Reviews and News:
What Cormac McCarthy’s sources tell us about McCarthy: “Books Are Made out of Books amounts to a survey of the quasi-mystic – and predominantly pessimistic – world view which shapes many of McCarthy’s works.”
Where are the conservative artists? “There’s a conversation I want to have. It is about the relationship between conservatives and liberals in the arts. Last year at this time, I was on Capitol Hill for Arts Advocacy Day. As the leaders of Americans for the Arts reminded us that day, ‘You can’t spell bipartisan without ART.’ But as I look around in my artist circles I wonder, are all artists liberal?”
Jordan Ballor on what Madeleine L’Engle and C. S. Lewis teach us about the dangers of collectivism and individualism.
Dictator lit: “As a character in Don DeLillo’s Mao II remarks, ‘The cult of Mao was the cult of the book.’ How can you be a dictator without your sacred text, without a document to show your word is law?”
Mike Pence’s daughter writes a children’s book about bunnies for charity. John Oliver has one of his staff write a witless parody of it for publicity.
Marat Grinberg recommends Soviet-era Jewish sci-fi: “Deified by their Soviet readers from the 1960s on, the Strugatsky brothers—Arkady (1925-1991) and his younger sibling Boris (1933-2012)—were not only the most popular and prolific Russian writers of science fiction, a highly respected genre in post-Stalinist Soviet culture, but its most daring practitioners. Translated widely during the cold war, their work was continually on the radar of American science-fiction writers from Isaac Asimov to Ursula Le Guin to Kim Stanley Robinson.”
Essay of the Day:
In the latest issue of National Affairs, Wilfred McClay explains how to think about patriotism:
“Patriotism, in the American context, is an intricate latticework of ideals, sentiments, and overlapping loyalties. Since its founding, America has often been understood as the incarnation of an idea, an abstract and aspirational claim about self-evident truths that apply to all of humanity. There is certainly some truth to this view, but to focus on it exclusively ignores the very natural and concrete aspects of American patriotism: our shared memories of our nation’s singular triumphs, sacrifices, and sufferings, as well as our unique traditions, culture, and land. These two types of American patriotism are undeniably in tension, but the tension has been a healthy one throughout our history; our nation’s universal ideals have meshed with, and derived strength from, Americans’ local and particular sentiments.
“Among elite opinion-makers today, the universal variety is viewed as the only legitimate form of American patriotism, while its more particular loyalties are dismissed as a divisive blood-and-soil nationalism. But there is much more to American patriotism than this, and we are in real danger of losing the shared sense of spirit and sacrifice that comes from remembering our past together.”
Photos: The world’s most powerful telescope
Poem: David Barber, “Madhouse Promenade”
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