Reviews and News:
A short history of paper money: “Kublai Khan, said Marco Polo, had ‘a more extensive command of treasure than any other sovereign in the universe’. There were no jangling pockets of coins in Kanbalu. Bark had been stripped from the mulberry trees and beaten into paper notes. The notes carried delicate little pictures of earlier currency — long, frayed ropes weighed down with coins. It was as though they were mocking the old ways. Paper money had been produced in China from as early as the 7th century, but that did not stop Marco Polo from gushing that the Great Khan had discovered ‘the secret of the alchemists’.”
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Mark Athitakis reviews Marisa Silver’s “marvelous” Little Nothing: “I mean ‘marvelous’ in the this-critic-approves sense, sure: Her command of character, style, and storytelling is expert and sustained. But I also mean it in the sense of being full of marvels: Its story is suffused with magic, lycanthropy, circuses, and cliffhanger incidents of good luck and bad. We’re already awash in stories like this, especially at the multiplex, where we’re dazzled to be distracted. Silver, however, grasps that the best stories dazzle us to guide us to a deeper sense of being.”
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Stephen Miller remembers Simon Leys: “What do Jean-Paul Sartre, André Malraux, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes have in common? These French writers admired Mao Zedong, the tyrant responsible for a famine in which 40-50 million people died. He was responsible, as well, for the Cultural Revolution, which had a death toll of around two million (some observers put the figure much higher) and cost untold suffering and destruction. ‘When it comes to Maoism,’ the late China scholar Simon Leys once said, ‘some members of the French intellectual elite have easily beaten the world record for stupidity.’ Simon Leys was the pen-name of Pierre Ryckmans, a prescient Belgian who taught for many years in Australia and died two years ago.”
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Venice without Venetians: “On any given day, tourists outnumber actual Venetians by 140 to 1.”
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William McGurn on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission report on religious liberty: It’s “so bad, it’s good”: “The commission report is called ‘Peaceful Coexistence: Reconciling nondiscrimination principles with civil liberties.’ Its top finding is this: ‘Civil rights protections ensuring nondiscrimination, as embodied in the Constitution, laws, and policies, are of pre-eminent importance in American jurisprudence.’ Translation: Nuisances including the First Amendment’s ‘free exercise’ of religion guarantee take a back seat to the rapidly multiplying non-discrimination causes such as the ‘right’ to coerce any baker you want into baking the cake you want for your same-sex wedding.” (HT: Peter Lawler)
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The “haunted” life of Shirley Jackson: “Her mother hectored her mercilessly about her weight and bad habits from the time she was a child until the last days of her life. (Jackson died of an apparent heart attack in 1965, only 48.) The importance of keeping up appearances in polite society was central to Jackson’s affluent upbringing in Burlingame, California, and Rochester, New York. Her mother’s family was firmly grounded among San Francisco’s wealthy elite, and her father was an executive in the printing business. But appearances were something Jackson rejected from an early age with her unruly auburn hair, unconventional style of dress, caustic wit, and swagger. And even though Jackson was confident and outspoken, she could find intimacy dangerous, a dark realm of judgment and scrutiny and deeply personal insults that—not surprising, given her mother’s fixation on social standing—seemed to carry the verdict of the wider culture. By the time Jackson, then 21, met her husband, the New Yorker writer and literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, she was primed to accept condescension, belittling, and neglect as her natural habitat.”
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Essay of the Day:
In National Post, Theresa Tedesco explains how Edward Snowden escaped capture after he leaked NSA documents:
“The tall, lanky American dressed in all black looked familiar. But Ajith, a 44-year-old Sri Lankan refugee seeking asylum in Hong Kong figured the nervous-looking man with the red-rimmed eyes fidgeting in the darkness outside the United Nations building in the Tsim Sha Tsui district of Kowloon was a U.S. army dodger.
“Summoned by his immigration lawyer in the late evening of June 10, 2013, Ajith (last names of the refugees in this story have been withheld), a former soldier in the Sri Lankan military, was told the unidentified man was ‘famous’ and needed ‘protection.’ Little else was revealed except that he would be responsible for covertly moving the American around at a moment’s notice.
“‘I was very happy to help him,’ Ajith recalled during a recent interview with the National Post in his small windowless room in Kennedy Town, on the western tip of Hong Kong Island. ‘This famous person was a refugee too, same as me.’
“Earlier that day, that ‘famous’ 29-year-old walked out of the five-star luxury Hotel Mira in Kowloon and sparked an intensive global manhunt not seen since the search for al-Qaeda’s Osama Bin Laden after the Sept. 11, 2001, bombings.
“Edward Snowden, a former U.S. intelligence contractor, became the most wanted fugitive in the world after leaking a cache of classified documents to the media detailing extensive cyber spying networks by the U.S. government on its own citizens and governments around the world.
To escape the long arm of American justice, the man responsible for the largest national security breach in U.S. history retained a Canadian lawyer in Hong Kong who hatched a plan that included a visit to the UN sub-office where the North Carolina native applied for refugee status to avoid extradition to the U.S.
“Fearing the media would surround and follow Snowden — making it easier for the Hong Kong authorities to arrest the one-time Central Intelligence Agency analyst on behalf of the U.S. — his lawyers made him virtually disappear for two weeks from June 10 to June 23, 2013, before he emerged on an Aeroflot airplane bound for Moscow, where he remains stranded today in self-imposed exile.
“‘That morning, I had minutes to figure out how to get him to the UN, away from the media, and out of harm’s way with the weight of the U.S. government bearing down on him. I did what I had to do, and could do, to help him,’ Robert Tibbo, the whistleblower’s lead lawyer in Hong Kong told the Post in a wide-ranging interview, the first detailing the chaotic days of Snowden’s escape three years ago. ‘They wanted the data and they wanted to shut him down. Our greatest fear was that Ed would be found.'”
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Image of the Day:
Rainbow and lightning
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Poem: A. E. Stallings,
“Sunset, Wings”
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