Reviews and News:
Cynthia Ozick’s long crusade: In 1978, she argued that Harold Bloom’s “conception of poetry as a self-enclosed system that referred to nothing but itself…was a form of idolatry. The very idea of belatedness, so central to Bloom’s theory, was, in Ozick’s view, anathema to the Jewish tradition, according to which there were no latecomers. This was the meaning of the words in the Passover Haggadah, ‘We ourselves went out from Egypt,’ and the midrash that states, ‘All generations stood together at Sinai.’ In Jewish thought, there is ‘no power struggle with the original, no envy of the Creator.’ The idol-maker, by contrast, ‘hopes to compete with the Creator, and schemes to invent a substitute for the Creator.’ In short, her adversary had violated the Second Commandment, and must be punished… Ozick, who is now 88 (‘piano keys,’ as she sprightfully said when I congratulated her on her recent birthday), has not ceased from the mental fight in the intervening years. She remains a crusader, a missionary or, as she recently put it to me, ‘a fanatic’ in the cause of literature.”
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James Madison’s notes on the Philadelphia Convention are regularly treated as a neutral account of the creation of the Constitution, but he revised them for “political and personal” reasons, a new book argues.
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Ringing it in London: “In the common conception a bell is just for making a noise – it isn’t for making music. The Raleigh Ringers, an ensemble from North Carolina that formed in 1990, exist to convince the world otherwise.”
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The Exeter Book has been named an UNESCO “foundation volume of English literature.”
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The attack on religious liberty is really about sex, Jonathan V. Last writes in a short notice of Mary Eberstadt’s new book, It’s Dangerous to Believe.
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Was Buckminster Fuller a genius or a crackpot?
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Today’s useless question: Is the idea of art for art’s sake a sign of social privilege? The word “bourgeoisie” is used.
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Essay of the Day:
Earlier this year, Australian businessman Craig Wright claimed to be the creator of Bitcoin. Andrew O’Hagan met with Wright and his wife in London after they fled the Australian tax authorities in December:
“I had arrived five minutes early at 28-50 Degrees, a wine bar and restaurant in Mayfair. It was just before 1 p.m. on 16 December and the lunchtime crowd, men in blue suits and white shirts, were eating oysters and baby back ribs and drinking high-end wine by the glass. A jeroboam of Graham’s ten-year-old tawny port stood on the bar, and I was inspecting it when MacGregor arrived with Mr and Mrs Smith. That’s what he’d been calling them in his emails to me. Craig Wright, 45 years old, wearing a white shirt under a black jacket, a pair of blue chinos, a belt with a large Armani buckle and very green socks, wasn’t the kind of guy who seems comfortable in a swish restaurant. He sat across from me and lowered his head and at first he let MacGregor do the talking. Ramona was very friendly, chatting about their time in London as if they were a couple of holidaymakers who’d just blown into Mayfair. She wasn’t drinking, but the rest of us ordered a glass of Malbec each. When Wright lifted his head to laugh at something, I noticed he had a nice smile but uneven teeth, and a scar that climbed from the top of his nose to the area just above his left eyebrow. He hadn’t shaved since he’d left Sydney.
“Wright told me he was rubbish at small talk. He too wanted what I wrote to be ‘warts and all’; he felt he was being misunderstood by everybody, and normally that wouldn’t bother him but he had to consider the respectability of his work, and his family’s rights. He appeared to ponder this for a moment, then he told me his old neighbours at the house in Gordon hadn’t been friendly.
“‘They barely even knew your name,’ Ramona said.
“‘They do now,’ he replied.
“I found him easier to talk to than I’d expected. He said his father had worked for the NSA (he couldn’t explain this), but that, to this day, his mother thinks he worked for Nasa. ‘The few people I care about I care about a lot,’ he said, ‘and I care about the state of the world. But there’s not much in between.’ He said he was happy I was writing about him because he wanted ‘to step into history’, but mainly because he wanted to tell the story of the brilliant people he had collaborated with. He and Ramona were both jet-lagged and anxious about things back home. ‘We should have been having our company’s Christmas party today,’ Ramona said.
“MacGregor asked Wright if being a libertarian had influenced his work, or if the work had turned him into a libertarian. ‘I was always libertarian,’ he replied, and then he told me his father had more or less kidnapped him after his parents got divorced. He hated being told what to do – that was one of his main motivations. He believed in freedom, and in what freedom would come to mean, and he said his work would guarantee a future in which privacy was protected. ‘Where we are,’ he said, ‘is a place where people can be private and part of that privacy is to be someone other than who they were. Computing will allow you to start again, if you want to. And that is freedom.’ In fact he never stopped imagining different lives for himself. That afternoon he seemed preoccupied by the case people were making against his being Satoshi. He shook his head a lot and said he wished he could just get on in silence with his work. ‘If you want to stay sane through this, ignore Reddit,’ his wife told him.
“The next day, 17 December, we met again, in a private room in Claridge’s. You could see outside, over the rooftops, cranes garlanded in fairy lights. Ramona came in looking tired and totally fed up. From time to time, especially when exhausted, she would resent the hold these people had over them. ‘We have sold our souls,’ she said to me in a quiet moment.
“MacGregor said he would spend the evening preparing paperwork to be signed by Wright the following day. This would effectively be the final signing over to nCrypt of the intellectual property held by Wright’s companies. This was the main plank in the deal. MacGregor was confident the work was ‘world historical’, that it would change the way we lived. He regularly described the blockchain as the greatest invention since the internet. He said that what the internet had done for communication, the blockchain would do for value.
“MacGregor explained that Wright’s Australian companies were being signed over to nCrypt and that he’d extended an ‘olive branch’ to the ATO, which had responded quickly and positively. A lot of trouble with the ATO had to do with whether bitcoin was a commodity or a currency and how it should be taxed. It also had doubts about whether Wright’s companies had done as much research and development as they claimed, and whether they were therefore entitled to the tax rebates they had applied for. The ATO had said it couldn’t see where the spending was going. Some critics in the media claimed Wright’s companies had been set up only for the purpose of claiming rebates, though not even the ATO went that far.”
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Image of the Day: Wildfires
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Poem: Ernest Hilbert, “From the Balcony on Heavy Metal Tribute Night at the Trocadero.” (You can read my review of Hilbert’s most recent volume here.)
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