Reviews and News:
Elizabeth Bishop is universally praised today, but does she have any shortcomings? A. M. Juster: “A ‘great’ poet…offers a vision and body of work that provokes strong emotions and worthwhile reflection. Bishop is too self-absorbed to meet that standard. Moreover, with just a few memorable exceptions, her subject matter has such limited range that one can create a template for much of her poetry.”
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George Smiley to return in new John le Carré novel: “The 85-year-old author is set to bring his most famous character in from the cold, 25 years after espionage classics Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy.”
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The adolescent charm of celebrity poetry: “Like teenagers, famous people are indulged and relatively gorgeous. They have so many options ahead of them. They survive on whims. They have other, smarter people on-hand to make all of their biggest decisions, which leaves them time to pursue their teen- or teen-adjacent interests…Like most teens, they sometimes make really bad, terribly serious art.”
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Listen to part of a lost, unfinished Liszt opera: The one act, written largely in shorthand “languished in a Weimar archive for nearly 170 years. David Trippett, a senior lecturer in music at the University of Cambridge who discovered it there a decade ago, has spent the last two years working on the 111-page manuscript.”
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Why adolescent boys shun the arts: “‘Society-wide cultural norms … define highbrow culture as belonging to the feminine sphere,’ notes a research team led by Ghent University sociologist Susan Lagaert.”
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Will Eisenhower ever have a fitting memorial?
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What’s the connection between Ahasuerus—the “doltish king of the book of Esther”—and the Wandering Jew?
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Why it smells so good after it rains.
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Essay of the Day:
In First Things, Christopher Caldwell argues that America’s opioid addiction is not easily beat. This is because addiction itself provides a sense of meaning in an increasingly meaninglessness world:
“In 1993, Francis F. Seeburger, a professor of philosophy at the University of Denver, wrote a profound book on the thought processes of addicts called Addiction and Responsibility. We tend to focus on the damage addiction does. A cliché among empathetic therapists, eager to describe addiction as a standard-issue disease, is that ‘no one ever decides to become an addict.’ But that is not exactly true, Seeburger shows. ‘Something like an addiction to addiction plays a role in all addiction,’ he writes. ‘Addiction itself . . . is tempting; it has many attractive features.’ In an empty world, people have a need to need. Addiction supplies it. ‘Addiction involves the addict. It does not present itself as some externally imposed condition. Instead, it comes toward the addict as the addict’s very self.’ Addiction plays on our strengths, not just our failings. It simplifies things. It relieves us of certain responsibilities. It gives life a meaning. It is a ‘perversely clever copy of that transcendent peace of God.’
“The founders of Alcoholics Anonymous thought there was something satanic about addiction. The mightiest sentence in the book of Alcoholics Anonymous is this: ‘Remember that we deal with alcohol—cunning, baffling, powerful!’ The addict is, in his own, life-damaged way, rational. He’s too rational. He is a dedicated person—an oblate of sorts, as Seeburger puts it. He has commitments in another, nether world.
“That makes addiction a special problem. The addict is unlikely ever to take seriously the counsel of someone who has not heard the call of that netherworld. Why should he? The counsel of such a person will be, measured against what the addict knows about pleasure and pain, uninformed. That is why Twelve Step programs and peer-to-peer counseling, of the sort offered by Goyer and his colleagues, have been an indispensable element in dragging people out of addiction. They have authority. They are, to use the street expression, legit.
“The deeper problem, however, is at once metaphysical and practical, and we’re going to have a very hard time confronting it. We in the sober world have, for about half a century, been renouncing our allegiance to anything that forbids or commands. Perhaps this is why, as this drug epidemic has spread, our efforts have been so unavailing and we have struggled even to describe it. Addicts, in their own short-circuited, reductive, and destructive way, are armed with a sense of purpose. We aren’t. It is not a coincidence that the claims of political correctness have found their way into the culture of addiction treatment just now. This sometimes appears to be the only grounds for compulsion that the non-addicted part of our culture has left.”
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Photo: Church of St. Thomas
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Poem: Christian Wiman, “Three Poems”
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