J.R.R. Tolkien’s latest posthumous book may be his last. The publication of The Fall of Gondolin “represents the conclusion of a loose trilogy set in the Elder Days of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional realm of Middle-earth,” Andrew Ervin writes. “In his preface, Christopher Tolkien writes that he thought Beren and Lúthien would be the final of his father’s stories published on his watch. ‘The presumption proved wrong, however,’ he writes, ‘and I must now say that “in my ninety-fourth year The Fall of Gondolin is (indubitably) the last.”’ If that proves to be the case, his stewardship of his father’s legacy has been a tremendous success.”
Revisiting Picasso’s early work: “At just 13 years old, Picasso officially began his career as an artist. During these formative years, he developed a realist style characterized by naturalistic brushwork, a true-to-life color palette, and everyday subject matter. Specifically, he enjoyed painting portraits of his loved ones and scenes inspired by his Catholic faith. Both of these artistic interests are evident in The First Communion, a large-scale painting of his sister, Lola, from 1896.”
Skim reading is the new normal, and that’s bad news: “Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers. Younger school-aged children read stories on smartphones; older boys don’t read at all, but hunch over video games. Parents and other passengers read on Kindles or skim a flotilla of email and news feeds. Unbeknownst to most of us, an invisible, game-changing transformation links everyone in this picture: the neuronal circuit that underlies the brain’s ability to read is subtly, rapidly changing—a change with implications for everyone from the pre-reading toddler to the expert adult.”
Leann Davis Alspaugh reviews an exhibit of Precisionist artist, who are billed as “the first indigenous American art movement.”
Why is the Myers-Briggs personality test increasingly popular today? Well, the author of this piece doesn’t quite say this, but I will: Because we don’t know who we are and think that a pseudo-scientific questionnaire will tell us. Identity and personality are two separate things, as any reader of old Billy Shakes knows.
Conservative are generally anti-utopian. Nathan Schlueter thinks this is a mistake: “The utopian imagination (as opposed to utopianism) is a constituent part of human nature, rooted in the basic orientation of human desire towards happiness, understood not as a transient satisfaction, but as a complete life of flourishing. This desire for happiness is necessarily informed, often inchoately, by some imagined but not yet present state of affairs, a connection highlighted in Thomas More’s clever play on the word he coined. Utopia, which means ‘no place’ (ou-topos) is but one letter away from Eutopia (eu-topos), which means ‘happy place.’ More’s clever word play captures the dynamic and uneasy relationship between the ideal and the real, and between reason and imagination, in the human desire for happiness.”
Essay of the Day:
Thomas Chatterton Williams is one of my favorite young writers. In The New York Times, he reviews two books on how our obsession with safety is bad for our country:
“Earlier this summer, a white poet named Anders Carlson-Wee published ‘How-To’ in The Nation. It’s a brief verse riffing on the various performances many homeless people must undertake in order to render themselves visible to passers-by. ‘If you got hiv, say aids,’ Carlson-Wee wrote. ‘If you a girl, say you’re pregnant — nobody gonna lower themselves to listen for the kick. People passing fast.’ Corny, perhaps, but it’s hard not to see this as an exercise, however forced or clumsy, in empathy. A few weeks later, The Nation appended a lengthy editor’s note — longer than the work itself — to the original post, stating that the poem ‘contains disparaging and ableist language that has given offense and caused harm to members of several communities.’ One particularly offending line read: ‘If you’re crippled don’t flaunt it. Let em think they’re good enough Christians to notice.’ Carlson-Wee apologized, too, acknowledging on Twitter that the criticism had been ‘eye-opening.’ The first reply to this tweet of contrition was a seemingly serious further rebuke: The phrase ‘eye-opening’ was dismissive of the visually impaired.
“If it feels as though we no longer know how to speak or listen in good faith to one another, it’s because we don’t. This is the kind of controversy that might have seemed overblown as recently as the start of the Obama administration. Today it arrives with frequency and fervor — a marker of the country’s rapidly shifting mores, which are the product of new generations increasingly fluent in, in thrall to and in fear of the hyperspecialized language and norms of academia. Whether you even find the above exchange intelligible reveals a great deal more than merely your political bent, touching on aspects of age, education and geography — not to mention distinctions of race and class.
“How did we arrive at this fraught place where the use of nothing more sinister than a body metaphor can assume the power to cause harm? Two timely new books attempt to make sense of the various cultural processes happening on social and in traditional media and, above all, in and around our nation’s (mostly selective, four-year) college campuses. Whether we realize it or not, these processes have radically transformed the ways in which we speak about and to one another and give and take offense, exposing far larger and more significant currents in our national political and social life.”
Photo: Popocatéptl
Poem: Eric McHenry, “Lives of Poets”
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