university education may now be spread more widely but that has not eliminated the personal advantages that, on average, follow a degree. Graduates are more likely to get jobs, more likely to get better jobs and more likely to keep their jobs in a recession. The Department for Education puts the graduate premium on average at £250,000 before tax over a lifetime for women and £170,000 for men. These figures may be overstated and might not be sustained, but it is overwhelmingly likely that most graduates will still benefit materially from their degrees.”
Plus: “There has been no drop in the participation rate of students from poorer family backgrounds. Quite the reverse – despite Jeremy Corbyn’s personal refusal to believe the evidence.”
Photo: Farm
Poem: Simone Muench and Dean Rader, “The Beautiful American Word, Sure”
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