Reviews and News:
Hamilton’s flaws: “To be sure, the show, drawn loosely from Ron Chernow’s bestselling 2004 biography, notes that Hamilton was a man of ’76 and played a leading role in establishing our republic. It demonstrates—perhaps exaggerates a bit—his opposition to slavery. But why does he oppose slavery? Why did he support a republican revolution? Why did it succeed? That is unclear, and when it tries to be clear, Hamilton is often off base.”
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A history of swimming pools.
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The accomplishment of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory: “Earlier this year, when the New York Times asked novelist and essayist Roger Rosenblatt to name the best memoir he’d read recently, he was unequivocal in his reply. “Speak, Memory, recently or ever,” Rosenblatt told the Times. He was referring to the classic account by Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) of his idyllic Russian childhood in a family of colorful aristocrats, the 1917 Bolshevik revolution that banished him to exile, and the path that would eventually lead him to live in the United States. Rosenblatt is far from alone in hailing Speak, Memory as a gem. ‘To write superior autobiography one requires not only literary gifts, which are obtainable with effort, but an intrinsically interesting life, which is less frequently available,’ literary critic Joseph Epstein once observed. ‘Those who possess the one are frequently devoid of the other, and vice versa. Only a fortunate few are able to reimagine their lives, to find themes and patterns that explain a life, in the way successful autobiography requires. Vladimir Nabokov was among them.’”
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Bob Proehl’s A Hundred Thousand Worlds has a few too many. There are some skillfully depicted characters, but the novel is messy.
Chuck Klosterman’s But What if We’re Wrong tries to imagine how the future will view the present—an admirable goal that has resulted in an “exasperating” book. How so? “For one thing, there’s the prose, which lurches from the slangy (‘Let’s get nutzo’) to the lumbering (‘If you prioritize cultural multiplicity . . .’) to the pompous (‘Am I certain this will happen? I am not certain’). Klosterman is a prolific coiner of empty epigrams (‘History is defined by people who don’t really understand what they are defining’). He is given to little eruptions of fake humility (‘I don’t know’ followed by a portentous paragraph break. ‘I really don’t’). He cracks labored jokes (‘a yet-to-be-identified Irish-Asian skoliosexual from Juárez, Mexico, who writes brilliantly about migrant cannibalism from an anti-union perspective . . .’). He seems to think that ‘antagonist’ means the opposite of ‘protagonist’ and that ‘third rail’ connotes a moderate position between two extremes, rather than something that will fry you if you touch it. Above all he loves the word ‘transpire,’ deploying it wherever a more literate writer would use ‘happen’ or ‘occur.’ He even talks about an ‘earthquake’s transpiring.’ Such little lapses of the pen might be forgivable if Klosterman had pursued his book’s premise with more rigor. But his argument tends to be desultory and slapdash. Entire passages defy analysis. Profound questions — what he calls ‘the big potatoes’ — are treated with intolerable glibness.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The Atlantic, John McWhorter examines the efficiency of languages. Why are some telegraphic and others not:
“Part of the answer is unsatisfying but powerful: chance. Time and repetition wear words out, and what wears away is often a nugget of meaning. This happens in some languages more than others. Think of the French song ‘Alouette, gentille alouette …’ (‘lark, nice lark’) in which one sings ‘ahh-loo-eh-tuh.’ In running speech the word has long been pronounced just ‘ah-loo-ett’ with no -uh at the end. That –uh in the song today is a leftover from the way the word actually was once pronounced normally, and it indicated the word’s feminine gender to the listener. Today, beyond marginal contexts like that song, only the final e in the spelling of alouette indicates its gender; hearing it in a sentence we’d have to rely on the definite article la alone to know that the word is feminine.
“In a language where final sounds take the accent, such sounds tend to hold on longer because they are so loud and clear—you’re less likely to mumble it and people listening are more likely to hear it. In Hebrew, ‘Thank you very much,’ is ‘Toda raba,’ pronounced ‘toe-DAH rah-BAH.’ The sounds at the end of the word mark gender in Hebrew, too, and they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon because they are enunciated with force.
“When a language seems especially telegraphic, usually another factor has come into play: Enough adults learned it at a certain stage in its history that, given the difficulty of learning a new language after childhood, it became a kind of stripped-down ‘schoolroom’ version of itself. Because all languages, are, to some extent, busier than they need to be, this streamlining leaves the language thoroughly complex and nuanced, just lighter on the bric-a-brac that so many languages pant under. Even today, Indonesian is a first language to only one in four of its speakers; the language has been used for many centuries as a lingua franca in a vast region, imposed on speakers of several hundred languages. This means that while other languages can be like overgrown lawns, Indonesian’s grammar has been regularly mowed, such that especially the colloquial forms are tidier. Lots of adult learning over long periods of time is also why, for example, the colloquial forms of Arabic like Egyptian and Moroccan are somewhat less elaborated than Modern Standard Arabic—they were imposed on new people as Islam spread after the seventh century.”
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Image of the Day: Steamy scrum
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Poem: Mark Jarman, “Yahrzeit”
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