Reviews and News:
Bernie Sanders has signed a deal with Thomas Dunne to write a book on his presidential campaign and policy ideas. The book will be called Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In. “Financial details were not disclosed.”
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How much of his ear did Van Gogh cut off? The whole thing: “A note written by Félix Rey, a doctor who treated van Gogh at the Arles hospital, contains a drawing of the mangled ear showing that the artist indeed cut off the whole thing.”
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Joseph Hebert responds to Paul Cantor’s essay on Shakespeare and chivalry: “The problem with chivalry, in Cantor’s view, is that it distorts ‘the common-sense understanding of down-to-earth human affairs,’ making ‘the ordinary relations between men and women . . . seem crass and base by comparison with the poetic ideal,’ and turning warfare ‘into something more brutal by making it fanatical.’ In a pattern that Shakespeare pokes fun at in his plays, chivalry (at least in its more desiccated forms) encourages human beings to fight and to love ‘by the book,’ imposing a set of artificial constraints on their perceptions and behaviors. Cantor is right to see Shakespeare’s poetic art as integrally concerned with observing and commenting upon moral, political, and religious matters ranging from the comic to the sublime. He is also right to notice Shakespeare’s keen interest in the revolutionary ideas and acts of men like Niccolò Machiavelli and Henry VIII. Cantor is mistaken, however, in declaring Shakespeare a trenchant critic of the old order and a firm supporter of its modern opponents. It would be more accurate to say that Shakespeare’s penetrating pen exposes the dangers of folly and fanaticism wherever he finds them. And though he certainly finds fault in distorted versions of Christian ideals—including the excesses of certain forms of chivalry—Shakespeare pays tribute to the truth, beauty, and goodness of genuine Christian virtue.”
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Frederick the Great was a “ruthless, Shakespearean Prince Hal-cum-Henry V, only real, and more talented, and much, much more terrible—not in the common sense of low or immoral, but in the sense of one who rightly inspires fear.”
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Napoleon’s bête noire: “Staël studies are burgeoning. Her fiction and literary criticism are once again being read (though the novels will always be prosy), and university departments increasingly give her political theory the attention she thought it was due (even if the reverence she felt for the opinions of her pompous father Jacques Necker, a Swiss banker twice put in charge of the French nation’s finances, makes some of it less boldly experimental than it might otherwise have been). One of the great merits of Biancamaria Fontana’s excellent survey is to trace with patient lucidity the independence of her political thought, despite the disabling circumstances of her being a woman, her father’s daughter and Napoleon’s bête noire, at a time when any one of these things might have sufficed to curtail such an endeavour.”
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How a Gutenberg Press works.
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Essay of the Day:
In Standpoint, Daniel Johnson argues that the West needs to return to the past and find a will to protect its traditions. Otherwise, it’s over:
“The diagnosis, surprisingly, is more complex than the cure. There are numerous viruses attacking the Western body politic, but only one medicine. To face the future unflinchingly, we must return to the past: listen to the patriarchs and prophets, the ancestral voices of our literature, break open the arsenal of our intellectual history, and mobilise the resources of righteous indignation against the dominions, principalities and powers of darkness that threaten to overwhelm us. The great books, from Homer to Shakespeare, from Plato to Pascal, from Dante to Bellow, must once again not only be assigned to every student, but learned where possible by heart. The music of the masters, from Gregorian chant to George Gershwin, from Sebastian Bach to James MacMillan, from Palestrina to Arvo Pärt, must not only float across the courts and quads of our colleges, but fill our airwaves and headsets. The art and architecture of the West must not only fill our galleries and screens, but be protected from the vandals who threaten antiquities from Leptis Magna to Palmyra.
“In short, we must celebrate Western civilisation as the living, breathing, flourishing organism that it is. Unless the coming generations embrace its treasures and make them their own, we will forfeit all that the children of Abraham have created to give glory to God, all that has ennobled the West and enabled the rest of humanity to be more humane. But a robust, self-confident culture alone is not enough: there must also be foreign and defence policies muscular enough, not only to support the democratic, liberating and civilising mission of Western civilisation, but also to keep that civilisation safe from predators.”Read the rest. * *
Image of the Day: Cloud shadows
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Poem: Stephen Scaer, “Make Believe”
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