Reviews and News:
Blake Seitz reviews Joel Kotkin’s The Human City for The Washington Free Beacon: “The reality of suburban life simply isn’t as grim as the naysayers suggest, and Kotkin rattles off a long list of statistics to prove it. For one, suburbia is no longer a homogenous redoubt of whites who took flight from the city. The racial makeup of the suburbs is changing as minorities themselves take flight from bad schools and prohibitive costs in the urban core; according to the Brookings Institution, about 60 percent of Hispanics and Asians already live in suburbs. Additionally, the suburbs are not as wasteful as they are made out to be. According to Kotkin, low-density suburbs only have marginally higher emissions of carbon dioxide and pollutants than high-density cities when common spaces and devices like elevators are taken into account. Pursuing a policy of “cramming,” then, would produce negligible environmental benefits at great expense to the comfort, privacy, and well-being of residents.”
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What’s the use of feminism today? Not much, according to Naomi Schaefer Riley: “if there were ever evidence that feminism is a set of useless tropes for young women today, Orenstein’s Girls and Sex is it, though Orenstein herself does not know it.”
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Robert Lax’s ambition: “Lax—beloved friend of Thomas Merton, most gifted student of Mark Van Doren, early and frequent contributor to the New Yorker, and a man who could count E. B. White as a fan—suffered no shortage of ambition, but it was a profoundly unusual sort. Early on in their friendship he told Merton that ‘all he had to do to become a saint was to want to be one.’ Lax appears to have honored his own counsel.”
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What’s the problem with America? According to Yuval Levin’s new book, The Fractured Republic, it’s a combination of “individualism, diversity, dynamism, and liberalization.”
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Britain’s navy would regularly beat American ships at sea during the War of Independence. What were harder to conquer were America’s rivers and lakes.
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Andrew Jackson was tough—he once won a duel after taking a bullet to the chest. As president, this was both an asset and a liability, as Geoffrey Norman shows in this week’s Weekly Standard: After he was elected, “Jackson quickly went to work on those patronage abuses he’d spoken of. He believed the government was full of corrupt officeholders who had been given their jobs as political favors. He seems to have been sincere in this belief and in his conviction that “rotation” of these positions would be good for the health of the republic. So his administration began removing people from their positions, replacing them with, inevitably, its ‘own people.’ One of his supporters in the Senate, William L. Marcy, of New York, made the case about as succinctly as possible, saying that in politics, as in war, ‘to the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.’ If the aim was to weed out corruption, the new administration came up short.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The Atlantic, James Parker argues that Les Murray is the greatest living English-language poet:
“If you keep up with poetry—the prizes, the names people sling around—you know about Les Murray. If you don’t, here he is. Leslie Allan Murray (who, to quote his biographer, Peter Alexander, can “read more than twenty languages, and lift the back of a motorcar by hand”) was born into rural squalor in New South Wales, Australia, in 1938. Holes in the walls, cooking over the fire, no running water, no electricity. His father tended cows and hacked timber, and young Les was often barefoot. The Bunyah valley, where the family farm was, had its own lingo: If you castrated an animal, you ‘picked his haggots.’ Misery disfigured the boy’s adolescence. His mother died when he was 12, leaving him alone with his stricken father; in high school, where he presented as a large and awkward yokel-brainiac, he was skillfully and pitilessly victimized…”
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“Murray converted to Catholicism in his 20s—this new book, like most of his more than three dozen others, is dedicated ‘To the glory of God’—and good art is good theology, the fearless embrace of creation. It’s everywhere in his work; it’s what stirs his word-centers. Look for examples and you’re instantly overwhelmed, jammed with a glut of rejoicings. How about the clownish, unpunctuated rush of “Downhill on Borrowed Skis”—fell straight down a hill / fell standing up by clenched will / very fast on toe-point swords—from 1999’s Conscious and Verbal? Or almost anything from his Dolittle-on-acid animal-ventriloquism act, 1992’s Translations From the Natural World (but especially, and most belovedly, “Two Dogs”: Her eyes go binocular … Bark tractor, / white bitterhead grub and pull scarecrow. Me! assents his urine)? Pick any page in 2012’s New Selected Poems and there’s Murray performing, with solemn hilarity, the religious office of the poet: God, at the end of prose, / Somehow be our poem— / When forebrainy consciousness goes.
“It’s been easy, as his name has steadily acquired its reputational ballast, to caricature Les Murray as an antimodern stodge. There have been ‘poetry wars’ and skirmishes with the media, and in the late ’90s he even helped the conservative prime minister at the time, John Howard, draft a new preamble to the Australian Constitution. But real poetry admits no stodginess, and the truth is that in his customized, snapshot, polyglot flexi-language, crusty old Les has invented a paradoxically perfect instrument for recording, and admiring, the phenomena—what he has called the ‘feral poetry’—of modernity.”
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Image of the Day: Lincoln’s Assassination
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Poem: Robert Rehder, “Habeus Corpus”
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