Reviews and News:
A forgotten poet for our times: “This coming April will see the fiftieth anniversary of the death of one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets, but one who has been unfairly purged from the history of English letters. Roy Campbell died in a car crash in Portugal on Saint George’s Day in 1957, but the damnatio memoriae against him by the literary establishment persists. Yet Campbell’s poetry is highly relevant today. He lived through and much of his poetry involves the great crisis of the West in the last century: the breakdown of traditional social relations, morality, and culture after the First World War, as well as the conflicts between liberal democratic capitalism, fascism, and communism. He wrote in traditional meters and forms with a clarity and precision that was unusual for his time, and which is in stark contrast to the obscurantism and fake subtlety of today’s poetry.”
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In praise of readability.
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A 42-year-old man who burned a Quran has been charged with blasphemy in Denmark.
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Elizabeth Bishop’s art of losing.
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William F. Buckley’s faith.
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Joseph Bottum on the novels of Peter S. Beagle: “Good as it is, The Last Unicorn marks the point where Beagle began to go astray—the point where his magic realism fell over entirely into fantasy, his charm began to serve no purpose other than charm, and he seemed to have nothing but mood to convey with his writing.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The Wilson Quarterly, Brandon Ambrosino argues that our relationship to the past has changed, and not for the better:
“To be sure, looking back at past cultures is nothing new. Renaissance artists looked back to classical Greeks and Romans, and Gothic architects looked back to their medieval forebears. But today’s looking back seems fundamentally different, as Reynolds puts it: We seem to be the first ‘society in human history so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past.’
“Think about the wildly popular I Love the [Decade] television series. Originally conceived and produced in Britain, the show was shown in America on VH1. The first incarnation, I Love the ’80s, aired in 2002, and was quickly followed with retrospectives on the ’70s and the ’90s. Interestingly, the latter premiered in 2004, not long after the close of the decade being explored. Even more curiously, I Love the New Millennium premiered in 2008 — before the decade was even finished, and long before the new millennium was over.
“The dictum ‘history isn’t merely what happened in the past’ was proven true by these series, which were less interested in explaining historical periods and more interested in reminding viewers that certain things existed at a particular time. Oh, remember Pogs? Oh, and Nickelodeon! The point wasn’t to understand or interrogate certain epochal phenomena, as Reynolds explains, but rather to nostalgize them, to get viewers to say, Aww, these things happened, or Cool, these things happened, or sometimes simply, Oh yeah, here are things that happened.
“This is a particularly postmodern way of looking at the past — not reverently, but bemusedly. In his discussion of the concept of ‘retro-chic,’ historian Raphael Samuel notes how postmoderns ‘make a plaything of the past,’ by cultivating an air of ‘detachment and ironic distance” from it. When they remake an original, they aren’t concerned with historical accuracy but with ‘decorative effect.’ To them, the past is something like a flea market, filled with various cultural signifiers that can be bought on the cheap and displayed anew in whichever context the new owner desires. There’s a sense in which the ethos of the various I Love The series has become our default way of viewing history: as our own ‘plaything’ (Samuel’s word), as a gigantic and ever-growing archive from which to borrow and repurpose the styles and slogans and entertainment that charm us.”
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Image: Lake Berryessa water hole
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Poem: Rachel Dacus, “Grains of Monet”
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