Reviews and News:
Barton Swaim never cared for the seemingly “deliberately incoherent” music of Gustav Mahler until he attended a performance of the composer’s Ninth Symphony in Edinburgh: “The SRSO played cleanly and lyrically but with violent lunacy at the right moments, even the notoriously difficult brass unerring in its execution. Indeed in Ninth’s tutti passages, and particularly in the haywire coda of the third movement, the orchestra was almost deafening—aurally and mentally devastating, no doubt as Mahler intended it to be. As I listened to this colossal work of art, engrossed by it and actually enjoying it for the first time, I tried to think of an analogy for what Mahler had done. Writers trying to find ways of explaining Mahler’s music frequently draw on images and metaphors of death, and fair enough; the Ninth Symphony’s final movement is pretty obviously a long, death-like farewell. But there is far more than death here. Perhaps Mahler was attempting to do something akin to what the writer of Genesis attempted in narrating the life of Joseph. It is a sprawling story that takes in greatness of character and inextinguishable human love, but also mischance, pettiness, hatred, stupidity, deceit, self-absorption, greed, and of course death. The story is an intensely beautiful one, including though it does many unsavory details one might have assumed a myth-making historian would leave unrecorded. It is the story (to put it briefly) of how one vicious and cowardly act of human trafficking turns out to be, in the sublime superintendence of God’s quiet governance, the very thing that keeps a tribe of families from destruction. ‘You meant evil against me,’ says Joseph at the story’s end, ‘but God meant it for good.’ So much of a Mahler symphony is jarring and confusing and unhappy, but somehow he stitches its themes together in ways that always seem natural—his transitions never sound forced—and the whole, once you’re able to take it in, forms a thing of great humaneness and power. I wonder the degree to which Mahler had internalized this Judaic aesthetic, if that’s not an unduly literary way to put it.”
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Kevin Williamson reviews J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and argues that it’s not really about the poor whites of Appalachia as much as it is about a dysfunctional middle-class family and the bad decisions of a mother: “The economics of Vance’s life are worth noting. As he reports, the chaos of his upbringing—at one point, he’s dividing his time between three different households, and most of the members of his tight clan have different surnames—is real and it is awful, but it has little to do with economic opportunity per se. His family doesn’t live in the poor section of town, and they have money to provide him with all sorts of desirable things, including golf lessons. He gets a nice set of secondhand MacGregors—being a poor hillbilly ain’t what it used to be.When he needs a decent job to put aside some money to finance his move to New Haven, he finds one working in a floor-tile warehouse for $13 an hour with no trouble…The family does not start off poor—it achieves poverty under the expert ministrations of Vance’s mother. She gets herself into a domestic-abuse case—during one of her theatrical fits, she threatens to kill Vance and herself, and then commences beating the terrified child, who bolts from the family car (of course it happens in a car) while on a highway and then runs to the house of a stranger begging for shelter. The homeowner takes him in and calls the police. Of course, Vance’s grandparents do everything they can to protect his mother from the consequences of her actions, including pressuring little J. D. to lie about the episode in court. They also hire very expensive attorneys for her. That kind of help does not come cheap. Between the legal fees, the rehab facilities, the never-to-be-repaid ‘loans’ during spells of self-inflicted unemployment, Vance’s mother bleeds her parents white over the course of her adult life. By the time Mamaw dies and Vance is left to settle her estate, her only remaining asset is her house. If she hadn’t died at the peak of the housing bubble, Vance estimates, her estate would have been bankrupt. Thought experiment: Imagine these people living on minimum wage or welfare. Imagine them living in a black ghetto in Detroit rather than a white ghetto in Ohio.”
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Adam Kirsch finds that Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry unwittingly captures the dead end of contemporary poetry: “The Romantics, faced with a disenchanted universe, attempted to discover a new source of enchantment in the human imagination, and poetry became a metaphor for that creative, life-enhancing power. Poetry used to mean poems. Now poems began to seem like just one habitation, and far from the grandest, of the force that is poetry. Naturally, this fateful division between poetry and poems had enormous consequences for the way poems were written. After all, if poetry is ineffable and infinite, there is no reason it should be bound by the mechanical laws of meter and rhyme. In the modern age, poetry became antinomian. Thus we find Emerson arguing, in his essay ‘The Poet,’ that ‘it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.’ The metaphor of growth cancels out the old metaphor of craft. For Horace, a poem was something you had to learn how to make, at the expense of great effort. For Keats, ‘if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all’… Like a Romantic poet, Lerner yearns for a transformation that poetry can intimate and promise but never enact. What he largely ignores in his book is the idea that poetry can also be a means of reconciling us to our place, to ‘the very world, which is the world / Of all of us,—the place where, in the end, / We find our happiness, or not at all,’ as Wordsworth wrote.”
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The versatile pit bull: “The dogs were once used as some of the most successful acting dogs of all time. Pete the Pup of Our Gang and Little Rascals fame was a pit, and the dogs were used as mascots at a handful of universities, including Harvard and Columbia, in the early twentieth century. Two pit bulls participated in World War I battles alongside American troops, including a dog named “Sergeant” Helen Kaiser, who survived mustard gas attacks and shrapnel wounds and was awarded the French Croix de Guerre two times for bravery. Pit bulls were subsequently deployed as American military police dogs in World War II.In fact, pit bulls were the symbol of American fortitude through the Second World War. Recruiting posters for the military used the pit bull to represent America, as against the English bulldog, German dachshund, and Russian wolfhound. Although not the biggest dog, the pit bull was thought to be affable but not obsequious, friendly but, if necessary, fierce—qualities that distinguished America from the rest of the world.”
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The value of reading old books: “Modern books can be beautiful. Some will become classics, and we should read many of them, regardless of what we imagine future generations will think. They are our books, after all. But sometimes the most exhilarating departure from normal is to travel to another world. Old books are the ticket.”
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David S. D’Amato reviews Edward O’Donnell’s “fascinating” and “perplexing” Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: “Longtime students of Henry George and his ideas can expect to find Professor O’Donnell’s picture of George at times quite unrecognizable, a product of oversimplified and often mistaken notions at least as much as George’s actual words. Here we find George, the lifelong champion of laissez-faire, recast as among its loudest opponents—the principled libertarian portrayed as an activist for generic state socialism. It is particularly distressing that an ostensible expert on the man should fall into this trap given that George himself stands as one of the century’s most resounding voices for laissez-faire free trade. And this is no mere interpretation of George, meant to serve cynically some libertarian agenda; rather it is the consistent testimony of George’s writings on political economy, repeated again and again, that laissez-faire is to be promoted and desired by the working class. Indeed, George’s critiques of his laissez-faire fellow travelers take them to task for being insufficiently true to their favorite idea—for failing to be ‘free traders in the full sense of the term.’ He extolled the ‘harmony and beauty of free trade,’ yet hidden and unlocked, buried under the accumulated privilege and ill-gotten gains of the rich. Today’s facile and deeply confused political spectrum simply cannot hold a thinker like George.”
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Essay of the Day:
In a review of Anthony Gottlieb’s The Dream of Enlightenment, Thomas Nagel explains what’s old and what’s new in Enlightenment philosophy and where the six philosophers of Gottlieb’s history both agreed and disagreed (which Gottlieb doesn’t always understand):
“The metaphysical and epistemological problems that arose out of the scientific revolution are particularly difficult and abstract, and the responses of these thinkers are among the most formidable structures that philosophy has produced. They were concerned, as philosophers have always been, to understand the nature of reality in the broadest sense: what kinds of things and facts ultimately constitute everything there is. They were also concerned with whether we humans have the capacity to discover the answers to those questions, and if not, what limits to our knowledge are imposed by our finite human faculties. The advances of the scientific revolution gave these problems a new form.”
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Image of the Day: Giovinazzo
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Poem: J. A. Gray, “The Ten Suggestions”
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