Prufrock: Invisible Nations, Against Open Borders, and a History of the Advice Column

It’s Tuesday, and perhaps your Monday was terrible. Maybe it was your fault … again. You were rude, ate too much, drank with abandon. What should you do? I don’t know, though reading the Bible and Anna Karenina might help. So does apologizing to others if that’s what you need to do. How about reading a self-help book or an advice column? Determining in your heart to do better today? That depends. As Caitrin Keiper shows in an entertaining review of Jessica Weisberg’s Asking for a Friend—a history of the advice column in America—we can’t avoid asking for advice. It’s part of who we are, and in a society where the old sources of authority—the Church, family—have been in decline for years, new sources appear. At the same time, if you think you can perfect yourself by following gurus, God have mercy on your soul. From Sarah Ditum’s review of Marianne Power’s The Year of Living Mindfully: “At a conference/rally/high-pressure sales event starring motivational speaker Tony Robbins, Power (who is most delightful when she zeroes in on bathos) finds herself doing the ‘mashed potato’ with a Norwegian accountant as collective hysteria takes hold. But she also, she records, finds herself convinced by some of the manuals. She wants to believe that following them will lead her to ‘Perfect Me’. Instead, they lead to breakdown.”

Speaking of failure, you probably knew that William Faulkner was a terrible postmaster. If not: “In 1921, 24-year-old William Faulkner had dropped out of the University of Mississippi (for the second time) and was living in Greenwich Village, working in a bookstore—but he was getting restless. Eventually, his mentor, Phil Stone, an Oxford attorney, arranged for him to be appointed postmaster at the school he had only recently left. He was paid a salary of $1,700 in 1922 and $1,800 in the following years, but it’s unclear how he came by that raise, because by all accounts he was uniquely terrible at his job. ‘I forced Bill to take the job over his own declination and refusal,’ Stone said later, according to David Minter’s biography. “He made the damndest postmaster the world has ever seen.’”

James Erwin reviews Joshua Keating’s Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood: “You are, I am confident in declaring, reading this within the boundaries of a nation. Virtually every square inch of land on the planet (with the partial exception of Antarctica) has been assigned to one polity or another—as have the world’s people. We are all citizens of a country. That is the easily digested story we have been told since childhood. Almost as easy to understand is the answer to the question, ‘What if you don’t like the country you’re in?’ You can leave it for another country, or you can make a new one. The history of the last century is rife with examples of peoples creating new states: There’s Yugoslavia. There’s the cluster of countries where Yugoslavia used to be. If the map doesn’t suit you, then draw a new line on it. In Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood, Joshua Keating looks closely at this simple story—and shows not only that the accepted narrative does not capture the true shape of the world but that the consensus underneath that narrative is eroding.”

In his new book, Reihan Salam argues against open borders. Read an excerpt at National Review: “Immigration policy is not about whether to be welcoming or hard-headed. Short of absolutely open borders, which most advocates of more-open borders at least claim to reject, it is about compromise. Like it or not, we need to weigh competing interests and moral goods, and to adjust our approach over time.”

How Christian rock became Christians in rock: “Christian rock is all around us. On Billboard’s list of the twenty most popular rock songs of 2017, fully half of them were by bands whose members have espoused the Christian faith. This has something to do with a phenomenon that would have been hard to imagine in 1969: two of the country’s top rock acts, the Killers and Imagine Dragons, are led by Mormons. It also has something to do with the fact that faith no longer seems so alien to popular music—ours is an era when plenty of artists, not just religious ones, aim to send inspirational messages. (Think of ‘Praying,’ the gospel-powered Kesha song about resilience and recovery.) This has made Christian bands harder to ignore, and at times harder to identify. Depending on your perspective, this could mean that Christian rock has triumphed or that it has gone soft.”


Essay of the Day:

In The Hopkins Review, Ernest Hilbert writes about the poetry of heavy metal and mosh pits:

“Before I wrote poems, I wrote some of the lyrics for the band Judgement, a thrash metal outfit for which I played bass. Like poetry, heavy metal gets into the blood. I try to use the energy of heavy metal in my own verse, forge something between the choppy horror-punk strophes of Slayer and the grand Latinate lines of Milton. It is only natural that I would grope in the dark for a poetic correlative to the experience of being in a mosh pit. If poetry can capture the dread of death, the ache of heartbreak and loss, the terrifying beauty of the world, surely it can match the pit. But, after 25 years of writing, I’m still not certain it can.

“Looking out over the gathered masses at a Slayer concert, I sometimes think of Milton’s fallen angels, exhausted and disordered after falling through the abyss from heaven, ‘grand infernal Peers’ awakening and discovering where they are. Satan is ‘Hells dread Emperour with pomp Supream’ enthroned in ‘A Globe of fierie Seraphim inclos’d / With bright imblazonrie, and horrent Arms’ in ‘the hollow Abyss / Heard farr and wide, and all the host of Hell / With deafning shout, return’d them loud acclaim.’ This grand imagery goes some way toward explaining the sheer exultation of the decibels, the flashing lights, the gleaming skin, the massive motion of the mosh pit.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Fata morgana effect in the Juan de Fuca Strait

Poem: Mark Blaeuer, “Big Business”

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