Reviews and News:
As you probably know, Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Whatever one thinks of Dylan’s music, his lyrics alone are not great works of art. The late Christopher Hitchens and Salman Rushdie used to recite Dylan’s lyrics in “deadpan” blank verse, which was both “ridiculous” and “quite hypnotic”—”you hardly care that a tambourine man can’t really be playing a song.” Cass Sunstein disagrees. Dylan has surpassed Whitman and perhaps equaled Shakespeare. Andrew Ferguson reports: “Within hours the pop music critic of the New York Times had gone mad with antitheses: ‘[T]here’s no question that Mr. Dylan has created a great American songbook of his own: an e pluribus unum of high-flown and down-home, narrative and imagistic, erudite and earthy, romantic and cutting, devout and iconoclastic, finger-pointing and oracular, personal and universal, compassionate and pitiless.’ Anyone who can pack that much pluribus into a mere unum, went the argument, had to be worthy of the Nobel. The Times‘s critic was quickly followed by Cass Sunstein, a law professor at Harvard, writing at Bloomberg.com. (A Harvard professor celebrating Dylan on a website devoted to stock market news—that’s how thoroughly he has saturated American culture.) ‘Bob Dylan,’ Sunstein wrote, ‘has surpassed Walt Whitman as the defining American artist, celebrating the capacity for self-invention as the highest form of freedom.’ Only Whitman? Why the demotion? Sunstein must have felt the Whitman comparison was insufficient. This is a job for Shakespeare! ‘If “Like A Rolling Stone” is Dylan’s “Hamlet,”‘ Sunstein wrote, ‘”Desolation Row” is his “King Lear.” It’s a fever dream, or a love letter, about an unruly procession of humanity.’ There was a lot of talk about Dylan’s self-invention in all the encomiums, but it’s pretty clear who’s doing the inventing around here—an alchemical transformation of a hardworking and witty pop star into a towering poet of world-historical achievement.”
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On meeting the real Christopher Robin: “We first met about 18 years ago when I was writing a musical play about his father, AA Milne. I made the pilgrimage to Dartmouth in Devon where Christopher, then about 60, and his wife, Lesley, owned and ran a bookshop and cared for their severely disabled, grown-up daughter, Clare. Christopher – slim, a little bent, owlish glasses, tweed jacket – was not at all as I had expected. I had been told I would find him painfully shy, distant, introspective, diffident about his parents, reluctant to talk about Pooh. He surprised me at once. He was consciously charming, courteous, kindly, gentle but forthcoming, amusing, amused. He said: ‘Of course we must talk about Pooh.’ He had a mischievous twinkle. ‘It’s been something of a love-hate relationship down the years, but it’s all right now.'”
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Philip Ziegler’s Between the Wars is “a fascinating, panoramic overview of the decades that preceded and followed his birth, encapsulating a world balanced precariously on the cusp of peace and conflict. In his self-declaredly idiosyncratic choice of events, domestic and international, political, and social, cultural and scientific, Ziegler begins by describing the alarming responsibility that faced three men, each with their own country’s welfare foremost on their private agenda. In 1919 the French prime minister Georges Clemenceau, the American president Woodrow Wilson and Britain’s David Lloyd George gathered in Paris to sign a misconceived treaty that according to Ziegler resulted in another world war that ‘might never have occurred’ if this agreement had been ‘drafted with greater realism and foresight’.”
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Why Carthage failed and Rome succeeded.
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Why for-profit universities fail.
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The real Rupert Brooke?
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Essay of the Day:
Well, here’s another great essay from Public Discourse. This time it’s by Mark Regnerus, who argues that sociological studies of children in same-sex households are allowing politics to skew data:
“It was nearly five years ago that I first received data back from the research firm that had carried out the New Family Structures Study (NFSS) protocol. Shortly thereafter, I began to question the scholarly consensus that there were ‘no differences’ between same-sex and opposite-sex households with children. My skepticism didn’t sit well with the guild.
“Social network analyst (and friend) Jimi Adams subsequently assessed patterns of ‘citation networks’ in the same-sex parenting literature and concluded that there is indeed a consensus out there that claims there are ‘no differences.’ I see it. I just think the foundation for it is more slipshod than rock-solid. It is the result of early but methodologically limited evaluations that formed a politically expedient narrative. It is not the product of a rigorous, sustained examination of high-quality data over time, across countries, and using different measurement strategies and analytic approaches.
“Some liken the debate over the science of same-sex parenting to the one over climate change. They argue that the science is so extensive, the published studies so numerous, and the conclusions so overwhelmingly unidirectional that only scientists acting in bad faith would object. But that’s not where this field of study is. How can one possibly come to a legitimate consensus about the short and long-term effects of a practice (childrearing) of a tiny minority about whom generalizable data of sufficient size for valid comparative analysis were not available until the past decade? The answer, of course, is that you cannot.
“What we have, rather, is a political consensus generated by lots of small studies of tiny, non-representative samples misinterpreted as applying to the entire population of same-sex parents. It is—by comparison to climate change—like saying that since the surface temperatures in Taiwan, Togo, and Texas have inched up a degree or two that the entire globe must have as well. Scientists know better than to declare such a thing based on limited evidence.
“In fact, I am unaware of any other domain of science in which scholars have so little high-quality data to answer comparatively new research questions and yet are so quick to declare those questions answered and done with. We don’t do that in any other field or with any other question. What ought to be an empirical matter—an important one, no doubt—has instead turned into a moral test of fealty.”
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Image of the Day: Robin Williams’s bicycles (HT: Collin Garbarino)
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Poem: Karl Kirchwey, “Roman Fountain”
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