Reviews and News:
The arts are not therapeutic. According to a report by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council, “art and music are just as likely to entrench hostilities between communities as they are to ease them, while the statistical evidence suggesting that setting up theatre groups in prisons leads to lower rates of reoffending is weak at best.”
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Frank Gehry is the worst: “At a 2014 press conference in Oviedo, Spain, a reporter asked him how he would respond to ‘charges that his buildings were more in the line of dazzling spectacles than functional architecture.’ This, understandably, hit a nerve. Gehry scowled and flipped the bird to the reporter who had asked what was, after all, a very reasonable question. He then, disjointedly, added that ’98 percent of everything that is built and constructed today is pure shit,’ and that ‘Once in a while, however, a group of people do something special. Very few, but God, leave us alone.’ Gehry told the reporter not to ask ‘questions as stupid as that one.'”
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Christopher O. Tollefsen reviews Christopher Kaczor’s The Gospel of Happiness.
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The eugenics sham: “Former New York Times editorial board member Adam Cohen recounts this ugly chapter in American history in Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck. Cohen proves himself a capable and comprehensive historian, documenting the pseudoscientific, bigoted, and fecundophobic tendencies of eugenics, a ‘secular religion’ that inspired state and local governments to render more than 60,000 Americans impotent and infertile over a few decades. He offers a point-by-point refutation of twentieth century eugenics: how its proponents ginned up evidence through misapplied IQ tests and fudged statistics at the Eugenics Record Office; how their attempts to control ‘defective germplasm’ were doomed to failure; how the entire ideology was fueled, at base, by class hatred.”
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Michiko Kakutani reviews Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time: “It’s a book that attempts to turn the composer’s complex relationship with the Soviet authorities into an Orwellian allegory about the plight of artists in totalitarian societies — and a Kafkaesque parable about a fearful man’s efforts to wrestle with a surreal reality, even as he questions his complicity with the system.”
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The Prohibition fiasco: “In the end, most Americans concluded that highly coercive policing, a massive administrative apparatus, and a hefty tax burden were too high a price to pay for slightly healthier livers and supposedly cleaner, more godly behavior. It was this mismatch between moral strictures and state structures that produced the great disaster of Prohibition.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The University Bookman, Tobias J. Lanz reconsiders Ernst Jünger’s 1977 novel Eumeswil:
“Despite Jünger’s clear rejection of Nazism and his apolitical postwar life, he was never forgiven by the literary establishment for his active but brief dalliance in right-wing politics. Criticism and controversy followed him until his death at age 102, in part because he never relinquished his elitist ideals nor ever apologized for anything he wrote or said. More, he never ceased critiquing the progressive historical vision of the political left. Most significantly, he saw little difference between modern right- and leftwing ideologies. Both are destructive.
“This is what makes the republication of the novel Eumeswil important. In this book Jünger names the powerful authoritarian features in our present postmodern world. These are often masked by the language of peace and equality and the impressive achievements of science and technology. Humanity appears freer than ever. But Jünger reveals his doubts in Eumeswil.”
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Image of the Day: Living off-the-grid in Finland
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Poem: Sarah Holland-Batt, “Thalassography”
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