Reviews and News:
Is Mark Rothko overrated? Maureen Mullarkey argues he is in a review of Christopher Rothko’s new book on his father: “The text makes instructive reading, largely as inoculation against the fallacy in which it is drenched. Christopher Rothko’s rhetorical posturing mirrors Mark Rothko’s delusional grandeur.”
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The crisis of English prose: “English prose is now in direr straits: not only are examples of clear and attractive writing few and far between, they are also depressingly hard to unearth. To what institutions or individuals should one turn nowadays for lucid and cogent discussion? Political discourse is more obfuscatory and bet-hedging than ever; newspapers are adopting an increasingly pared-down, smart-phone-friendly register; TV newscasters are finding more banal ways to convey complex information to the viewer; documentaries shrink from documenting and discussing the difficult for fear of taxing their dwindling audiences; much of the public sector and business world has moved beyond meaningful verbal communication: clients and customers are less trouble when bemused than when engaged.”
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The life and work of Lord Acton: “Contradictions in Acton’s life and views abound: although he never graduated from university, he received several prestigious honorary doctor’s degrees and from 1895 to his death held the chair of Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University…when his head was measured to make sure the cap fit correctly, it turned out that he had the largest head on record at the university; ruefully, he commented in a letter that he imagined that poet Robert Browning, who also had a large head, might take umbrage.”
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A history of exotic animals in England.
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Why did a ship that was close enough to the Titanic to rescue all her passengers and crew do nothing? David Dyer explores this and other questions in his new historical novel, The Midnight Watch.
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The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder shows the artful simplicity of her prose and her gift for narrative and description. It is “the valedictory volume” of her work.
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Essay of the Day:
In The New Criterion, Gary Saul Morson argues that Crime and Punishment is one of the most scathing critiques of “the intelligentsia” in modern literature:
“Raskolnikov is mad for rationality. In addition to radical amoralism, he has also invoked another form of rationalism, then called utilitarianism, as a justification for the murder he plans to commit. His victim is to be an old pawnbroker, a greedy, cruel woman who not only preys upon her poor customers but also mistreats her kindly, simple-minded sister Lizaveta. Logic itself, he decides, prescribes her death.
“According to utilitarianism, the fundamental criterion of morality is the greatest happiness of the greatest number. What if that entails murder? Sitting in a tavern, Raskolnikov overhears two students posing that very question. ‘On the one side,’ one student explains, ‘we have a stupid, senseless, spiteful, ailing, horrid old woman, not simply useless but doing actual mischief, who has not an idea what she is living for and who will die in a day or two in any case. . . . On the other hand, fresh young lives thrown away for want of help by thousands.’
“The conclusion is mathematically certain: ‘Kill her, take her money and with the help of it devote oneself to the service of humanity and the good of all. . . . One death and a thousand lives in exchange—it’s simple arithmetic!’ You can’t argue with arithmetic. For that matter, since the pawnbroker’s life is not just valueless but of negative value—she does positive harm—it would be moral to kill her even without using the money for a good purpose. Indeed, it is immoral not to kill her, since her death would increase society’s total utility.
“Raskolnikov is struck by the coincidence that the students are discussing just what he is thinking, but Dostoevsky’s point is that these ideas are in the air. It is almost as if people don’t think ideas, but ideas use people to be thought.”
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Image of the Day: Badlands
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Poem: Elizabeth Spires, “Picture of a Soul”
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