Reviews and News:
The University of Chicago tells incoming freshman that there will be no university-sponsored “safe spaces” on campus: “Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”
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Scruton on Wagner: “Scruton explains Wagner’s recognition that the need for religion in man was inherent, but had outlived any possible belief in God. Art was thus to be the medium whereby the authentic religious urges of man were to find expression. As Wagner famously wrote: ‘It is reserved to art to salvage the kernel of religion, inasmuch as the mythical images which religion would wish to be believed as true are apprehended in art for their symbolic value, and through ideal representation of those symbols art reveals the concealed deep truth within them.’ Wagner presents the sacred as a purely human phenomenon, one that might be looked upon by a god with envy and awe, as in The Ring, but which needs no god to complete it. Art expresses and completes our religious emotions or, as Scruton puts it with a characteristic aphorism, art shows the believable moral realities behind the unbelievable metaphysics.”
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Nero in paint: “The murder of his mother Agrippina was one of the most notorious of the emperor Nero’s crimes. By 59 AD, impatient with her power and, so the story went, with her opposition to his new girlfriend, the young ruler decided on matricide. According to several Roman writers, his first plan was to send her out to sea in a specially designed collapsible boat, but she managed to swim to shore. So he finally resorted to a more conventional strategy and sent a hit man round to her villa to finish her off. For ancient observers the whole incident, true or not, was a telling combination of the faintly ridiculous amateur dramatics of imperial power and sheer terror. The scene has appealed to artists ever since: not so much the bungled boat trick, but the aftermath of the murder, and in particular its effect on Nero himself. A tall story grew up in the Middle Ages about how Nero became obsessed with seeing the very place in which he had been formed, and several medieval manuscripts picture the emperor-turned-dissector looking on, as his mother’s abdomen is cut open and her uterus revealed. Later images, less bloody but no less chilling, focus on the psychology and the desires of the killer. One memorable late nineteenth-century painting by J. W. Waterhouse pictures Nero as a moody teenager (in fact he was in his early twenties) lying on his bed, head in hands, overcome with remorse at what he has just done. Others recreate the moment when he comes to gaze at his mother’s dead and naked body.”
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Almost 70% of smuggled objects seized in Syria and Lebanon are fakes, according to Syria’s antiquities chief Maamoun Abdulkarim.
Old predictions about the Internet: “How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc…Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.”
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Michael Dirda: “The Gentleman pays homage to late Victorian melodrama and in its tone aspires to a P.G. Wodehouse-like insouciance. While Forrest Leo falls short of the master’s flair, his first novel does provide consistent amusement for an idle evening. If that sounds like faint praise, you are welcome to return to that earnest, high-minded, critically acclaimed bestseller.”
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Essay of the Day:
Who is Kim Jong-un and why has his reign in North Korea so far surprised many in the West? Andrew J. Nathan considers:
“The pudgy cheeks and flaring hairdo of North Korea’s young ruler Kim Jong-un, his bromance with tattooed and pierced former basketball star Dennis Rodman, his boy-on-a-lark grin at missile firings, combine incongruously with the regime’s pledge to drown its enemies in a ‘sea of fire.’ They elicit a mix of revulsion and ridicule in the West. Many predict that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea cannot survive much longer, given its pervasive poverty, genocidal prison camp system identified by a UN commission of inquiry as committing crimes against humanity, self-imposed economic isolation, confrontations with all of its neighbors, and its leader’s youth and inexperience. The Obama administration has adopted a position of ‘strategic patience,’ waiting for intensifying international sanctions to force North Korea either to give up its nuclear weapons or to implode and be taken over by the pro-Western government of South Korea.
“But North Korea’s other closest neighbors, the Chinese, have never expected the DPRK to surrender or collapse, and so far they have been correct. Instead of giving up its nuclear bomb and missile programs, Pyongyang is by now thought to have between ten and twenty nuclear devices and over one thousand short-, medium-, and long-range missiles, and to be developing a compact warhead that will be able to hit the US mainland.
“At home, the regime recently survived the toughest test that totalitarian systems face, a leadership succession. The country was ruled by Kim Il-sung from 1948, when the postwar Soviet occupation of North Korea ended, until his death in 1994; by his son, Kim Jong-il, from 1994 until he died in 2011; and since 2011 by the founder’s grandson, Kim Jong-un. Jong-un was his father’s youngest son and a surprise successor; he emerged as heir apparent only two years before his father’s death, in contrast to his father, who had been heir apparent for twenty years. Kim Jong-il is believed to have run the country’s terrorism, counterfeiting, smuggling, and proliferation operations for most of that time.
“In another contrast, the second Kim had staged a protracted public mourning for his father and made a show of modesty by postponing his formal takeover of top posts for three years, whereas Jong-un, only twenty-seven years old, anointed himself as first secretary of the ruling Korean Workers’ Party (KWP) immediately upon his father’s death and before long assumed the posts of chair of the Central Military Commission, chair of the National Defense Commission, and supreme commander of the Korean People’s Army, among others. This May, he summoned the Seventh Congress of the Korean Workers’ Party, its first in thirty-six years, so he could accept the position of party chairman and place his personal stamp on the country’s policy of ‘parallel advance’ (byungjin) in building both the economy and nuclear weapons.
“The third Kim’s authority rests on a uniquely North Korean form of legitimation that his grandfather established for the regime. The predecessor of the KWP was a classically Leninist organization called the Korean Communist Party, created in the 1920s under Soviet and (later) Chinese tutelage. But after Kim Il-sung took over the northern half of Korea in 1948, he purged his pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese rivals and constructed a distinctive cult of personality. In this cult, ‘Kim Il Sung was not presented as an heir to, a disciple of, or the recipient of the guidance of any foreign leader, philosopher, or thinker,’ according to the North Korea expert Andrei Lankov inThe Real North Korea. ‘He was the founding father…in his own right, the Creator of the Immortal Juche Idea and the Greatest Man in the Five Thousand Years of Korean History.’
“The cult’s imagery drew themes from Christianity (which had long been propagated by missionaries on the Korean peninsula, including, according to some sources, Kim Il-sung’s maternal grandfather), Buddhism, and the emperor myth of Korea’s former colonizer, Japan. As B.R. Myers shows in The Cleanest Race, his analysis of North Korean propaganda, Kim Il-sung was portrayed as an androgynous figure—plump, soft, and clean—endowed with moral purity and uncanny composure, dispensing practical guidance and motherly love to a needy ‘child race.’
“The North Korean regime, therefore, is neither ‘Stalinist’ nor ‘Confucianist,’ as it is often described. It adheres to an ideology called Kimilsungism, centered on the notion of juche (‘self-reliance’). This ideology was once described by Kim Jong-il as ‘an original idea that cannot be explained within the framework of Marxism-Leninism…an idea newly discovered in the history of human thought.’ Centered around the idea that ‘man, not nature, holds the position of Master in the material world,’ juche is what the Korea scholar Bruce Cumings calls ‘the opaque core of North Korean national solipsism.'”
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Image of the Day: South Moravia
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Poem: Kathryn Jacobs, “Summer Sublet”
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