Michael Moore, the people’s filmmaker (or so he may imagine himself), is apparently stiffing “decent, hardworking people” for over $150,000 and then slandering them: “Michael Moore is a man who’s always stood up for the little guy, right? And wants people to do the right thing? Well do the right thing is what I’m saying …”
Anthony Burgess’s reviews reviewed: “As an author who’d started out as a critic (like Graham Greene and George Bernard Shaw, both of whom he writes about here with great insight), Burgess knew all too well that ‘Writing a book is damned difficult work, and you ought to praise any book if you can.’ There are hard-won accolades for Malcolm Lowry (‘one of the great major novelists’), Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (‘frightening in its originality’), and Nabokov (‘He did us all honour by electing to use, and transform, our language’). Always approaching a text from uncommon angles, Burgess drew upon his formidable knowledge of the novel, and a far from self-effacing wit. He was a willing provocateur who loved to temper his erudition by being skittish, controversial and tongue-in-cheek for the cheque.”
John Wilson reviews Donald Hall’s A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety: “Donald Hall’s splendid miscellany, was published in July, just a couple of weeks after his death at age eighty-nine. Although he was best known as a poet, I’ve always preferred his prose. There is no continuous narrative in A Carnival of Losses, and only a perfunctory gesture at organizing the contents: What we get is precisely what the subtitle promises, and I rejoice in it.”
René Girard’s structuralism led him to unexpected conclusions—a belief in God, for one: “The son of an irreligious and anti-clerical French republican father, Girard had presumed this argument would fit neatly within his leftist, skeptical view of things. But no. If one should awaken to this mimetic drive, one may also renounce the self it has formed and surrender to being formed by another—in the words of Christian theology, by God, the ‘absolute other.’ Such was the conversion of Dostoyevsky’s protagonists, Raskolnikov and Verkhovensky, and such was Girard’s. For the first time in his life, he became a practicing Catholic.”
The enduring relevance of James Fenimore Cooper: “Cooper’s frontier fiction still matters because it provides us with something many of our contemporaries love to sneer at: an ideal. In his Romantic vision of the American wilderness, his heroes have simple virtues such as courage, loyalty, honesty, and perseverance. Our age seems to relish moral complexity and ambiguity; our heroes are flawed, edgy, burdened with dark secrets. But Hawkeye, as Natty Bumppo is known to some, is brave and truthful. He knows who he is and puts his life on the line for his friends — whether white settlers or Native Americans. Sure, in real life, our loves contain self-interest, and our courage gets mingled with fear and doubt; but stories can offer us an ideal vision of the good life for which we can strive.”
Essay of the Day:
Bring back the Sabbath, William R Black argues in Aeon. “It is time for us, whatever our religious beliefs,” he writes, “to see the Sabbatarian laws of old not as backward and pharisaical, but rather as the liberatory statements they were meant to be”:
“‘Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy.’ The commandment smacks of obsolete puritanism – the shuttered liquor store, the cheque sitting in a darkened post office. We usually encounter the Sabbath as an inconvenience, or at best a nice idea increasingly at odds with reality. But observing this weekly day of rest can actually be a radical act. Indeed, what makes it so obsolete and impractical is precisely what makes it so dangerous.
“When taken seriously, the Sabbath has the power to restructure not only the calendar but also the entire political economy. In place of an economy built upon the profit motive – the ever-present need for more, in fact the need for there to never be enough – the Sabbath puts forward an economy built upon the belief that there is enough.”
Photo: Real Time Perseid
Poem: Jennifer Reeser, “Cloud Bank over Broken Arrow”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
