Reviews and News:
William James claimed that laughing gas helped him understand Hegel. It also seemed to offer insight from another world. “What’s mistake but a kind of take?” he wrote under its influence, “What’s nausea but a kind of -ausea?”, “That sounds like nonsense, but it is pure onsense!” For Gardiner Quincy Colton, however, “a temperance campaigner who ran a travelling exhibit called ‘Court of Death’, about the evils of drink,…the gas materialised original sin. Its uncanny effect exposed ‘the inner natures of the audience, revealing how bestial they might become if they failed to make temperance their guiding light’.”
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The other trench-poets: “Pan-European in scope, Geert Buelens’s Everything to Nothing makes clear that other nations suffered their own disasters, often on a scale comparable with the Somme, but that literary responses to the conflict were much more varied than the conventional wisdom would have it.”
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The enduring appeal of Peter Rabbit.
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The life and and work of Elizabeth Jane Howard: “There are plenty among our leading novelists who believe that in the endlessly fascinating game of enduring literary reputations Elizabeth Jane Howard, who died at the age of 90 in 2014, will eventually come out rather well. Among vocal admirers of her Cazalet Chronicles, a five-part family saga that charts the changing role of women in England before, during and after the Second World War, is Hilary Mantel, who hails Howard as ‘more adept at switching between time schemes, or from one narrative to another, than any author I can think of’. But there are equally many who will remember her, if at all, as a footnote in the stories of her famous lovers and husbands, including, in the first category, Arthur Koestler, Laurie Lee, Kenneth Tynan, Romain Gary and Cecil Day-Lewis, and in the second the naturalist Peter Scott and Kingsley Amis. What makes Howard even harder to place is her inconsistency as a writer. She can be very good, as for example, in her still fresh and relevant 1950s novels The Beautiful Visit and The Long View, which reflect on a woman’s place in a male world. And she can be embarrassingly bad, notably in 1972’s Odd Girl Out, written as her marriage to Amis had cascaded down from love to hatred. But Artemis Cooper correctly identifies the toughest question in evaluating Howard. How could one who on the page showed such emotional insight about human relationships have been so serially hopeless at applying that knowledge in her own life?”
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Debating Joan of Arc in France: “Changes to how Joan of Arc and other touchstone historical figures are taught in elementary school, as well as changes to how French, Latin and Greek are introduced, have sparked fierce arguments between right-leaning politicians and intellectuals, who believe schools should foster national pride, and the Socialist education minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem and her defenders, who argue that the curriculum should reflect changes in society.”
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“World’s Grumpiest Boss” dies: “‘There will be no more birthday celebrations, birthday cakes, levity or celebrations of any kind within the office,’ the boss wrote on Feb. 8, 1978. ‘This is a business office. If you have to celebrate, do it after office hours on your own time.’ The employees of Tiger Oil Company probably weren’t surprised. They had seen worse. ‘Do not speak to me when you see me,’ the man had ordered in a memo the month before. ‘If I want to speak to you, I will do so. I want to save my throat. I don’t want to ruin it by saying hello to all of you.’ The boss was Mike Davis, otherwise known as, tellingly, Tiger Mike. A former chauffeur, he had become a Houston oil and gas magnate. But he earned an even greater measure of notoriety as the author of blunt and widely circulated office memos that earned him the unofficial title ‘world’s grumpiest boss.’ Mr. Davis died at 85 on Sept. 18 at his home in Las Vegas.”
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Dispatches from the academy: Activist professors too emotionally strung out to teach, do research; Yale philosophy professor to Society of Christian Philosophers: “F*** you assholes.”
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The problem with “courtship”: “In I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Harris equates dating with hooking up because neither is explicitly oriented toward the commitment of marriage. Hooking up is sexual intimacy without commitment; dating, emotional intimacy without commitment. Accordingly, for Harris, dating is a sanitized hookup. Yet his analysis fails to understand that there’s nothing intimate (other than the sex) about hooking up. Emotional detachment is the defining feature of hooking up: encounters are brief to maximize sexual pleasure and minimize interpersonal interaction. Dating isn’t a sanitized form of hooking up; it is the antithesis. Instead of exploring the significance of hooking up, Harris twists the phenomenon to further denigrate dating.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The London Review of Books, Jon Day writes about the legendary Olympic distance runner Emil Zatopek:
“He was the greatest long-distance runner of the mid-20th century, but when he ran Emil Zátopek looked ridiculous. His face was a mask of pain and his head lolled to the side, as though his neck couldn’t hold it up. The American sportswriter Red Smith said he ‘ran like a man with a noose around his neck, the most frightful horror spectacle since Frankenstein, on the verge of strangulation’. His arms flailed, another journalist wrote, as if he was ‘wrestling with an octopus on a conveyor belt’. Below the waist his movement was efficient and graceful, but Zátopek knew he lacked what sports commentators call ‘style’. ‘I am not talented enough to run and smile at the same time,’ he once said. On the track he suffered, and he was loved because he showed it.
“By modern standards some of his achievements seem modest. He was the first person to run 10,000 metres in under 29 minutes, but runners are now getting close to 26 minutes. He would not have qualified for the 10,000 metres event in the 2016 Olympics, and his marathon times are now matched by those of strong amateurs. The range of his abilities, however, remains unequalled. He was 174.3 cm tall and weighed 68 kg. He had long legs, but his left was slightly thinner than his right. His resting heart rate was measured, on different occasions, at 68 and 56 bpm. Both rates are high for a runner, though it was noted that he was able to recover quickly after exercise. He had an odd diet, fuelling himself before races with beer, cheese, sausages and bread. He drank strange concoctions that he thought would improve his performance: the juice from jars of pickles; a mixture of lemon juice (for vitamin C) and chalk (he thought the calcium would protect his teeth). He ate the leaves of young birch trees because he had noticed that deer did so. Deer run quickly, he reasoned, so he might too. He experimented with eating dandelions, as well as ‘vast quantities of garlic’, and when people asked him why he told them: ‘The hare runs through the woods, eats what he finds – and he’s fine.’ He spoke at least eight languages, which he taught himself by reading dictionaries. ‘Learn enough words,’ he said, ‘and the grammar looks after itself.’ During long runs he used to chat to his competitors, which some took for friendliness, others arrogance.
“Both Richard Askwith and Rick Broadbent have gone through the archives and spoken to those who knew Zátopek – particularly his wife, Dana, an Olympic gold-medal-winning javelin thrower – in order to tell his story in unprecedented detail. Zátopek was born in 1922 and grew up in Kopřivnice in what was then Moravia in Czechoslovakia, and is now part of the Czech Republic. His father, who worked as a carpenter in a car factory, used to beat his children with a belt until Emil’s mother took it away and burned it. After that he beat them with a ruler. As a child Zátopek shunned sport, having been discouraged by his father, who felt that it was a waste of time and shoe leather, and that spare energy would be better spent working on the family’s smallholding. His parents’ indifference continued long after Zátopek became successful. When he first broke the Czech national record for 2000 metres in 1944, his father wrote to him: ‘We are worried about your health, and so we have decided that you will stop it. It is time to hang up your running shoes.’ Emil ignored him.”
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Image of the Day: Terraced fields
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Poem: David Yezzi, “Truepenny”
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