Reviews and News:
The story for some in the liberal media is that Trump won because racist and xenophobic whites came out in droves for him. He won, as Damon Young puts it simplistically in The Nation, because white people decided to defend their “white privilege.” The reality, as usual, is more complex. According to Oren Cass, Trump did worse with whites than Romney did but better–significantly better–with minorities: “The Trump campaign didn’t produce a whiter electorate. In fact, if the only change in 2016 had been in white versus nonwhite turnout, Clinton would have increased Obama’s margin by 1.7 percent. Trump didn’t dominate the white electorate—his narrow gains there only sliced 0.7 percent off the Democrat advantage. The real gain came with minorities, cutting in by 3.2 percent, leaving the popular vote within one percentage point and helping tip the Electoral College. This is even simpler to see in isolation: whether nonwhite turnout was 28 percent or 30 percent, Trump’s 11 point net gain within that group was worth more than three points to the final margin…Look at Pennsylvania (2012, 2016). The electorate did shift from 78 percent white to 81 percent white. But Trump actually won a lower share of that population (56 percent) than Romney did four years earlier (57 percent). A two-point drop in Clinton’s support relative to Obama left Trump with a net gain of 1 percent. He logged a net gain of 2 percent with African Americans. He logged a net gain of 10 percent with Latinos.”
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Parisiennes during the Nazi occupation: Coco Chanel does “just fine under the ‘protection’ of a German officer and escaping the postwar retribution meted out to other collaborators possibly thanks to the intervention of no less than Winston Churchill, a cousin of a previous lover, the Duke of Westminster. The stories of the many titled ladies playing up to the occupiers with similar lack of consequences are as shameful as the countless heroic tales of those women, famous and not, who risked everything working for the Resistance are edifying.”
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A. N. Wilson reviews Simon Goldhill’s study of the strange Victorian Bensons: “Fred Benson was one of six children born to Edward White ‘E. W.’ Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1883–96, and his wife Mary ‘Minnie’ Sidgwick Benson. The great thing about being a Benson fan is that the siblings left behind so many volumes to cherish. Fred wrote dozens of novels. His brother, Monsignor (Robert) Hugh, a convert to Roman Catholicism, was the author of thrilling recusant tales such as Come Rack! Come Rope! (1912). And my own favourite, A. C. (Arthur Christopher) Benson – lyricist of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ – was one of the most prolific, as well as the sharpest and funniest, diarists in the language….Rather, having steeped himself in the Bensons and their works, [Goldhill] produces a reflection on the changing attitudes to sex, and to God (and a few other things too, but chiefly those two), during the protagonists’ lifetimes. ‘My story in this book has been how a narrative of change across the period from 1850 to 1940 – in writing, sexuality, and religion – can be traced through the Benson family’s history, not because they are normal and thus exemplary but because they are queer and yet paradigmatic.'”
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Polls don’t predict election outcomes, but history might: “The story of the 2016 election is one of a stunning defeat, not just for Hillary Clinton, but also for the pollsters, pundits and data-driven journalists who overwhelmingly predicted her victory. But at least one scholar, Allan J. Lichtman, saw both coming. Dr. Lichtman, a historian at American University in Washington, is the co-creator of a historically based model that has correctly predicted the winner of the popular vote in the last eight presidential contests — and, back in September, predicted the supposedly unthinkable election of Donald J. Trump…’Some of the pollsters are good friends, and good people, but during the next election, I hope we send them to a very nice Pacific Island for a very nice vacation.'”
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In defense of figuration in modern painting: “Timothy Hyman’s remarkable new book makes the case for the relevance of figurative painting in the 20th century, a period effectively dominated by modernist abstraction…Hyman claims many of the great independent artists for his argument — Balthus, Kirchner, Bonnard, Ensor — and registers them as resistance fighters in the war of influence and received opinion.”
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John Wilson reviews Michael Connelly’s latest novel, The Wrong Side of Goodbye.
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Essay of the Day:
A. E. Housman is the poet of a dying England but also of exile and the English countryside. Paul Keegan takes a closer look at the relationship between the poet and the country he called home:
“Opinion about his relation to his age has always been self-divided. He said he had no relation to it. Edmund Wilson wrote in 1938 that the poems ‘went on vibrating for decades’, despite their lethal pastoral of condemned men and suicides, soldiers and doomed lovers, their stopped clock of velleities and arrested intimacies.
“The poems have often been mothballed as the sum of their props, starting with Pound’s ‘Song in the Manner of Housman’: ‘People are born and die,/We also shall be dead pretty soon/Therefore let us act as if we were/Dead already’; Woolf in 1936 summarised the personal mythology as ‘May, death, lads, Shropshire’; Orwell in 1940 listed ‘suicide, unhappy love, early death’; Forster in 1950 ticked off ‘the football and cherry trees, the poplars and glimmering weirs, the red coats, the darnel and the beer … the homesickness and bed-sickness, the yearning for masculine death’. Larkin in 1979 noted ‘ploughing, enlisting, betrothals and betrayals and hangings’. No other poet has been so itemised, and Parker’s angle widens dramatically to include ‘love and loss; youth and death; friendship and betrayal; crime and punishment; the passing of time; the military calling; the English landscape; exile from places of past happiness; the country versus the city; the absence of God and the indifference of the natural world to the fate of men’. The inclusiveness hopes to catch that fugitive thing – Englishness – in the darkened Claude glass of the poems. Housman Country tells us many things about England, whose future has so often been taken to lie in its past, while also raising questions as to what England can tell us about Housman.”
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Image of the Day: Aspen
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Poem: Dana Gioia, “Tinsel, Frankincense, and Fir”
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