Reviews and News:
The myth of the Andalusian Paradise: “In an exhilarating and unput-downable read, Fernández-Morera debunks the fashionable myth that Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together (convivencia) under ‘tolerant’ Muslim rule. He prefaces each chapter with a quote by scholars, politicians and respected publications extolling the Andalusian paradise. World-class academics — hailing from Yale, Harvard, Chicago, Princeton, London, Oxford — look like fools in their apologetics for jihad: the violent Muslim conquest of Spain euphemistically described as a ‘gentle migratory wave’.”
* *
Fielding technology. “For years, players have been valued for their hitting. Now a groundbreaking tool makes it possible to measure how much their defense contributes to a team’s success.”
* *
Baseball and social change: Baseball “was built on a legacy of intentional escape from the burdens of everyday life. Rivalries and tradition are more important to fans than the political or social issues of the day. The game’s enduring appeal is found in its strong connection to the past. Today’s game looks almost identical to its earliest days, and the ballparks, rules, and uniforms reflect a different era. Even as the game and the business around it adapt to the demands of more recent years, fans cling to elements of the game that—to them—are unchanged from the beginning of the game itself.”
* *
A history of Esperanto.
* *
The Encyclopedia of Militant Islam “presents detailed information on 44 different militant Islamic groups. Some, like Hamas and ISIS, are in the news in western nations. Others, like Jemaah Islamiyah (which has active terrorists in the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia) are virtually unknown in the West.” It also reveals that the “nations with the highest rates of terrorist attacks are majority Muslim…Hence, ordinary, non-violent Muslims are the primary victims of Islamic terror.”
* *
New Raphael discovered: “A painting that was at one time valued at $26 recently had a new evaluation that increases its worth a million-fold. Originally attributed to minor Renaissance artist Innocenzo Francucci da Imola, experts now believe it’s actually a Madonna by the Renaissance master Raphael. In today’s market, its value is around $26 million.”
* *
Essay of the Day:
In The Claremont Review of Books, Mark Bauerlein asks: “Why are my colleagues so caught up in same-sex matters?”
“Few of them are gay, but they have made ‘queer theory,’ gender studies, and other schools of thought opposed to what they call ‘heteronormativity’ central to the humanities ever since the subjects blossomed in book lists, periodicals, conferences, and hirings in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Of course, it isn’t hard to understand why same-sex attraction draws political support. The professoriate is uniformly liberal on social issues. To them, the case for anti-discrimination is a no-brainer, and conservative resistance to same-sex marriage and transgender rights amounts to a lingering Jim Crow. But making LGBT topics into a research field and a professional identity doesn’t make obvious sense.
“The demographics don’t support it. According to the 2013 National Health Interview Survey, a project of the Centers for Disease Control, 96.6% of American adults identify as straight, 1.6% gay or lesbian, and 0.7% bisexual. Those numbers fit closely to the fields as they were when I started graduate school in 1983, and same-sex issues were a rare concern. The teacher who taught me the most in those years was gay and offered a course in gay lit each year for undergrads, but his position was understood as a side interest, not a defining feature. His professional identity was as a Romanticist taking a history-of-ideas approach.
“None of the critical anthologies I was assigned around then touched upon same-sex attraction—not David Lodge’s Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Hazard Adams’s Critical Theory Since Plato, or Adams and Leroy Searle’s Critical Theory Since 1965. To check my memory, I just pored over one of the flagship scholarly journals, PMLA (or, Publications of the Modern Language Association), from 1982-83, and found several essays on feminist themes, but nothing on same-sex desire. In five years of Critical Inquiry, 1979-83, only four essays out of the more than a hundred broached it. For the same years, I found nothing at all in the avant garde journal boundary 2.
“Ten years later, everything had changed. One could now describe gay studies as a ‘booming field dominated by literary criticism, film criticism, and cultural history,’ as Rutgers English professor Michael Warner did in his 1991 essay ‘Fear of a Queer Planet.'”
* *
Image of the Day: Tuscany
* *
Poem: Hagiwara Sakutarō, “In the Mountains”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
