Reviews and News:
How to translate Shakespeare into American Sign Language: “There are few lines in literature as memorable as ‘To be, or not to be—that is the question.’ Uttered in the third act of Hamlet, the soliloquy offers a poignant examination of whether it is better to quietly bear the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ or to die, and ‘end the heartache’. The line has been delivered innumerable times across the world, and each actor offers a unique interpretation through pauses, tone and gesture.” But a verbatim translation translation of the line is impossible in ASL: “Often ASL masters cannot simply transfer words—they have to replace them entirely. ‘To be or not to be’ poses a particular problem because the verb ‘to be’ does not exist in ASL.”
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C.S. Lewis and the art of disagreement: “Lewis relished disagreement and debate. George Watson, who attended Lewis’s lectures at Oxford and later worked alongside him at Cambridge, recalls how ‘Lewis was a Christian conservative from around the age of thirty, which is to say before I knew him; and since I am neither one nor the other, there was never any question of doctrinal influence. If I was not exactly a friend, still less was I a disciple. That in no way altered my sense of admiration and affection. . . . We both thrived on dissent. . . . The best teacher I ever had, and the best colleague, he did not ask or expect me to share his convictions.'”
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Why kids need recess: “The benefits of recess might seem obvious—time to run around helps kids stay fit. But a large body of research suggests that it also boosts cognition. Many studies have found that regular exercise improves mental function and academic performance. And an analysis of studies that focused specifically on recess found positive associations between physical activity and the ability to concentrate in class.”
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Emily Dickinson’s scrap poems: “There are no masterpieces hidden among the envelope poems, but Dickinson’s incandescent thinking is everywhere on display, and the makeshift nature of the scraps gives us a vivid idea of what composition must have felt like for a woman whose thoughts raced far ahead of her ability to capture them.”
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A contrary view of Putin: “‘Putin is not one person. He (or it) is a huge collective mind.’ In other words, Putin’s decisions reflect not so much the plans or whims of an individual as the outcome of factional battles among an extensive cast of characters. Not only is the focus on Putin himself misguided but, according to Zygar, there is no coherent strategy behind the Kremlin’s actions at all. ‘It is logic that Putin-era Russia lacks,’ he writes. ‘Everything that happens is a tactical step, a real-time response to external stimuli devoid of an ultimate objective.’ Those looking for cunningly woven conspiracies, then, are in for a disappointment: Putin is more puppet than puppet master, his moves dictated by events and people beyond his control.”
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Wyndham Lewis’s devoted disciple: “In 1978-79, while living in London and writing the life of Wyndham Lewis on a Guggenheim fellowship, I frequently saw and formed a close friendship with Lewis’s charming, congenial and feckless disciple, Hugh Gordon Porteus. Born in 1906, he was a valuable source of information. A minor but significant presence in literary London from the Thirties to the Sixties, he was delighted to be unearthed and freely reminisced about himself and all his eminent friends, from Lewis and T.S. Eliot to Lawrence Durrell and Dylan Thomas. He made a cameo appearance in all their biographies, but was never fully described. His obituary in the Independent of February 8, 1993, called him ‘a flamboyant figure in London’s bohemia’. Eight days later in that newspaper Anthony Thwaite described him as ‘a rather hearty, ruddy-faced, almost tweedy man, with a slightly barking voice’.
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Essay of the Day:
In Commentary, Jonathan Foreman revisits the work of Lionel Shriver following her denunciation by some on the left earlier this year for inconvenient ideas:
“Before she was accused of thought- crime, the London-based American writer Lionel Shriver was best known for her 2003 bestseller, We Need to Talk about Kevin, an epistolary novel about a mother’s efforts to understand why her son had carried out a Columbine-like school massacre. She has published five novels since Kevin, to wide acclaim, but it was a keynote speech she gave at an Australian literary event in September that made her the most unlikely celebrity of 2016.
“Shriver had been invited by the Brisbane Writers Festival to discuss ‘community and belonging.’ Instead, Shriver gave a talk about ‘fiction and identity politics’ that criticized the idea of ‘cultural appropriation’ and other forms of political correctness. She espoused the right of writers to create characters and speak in the voices of people ethnically or culturally different from themselves, pointing out that ‘otherwise, all I could write about would be smart-alecky 59-year-old 5-foot-2-inch white women from North Carolina.’
“She excoriated contemporary forms of politically correct censorship with typically astringent fearlessness and rubbished the whole notion of identity politics: ‘Membership of a larger group is not an identity. Being Asian is not an identity. Being gay is not an identity. Being deaf, blind, or wheelchair-bound is not an identity, nor is being economically deprived.’ It was a tough, fine, coruscating essay that should be widely read by every university head, arts administrator, and literature teacher in the West. But it might have gone unnoticed beyond Queensland had not a local activist stormed out of the talk and then written about its offensiveness for the Guardian.
“The article was by Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a 25-year-old Sudanese-Australian author (of a memoir, of course), engineer, and activist, who had ostentatiously walked out of Shriver’s speech (while live-tweeting her walkout). Many people who came across the article, myself included, thought initially that it was a witty spoof of the ultra–politically correct counterculture that has taken such a hold in many academic and literary institutions. Its censorious mixture of ignorance, arrogance, inverted racism, melodramatic self-pity, and self-righteousness (at one point Abdel-Magied declares that Shriver’s dismissal of ‘cultural appropriation’ is ‘the kind of attitude that lays the foundation for prejudice, for hate, for genocide’) seemed almost too perfect, too titanically solipsistic to be real.
“The piece describes in detail the impact that Shriver’s lecture about ‘fiction and identity politics’ had on the Young Person. She’d known something was amiss at the beginning of the talk when Shriver mocked the fuss made at Bowdoin College in Maine about a Mexican-themed party at which non-Mexican students wore sombreros—even donning a sombrero herself—and ‘the audience chuckled, compliant.’
“Naturally, Abdel-Magied ‘started looking forward to the point of the speech where [Shriver] was to subvert the argument. It never came.’ Twenty minutes into the talk, Abdel-Magied was overwhelmed and turned to her mother, who was there with her: ‘”Mama, I can’t sit here,” I said, the corners of my mouth dragging downwards. “I cannot legitimize this.”‘
“Abdel-Magied’s tale of oppression by disrespect gets more dramatic: ‘The faces around me blurred. As my heels thudded against they grey plastic of the flooring, harmonizing with the beat of the adrenaline pumping through my veins, my mind was blank save for one question. How is this happening?’
“The shocking, unbelievable ‘this’ that prompted Abdel-Magied to turn down her mouth, text her friends, and storm out of the hall was the un-ironic expression of an opinion so close to secular blasphemy that a believer like Abdel-Magied could not bear to hear it. It turned out Shriver’s talk was ‘nothing less than a celebration of the unfettered exploitation of the experiences of others, under the guise of fiction’ [italics hers]. Worse still, in words she presumed were so outrageous her readers would immediately recoil from them, ‘Shriver’s real targets were cultural appropriation, identity politics, and political correctness.’
“Perhaps the most comically un-self-aware passage in Abdel-Magied’s cri de coeur comes close to the end of the article when she wonders at the fact that Shriver was ever ‘given such a prominent platform from which to spew such vitriol.’ Why was Shriver even invited, Abdel-Magied asks when ‘the opening of a city’s writers festival could have been graced by any of the brilliant writers and thinkers who challenge us to be more. To be uncomfortable.[emphasis mine] To progress.’
“This seems baffling, given that her own account of the event makes it clear that Abdel-Magied could not herself tolerate being even mildly uncomfortable, and given that almost every review of a Shriver novel describes her work as challenging and discomforting.
“Shriver’s relative obscurity before and even after the success of Kevin (which was made into a 2009 movie starring Tilda Swinton) has been both undeserved and understandable: Undeserved because Shriver is a superb, unforgiving satirist in the Horatian tradition. Her caustic new novel, The Mandibles: 2029–2047, depicts life in an impoverished, dystopic United States following the collapse of the dollar. Understandable because the sensibility that informs Shriver’s work is largely anathema to the grandees of what passes for literary culture in our day.”
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Image of the Day: Hong Kong
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Poem: Yi Tal, “Falling Blossoms,” translated from the Korean by Ian Haight and T’ae-yong Hŏ
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