Reviews and News:
Last semester, the University of Oklahoma offered a year-long course with a huge amount of reading in great works of the Western tradition. It filled up in minutes.
Harold Bloom sticks to his solitary path in a new book on Lear: “One of his favorite words is ‘affect,’ and he tells us that Lear is all affect while Edmund is wholly devoid of it. If ‘affect’ may roughly be translated as ‘feeling’ or ’emotion,’ then Bloom, like Lear, is all affect, a full-time job.”
The increasingly absurd identity ideology: “Afua Hirsch, quite unintentionally, has provided us with a searing insight into the 21st-century politics of identity. Her narcissistic study of her personal identity – Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging – is intended to be a memoir-cum-treatise on what it’s like to be black and of African origin in Britain in the early part of the millennium. But it works far better as a glimpse, an often terrifying glimpse, into the myopia and backwardness and insatiable appetite for victim status that motors the identitarianism that is now the dominant ideology of the bourgeoisie.”
Lionel Shriver on being called a racist: “In our age of denunciation, calling others racists offers tempting cover from having the same rhetorical cudgel land on the detractor, just as writhing in pain absolves accusers in The Crucible of being witches. That immunity is precious, since a racist has become the very worst thing that anyone can be.”
Julian Assange has had his Internet access taken away by his Ecuadorian parents.
Why is a work of medieval Arab historiography suddenly rising in popularity? It’s not just because it’s one of Zuck’s favorite books. “Not long ago we were told that we had reached a condition in which history, as a process of progressive development, had finally achieved its goal. That situation now looks to many people more like a period in which the idea of progress has played itself out, at least outside a world of political rhetoric that grows ever more disconnected from reality. Under such circumstances a cyclical theory of history that works somewhat mechanistically and emphasizes the rise and fall of centers of power due to their relative effectiveness and the corruptions of success becomes much more plausible.”
Essay of the Day:
Gerald Murnane lives in rural Australia. He has never flown, worn sunglasses, nor touched a computer or cell phone. He tends bar regularly at a local golf course and may be the next winner of Nobel Prize in Literature:
“Murnane’s books are strange and wonderful and nearly impossible to describe in a sentence or two. After his third novel, The Plains, a fable-like story reminiscent of Italo Calvino published in 1982, Murnane largely turned away from what might be called conventional narrative pleasures. Dispensing almost entirely with plot and character, his later works are essayistic meditations on his own past, a personal mythology as attuned to the epic ordinariness of lost time as Proust, except with Murnane it’s horse races, a boyhood marble collection, Catholic sexual hang-ups and life as a househusband in the suburban Melbourne of the 1970s.”
Photo: Henningsvær
Poem: “Soldier’s Song”
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