Reviews and News:
A raunchy, gimmicky production of Midsummer Night’s Dream by the new artistic director of The Globe suggests that she “has very little faith in the power of Shakespeare’s words.”
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Camille Paglia blames faculty for the crisis of free speech at American universities: “As a veteran of more than four decades of college teaching, almost entirely at art schools, my primary disappointment is with American faculty, the overwhelming majority of whom failed from the start to acknowledge the seriousness of political correctness as an academic issue and who passively permitted a swollen campus bureaucracy, empowered by intrusive federal regulation, to usurp the faculty’s historic responsibility and prerogative to shape the educational mission and to protect the free flow of ideas.”
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Many reviews of Adam Hochschild’s Spain in Our Hearts, a study of the role of Americans in the Spanish Civil War, read like “the work of former AP history students, regurgitating the received opinions of their textbooks with no more pain or passion than they would show reviewing books on Free Silver or the Thirty Years War. For them, the Spanish Civil War is simply an old event of easy judgment. Nationalists bad, Republicans good, of course. The interventions of Germany and Italy bad but typical of fascists, the interventions of the Soviet Union semi-bad but typical of communists, and failure of the United States government to intervene maybe worst of all, because it reveals the hypocrisy of American rhetoric about support for democracy.” This is naïve. What does it mean that most Americans no longer understand the Spanish Civil War?
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Patrick Heren reviews Leif Wenar’s Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence and the Rules that Run the World: “Some years ago a British friend of mine commanded the UN forces in Kosovo. I asked him what his mission was. ‘To instil respect for the rule of law!’ he barked. And how far did he get with that in his year there? ‘At least one quarter of one per cent,’ he returned with a grin. ‘Merely another four centuries to go.’ A similar air of unreality pervades Leif Wenar’s Blood Oil, a good-hearted programme for weaning the West off reliance on oil and other resources sold by dictators, tyrants and hereditary monarchs, in the process turning these benighted nations into models of democracy and fair wealth distribution. However, unlike my friend the soldier’s appreciation of Balkan brigandage, Professor Wenar appears not to recognise the realkommerz of global resource trade.”
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Botticelli’s Divine Comedy: “Sometime around 1490 Sandro Botticelli set out to make a book unlike any ever seen before. Prompted by a patron, and inspired by his own deep love of Dante, the artist planned the first fully illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy.”
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Ottilie Mulzet reviews György Spiró’s Captivity – a masterful novel that attempts to re-awaken the classical “Latin-Hellenic-Hebraic world.”
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Essay of the Day:
In Aeon, Joseph J Fins argues that thousands of patients are misdiagnosed as vegetative. It needs to stop:
“A seasoned nurse came up to me after a lecture I’d given at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. She seemed shaken by my talk and I was surprised. She worked on the palliative care service, and cared for dying patients and their families with a calm that was always reassuring. So it was strange to see her rattled. It was as if she had seen a ghost.
“I had just finished giving a talk about severe brain injury, and told the story of Terry Wallis, a man in Arkansas who’d had a car accident in 1984. He survived but was left in a vegetative state, and his doctors and family thought he would be unconscious forever. Then in 2003 he began to speak. Tentatively at first, he said ‘Mom’ and then ‘Pepsi’. It was a stunning development almost two decades after he was injured. Terry’s words became the stuff of international headlines, baffling commentators who thought that recovery from the vegetative state was impossible.
“Why? Because the vegetative state had gained an almost iconic status in the United States, in law and in medicine, following the landmark 1976 right-to-die case involving Karen Ann Quinlan. Quinlan had been left in the vegetative state after a presumptive drug overdose. Based on expert testimony, the New Jersey Supreme Court justified the removal of Quinlan’s ventilator because evidence indicated that her brain state was a place of unbreachable hopelessness.
“This landmark decision, broadcast around the world, launched the right to die into US jurisprudence. That right was grounded, in part, on the presumption that people in the vegetative state don’t recover. And then in 2003, Terry spoke.
“The world was taken by surprise, but I wasn’t. My colleagues and I had an alternative hypothesis. Terry had not been in the vegetative state all those years. More than likely, he was in the minimally conscious state (MCS), a new diagnostic category that came into the medical literature in 2002.
“Terry’s case is less exceptional than it first appears. A 2009 study showed that 41 per cent of ‘vegetative’ patients with traumatic brain injury in nursing homes are in fact minimally conscious – they appear vegetative but retain awareness of their environment and sometimes even respond.”
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Image of the Day: Cherry blossoms on Inokashira Park Lake
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Poem: Carlo Betocchi, “Come Back”
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