Reviews and News:
Dantan the Younger’s musical caricatures: “Though Dantan sculpted his famous personalities from all walks of life—medicine, literature, the stage, industrialists and savants, and prominent English—his musical charges are the most delightful of his work. These days we may not often recognize the names of many of Dantan’s subjects; nonetheless their charges never fail to make us smile—and even laugh out loud.”
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Whitman’s first rule of manliness and health: eat meat.
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Two new studies suggest there is confusion about the meaning of empathy and its usefulness in creating a better society.
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Cannibalism is rare and very unhealthy.
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America’s atheists: “Mencken may never have been a believer, but he could not avoid engaging, sometimes sympathetically, with the religious convictions of others, even as he pushed to confront the faithful with their practical, this-world immorality of their religious beliefs.”
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Russia’s new ideology? “Patriotism rooted in Christianity is the ideological solution that Putin has found to legitimize his authority and re-build the country. It does not mean that the president, a former KGB officer, has suddenly repented and became a Christian. It rather means that Putin proved to be a pragmatic politician, who re-discovered the potential and the power of the Russian Pravoslavie, the ‘right faith.'”
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Tickets for the 2017 Walker Percy Weekend are now available. I went to the inaugural weekend in 2014 and highly recommend it.
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Essay of the Day:
In Tablet, Daniel Bezalel Richardsen writes about the life and work of linguist David Shulman:
“Scholar David Shulman has made an improbable journey, geographically and academically: from small-town Iowa to Jerusalem, where the Hebrew University professor received the Israel Prize in 2016 for his research on southern India.
“The rigor in Shulman’s erudition is tempered by a deep pathos and love for his subject. The acclaimed Indian novelist Kiran Desai professed being ‘moved to tears’ on reading Shulman’s travelogue Spring, Heat, Rains: A South Indian Diary. Commenting on Shulman’s More Than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India, Yigal Bronner, a specialist of Sanskrit poetry, writes that it is ‘hard to compare Shulman’s work with any other book because nobody has ever tried to accomplish anything remotely similar.’
“Shulman’s latest offering is the book Tamil: A Biography, a detailed story of one of the few ancient languages to maintain an unbroken vim and vigor over the millennia among its over 80 million speakers around the world, myself included. One of the most astonishing revelations in Shulman’s biography of the language is that Tamil makes an appearance in the Hebrew Bible through its linguistic antecedent, Dravidian…”
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Photo: Fishing
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Poem: Jason Gray, “Relativity”
