Prufrock: The War on Pronouns, the Heyday of the UFO, and Harry Clarke’s Stained Glass

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Caitlin Doyle reviews Amit Majmudar’s Dothead: “‘Logomachia,’ a 16-page poem in sections, centers on the relationship between scientific knowledge and faith. Majmudar describes the experience of holding up an x-ray for examination: ‘Each pixel: a point geometry / defines dimensionless, no height, no width, no death.’ By replacing the expected word ‘depth’ with ‘death,’ he spurs us to consider what may be missing when we allow the methods of science to overly determine our lives. The facts of a diagnosis, he suggests, don’t necessarily allow us to grasp mortality.”

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Revisiting Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed: “The only other painting at the National Gallery that comes close to its depiction of speed is Titian’s Death of Actaeon, which shows Diana, the goddess of hunting, running through woods to witness Actaeon’s death: she has already transformed him into a stag as punishment for coming across her and her nymphs bathing. His own hounds have caught up with him, they don’t recognise their master and they’re about to tear him apart – just as certainly as the train will destroy a hare in Rain, Steam and Speed. ‘Always take advantage of an accident,’ Turner once said. ‘A painter can only represent the instant of an action, and what is seen at first sight’ was another of his aphorisms, one that he borrowed from Gotthold Lessing or John Opie, magpie that he was.”

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YouTube censors Prager University.

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Harry Clarke’s stained glass: “Clarke has been praised as one of the greatest inheritors of the Medieval glass tradition. Something of the grotesque humor in the suffering figures of Gothic glass must have appealed to Clarke’s sensibilities, particularly in the later years of his life when he knew he was dying from tuberculosis.”

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John Wilson reviews Amy Gentry’s “superb” first novel, Good as Gone.

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Essay of the Day:

In Public Discourse, Anthony Esolen considers the violence of fantasy pronouns:

“The inventors of such ugly and meaningless collocations as ‘xe’ and ‘zir’ do not want to enrich the language, and they do not want us to probe more deeply and sensitively into the realities of male and female. They want to impoverish the language and to prevent us from acknowledging things about men and women that even little children perceive.

“This is the sort of thing—and maybe the only sort of thing—that can really be called a ‘microaggression.’ If there is a burr in my shoe, I do not make a federal case of it, suing my neighbor for not mowing his grass. I take off my shoe, get rid of the burr, and go about my business. If somebody says to me, ‘Italy never produced a mathematician worthy of the name,’ I think of the Fibonacci family, roll my eyes, and go back to reading my book. Microaggressions warrant microattention: the elephant need not go on a stampede on account of the flea.

“But this microaggression is like the deliberate injection of carcinogenic RNA into the healthy cells of the mind. It would infect common sense with confusion and madness. It would render people incapable of obvious judgments: so that you cannot say that Laurie is ‘strong for a girl’ because she can do fifteen unmodified pushups, or that little Mike needs a father in his life, or that every culture known to man has celebrated the union of man and woman in marriage. And that prompts the question: why should anybody want to do this to other people? Cui bono?”

Read the rest.

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Image of the Day: Faroe Islands

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Poem: Les Murray, “Boarding in Town for School”

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