Reviews and News:
The virus of politically-correct language: “In this month’s issue of Discovery magazine, there is an interesting article on how the Incas, who lacked a written language, used knots on strings as a mnemonic device. The magazine spells the word Inca as Inka. Inca has been in the English language since 1592, borrowed from Spanish. Spanish got it from Quechuan, the language of the Inca people. Spanish priests wanted to use Quechuan as an evangelical tool, and so they wrote it down, using, of course, Spanish orthography; Quechuan having no orthography of its own. Then in 1975, the Peruvian government promulgated a new orthography of Quechuan, which uses the letter K whereas in Spanish the letter C would be used. Does Discovery magazine think that Peru’s Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua should determine how English words are spelled instead of Merriam-Webster or the Oxford English Dictionary?”
On finding an unpublished poem by Ezra Pound in an Italian castle: “Finding a previously unpublished poem by Ezra Pound sounds both adventurous and grittily archival, but really, this was neither. It was waiting in an obvious place: in the Schloss Brunnenburg, in the Tyrol, in Northern Italy, which is the fairy-tale castle where Pound lived late in his life, and where his daughter still lives today. The poem wasn’t lost, it just hadn’t been found.”
Martin Amiss on American’s lack of wit (and other things): “If America is, for Amis, an easier place in which to grow old – fewer critics, for a start – he retains an expectation that he and his wife will move home one day. ‘I miss the English,’ he says. ‘I miss Londoners. I miss the wit. Americans, they’re very, well, de Tocqueville saw this coming in about 1850 – he said, it’s a marvellous thing, American democracy, but don’t they know how it’s going to end up? It’s going to be so mushy that no one will dare say anything for fear of offending someone else. That’s why Americans aren’t as witty as Brits, because humour is about giving a little bit of offence. It’s an assertion of intellectual superiority. Americans are just as friendly and tolerant as Londoners, but they flinch from mocking someone’s background or education.’”
The first volumes of The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh will be published in a few weeks—a massive undertaking to print every word Waugh wrote. “One of the fascinating aspects of Evelyn Waugh is how much of his life he poured into his art. When his Diaries were published in 1976 his eldest son, Auberon, declared, ‘[They] show that the world of Evelyn Waugh’s novels did in fact exist.’”
In Case You Missed It:
Michel Foucault’s late libertarianism: “Starting in 1978, in interviews and lectures, Foucault used modern libertarian and libertarian-leaning thinkers like F. A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Wilhelm Röpke, Milton Freedman, and Gary Becker to challenge the Left’s orthodoxies, especially their veneration of a benevolent welfare state. Foucault stunned his acolytes by suggesting that these writers rewarded serious study. Worse still, he castigated democratic socialism’s failures and challenged his students to apply cost-benefit analysis to governmental bureaucracies.”
A letter in which Charles Dickens complains of Hans Christian Andersen’s disastrous stay at Gad’s Hill was sold on Saturday. Andersen was upset no one was available to shave him in the mornings, he cried on the lawn when he received a negative review of one of his books, and stayed five instead of two weeks.
Monet painted or sketched well over 2,000 works. What sort of work did he collect? Renoir, prints by Katsushika Hokusaiand, and the paintings of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, whom Monet viewed as “the only master.”
Remembering John Gardner’s stand against literary “tricksiness.”
Interview: John J. Miller talks with Lorraine Murphy about Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
Classic Essay: Walter Berns, “Religion and the Death Penalty”
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