Is the Chapo Trap House book on socialism the dumbest book ever on the topic? Pretty much.
Woody Allen has released a new film every year for the past 44 years. Will he break his streak in 2019? Let’s hope so.
Over a hundred Facebook employees have criticized the social network for its “political monoculture”: “‘We are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views,’ Brian Amerige, a senior Facebook engineer, wrote in the post, which was obtained by The New York Times. ‘We claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology.’” I don’t comment on politics much in this space, but let me say, briefly, that I understand why this sort of thing frustrates conservatives, I do, but Facebook is a publically-traded company run by a board of directors who may decide whatever they want regarding company ethos. They have no obligation, unlike state- or federally-owned institutions, to be apolitical. If investors don’t like Facebook’s politics, they can sell their stock. If users don’t like it, they can stop using the platform. If employees don’t like it, they can quit or, better yet, start their own company. So what if Facebook says one thing and does another? Most companies do. If this bothers you, and, again, I can understand why it would, take real action. But enough with merely complaining.
My Ántonia at 100: “For years, critics categorized and dismissed Willa Cather as a mere regional writer, a Nebraskan and little more. To a great extent, this was true, as Cather often wrote about the American frontier, though she was equally adept at describing it in the Canadian hinterlands, on the Great American Plains, and in the American Southwest. In all her frontier novels, she focused on three vital themes: the fundamental necessity of personal virtue and sacrifice; the communal effort; and the unforgiving but sacramental elements of nature and, especially, the land itself. My Ántonia explores all three themes.”
Here’s a short video on the evolution of logo design at The Atlantic. Logos used to represent what companies did. Now they represent who companies are. A major step in this change was the logo for Chase Bank, which was one of the first to use an abstract design.
Saturday marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in America and the beginning of Pottermania. The New York Times has published a selection of memorabilia.
Bert Stratton is not digging the gig economy. (By the way, Stratton is one of the few remaining independent bloggers who is consistently worth reading. Check out his post on the late poet Tom Clark. Another favorite blogger of mine is Patrick Kurp. He posts a short literary reflection nearly every day at Anecdotal Evidence. Bookmark both and enjoy.)
Judith Thurman on what hyperpolyglots can teach us about language acquisition: “I didn’t expect Rojas-Berscia to master Maltese in a week, but I was surprised at his impromptu approach. He spent several days raptly eavesdropping on native speakers in markets and cafés and on long bus rides, bathing in the warm sea of their voices. If we took a taxi to some church or ruin, he would ride shotgun and ask the driver to teach him a few common Maltese phrases, or to tell him a joke. He didn’t record these encounters, but in the next taxi or shop he would use the new phrases to start a conversation. Hyperpolyglots, Erard writes, exhibit an imperative ‘will to plasticity,’ by which he means plasticity of the brain. But I was seeing plasticity of a different sort, which I myself had once possessed. In my early twenties, I had learned two languages simultaneously, the first by ‘sleeping with my dictionary,’ as the French put it, and the other by drinking a lot of wine and being willing to make a fool of myself jabbering at strangers. With age, I had lost my gift for abandon. That had been my problem with Vietnamese. You have to inhabit a language, not only speak it, and fluency requires some dramatic flair. I should have been hanging out in New York’s Little Saigon, rather than staring at a screen.”
Essay of the Day:
In Standpoint, Ian Thomson takes a closer look at Dante’s portrayal of Islam in The Divine Comedy. Edward Said argued that The Divine Comedy’s representation of Islam is “a peculiarly disgusting” example of Western Orientalism. That doesn’t do justice to the text:
“Dante saw Islam as a heretical interpretation of Christianity that aggravated East-West antagonisms. Ali is punished because he engineered a schism in the Islamic community (Ummah) by founding the Shia sect soon after the Prophet died in AD 63; this broke up the Caliphate and set Shiites murderously against Sunnis. While Ali is left fatally cloven, a sword-bearing devil slashes open the Prophet’s wound whenever it heals itself. Thus the dividers of humanity are themselves divided. Accompanied by the ghost of the Roman poet Virgil, his guide, Dante is struck dumb at the sight of the butchered Prophet, who prises open the wound in his chest for him to see, a gesture which intensifies his eternal fate.
The bowels hung out between his legs;
one could see his organs and the foul sack
that makes shit from all we swallow.
I stood and stared at him —
he gazed back, tearing open his chest
with both hands. ‘Look how Muhammad claws
And mangles himself, torn open down to the breast!
Ali goes screaming in front of me,
carved from his chin to his brow . . .’
“Here, conceivably, is the mystical Islamic legend of al-sharh or symbolic ‘opening up’ (the principle meaning of sharh is ‘explaining’, or ‘anatomising’) of Muhammad’s breast by God with the intent to purify him morally; however, Dante transforms it into a slice of proto-Burroughsian grand guignol. (When William Burroughs’s hallucinatory novel Naked Lunch was prosecuted for obscenity in Boston in 1965 — the uproarious ‘talking asshole’ chapter — Dante was cited in its defence.)
“There is much that is horrible in Canto 28, whose gleefully crude language evokes an image for us of dirty dead meat, butchers and excrement (as well as, perhaps, contemporary horror film). It is by no means certain that the date of Muhammad’s death was known in the West in Dante’s day. Dante may or may not have known that the Prophet Muhammad died on the same day as his muse and great love Beatrice dei Portinari — June 8; if so, the coincidence would surely have dismayed him.
“Muhammad’s physical sundering is certainly grotesque; but is it really, as Edward Said argues in his study of colonialism and empire, Orientalism (1978), ‘a peculiarly disgusting’ example of Western Orientalism and denigration of Islam? Dante’s ‘moral apprehension’ of Islam is part of the ‘Orientalist vision’ which turns Islam into a pariah religion, says Said, and Muhammad into an ‘imposter’ who is ‘always the Oriental’. However, all schismatics, not just the Prophet and Ali, suffer violence in The Inferno. Whether they are Muslim or Christian (most of them are Christian), Dante’s damned souls are frequently twisted, torn, pricked and gnawed at by devils or harpies. The Inferno, a giant judicial machine in which God’s justice is vindicated before all men, subjects Muslims and Christians alike to the same merciless sword. Edward Said does not (or perhaps does not wish to) acknowledge Dante’s ambiguous view of Islamic culture. The Prophet is vilified by Dante as a Christian schismatic; at the same time Dante displays a degree of sympathy for Arabic culture and even, according to one critic, borrows from an Islamic imagery of the afterlife.”
Photo: Kverkfjöll
Poem: Aaron Poochigian, “The Glassblower”
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