Reviews and News:
Statue of Liberty green: “As might be expected, when the Statue of Liberty turned green people in positions of authority wondered what to do. The Army was in charge of the Statue then, because it had been erected on Bedloe’s Island, which was an active military base. In 1906, New York newspapers printed stories saying that the Statue was soon to be painted. The public did not like the idea. The officer in charge of the base, Captain George C. Burnell, told the Times, ‘I wish the newspapers had never mentioned that. I am in receipt of bushels of letters on the subject, and most of them protest vigorously against the proposed plan. I can’t say now just what we will do, but we will have to do something.’ The Times reporter then went to the country’s largest bronze and copper manufacturer, on West Twenty-sixth Street, and asked if the Statue should be painted. The company V.P. said that painting it would be vandalism, and completely unnecessary because of the protective quality of the patina. The executive went on: ‘You may be surprised to know that for years we have been trying to imitate the color effect of the Statue of Liberty by artificial means in our copper work. By architects and artists generally this color effect is considered the type of perfection for this kind of metal. I remember once asking the late Stanford White [White had been murdered just the month before] how he wished us to finish the decorative metal work on a noted building that he was putting up. “Go down to Bedloe’s Island,” he said, “and study the Statue of Liberty. You will find the most beautiful example of metal coloring in existence in the world today.'”
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Are literary judgments subjective? Well, of course they are, since they are made by people. The question is whether they are merely subjective. To state the latter is to make a rather narrow claim about the nature of truth. “The scientistic objection to literary criticism is based on a naïve (albeit widespread) view that scientific forms of reasoning are the only valid ones. Isaiah Berlin pointed out that Marxism was permeated by what he called an infatuation with science. This infatuation, inspired by the evident technological and medical successes of science, permeates many aspects of modern world. The tendency to believe that only by placing literary studies on a scientific footing can literary studies be rendered respectable is no doubt one of the reasons for the trend towards pseudo-scientific theories in the humanities at large and in literary studies in particular. (Jargon is a key indicator of pseudo-science, and there is no shortage of jargon of literary theory.) Allied to this infatuation with science is a desire to disassociate literary studies from value judgment. According to this view, value judgments are merely subjective, and are to be ruthlessly ignored in the pursuit of objective theory.”
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A few days ago, we reported on Lionel Shriver being reprimanded for daring to state, among other things, that creating characters of other races or cultures is not an act of “cultural appropriation.” Here is the full text of her speech.
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Meet the new head of the Library of Congress.
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The pleasures of the encyclopedia and how it got one man out of prison: “A few months ago, Robin Woods drove seven hours from his home, in Maryland, to visit a man named Mark Stevens, in Amherst, Massachusetts. The two had corresponded for years, and they’d spoken on the phone dozens of times. But they had never met in person. Woods, who is bald and broad-shouldered, parked his car and walked along a tree-lined street to Stevens’s house. He seemed nervous and excited as he knocked on the door. A wiry man with white hair and glasses opened it. Within a few minutes, Woods, who is fifty-four, and Stevens, who is sixty-six, were sitting in the living room, talking about books. The conversation seemed both apt and improbable: when Woods first wrote to Stevens, in 2004, he was serving a sixteen-year prison sentence, in Jessup, Maryland, for breaking and entering. It was a book that had brought them together. ‘I never met you until today, but I love you very much,’ Woods told Stevens. ‘You’re a good man.’ At Jessup, Woods had begun reading Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia, a four-pound tome that starts with an entry on the German city of Aachen and ends with zymogen, a protein precursor to enzymes. He hoped to read all of its two and a half million words, and he spent hours flipping through the pages, following cross-references. ‘Once I would find a subject, it would lead me to the next,’ Woods told me. ‘You could put a whole story together.’ One day, he was puzzled to read an entry stating that the Turkic ruler Toghrïl Beg had entered Baghdad in 1955. He quickly realized that it should have said 1055. ‘I read it several times to make sure,’ he said. Then he turned to the masthead, which listed the editor, Mark A. Stevens. ‘Dear Mr. Stevens,’ Woods wrote in a letter, ‘I am writing to you at this time to advise you of a misprint in your FINE!! Collegiate Encyclopedia.’ He described the error and offered his thanks for Merriam-Webster’s reference books. ‘I would be lost without them,’ he wrote, unsure if he’d ever get a response.”
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58 generals and admirals sign letter opposing the design of the Eisenhower Memorial
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Essay of the Day:
Anson Rabinback revisits the composition and publication of Mein Kampf, recently reprinted in German for the first time since 1945, and takes a closer look what role the book played—if any—in shaping Nazi Germany:
“As is well known, Mein Kampf was initially composed in 1923–4 during the nine months Hitler spent in Landsberg prison serving his reduced (from five years) sentence for high treason. Contrary to popular myth, the first version was not dictated but typed. Prison authorities observed him working diligently on the manuscript for several hours each day. Hitler had already outlined some of its main themes in a series of newspaper articles and accumulated a substantial library supplied by a parade of admiring visitors. He later called Landsberg my ‘university at state expense’. The editors, however, give the unmatriculated Hitler low marks, calling Mein Kampf a ‘swamp of lies, distortions, innuendoes, half-truths and real facts’. A typical example is Hitler’s claim that during the Weimar Republic ‘no one’ took any interest in the war guilt clause in the Versailles Treaty whereas, from 1918 on, German governments expended considerable resources to refute the accusation.
“Anticipating its imminent completion – the original title was ‘4½ Years of Struggle, Against Stupidity and Cowardice’ – the Eher Verlag announced its publication in June 1924. But Hitler failed to keep to successive deadlines, a difficulty compounded by the conditions of his probation and the Bavarian government’s ban on the NSDAP and his public utterances. It finally appeared in July 1925 as Mein Kampf: A reckoning, the first of two volumes. In all likelihood, the more aggressive title was dropped so as not to endanger Hitler’s efforts to lift the ban on his public appearances. The second and more programmatic volume, prepared in his Obersalzburg retreat with the aid of a secretary, followed in December 1926. Until the electoral breakthrough of the National Socialist Party in September 1930, Mein Kampf registered lacklustre sales. A 1930 popular edition (Volksausgabe) combining the two volumes then went through multiple printings, reaching a total of 12.4 million copies by 1944.
“Mein Kampf was neither ignored nor was it merely decorative, as the myth of the book would later have it. It was rarely quoted and apart from minor alterations it remained largely unchanged over the years. Tellingly, there were no authorized abridged versions or compendia of its most quotable passages. Albrecht Koschorke usefully identified the tension between the book as content and as gesture, between intellectual incoherence and its status as the symbolic artefact of the Führer cult. As the totemic expression of the identity of thought and person, of Hitler’s singular path to racial and national awakening, its authority was ritualistic, immune to any demystifying critique of its content. In short, it never became the canonical statement of National Socialist doctrine. It was more suitable and more profitable as a present, for example, the ‘Marriage Edition’ given at civil ceremonies to all newly wed couples at state expense. Nonetheless, in his new biography, Volker Ullrich rightly observes that ‘it must be assumed that convinced National Socialists read at least major parts of it’, and the fact that it was borrowed frequently from libraries also speaks to a genuine popular interest.
“To call Mein Kampf ‘an unusually egocentric book’, as do the IfZ editors, is an understatement. It is worth recalling that its author, who subsequently gave his profession as ‘political writer’, was, at the time, a washed-up local demagogue who led a disastrous coup d’état and landed in jail. Mein Kampf turns this dismal state of affairs into the story of a ‘great historical personality’, a great theorist, organizer and leader – Hitler remarks on the rarity of this combination – capable of moving the masses.”
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Image of the Day: Philae Lander on Comet 67P
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Poem: Osip Mandelstam, “Moscow Drizzle.” Translated by Svetlana Lavochkina
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