Reviews and News:
British novelist Ian McEwan recently told an audience that he thought “of people with penises as men.” Within a week, he had “bowed and scraped before the trans religion.”
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Heather Mac Donald on feminism and multiculturalism in Western Europe: “Feminists incessantly harp about a phantom ‘rape culture’ in the United States and other Western countries. On New Year’s Eve 2016, Northern European cities experienced an outbreak of the real thing—and the opponents of patriarchy went silent.”
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Marjorie Perloff on Susan Howe’s quest for “the plain sense of things.”
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Isaac Newton’s alchemy manuscript to be put online.
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In search of a lost Velázquez: “In 1845, a humble English bookseller named John Snare purchased a painting of King Charles I at an auction for 8 pounds, roughly the same cost as a horse. The painter was identified as Van Dyck, but Snare, with an art lover’s instincts and an autodidact’s ravenous literacy, was certain it was painted by Diego Velázquez.”
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1979: The year that modern jihad “emerged as a global movement.”
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Revisiting the Great Fire of London.
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Reviews “should be fun” and often negative, according to Michael Hofmann. He isn’t that great of a poet, but he knows how to cut in prose: “‘I have a sense of the enterprise being ecological,’ he says. ‘There is so much excessive praise and excessive interest in the books world, and it’s all too focused on too few people. If you cut things down to scale, you do something good.'”
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Essay of the Day:
In 1991, a country club pro in Austin decided to publish his notes on teaching golf. The result was Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book—one of the most successful golf guidebooks of all time. Kevin Robbins tells the story in Texas Monthly:
“Shrake arrived at the Austin Country Club to find Harvey in his cart. He saw a briefcase in his lap.
“‘I want to show you something that nobody except Tinsley has ever read,’ the old man said.
“He snapped open the latch. ‘Here.’
“Shrake took the red Scribbletex notebook back to the cabin in the woods. As he thumbed through the pages, he detected a poetic meter in the way Harvey used language. The words on the pages seemed that day to take life inside Shrake’s mind.
“‘I said, yeah, I could do this, and all of a sudden I felt like I had been called upon to do this for some reason,’ Shrake recalled in 2009. ‘The fates had transpired to put me with Harvey.’
“He wrote in longhand a two-page proposal for a book. He called his assistant, Jo Ellen Gent, from her office downstairs. He asked her to stop whatever she was doing to type the proposal and put it in the mail.
“Shrake called Esther Newberg, his agent in New York, and revealed his idea about Harvey Penick and his Scribbletex notebook. He told her about taking dead aim and swinging buckets and weed cutters, about taking one pill, not the whole bottle, and about clipping tees. He described Harvey’s friendships with Ben Crenshaw and Tom Kite and Betsy Rawls and Kathy Whitworth. Shrake tried to explain that being in Harvey’s presence felt like being a part of the Tao of golf, like being there at the beginning.
“‘Who’s going to buy that?’ Newberg demanded.”
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Image of the Day: Tbilisi
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Poem: Les Murray, “Sunday on a Country River”
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