Reviews and News:
Peter Singer’s odious utilitarianism. The philosopher has repeatedly claimed that severely disabled people should be killed. Now he suggests that it might be OK to rape those that have been allowed to live.
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Dracula in Iceland: “In 1897, Dracula was published – and a mere three years later Icelandic readers were introduced to Bram Stoker’s novel via the newspaper Fjallkonan (The Lady of the Mountain). Translated as Makt Myrkranna (Powers of Darkness), it appeared in serial form between January 1900 and March 1901, and was published as a book a few months later. The translator happened to be the paper’s founder and editor, Valdimar Ásmundsson, who today is probably best known in Iceland as the husband of Bríet Bjarnhéðinsdóttir – the country’s most famous and cherished suffragette. It was eighty-five years before anyone from the outside world noticed that the translation varied from the original in any way. In 1986, the Dracula scholar Richard Dalby discovered an original preface to the Icelandic version; and in 2014, Hans Corneel de Roos, intrigued by the preface, found out that dramatic alterations had been made to the story itself.”
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French Catholics’ political awakening: “Something quite unexpected is happening in France: in what has long been regarded as one of the world’s most secular societies, Catholics are now reemerging as a potent force in public life.”
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Large and elaborate Roman mosaics discovered in Southern France.
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Peter Berkowitz on what a new history of American civil religion gets wrong.
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“Little by little, and you end up with a hooligan…,” and other Soviet anti-alcohol posters.
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Yevgeny Yevtushenko, cowboy poet: “Yevtushenko, who died of cancer Saturday, lived in Oklahoma, where he’d been teaching poetry at the University of Tulsa since 1992. His eulogies trumpet his defense of the Jewish people; they quote from ‘Babi Yar,’ his most recognized poem, composed after his first visit to the unmarked mass grave near Kiev, Ukraine; they boast of the thousands who once flocked to hear him read. But few have mentioned his impact in the world of cowboy poetry, a genre in which Yevtushenko—unlike so many snickering journalists and dismissive academics—appears to have found common ground with Americans. ‘He said, I consider myself a Siberian cowboy! He actually said very disparaging things about academic poets in the United States, about how precious they were,’ said Hal Cannon, the founding director of the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering and its host organization, the Western Folklife Center.”
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Where has all the antimatter gone?
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Essay of the Day:
In The New York Times Magazine, Robert F. Worth profiles Gilles Kepel, a French Islamic scholar who recently found himself on a death list, as the country struggles with how to handle Muslim assimilation:
“Gilles Kepel, a French political scientist, was at home in Paris brushing his teeth one morning last June when his cellphone rattled on the sink. It was a text from a journalist he knew: ‘I’m sorry to tell you this, but you’re on the death list.’ Kepel turned toward his TV, which was already on, and the top story eliminated any confusion. A French-born jihadi named Larossi Abballa had murdered a police officer and his wife in a town west of Paris and then delivered a macabre speech on Facebook Live — with the couple’s 3-year-old child cowering nearby — in which he called for the killing of seven public figures. The French media omitted the details, but an Interior Ministry official soon called with confirmation: Kepel’s name was near the top of the list. His initial feeling, he later told me, was ‘as if the subject I’ve been studying for 35 years had turned around to strike at me.’ Within hours, he had a government security team assigned to guard him 24 hours a day. A similar death warrant was issued against him later that summer, elevating the sense of danger.
“The threats came at an unusual turn in Kepel’s career. He has long been a prominent figure in the French intellectual world, a scholar whose face — a distinctive, narrow-eyed mask of polished sobriety — is often seen on TV news shows. But recently he has assumed a far more combative stance. Kepel has argued that much of France’s left-leaning intelligentsia fails to understand the nature of the threat the country faces — not just from foreign terrorists but also from the Islamist provocateurs in its exurban ghettos, the banlieues. Unlike the Islam-bashing polemicists who haunt French opinion pages, Kepel brings a lifetime of scholarship to this argument. He has always been careful to distinguish mainstream Islam from the hard-line Islamist ideologues of the banlieues, who have no real equivalent in the United States. He has long been a man of the left; his wife’s family is from North Africa, and he has no sympathy for the xenophobia of the right-wing National Front. But he believes that radical Islamists are trying to shred France’s social fabric and foster a civil war, and that many leftists are unwittingly playing into their hands. This view has made him a target for almost everyone.
“Kepel’s assault against what he calls ‘Islamo-gauchism’ has earned him an unusual role during a French presidential campaign that has seemed, at times, to be a referendum on the country’s tortured relationship with its Muslim immigrants and with Islam writ large…”
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“Some of Kepel’s fellow intellectuals contend that the election should be an opportunity to look inward instead of blaming Islamists. The political scientist Olivier Roy argues that France’s rigorously secular government and society have helped create an airless environment that has allowed jihadism to thrive. Roy and others on the left appear to believe that the terrorist violence of the past two years has illuminated fatal flaws at the heart of French political culture: too rigid, too hierarchical, too insistent on imposing cultural conformity on an increasingly diverse population. This critique is sometimes echoed by critics in Britain and the United States, who say France needs to get over its horror of communautarisme — the formation of ethnic and social enclaves — and loosen the sense of what it means to be authentically French. In other words, France would be better off adopting a more hands-off, multiculturalist approach to the head scarf and other Islamic cultural symbols.
“Kepel scoffs at this argument, and sometimes derides its proponents as naïfs or even Islamist fellow-travelers. He is more than an observer to this debate: Kepel was a member of the commission that helped create France’s controversial 2004 law banning Islamic head scarves and other religious symbols and clothing in public schools, and remains proud of that role. He believes that eroding French state secularism, known as laïcité, would lead to a ‘Balkanization of Europe along religious and ethnic lines,’ with a Muslim voting bloc, Muslim schools and a hardening of quasi-separatist communities of various religions…”
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Photo: Carrizo Plain
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Poem: Adam Giannelli, “How the Light Is Spent”
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