Reviews and News:
How did J. R. R. Tolkien fall in love with inventing languages? It started early: “Although the editors of this new critical edition place his earliest inventions in his mid-teens, Tolkien told one interviewer that he began when he was eight or nine… The first language that Tolkien describes, Animalic, was the concoction of two cousins in which ‘Dog nightingale woodpecker forty’ meant: ‘You are an ass.’ Tolkien takes us from this simple substitution code through common argots such as pig Latin (‘Ellohay, owhay areyay ouyay?’) to Nevbosh, composed of twisted bits of Latin and French in his early teens. He notes that a few words in Nevbosh were pure inventions – sound clusters that seemed peculiarly fit for their meaning. That leads him on to ‘sound symbolism’: the idea that even beyond onomatopoeia, we naturally associate certain sounds with certain meanings.”
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Over at The Spectator, Matt Rumm takes a stab at defending conceptional art.
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The real LBJ? “Johnson…was an activist and reformer but by no means a liberal ideologue. In fact, according to Woods, he was something of the opposite: a consensus builder who saw that he needed support from all quarters to win the votes needed to pass his agenda. It was partly for this reason that the liberals in his party never completely trusted him. He told middle-class voters and business leaders that reform was the conservative alternative to violence and upheaval. Johnson worked Congress on a daily basis, calling and meeting with members regularly, either to cajole or browbeat them as the situation required.”
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Don’t expect the media to report on it accurately, but a new study finds that female same-sex parents “report more anger, irritation, and comparative frustration with their (apparently misbehaving) children than do opposite-sex parents.” Mark Regnerus explains.
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David Foster Wallace at the net.
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The battle for the constitution: “Barnett argues that American history can be characterized as a battle between a ‘Republican’ vision of the Constitution, in which the natural rights of citizens take precedence over the government, and a ‘Democratic’ vision, in which the interests of the government take precedence over individual rights. These visions have often, though certainly not always, aligned with the platforms of the national parties that share their names.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The Walrus, Jason Guriel writes about something I’ve complained about over the last year: The increasing tendency of critics to insert themselves into their reviews and literary essays. Stop it, he argues. Well, he doesn’t quite say that, but if you’re a critic, you should at least pause before you write about that pizza you once bought on Fifth Avenue or the time your Meemaw took you to Chicago:
“Reviews and essays that call attention to the critic are kind of like those movies that insist the viewer wear 3-D glasses. They promise depth, middle distance, a more fulsome experience, three-dimensionality: some additional layer of life. But the promise is redundant. Good criticism, like good films, will always give the impression of depth, of a presiding, trustworthy personality. Smart sentences, one after the other, are usually heartbeat enough.”
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Image of the Day: Tiger cub
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Poem: Kate Light has died. Here’s her “I Never Want To Go When It’s Time”
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