Reviews and News:
C. H. Rolph’s account of the obscenity trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover shows why, Peter Hitchens argues, “this frankly rather terrible book was, for a few weeks, so important, and why, in a way, it changed the country forever. Just how terrible it was could not be admitted, for to do so would have destroyed the argument that its greatness justified its explicit crudity. The intellectual fashion of the time said that Lady Chatterley was a great work. And who would dare defy that fashion? Nobody.”
Wynn Wheldon reviews Mark Helprin’s Paris in the Present Tense.
The Bayeux Tapestry returns to Britain for the first time in 950 years. (HT: David Davis)
The Chronicle of Higher Education profiles Jordan Peterson, the Canadian clinical psychologist who became famous in 2016 for defending free speech in response to Canadian Bill C-16. Rod Dreher recommends a recent interview Peterson did for Britain’s Channel 4: “The interview ought to be shown in journalism classes as an example of what happens when a journalist believes that ideological ardor substitutes for reason, and that contempt for her interview subject should rightly override professionalism.”
The philosophy department at Johns Hopkins University receives a $75 million gift.
It’s not a smartphone, it’s a mobile multifonction—at least if the Commission d’enrichissement de la langue française gets its way.
Essay of the Day:
In The Times Literary Supplement, Robert Bird examines Dostoevsky’s drawings and calligraphy:
“In 1837, soon after their mother’s death, the Dostoevsky brothers travelled to St Petersburg, where they sat the entrance exams to the Imperial Engineering Academy. Mikhail failed, but Fyodor was accepted, though he was denied a scholarship, allegedly because of a lack of family clout. Despite his straitened circumstances he completed his studies in 1843 at the rank of sub-lieutenant and proceeded to a position in the imperial engineering corps.
“For reasons that remain unclear, Dostoevsky’s engineering career lasted barely a year, leaving him wholly reliant on a meagre inheritance and his long-shot wager on future literary earnings. No doubt he would have made a poor office worker anyway, but there was also an unsubstantiated rumour that his resignation was personally instigated by Nicholas I, allegedly incensed that the young engineer had submitted a rendering of a fortress without a front entrance. True or not, this anecdote not only provides a first glimpse of Dostoevsky’s fabled absent-mindedness, but also calls to mind the claustrophobic images that soon came to pervade his fictions, in which the only way out is up.
“Dostoevsky’s gateless fortress also reminds us that, as a trained draughtsman, he thought in images no less than in words. He wrote frequently about painting, and many of his key terms suggest visual, rather than verbal communication, from ‘impression’ (vpechatlenie) to ‘disfiguration’ (bezobrazie). In his novels major characters first emerge as faces, and then persist as gazes; think of the self-sacrificing prostitute Sonya Marmeladova staring silently at Raskolnikov in her squalid room, and then at the crossroads. Countless artists and filmmakers have been moved to transpose Dostoevsky’s fictions into new works of visual art. It is no great surprise, then, that his manuscripts teem with calligraphic exercises and graphic doodles.”
Photo: Ellmau
Poem: Joseph S. Salemi, “To a Decorative Dwarf in the Garbage”
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