Reviews and News:
Flannery O’Connor’s “vision”: “This spring I reread ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’ with students in an introductory literature course at the United States Military Academy, where I teach. To my great surprise, only two plebes—as freshmen at West Point are called—out of maybe fifty or so had encountered O’Connor in high school. The jury was out on her stories: many of those who liked “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (a violent and funny story) disliked ‘The River’ (a violent and sad story), and vice versa. Some cadets saw the stories’ significance come into focus when we looked for religious themes; others lacked a frame of reference to understand what is at stake in baptism, say, or redemption at the eleventh hour. But they did, almost to a cadet, admire O’Connor’s descriptions: the mean trees sparkling, a woman’s face ‘as broad and innocent as a cabbage,’ the oversize peppermint stick that unnervingly cues us into the demonic and pedophilic nature of the piglike Mr. Paradise. ‘I see it,’ said one cadet, a football player, about the cabbage face, as I recall. ‘Good,’ I replied. ‘That’s exactly what O’Connor wanted you to do.’ And it’s true. Her vivid descriptions are carefully crafted to pull off exactly that magic trick of fiction: to replicate or recreate an image originating in one person’s mind (the writer’s) in the mind of another person (the reader). In her fiction, O’Connor deliberately tried to alter her readers’ perception, to get them to notice what she called the ‘distortions’ of modern life and to look at the created world closely enough that they might perceive in its depths proof of a creator. For secular audiences, she saw little point in subtlety, famously explaining her grotesque style in this way: ‘To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.'”
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Did van Gogh cut off his ear because of his brother’s engagement? “The artist cut off most of his ear during a psychotic episode about 12 hours after he learned of the engagement, which is ‘not something you would do if you welcomed the news, by any means,’ Mr. Bailey said in a phone interview on Tuesday. In the past, most scholars have credited the mental breakdown to a fight van Gogh had that same day with the painter Paul Gauguin, a friend of his. Mr. Bailey believes the engagement news to be a much more significant disturbance than the fight, and said that van Gogh’s fears of abandonment may have been stirred.”
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Wesley Hill on Nicholas Wolterstorff’s shallow argument for same-sex marriage: “Nicholas Wolterstorff’s case for recent case for same-sex marriage, delivered as a lecture at Neland Avenue Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids in mid-October, bears many of the virtues we’ve come to count on from the Yale professor emeritus of philosophical theology: lucidity, an intuitive and easy-to-follow structure, a winsome recourse to down-to-earth illustrations, a light touch, and an obvious personal concern for real, suffering Christians. But one virtue it does not possess is interpretive charity. Indeed, I’m trying to remember when I last encountered an argument for changing the church’s historic view of marriage that engaged so flippantly and superficially with the Christian tradition. If, as Donald Davidson has taught us, hermeneutical charity is the effort to maximize the sense of views we oppose and to search for all possible areas of agreement whenever we engage a view whose truthfulness and coherence we doubt, then I feel bound to conclude—alas—that Wolterstorff’s lecture lacks such charity almost entirely.
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Colley Cibber reconsidered: “Colley Cibber was unfortunate in his enemies. Alexander Pope made him King of the Dunces in The Dunciad, Henry Fielding pilloried him in the opening chapter of Joseph Andrews and in a number of plays, and Samuel Johnson ridiculed him. Posterity has paid more attention to the mockery of these great writers than to Cibber’s undoubted – and rather extraordinary – achievements. Elaine McGirr’s Partial Histories is an impassioned and unashamedly partisan attempt at reclamation.”
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The “quietly human…immortality” of David Constantine’s ghosts.
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Essay of the Day:
In The Claremont Review of Books, A. M. Juster takes stock E. E. Cummings’s accomplishments and shortcomings in a review of a book on the poet’s debt to classical literature:
“Academia never embraced Cummings as fervently as it did other leading Modernist poets, but after World War II Cummings rapidly acquired a large popular following, attracting some 7,000 people in 1957 to an outdoor reading in Boston, an unimaginable event today. In the 1960s a few of his more accessible poems resonated with counterculture readers, who tended to see “I sing of olaf glad and big” as a celebration of the draft protestor and ‘in Just-‘ as a celebration of sexual liberty. Idealistic English teachers of this period also perceived his frequent use of the lower-case as an exercise in subversive egalitarianism, although—contrary to public belief—Cummings preferred a traditional mix of the upper and lower cases for his own name.
“When the Vietnam era ended, enthusiasm for Cumming’s work diminished, but did not disappear. Harvard’s Helen Vendler accelerated his slide with colorful, often perplexing invective, calling his intricately layered, densely allusive work the ‘murderous devaluation of the intellect.’ As Rosenblitt accurately but gingerly notes at several places in the book, other scholars’ more prosaic interpretations have also misunderstood the Cummings legacy.
“Rosenblitt brings to her subject an encyclopedic understanding of all the conflicting traces of his life—not just his published poetry and prose, but also his juvenilia, artwork, translations, correspondence, drafts, unpublished work, and book ownership. On this basis she corrects, deftly but politely, her peers’ misreadings and factual errors, and also enhances her insightful close readings of the key poems.
“Rosenblitt carefully documents Cummings’ bifurcated interest in classical literature: he completed every class in ancient Greek that Harvard offered but did not major in Classics because he did not want to satisfy the Latin requirement. She rightly focuses on his rapture when reading Sappho and his concurrently evolving prosody, then makes a compelling case that many of his early experiments with prosody were inspired by the lacunae, fractured lines, uneven margins, and physical appearance of the extant papyri of Sappho.
“Despite Cummings’ Hellenism, many scholars have noted that his poems reveal the influence of Virgil and Horace. Rosenblitt discerns that these influences are largely mediated through an unexpected source, Paradise Lost. Cummings’s use of Milton, however, does not lead to automatic deference: Rosenblitt highlights Cummings’ rejection of Milton’s epic ambition in the 1958 book, 95 Poems, as well as his many reinventions of Paradise Lost.
“At Harvard, Cummings immersed himself in the Modernist movement, meeting several key figures and learning all he could about Modernist poetry and theory but also its art, particularly Cubism. Rosenblitt paints a thorough picture of the budding Modernist’s admiration of—and rivalry with—Eliot, Pound, and Williams. She argues convincingly that Cummings’ overlooked parody of Eliot’s The Wasteland was a critique of all the early Modernist icons, not just sniping at Eliot.
“As Rosenblitt explores Cummings’ modernism and classicism, she identifies a number of unappreciated influences on his poetry. She skillfully demonstrates, for example, that a five-poem sequence in Cummings’s 1922 book Tulips & Chimneys echoes and plays with Blake’s ‘Chansons Innocentes.’ She also walks the reader through his complicated reactions to Tennyson, Swinburne, Freud, and others.
“Unfortunately, Rosenblitt’s generous spirit and admiration for her subject occasionally constrain her from making harsh judgments about Cummings’ character and work. As with most early Modernists except Eliot, Cummings defined himself more by his rejection of values (particularly those of his clergyman father) than by adherence to an alternative set of values.”
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Image of the Day: Rainbow in Fiordland National Park
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Poem: Conor O’Callaghan, “Trailer Park Études”
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