Reviews and News:
Why Tolstoy played tennis: “Tolstoy spent hours and hours each week on a court he had set up at Yasnaya Polyana, the four-thousand-acre estate he owned, some hundred and twenty miles south of Moscow…Sergeenko describes an after-dinner game he witnessed: the players—Tolstoy, gray and sunken-cheeked, among them—running and playing and shouting. ‘And it is easily comprehensible that Lyeff Nikolaevitch [Tolstoy] is passionately fond of this game,’ Sergeenko writes, as ‘it affords considerable work for his muscles. He plays ardently and with fire, but without losing his temper. This constant work upon himself is to be felt even in a game of lawn-tennis.'”
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Saint Augustine among the barbarians: “In a series of letters to Boniface, the confused Roman commander, the Saint in no uncertain terms argued that secular authorities had the duty to protect the social order and the populations entrusted to them.”
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Erik Satie, oddball modernist.
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Is free will an illusion?
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In search of Emily Dickinson’s gardens.
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The pleasures of unfinished art: “Unfinished…has brought together a number of oddball works that reasonably can be called accidents of history: Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Ria Munk III, for example, incomplete because the artist died while painting it, or Benjamin West’s painting of the Founding Fathers negotiating a peace settlement with Britain, incomplete because the losing side refused to sit for the portrait. These works are interesting in their way. More interesting are the works done in the non-finito style: in other words, works that were left ‘unfinished’ intentionally as a matter of aesthetic, with some details left sketchy or raw.”
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Essay of the Day:
In First Things, Mark Bauerlein argues that whatever other explanations we might give of student protests on college campuses today, they show, at the very least, a lack of trust:
“When I describe [my college application] experience to high-achieving students today, it seems to come from another universe. To have been so casual about so fateful an outcome as college admissions seems nothing short of crazy.
“‘How many AP courses did you have to take?’ they ask. Answer: There were no AP courses in my high school.
“‘What did you write on your personal essay?’ I didn’t write one.
“‘For how long did you study for the SAT?’ Nobody I knew did any test prep, and it never occurred to me.
“‘What extracurriculars—music, sports, volunteering, prizes, science fairs . . .?’ None. Working at Kentucky Fried Chicken on the Rockville Pike wouldn’t count.
“Back in 1977, you see, UCLA took students with good grades and scores, that’s all, and students went there because, well, that’s just where you went. It wanted little information from me, and I needed no more information about it.
“Today, college admission for high achievers is a hazardous process. Selective colleges turn it into an exquisite filtering operation. They set benchmarks for grades and scores, then probe the applicants’ deepest feelings (in the personal essay), social virtues (volunteering, etc.), and how the applicant will enhance campus diversity. Eighteen-year-olds are scrutinized like racehorses at auction with some selected and others found wanting.
“For their part, applicants visit campus and get a feel for the place. They check official sources (Princeton Review, Fiske Guide) and unofficial ones (College Confidential, Yik Yak). My brother and I assumed UCLA had plans for us. Once we arrived and got a few terms of exposure, those plans would materialize within the institution’s framework. But the twenty-first-century achiever has his own plan that is more or less independent of the school he attends. The only question is whether the chosen school will serve it well. He, too, is weighing and comparing as a buyer of an educational credential. Neither party has much faith in the other.”
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Image of the Day: Tornado Alley
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Poem: Amit Majmudar, “The Interrogation”
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