Reviews and News:
The “macabre and terrifying world” of M.R. James—”the best ghost-story writer England has ever produced.”
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The ethics of table manners: “The more you think about those around you and the less you think about yourself, the more likely you are to behave well.”
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The great, contradictory Jonathan Swift: “In an autobiographical note written late in his life, Jonathan Swift set down an astonishing anecdote from his childhood. When he was a baby in Dublin, he was put into the care of an English wet nurse, and one day she heard that one of her relatives back in England was close to death. Hoping for an inheritance, the wet nurse jumped on a boat back to Whitehaven in Cumbria, taking the infant Swift with her. ‘When the Matter was discovered,’ Swift wrote, ‘His Mother sent orders by all means not to hazard a second voyage, till he could be better able to bear it.’ So the wet nurse kept Swift in England for two or three years, and by the time he returned home, Swift recalled, he could read the Bible from cover to cover. Swift was a figure of great contradiction, as this massive new biography by John Stubbs makes repeatedly clear; and almost all can be summarised in this single strange story. There is the back and forth between England and Ireland. The child is a victim of adult whim and greed and fear; and yet the telling is wholly unsentimental. There is no Dickensian or Disney pathos here, but an unsparing familiarity with the foibles of the world.”
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The meaning of chess: “Moss divides his book into 64 sections that correspond to the chessboard squares. They track his progress through the rankings, as he competes at chess tournaments in the UK and gatherings in the Netherlands, Russia, Gibraltar and the US. Along the way, he encounters notable figures from the world of chess and reflects on the history and broader cultural significance of the game. The Rookie is also an erudite survey of the literature chess has spawned, much of which perpetuates the notion of the chess-player as an obsessive misfit.”
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Mark Bauerlein on why Halloween at college is so frightening: “We’re coming up on Halloween, the most frightening time of the year — for college administrators. The debate over what costumes are too offensive to be worn on campus prompts some outsize emotions. Yale last year lost valuable faculty members because of a letter one of them wrote questioning prohibitions on Halloween costumes. The ensuing dispute was a national embarrassment, and it set Yale back $50 million in new diversity initiatives. Universities took note. The University of Florida cautions that some costumes ‘perpetuate negative stereotypes causing harm and offense to groups of people,’ and will maintain a round-the-clock counseling service for students who are upset by a costume. The dean of student affairs at Tufts University encourages students who spot an offensive costume to report it, and promises vigorous investigations that could result in “disciplinary sanctions.” Wesleyan University may have led the way last year in devising a cultural sensitivity checklist so potential offenders would realize their error before committing it, but the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, S.C.R.E.A.M. evaluator — or ‘Simple Costume Racism Evaluation and Assessment Meter’ — takes determining the threat level of Halloween garb to a new level.”
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Ron Hansen goes West: “Born in 1947, a Nebraska native (and now a literature professor in California), Hansen began his literary career as part of the general attempt to upscale Western fiction. His first book, Desperadoes, appeared in 1979 and told the story of the Dalton Gang through the not entirely trustworthy memories of the elderly Emmett Dalton, last survivor of the outlaw band. And he followed it up with his second novel, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford in 1983, another outlaw’s tale. Though the books sold well and received glowing reviews, he abandoned Westerns in the years that followed. Catholic themes moved to the forefront with such books as Mariette in Ecstasy (1991) and Exiles (2008). His 1996 Atticus did have a Western setting, but it was at least partly the Parable of the Prodigal Son, retold with a modern ranch family (and it remains, to my mind, his most powerful and moving book). And now we have Hansen’s latest work, The Kid, a new look at Billy the Kid—without much explanation for why the novelist has returned, decades on, to add a third installment to his stories about bad men in the Wild West.”
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Essay of the Day:
New York City’s last dairy shut down this weekend. Marguerite Holloway provides a short history of milk in New York in Atlas Obscura:
“Cows’ milk first came of age as a consumer product in New York City in the mid-19th century. Before then, by and large, urbanites ate durable dairy: cheese and butter. And urban babies drank mother’s milk. Pace University sociologist E. Melanie DuPuis, author of Nature’s Perfect Food, points to many reasons nursing was outsourced to the cow—among them, middle class women’s expanding roles outside the home. Cows provided a degree of liberation.
“As the city’s population grew, pasture dwindled. Remaining herds were packed in small quarters where disease spread and where the nearest, cheapest feed was distillery or brewery mash—a nutritious slop that rendered milk blue, redolent of alcohol, and clumpy. Chalk, magnesia, or plaster were often required to transform the milk into a substance that looked like milk. The contaminants and the bacteria thriving in the unsanitary dairies contributed to skyrocketing infant mortality. Two of today’s federally required tests, for water and for fat content, are a direct legacy of this era. ‘New York City was a pioneer and innovator in solving problems,’ said Andrew Novakovic, an agricultural economist at Cornell University. ‘Sometimes it was solving stuff that New York shouldn’t be proud of. But that is part of the story.’
“By the early 20th century, temperance advocates and public health activists had made ‘swill milk’ illegal in New York City and pasteurization was the new cause. Nearly all the city’s milk came via train or truck from upstate, restoring milk’s rural, wholesome image. As was true in other regions, this flow was described in the same terms as the flow of water: as a milkshed.
“The industry’s reputation soon regressed. Farmers, squeezed by low prices set by growing conglomerates, began striking in upstate New York. In a famous 1933 essay Edmund Wilson described law enforcement’s brutal response—employing ‘sub-machine guns, gas bombs and riot sticks’—to one strike. A later strike had vocal support from Pete Seeger and his troupe, the Vagabond Puppeteers. Industrialization was also up-ending consumers’ bucolic image of rustic farms and ambling cows; the Rotolactor, an iteration of the mainstay of mechanized milking today, had been recently invented. At the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens, Borden—one of the conglomerates—introduced its wide-eyed mascot, Elsie the Cow, in an effort, according to historian Anna Thompson Hajdik, to recoup some pastoral cred.
“The doyenne of what was to become the Elmhurst Dairy was at that fair too, dropping by to demonstrate how to milk a cow by hand. Dora Krout ran one of the last dairy farms in the city and although the cows ultimately had to go, she and her relatives merged their various dairy companies, focusing on processing and distribution. Her son-in-law and, then, her grandson, Henry Schwartz—the dapper, 82-year-old chief executive officer of Elmhurst—steered the family business through many other disruptions—including regulatory changes as well as regional and global milk-market restructuring that, respectively, opened the city’s dairy companies to outside competition and led to a decline in U.S. milk prices overall.”
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Image of the Day: Tuscany
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Poem: A. A. Milne, “Poem”
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