Reviews and News:
Evelyn Waugh’s “puckish charisma”: “When his children came to school age, he openly rejoiced at the end of the holidays. He went out of his way to avoid spending Christmas with them when they were little, either staying in boarding houses or travelling abroad. There is also a famous story…of his managing to procure a banana during the gourmet wasteland of the Second World War. The Waugh children had never seen the exotic fruit before – let alone tasted one – but their father, after showing it off proudly, covered it with cream and sugar and devoured the whole thing himself. It would be anachronistic to judge Waugh solely by his fatherly standards; most men of his generation and class had little to do with their children. But it is illuminating to see how much his children adored him, despite his neglect and occasional cruelty. His daughter Meg, particularly, worshipped him, even offering to come back and live at home to be near him after she had grown up. His friends, likewise, were fiercely loyal, although Waugh teased and bullied and satirized them in life and in his novels.”
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A fascinating history of ancient and modern Hebrew: “After the destruction of the Temple in the first century, Jews were scattered among non-Hebrew-speaking populations. As the Aristide incident demonstrates, keeping linguistic proficiency in a foreign land is difficult. Jews continued to pray in Hebrew, however, and a succession of adepts modified and clarified the workings of the language: The Masoretes standardized the text of the Torah, and the mystics and poets performed exegetical acrobatics with letters and numbers…Along the way, Hebrew benefited from the efforts of religious genius as well: In 11th-century France, the great commentator Rashi used a compact and elliptical Hebrew to illuminate the meaning of the Bible and Talmud…The poets of Spain’s golden age wrote beautiful odes to God, but also poetry about war and wine and women. Other medieval poets, living in a textual echo chamber, composed elaborate referential poem/prayers, called piyyutim. These were not only creative and pietistic exercises, but intellectual feats: Some were of great beauty, others as much puzzle boxes as poetry.”
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How Monet became the go-to artist for the rich and the famous.
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A bumpy ride through the Alps: “O’Shea’s quirky travelogue delivers an avalanche of entertaining facts and history. But the Toronto-born writer…has made some odd choices with this project. For starters, despite pronounced acrophobia, he structures his narrative around a mainly solo, white-knuckled ‘vertical road trip … up and down, up and down’ that winds through six of the seven alpine countries… Disappointingly, his journey is limited to the summer of 2014 — the hundredth anniversary of the start of World War I. Sure, summer driving is easier, but this is somewhat akin to visiting Cape Cod in the dead of winter.”
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The long tragedy of Europe’s borderlands: “Today Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria have ‘three alphabets, three currencies, three versions of history’. But for most of history the border was blurrier. People on all sides descended from the ancient Thracians (almost forgotten now, because unlike their Greek contemporaries they didn’t leave behind any writing). Later, Muslims, Catholics and orthodox Christians were sprinkled almost randomly around the region. In the Ottoman empire, you found the unlikeliest people all over the place. The anthropologist Ernest Gellner famously said that the ethnographic map of Europe used to look like a painting by Oskar Kokoschka, a ‘riot of diverse points of colour’. But after the multi-ethnic empires collapsed in 1918, the map came to resemble a Modigliani: neat flat surfaces clearly separated from each other.”
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The Times Literary Supplement publishes Anthony Burgess’s previously unpublished essay on the obscure Roman poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli (1791–1863): “Belli is one of those poets who make us revise our notions of literary greatness.”
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On Wednesday, I noted the new writing residency at the Mall of America. Over at Lithub, Emily Temple draws our attention to eight more usual residencies. And, yes, I would lock myself away in the 17th-century Hawthornden Castle—partly because there’s no website for the residency (you have to request an application by mail and send it back the way it came), partly because of the “rule of silence,” partly because some of staff apparently go grouse hunting, and partly because, well, Scotland.
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Essay of the Day:
In this week’s magazine, Andrew Ferguson explains the squishy social science behind the term “microaggression”:
“Sophisticated, affluent people in the United States (SAPs) have been trained through years of education to respect whatever is presented to them as “science,” even if it’s not very good science, even if it’s not science at all. Their years of education have not trained them how to tell the difference. Sophisticated and affluent Americans, as a group, are pretty gullible.
“So when their leaders in journalism, academia, and business announce a new truth of human nature, SAPs around the country are likely to embrace it. The idea of microaggressions is one of these. It was first popularized a decade ago, and now the pervasiveness of microaggressions in American life is taken as settled fact.
“We could have seen it coming. Already, by the time microaggressions became widely known, social scientists had invented the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The test, administered online and to college students throughout the country, pretended to establish that anti-black and anti-Latino prejudice among white Americans was ever-present yet, paradoxically, nearly invisible, often unrecognized by perpetrator and victim alike. Even people who had never uttered a disparaging remark about someone of another color were shown by the IAT to be roiling cauldrons of racial animus. You know who you are.
“The IAT thus laid the predicate for microaggressions. They were the outward, unwitting expressions of implicit racism; not only were they evidence of it, they were offered as proof of it. (Circularity is a common tool in cutting-edge social science.) Microaggressions are usually verbal but they don’t have to be. In their pathbreaking paper ‘Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life’ (2007), the psychologist Derald Wing Sue and his team of researchers from Columbia University helpfully listed many common microaggressions. Saying ‘America is a melting pot’ is really a demand that someone ‘assimilate to the dominant culture.’ Having an office that ‘has pictures of American presidents’ on the wall announces that ‘only white people can succeed.’ Also, an ‘overabundance of liquor stores in communities of color’ carries the microaggressive message that ‘people of color are deviant.'”
Sue’s paper came at a crucial time, just as it was becoming obvious that public, systematic, and institutionally enforced racism was declining toward zero. The paper perfectly matched the prejudices, if you’ll forgive the expression, shared by nearly every credentialed social psychologist and cognitive researcher…The pursuit and explication of microaggressions is a cottage industry in the larger industry of social-science research, and guaranteed grant-bait.”
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Photo: Stokksnes
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Poem: Pat D’Amico, “Tech Trails”
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