You knew, perhaps, that Gertrude Stein was a Vichy supporter, but did you know how fervently she supported the Fascist-friendly government: “In her correspondence during this period, Stein explicitly refers to herself as a ‘propagandist’ for the ‘new France.’ She was apparently excited by the possibility that Pétain himself had approved of her project to translate his speeches. And in one of the only pieces of Vichy propaganda Stein actually brought to press, a 1941 article on the French language in the Vichy journal La Patrie, Stein envisions a productive continuity between the political and cultural project of Pétain’s National Revolution and her own experimental writing. Even after the war, Stein continued to praise Pétain, stating that his 1940 armistice with Hitler had ‘achieved a miracle’ (this, after Pétain had been sentenced to death by a French court for treason).” Fans of her transgressive prose and lifestyle “may want to rescue her from her disquieting political views,” Barbara Will writes, “But to do so greatly simplifies both her complex character and the historical moment in which she and her fellow modernists lived.”
R. R. Reno reviews Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West in the latest issue of First Things and doesn’t beat around the bush: “Jonah Goldberg exemplifies the decadence and dysfunction of today’s public discourse.”
Stunt marriage proposals are an “abomination,” writes Shannon Proudfoot. “How does it feel being reduced to a mere audience member—one face in a gaping sea—staring up at a scene from your own life?” Go Shannon.
The Bible’s perfect blue: “Forty-nine times the Bible mentions a perfect, pure blue, a color so magnificent and transcendent that it was all but impossible to describe. Yet, for most of the last 2,000 years, nobody has known exactly what ‘biblical blue’ — called tekhelet in Hebrew — actually looked like or how it could be re-created.”
A first edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables has been stolen from The House of Seven Gables.
Is the “replicability crisis” the beginning of the end for psychology or the latest obsession of a handful of trolls? “As you’ve no doubt heard by now, social psychology has had a rough few years. The trouble concerns the replicability crisis, a somewhat antiseptic phrase that refers to the growing realization that often the papers published in peer-reviewed journals — papers with authoritative abstracts and nifty-looking charts — can’t be reproduced. In other words, they don’t work when scientists try them again. If you wanted to pin down the moment when the replication crisis really began, you might decide it was in 2010, when Daryl Bem, a Cornell psychologist, published a paper in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that purported to prove that subjects could predict the future. Or maybe it was in 2012, when researchers failed to replicate a much-heralded 1996 study by John Bargh, a Yale psychologist, that claimed to show that reading about old people made subjects walk more slowly. And it’s only gotten worse.”
James Frey’s Katerina “may be the worst novel of the year.” Ron Charles: “If you’re prone to sympathetic vomiting, you’ll want a smock, too, because most of what the inebriated narrator does in this novel is vomit. He vomited when he got up, he has vomited after sex, he vomits looking for alcohol, he will vomit while drinking — he’s a full conjugation of the verb ‘to vomit.’ Which is also the theme here. Katerina offers a volcanic regurgitation of Frey’s dream of writing a bestseller, his descent into addiction and the literary scandal that made him infamous. The author seems to believe that his fall from grace is burned into America’s consciousness like the fall of Saigon…”
Essay of the Day:
In First Things, Peter Hitchens takes stock of George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones novels:
“In his imaginary country, virtue and trust are always punished. The most attractive major character, Eddard Stark, dies swiftly, unjustly, and horribly. He dies largely because he is so honorable and dutiful. His horrified family is scattered to the winds to suffer or perish. And from that moment on in the story, almost everyone associated with honesty, selfless courage, and justice is doomed. Almost the only likable figure who survives through all the books is the dwarf, Tyrion, who is occasionally kind, but also consumed with cynicism and despair.
“Bravery and charity toward others are rewarded with death or betrayal. The simple poor are raped, robbed, enslaved, and burned out of their homes. Chivalry, a real thing in Conan Doyle’s world, is for Martin a fraud. All kinds of cruelty and greed, typified by the House of Lannister, flourish like the green bay tree. Treachery and the most debauched cynicism are the only salvation, the only route to safety or advantage. Perhaps the most intense moment of the entire saga, the ‘Red Wedding’ is composed entirely of the most bitter betrayals, including a terrible violation of the laws of hospitality. Yet as far as I can see, the betrayers gain advantage by their action. Three major figures, all in the grip of different versions of amoral cynicism, dominate all the thousands of pages that follow, and while others are murdered all around them, they live on …
“Martin cannot write as well as Tolkien or Lewis, in my view because he cannot draw on Tolkien’s or Lewis’s enormous storehouse of legend, saga, poetry, and literature. He sometimes dwells rather lengthily on the menus at the barbarous banquets he describes. He dwells on slavery and human cruelty in general, and his language can be coarse. Four-letter words occur. Well, and why not? I do not intend to disparage Martin by saying this. Like many scribblers, I would be glad to have Martin’s skill in gaining and keeping the reader’s attention. There is a strong argument for saying that such things as he describes have been true of humanity for most of its existence. And goodness, he has the storyteller’s gift. It seems to me that Martin may, especially in his portrayals of the incestuous, limitlessly unkind Lannister twin siblings Jaime and Cersei, have rediscovered human evil in its purest form.”
Photo: Zermatt
Poem: Michael Farrell, “Verlaine in the Lake”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
