Reviews and News:
Anthony Esolen on the politics of identity and the liberal arts.
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John Osborne “was the right man at the right time. His plays caught the national mood of Suez, CND and the New Left. In The Entertainer Archie’s daughter Jean has just been to a demonstration in Trafalgar Square. Above all, his plays spoke to young theatregoers: the duffel-coat generation who embraced the new culture of rock and roll, Soho cafés and irreverent comedy. Osborne seemed a spokesman for a new generation.” Wait, who was John Osborne, again?
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Erri De Luca’s wins Literary Review‘s Bad Sex in Fiction Award: “The winning entry is a reminder that, even in the wake of Brexit, Bad Sex knows no borders.”
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William Logan reviews Johnny Cash’s poems and other recent volumes: “Good song-writers don’t need to be considered poets.”
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Modern Age has two essays on immigration and America that may be of interest to readers. We have long been a multicultural nation, Michael Barone argues in one, and should not worry about continuing to be one: “In the twenty-first century, Americans are being told that this country is, for the first time, a multicultural society. The supposed contrast is with an America populated entirely with English-speaking people from the British Isles and parts of western Europe—a caricature of the pride taken by Daughters of the American Revolution in their pure and elevated ancestry. But at least the more knowledgeable of the Daughters realize what the Founding Fathers certainly knew, that the nation whose independence they asserted, at the risk of their lives, their liberty, and their sacred honor, was anything but a homogeneous polity, in ethnic origin, in religion, and of course in race: the one-fifth of colonial Americans who were slaves were already creating their own institutional churches and self-help associations. American English had become distinctive enough to provoke sneers in Britain, and there were different kinds of American English—New England and southern variants—with some of the Scots-Irish barely intelligible, and the German of the Pennsylvania Dutch even less so.” Early Americans, Chilton Williamson Jr. argues in another, viewed immigration as both unnecessary and undesirable, like many people today, and vox populi should rule: “Whether the United States should allow any immigration at all is a question that has never been considered by our national government, but rather how much immigration, what kind of immigrants, and from where. Yet only after that existential question had been framed and carefully considered should the immigration issue have been passed on to the stage of detailed policymaking. The American Founders believed immigration to have been quite as unnecessary, and indeed undesirable, as the American majority does today.”
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“The popular image of Scandinavians is full of contradictions. Denmark, Norway and Sweden must by several measures be the richest, happiest and most successful societies the world has ever known; yet their inhabitants are famous for melancholy, now familiar again through the depressed heroes of Scandi noir crime fiction: Wallander, Martin Beck, Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole. Scandinavia is also famous for hedonism and sexual freedom; yet the plots of Scandi noir stories often turn not on crimes but on old sins: adultery, incest, abuse. Likewise, the Scandinavian countries are probably in practice the world’s most egalitarian – but if you believe Stieg Larsson, Sweden in particular is run by far-right cabals including neo-Nazis and the families of former collaborators, a memory reinforced for Norway by the Anders Breivik massacre of July 22, 2011. What causes these extreme clashes of light and darkness?”
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Remains of 5,000-year-old Egyptian city discovered.
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Essay of the Day:
In The New Criterion, James Panero takes stock of the museum today:
“Writing nearly twenty years ago on ‘the ongoing transformation of the American museum,’ the late theorist Stephen E. Weil identified how museums were moving from ‘being about something to being for somebody.’ This is a phrase that has been taken up by critics of contemporary museum culture, but for Weil it signaled a positive change, a momentous redirection he traced back to the cultural revolts of the 1960s. The museum of the past, he said, was content to care for the ‘oldfashioned satisfaction,’ ‘aesthetic refreshment,’ and ‘pleasure and delight’ of its permanent collection—or what the museum director Barbara Franco derided as the ‘salvage and warehouse business.’ Through new evaluation standards tied to continued tax-exempt status, Weil argued, the museum of today ‘is being told that to earn its keep requires that it be something more important than just an orderly warehouse.’ In other words, through historical inevitability and government coercion, Weil concluded, the museum of tomorrow must come to see itself not as the steward of a collection of objects but as ‘an instrument for social change.’
“Twenty years on, the prophecy is coming true—but with increasingly ominous and destructive results, especially for collecting museums. In 1997 the Brazilian museum director Maria de Lourdes Horta envisioned how ‘a museum without walls and without objects, a true virtual museum, is being born’ to be ‘used in a new way, as tools for self-expression, self-recognition, and representation.’ Or as Neal Benezra, the director of sfmoma, more recently observed, ‘times have changed. Back then, a museum’s fundamental role was about taking care of and protecting the art, but this century it’s much more about the visitor experience.’
“Over the last few decades the American museum has only been too successful at turning this vision into reality. By the numbers, museums have become thriving enterprises, competing and ballooning into what we might call a museum industrial complex. Today there are 3,500 art museums in the United States, more than half of them founded after 1970, and 17,000 museums of all types in total, including science museums, children’s museums, and historical houses. Attendance at art museums is booming, rising from 22 million a year in 1962 to over 100 million in 2000. At the same time, and hand in hand with these numbers, billions of dollars have been spent on projects that have largely focused on expanding the social-service offerings at these institutions—restaurants, auditoriums, educational divisions, event spaces—rather than additional rooms for collections. At the present rate, the museum of the future will virtually be a museum without objects, as new non-collection spaces dwarf exhibition halls with the promise that no direct contact with the past will disturb your meal. As London’s Victoria and Albert Museum once advertised, the museum of the future will finally be a café with ‘art on the side.'”
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Image of the Day: Black skies above Mosul
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Poem: William Logan, “Misericordia”
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