Reviews and News:
What’s the difference between good and bad political poetry: “You don’t need to have read Orwell to recognize that partisan writing tends to be insincere and robotic, two traits that art must avoid. Partisan writing demands a loud immediacy, whereas art is more often the ‘foster-child of silence and slow time.’
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A “brilliant” history of the United States’s Special Operations Forces.
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Paradise Lost is as popular as ever. Translations of the epic poem over the last thirty years outnumber those from the preceding 300.
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An alternative history of jazz.
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Two new Harry Potter books to be published this fall. Actually, make that one book in two versions (one for adults and one for kids) on magic in Harry Potter written by “the brilliant curators of the British Library” (according to the British Library’s own website) in collaboration with J. K. Rowling.
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The differences between Netflix streaming and the Victorian serial: “Reading communities fostered by Victorian serials are a world away. The first readers of Great Expectations, for example, encountered the novel in All the Year Round. On December 1, 1860, the first instalment took Pip from his encounter with Magwitch in the churchyard, to his stealing of food to feed the escaped convict – just two chapters. While waiting for the next instalment, readers could enjoy the rest of the magazine, which included a poem, ‘The World of Love’, an account of charitable efforts to relieve poverty among the lower clergy, and a comic short story on the ‘Inconveniences of being a Cornishman’. The range is often surprising and there are moments of serendipitous exchange between constituent texts. Pip steals bread, cheese, some mincemeat, a meat bone and a pork pie from Mrs. Joe’s pantry, and, as the instalment closes, these victuals remain in his pocket for another week. But the reader carries on, to the next essay: a celebration of indulgent Italian cooking. This confluence of foodstuffs – Pip’s homely staples, sustaining life; the ‘glorified, transfigured, resplendent!’ delicacies of Rome – reveal shared concerns with class and consumption that bring Dickensian ‘social wonders’ to the fore. Viewing algorithms curtail these unexpected dialogues, the potential colloquy of Netflix’s archive increasingly limited to a percentage-rated monologue.”
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Essay of the Day:
Does physical labor have a future? Is anything lost if it doesn’t? Victor Davis Hanson considers these and other questions in City Journal:
“Those who would never stoop to paint their own houses gladly expend far more energy sweating at the gym. During the decline in physical-labor jobs over the last 50 years, an entire compensating industry has grown up around physical fitness. As modern work becomes less physical, requiring hours at a desk or some sort of immobile standing, the fitness center has replaced the drudgery of the field, the mine, and the forest as a means to exercise the body each day. A forbidding array of exercise bikes and StairMasters not only works the body; it also reinforces the modern, scientifically backed conviction that physical fitness promotes general wellness, mental acuity, and perhaps longevity. A new slang has entered the Western vocabulary, from ‘abs,’ ‘glutes,’ and ‘cardio’ to ‘ripped’ and ‘toned’ to describe the ideal results of daily exercise: a look of chiseled fitness. The ideal is much different from the appearance of the pipe fitter and welder of the past, whose protruding bellies and girth were not necessarily incongruous with physical strength and stamina incurred from daily physical labor.
“Yet the modern idea of ‘working out’ by no means denotes that someone is laboring at a physical task, except for wisely keeping fit. Our idea of exercising, then, is not quite the Odyssean notion of being equally adept in craftiness and brawn—the ability to build a raft or lead men into battle—or versatile in outfoxing sexy sirens and ramming poles through the heads of dull-witted huge monsters. We are more like Alcibiades, whose high life and gifts for political craft and oratory were balanced by his studied Olympic training and sponsorship of chariotry.
“One reason for our disdain for labor today is that the more physical work recedes in the twenty-first century, the more life superficially appears to get better, even for the vestigial muscular classes. Cheap cell phones, video games, the Internet, social media, and labor-saving appliances all make life easier and suggest that even more and better benefits are on the horizon. Formerly backbreaking industries, from the growing of almonds to the building of cars, are increasingly mechanized, using fewer but more skilled operators; in the future, this work might be all but robotized, without much human agency at all.
“Anyone who has spot-welded or harvested almonds with a mallet and canvas has no regrets in seeing the disappearance of such rote drudgery, from the view of both the laborer and the consumer, who benefits from the cheaper prices brought on by labor-saving devices. But as we continue on this trajectory, initiated in the Industrial Revolution, from less demanding physical work to rare physical work, is something lost? Something only poorly approximated by greater leisure time, non-muscular jobs, and contrived physical exercise?”
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Photos: Robots
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Poem: Melanie Almeder, “Fog”
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