Reviews and News:
The problem with “self-care”: “Self-care is less an organized industry than it is an emerging (and maddeningly vague) philosophy of life,” and it’s one that “shifts responsibility away from what you can do for yourself and toward the supposedly terrible things the world is doing to you.”
* *
Why don’t teachers make more money? One answer: unions.
* *
Much of today’s technology was not created by “curiosity-driven scientific exploration” but was the result of the “leashing of scientific creativity to the technological needs of the U.S. Department of Defense.” And that’s a good thing.
* *
It’s time to talk about Lord Byron again: “Byron’s self-transformation—his self-overcoming, in Nietzschean terms—seems genuine, judging from the last section of Letters. The jaded, rapidly aging nobleman broke through to actual nobility. These last Letters constitute at once the least salacious and most fascinating group. Gone are the petty sniping, the boastful vulgarity, the self-pity. (His literary productivity, alas, went with them.) In their place, we get instructions to bankers arranging loans for the cause, clear-eyed assessments of Greek mendacity, and accounts of close escapes from capture by the Turkish fleet.”
* *
Truman Capote’s ashes to be sold: “Thirty-two years after Truman Capote’s death, the iconic author, screenwriter, and society darling will embark on one final adventure. On Wednesday, Julien’s Auctions announced that Capote’s ashes will be sold in late September as part of an auction marketed (in questionable taste) as a rare ‘peek inside the lives of some of Hollywood’s most private stars.'”
* *
Univision buys Gawker for $135 million.
* *
The old problem of visitors damaging art in museums.
* *
The making of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
* *
Essay of the Day:
There may be some artists who create good work that is also political, but Arthur Miller is not one of them, Michael Anderson argues in The Hopkins Review:
“[C]ompare Arthur Miller with an irrefutably political playwright, Bertolt Brecht. The two share a remarkable number of biographical similarities. Both were born into affluent families; both had brothers who stayed home in the family business while their siblings pursued the muse. Both embraced Marxism in response to severe social dislocation—Germany’s collapse after World War I in Brecht’s case, the Great Depression in Miller’s—and, though enthusiastic Party functionaries, for both communism functioned more as an emotional salve than an intellectual commitment. Each was attacked by the Right (for attacking capitalism) and the Left (for deficient political correctness). Both produced an extensive corpus of non-theatrical works; each fancied himself a poet (Brecht with considerably more justification). Both were given to windy theoretical pontifications about theater that seemed less about drama in general and more about justifying their own plays. Both had unsuccessful stints in Hollywood. Called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, each dissembled (Brecht masterfully, Miller clumsily) about his political past. And each contracted a second marriage to a celebrated actress.
“The difference is in their dramatic strategies. Contrast Galileo and The Crucible, both plays that reckon the price of free conscience confronted by ecclesiastical authority, an authority abhorrent to the contemporary audience. Brecht’s churchmen are presented as highly intelligent, their arguments skillful and compelling; Miller’s are self-righteously canting tyrants. In the dialectical interchange of ideas, Brecht creates drama; in his one-sided hectoring Miller delivers a message, the protest against McCarthyism in John Proctor’s refusal to name names—an act arising from neither the characterization nor the plot.
Between Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, Miller wrote an adaptation (some have called it a ‘Bowdlerization’) of An Enemy of the People. The play is not Ibsen’s most psychologically incisive to begin with; Miller stripped all nuance from it. The result of what Robert S. Warshow called ‘Mr. Miller’s steadfast, one might almost say selfless, refusal of complexity’ was repeated in The Crucible: an impassioned opposition of incontestable virtue against obvious hypocrisy. This empty conflict is presented again and again in Miller’s plays. (For example: in The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, the protagonist asserts, ‘The truth, the truth is holy!’). So, too, is the defense of undisputed integrity—the closest approximation to an idea in his work. Instead of the moral simplification of art, Miller, as he would throughout his career, substituted the moral reductionism of propaganda.”
* *
Image of the Day: Louisiana flooding
* *
Poem: Nicholas Campbell, “The Moth”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
