Reviews and News:
Michael Dirda recommends a charming 19th-century German travel book: “Letters of a Dead Man— the gossipy correspondence of a German nobleman in 1820s England and Ireland — might look like a coffee-table book, but don’t be fooled. Even though you’ll need two hands and a firm grip just to pick it up, this classic of travel literature is worth the effort. While its author’s name certainly sounds imposingly Teutonic, Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau writes with an engaging intimacy, charm and eye for detail. At times he almost resembles his contemporary Stendhal, vivaciously describing Britain instead of Italy.”
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The lost art of reading handwriting.
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David Ligare’s neo-classical avant-garde: “The complaints are familiar: students don’t read, students are culturally illiterate, students don’t know history. The painter David Ligare, a California classicist now in his early 70s, has a message for them. For the last forty years, Ligare has produced what he calls ‘history paintings,’ ‘narrative paintings,’ or ‘literate paintings’ based on ancient Greco-Roman culture and literature. In the beginning, Ligare says, ‘…making paintings of people in historical clothes was very problematic. That was one of the reasons I did it. It was dangerous, it was totally against the art laws. And thirty years on, it still is challenging. How to see outside the gravity of our own time….'”
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Stanley Spencer’s teenage sketchbook has been discovered: “The earliest known drawings by Stanley Spencer, one of Britain’s greatest painters, have been discovered in his teenage sketchbook. The book, which dates from 1907, was uncovered by Eleanor Clayton, curator at The Hepworth Wakefield, as she put together the first major UK survey of Spencer’s work in 15 years to mark the 125th anniversary of his birth.”
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Scientism’s phantom war: “It’s a curious irony that the champions of scientism are some of the most vocal advocates of change and progress yet they so rarely change or progress. They’ve said almost nothing new in over a century. Reading Eric Dietrich’s Excellent Beauty: The Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness of the World, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d read this before. I’m not sure if it was Dennett or Dawkins, Huxley or H. G. Wells, or some concoction of all of them, but reading Dietrich’s latest gave me a strong dose of déjà vu.
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The New York Times reports on the rise of all male book clubs. The International Ultra Manly Book Club in Kansas City “rates the books it reads on a five-star system for overall quality, and on a five-hand-grenade system for ‘manliness.’ Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, for instance, earned four and a half stars and three hand grenades. Mr. Creagar suspects there are many male readers who would love to join a book club. ‘But they don’t get asked,’ he said, ‘or they worry that, if they do join, they’ll be seen as intruding on a female activity or stigmatized as being the only guy.'”
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Essay of the Day:
In The New Criterion, Dominic Green takes stock of Paris’s 21st-century decline. He argues that much of what ails the city can be attributed to an inability to speak honestly about Islam:
“The terrorist attacks, the rise of the Front National, and the state of emergency will force the French to find a way of talking about their predicament. For now, Pierre de Mahéas sees a retreat of the kind that Tocqueville warned about, from public duties to private satisfactions—into a ‘micro-society’ of friends and family, in which a ‘pathological interest in food’ stands for the shared aspects of social life. ‘It has become very difficult to talk about serious issues. The Kamel Daoud controversy is symptomatic of this difficulty.’
“Kamel Daoud is the Algerian author of The Meursault Investigation (2013), an acclaimed ‘counter-enquiry’ to Camus ‘L’Étranger. In late January, Daoud wrote an article for Le Monde about the unprecedented wave of gang robberies and sexual assaults that had occurred during Cologne’s New Year’s Eve celebrations. The German police had identified some of the attackers as recently arrived male Muslim migrants. Similar events had come to light in other German cities and in Sweden. The media, the police, and the government had all been slow to respond, and the usual ultra-nationalist suspects had capitalized on a wave of public disgust.
“Daoud’s article, ‘Cologne, Site of Fantasies,’ described mutual incomprehension, but it didn’t spread the blame equally. The ‘Occidentals,’ Daoud said, filtered the events through a set of images of the ‘refugee-immigrant’ as culturally alien and prone to terrorism. The tragedy of the migrants was reactivating ‘ancient fears of barbarian invasion’ and the ‘barbarism-civilization binary.’ This seems inarguable. The civilization of the Occidentals is founded on the Greek binary of barbarism and civilization, and the Hebrew binary of chaos and justice. And once you’ve been invaded by barbarians, you tend not to forget the chaos that follows.
“Daoud didn’t call the other part of Europe’s new binary ‘Orientals.’ He called them Muslim men. The refugee-immigrants come from ‘the vast universe of sorrow and horror which is the sexual misery of the Arab-Muslim world.’ The subjugation of women is the psychological ‘Gordian knot’ at the core of the ‘world of Allah’—and hence the inspiration of the death cult that claims to defend it.”
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Image of the Day: Lofoten Islands, Norway
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Poem: Jenny Xie, “Hard-Wired”
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