Reviews and News:
A fascinating history of Soviet Central Television: “Russia’s first attempt at the gameshow genre, Evening of Merry Questions (Vecher veselykh voprosov) was broadcast in May 1957. It was hoped that putting ‘unvarnished, unmediated ordinary people and everyday life on screen could convey the revolutionary transformation of Soviet life’. In fact, VVV primarily served to highlight the dangerously subversive consequences of live broadcasting. The show was dramatically axed on 29 September 1957, when an excessively easy audience contest led to the arrival of an unruly crowd of nearly 700 poorly dressed Muscovites — some drunk, one carrying a live chicken — who flooded into the theatre, overwhelming the stage and tearing down the curtain.”
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Elephants will no longer be used in Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus performances. PETA activists believe this is a stunning success and will greatly improve the elephants’ lives. Over at The Washington Post, Kristin Henderson argues it’s more complicated than that. “Is it inherently wrong to make elephants entertain us? Does it make a difference if, unlike Asia, they were born in captivity, so long as we work to give them a happy, healthy life? When elephants’ basic needs are met, when they grow excited in anticipation of something good and interact peacefully with those around them, that looks like something that could be called happiness. Watching Asia and her traveling sisters week after week, that was what I saw.”
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Old-school horror: “A severed head in a hatbox. Worms and caterpillars crawling over a decomposing face. Flies crawling into a screaming mouth. Worms crawling out between a woman’s lips. Another caterpillar, eating the eyeball from a human skull. Another severed head, with red roses in its empty eye sockets. A screaming head, in the process of being severed by a meat cleaver. These were a part of my childhood, and that of two generations of British children, from the 1960s to the 80s. These lurid images, and many more like them (exactly like them) adorned, if that’s the right word, the covers of a postwar publishing phenomenon. The Pan Book of Horror Stories ran to thirty volumes, published annually from 1959 to 1989, largely under the editorship of Herbert Van Thal.”
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Danny Heitman recommends we reread Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” this Halloween.
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In Case You Missed It:
A history of Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison: It “was a byword for barbarism, [but] some inmates had the time of their lives — smoking, carousing and playing shuttlecock.”
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The new segregation: “Probably the most corrosive thing about Safe Space ideology is that it encourages the segregation and racialisation of campus life. I witnessed this firsthand during a recent visit to an American campus, where I was greeted by the sight of students racially and ethnically segregated from one another while they were eating lunch. When I pointed out that the practice of segregated cafeteria tables violated the spirit of the academy, my host told me, ‘it’s their choice to find their own space’.”
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Beneath T. S. Eliot’s “ultra-civilized” exterior: “Eliot struck many of his contemporaries as a person not unlike J. Alfred Prufrock, ‘politic, cautious, and meticulous.’ Virginia Woolf mentioned him in a letter to her brother-in-law: ‘Come to lunch. Eliot will be there in a four-piece suit.’ With his fine manners and noble bearing, Eliot was all too restrained by his own sense of decorum and propriety. The novelist Aldous Huxley even called him ‘the most bank-clerky of all bank clerks’ after visiting Eliot at his office at Lloyd’s in London, reporting that he ‘was not on the ground floor nor even on the floor under that, but in a sub-sub-basement sitting at a desk which was in a row of desks with other bank clerks.’ Many years later, the poet was still fostering this bloodless caricature of himself, preferring to pretend that he was just ‘a mild-mannered man safely entrenched behind his typewriter.’ Not everyone believed the story as presented.”
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The problem with contemporary art is that unlike modernism it “‘isn’t even contemptuous of old standards—it is wholly indifferent to them . . . . Sincerity, formal rigor and cohesion, the quest for truth, the sacred and the transcendental—none of these is on the radar among the artists and critics who rule the contemporary scene.’ Instead, Identitarians are obsessed with ‘a set of all-purpose formulas about race, gender, class, and sexuality on the one hand and power and privilege on the other.'”
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Interview: Bill Kristol talks with Clarence Thomas about his jurisprudence, the late Antonin Scalia, and more.
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Classic Essay: Robert P. George, “Natural Law”
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