Sunday, September 28, 2008
Reading Rat September 2008
On authors and works in my recommended reading:
(on Norman Mailer)
this larger prognostication of his turns out to have been 80 percent brilliant. Mailer prophesied that Communism, based on its inbuilt inadequacies, was going to collapse. There was no reason to go to war against it. His analysis would loom today as totally brilliant if only he had added a 20 percent tip about what was meanwhile likely to happen to the unhappy people of Indochina during the interval between America’s withdrawal from the war and the Communists’ eventual withdrawal from Communist doctrine...--Paul Berman
(on Abraham Lincoln)
Lincoln may have been dead for four-score-and-seven years when Brown v. Board of Education (1954) inaugurated the "second Reconstruction," but many conservatives who were dubious about the second Reconstruction's use of federal power—especially federal judicial power—as the principal lever for bringing down Jim Crow could hardly help suspecting that the template for federal intervention in the 1950s had been copied from Lincoln's in the "first Reconstruction."--Thomas L. Krannawitter
(on Adam Smith)
Tammy Wynen stands near the back of a crowd outside a paper mill in Kimberly, Wisconsin. At a bank of microphones, speakers rail against Adam Smith; one, from the United Steel Workers, literally blames The Wealth of Nations for the mill’s impending closure.--The Economist
(on Giordano Bruno)
His personal philosophy, which he called Nolan after the town where he was born, appeared to be a high-minded and exuberant distillation of Greek atomists (who saw the universe as infinite), St. Thomas of Aquinas (a fellow Dominican whose "natural theology" sought to prove the existence of God through philosophy), and Copernicus (who moved Earth out of its formerly central position in the universe), along with a view of God as within (as opposed to transcending) nature and man and a fondness for ancient Egypt.--Marc Kaufman
(via Arts & Letters Daily)
(on Ajax by Sophocles)
The end of Ajax shows us a world where there are no real heroes left--or, rather, where heroism and courage have to be reinvented as mental qualities rather than physical ones.--Emily Wilson
(on George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh)
Animal Farm and Brideshead Revisited, published in the same year of 1945, might seem worlds apart, and yet both are biting parables of disenchantment.--Eric Ormsby
(on Herbert Spencer)
... Hofstadter [Richard Hofstadter in Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944)], repeatedly points to Spencer's famous phrase, "survival of the fittest," a line that Charles Darwin added to the fifth edition of Origin of Species. But by fit, Spencer meant something very different from brute force.--Damon W. Root
(on Carl Linnaeus)
One of the Swede's brilliantly simple ideas was to classify plants by counting their sexual parts, the pistils and stamens.--Mark Cocker
(via Arts & Letters Daily)
(on James Madison)
Great Britain’s mixed regime, for all of its vaunted moderation, hardly seemed an appropriate model for Americans so recently liberated from its tyrannical rule. To the contrary, as Madison saw it, the Revolution had been fought to defend the then-controversial view that popular government could rise to the standard of good government.--Gary Rosen
(on Thomas M. Disch)
On Wings of Song is his first extended treatment of the Midwest, and it is infused with the visceral, unmasked fury of a refugee. Disch is an angry writer, and large portions of his work are directed without mercy at his chosen enemies: the Catholic church, conservatives, middle America.--Waggish
(on translations of Alexander Solzhenitsyn)
For political and commercial reasons, the early English-language translations of Solzhenitsyn’s writings were done at top speed and mostly by second-rate translators. Luckily, Solzhenitsyn’s authorial voice is so strong that it comes through even when muffled, and in both the third volume of The Gulag Archipelago and in Solzhenitsyn’s high-spirited memoir, The Oak and the Calf (1980), one translator, Harry Willetts, managed at last to find an English idiom adequate to the originals. (Willetts also finally did justice to Ivan Denisovich.)--Michael Scammell
(on Emily Dickinson)
Dickinson’s externally uneventful life has been chronicled before, but Brenda Wineapple finds a new way in by focusing on her relationship with the man who would eventually help to bring her to the public gaze after her death.--The Economist
(on Richard Wagner)
Obsessional self-destructiveness played a much bigger role in his life than careerism ever did: witness his endless youthful fights with successive theater managements; the Dresden revolutionary activism of 1849, which sent him into exile for twelve years; and, even after King Ludwig had become his champion, his fury over Ludwig’s insistence on staging Das Rheingold and Die Walkure without the composer’s approval.--R. J. Stove
(on translations of Homer)
[Alberto] Manguel nominates two English versions for acclaim: Alexander Pope's (Iliad, 1715-1720; Odyssey, 1725-26) and the late Robert Fagles's (Iliad, 1990; Odyssey, 1996), using the latter for his citations. As Manguel says, Fagles is rightly "praised for his accuracy and modern ring"; others (like me) prefer Pope's music and nobility.--Joseph Tartakovsky
(on Relativity, the Special and General Theory by Albert Einstein)
The most important physicist since Newton.--Michael Lind
(on Ezra Pound)
Pound's vers libre is such as is only possible for a poet who has worked tirelessly with rigid forms and different systems of metric.--T. S. Eliot
(on Marcus Aurelius)
Besides him, history presents one or two sovereigns eminent for their goodness, such as Saint Louis or Alfred. But Marcus Aurelius has, for us moderns, this great superiority in interest over Saint Louis or Alfred, that he lived and acted in a state of society modern by its essential characteristics, in an epoch akin to our own, in a brilliant centre of civilisation.--Matthew Arnold
(on Plato)
His definition of ideas, as what is simple, permanent, uniform, and self-existent, forever discriminating them from the notions of the understanding, marks an era in the world.--Ralph Waldo Emerson
(on Rene Descartes)
Descartes was injuriously accused of being an atheist, the last refuge of religious scandal: and he who had employed all the sagacity and penetration of his genius, in searching for new proofs of the existence of a God, was suspected to believe there was no such Being.--Voltaire
Also of interest:
(on reading online)
We must recognize that screen scanning is but one kind of reading, a lesser one, and that it conspires against certain intellectual habits requisite to liberal-arts learning. The inclination to read a huge Victorian novel, the capacity to untangle a metaphor in a line of verse, the desire to study and emulate a distant historical figure, the urge to ponder a concept such as Heidegger's ontic-ontological difference over and over and around and around until it breaks through as a transformative insight — those dispositions melt away with every 100 hours of browsing, blogging, IMing, Twittering, and Facebooking.--Mark Bauerlein
(via Arts & Letters Daily)
(on the book business)
Fifteen years ago, Philip Roth guessed there were at most 120,000 serious American readers—those who read every night—and that the number was dropping by half every decade.--Boris Kachka
(via Arts & Letters Daily) ¶ 9/28/2008 08:29:00 AM
(on Norman Mailer)
this larger prognostication of his turns out to have been 80 percent brilliant. Mailer prophesied that Communism, based on its inbuilt inadequacies, was going to collapse. There was no reason to go to war against it. His analysis would loom today as totally brilliant if only he had added a 20 percent tip about what was meanwhile likely to happen to the unhappy people of Indochina during the interval between America’s withdrawal from the war and the Communists’ eventual withdrawal from Communist doctrine...
(on Abraham Lincoln)
Lincoln may have been dead for four-score-and-seven years when Brown v. Board of Education (1954) inaugurated the "second Reconstruction," but many conservatives who were dubious about the second Reconstruction's use of federal power—especially federal judicial power—as the principal lever for bringing down Jim Crow could hardly help suspecting that the template for federal intervention in the 1950s had been copied from Lincoln's in the "first Reconstruction."
(on Adam Smith)
Tammy Wynen stands near the back of a crowd outside a paper mill in Kimberly, Wisconsin. At a bank of microphones, speakers rail against Adam Smith; one, from the United Steel Workers, literally blames The Wealth of Nations for the mill’s impending closure.
(on Giordano Bruno)
His personal philosophy, which he called Nolan after the town where he was born, appeared to be a high-minded and exuberant distillation of Greek atomists (who saw the universe as infinite), St. Thomas of Aquinas (a fellow Dominican whose "natural theology" sought to prove the existence of God through philosophy), and Copernicus (who moved Earth out of its formerly central position in the universe), along with a view of God as within (as opposed to transcending) nature and man and a fondness for ancient Egypt.
(via Arts & Letters Daily)
(on Ajax by Sophocles)
The end of Ajax shows us a world where there are no real heroes left--or, rather, where heroism and courage have to be reinvented as mental qualities rather than physical ones.
(on George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh)
Animal Farm and Brideshead Revisited, published in the same year of 1945, might seem worlds apart, and yet both are biting parables of disenchantment.
(on Herbert Spencer)
... Hofstadter [Richard Hofstadter in Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944)], repeatedly points to Spencer's famous phrase, "survival of the fittest," a line that Charles Darwin added to the fifth edition of Origin of Species. But by fit, Spencer meant something very different from brute force.
(on Carl Linnaeus)
One of the Swede's brilliantly simple ideas was to classify plants by counting their sexual parts, the pistils and stamens.
(via Arts & Letters Daily)
(on James Madison)
Great Britain’s mixed regime, for all of its vaunted moderation, hardly seemed an appropriate model for Americans so recently liberated from its tyrannical rule. To the contrary, as Madison saw it, the Revolution had been fought to defend the then-controversial view that popular government could rise to the standard of good government.
(on Thomas M. Disch)
On Wings of Song is his first extended treatment of the Midwest, and it is infused with the visceral, unmasked fury of a refugee. Disch is an angry writer, and large portions of his work are directed without mercy at his chosen enemies: the Catholic church, conservatives, middle America.
(on translations of Alexander Solzhenitsyn)
For political and commercial reasons, the early English-language translations of Solzhenitsyn’s writings were done at top speed and mostly by second-rate translators. Luckily, Solzhenitsyn’s authorial voice is so strong that it comes through even when muffled, and in both the third volume of The Gulag Archipelago and in Solzhenitsyn’s high-spirited memoir, The Oak and the Calf (1980), one translator, Harry Willetts, managed at last to find an English idiom adequate to the originals. (Willetts also finally did justice to Ivan Denisovich.)
(on Emily Dickinson)
Dickinson’s externally uneventful life has been chronicled before, but Brenda Wineapple finds a new way in by focusing on her relationship with the man who would eventually help to bring her to the public gaze after her death.
(on Richard Wagner)
Obsessional self-destructiveness played a much bigger role in his life than careerism ever did: witness his endless youthful fights with successive theater managements; the Dresden revolutionary activism of 1849, which sent him into exile for twelve years; and, even after King Ludwig had become his champion, his fury over Ludwig’s insistence on staging Das Rheingold and Die Walkure without the composer’s approval.
(on translations of Homer)
[Alberto] Manguel nominates two English versions for acclaim: Alexander Pope's (Iliad, 1715-1720; Odyssey, 1725-26) and the late Robert Fagles's (Iliad, 1990; Odyssey, 1996), using the latter for his citations. As Manguel says, Fagles is rightly "praised for his accuracy and modern ring"; others (like me) prefer Pope's music and nobility.
(on Relativity, the Special and General Theory by Albert Einstein)
The most important physicist since Newton.
(on Ezra Pound)
Pound's vers libre is such as is only possible for a poet who has worked tirelessly with rigid forms and different systems of metric.
(on Marcus Aurelius)
Besides him, history presents one or two sovereigns eminent for their goodness, such as Saint Louis or Alfred. But Marcus Aurelius has, for us moderns, this great superiority in interest over Saint Louis or Alfred, that he lived and acted in a state of society modern by its essential characteristics, in an epoch akin to our own, in a brilliant centre of civilisation.
(on Plato)
His definition of ideas, as what is simple, permanent, uniform, and self-existent, forever discriminating them from the notions of the understanding, marks an era in the world.
(on Rene Descartes)
Descartes was injuriously accused of being an atheist, the last refuge of religious scandal: and he who had employed all the sagacity and penetration of his genius, in searching for new proofs of the existence of a God, was suspected to believe there was no such Being.
Also of interest:
(on reading online)
We must recognize that screen scanning is but one kind of reading, a lesser one, and that it conspires against certain intellectual habits requisite to liberal-arts learning. The inclination to read a huge Victorian novel, the capacity to untangle a metaphor in a line of verse, the desire to study and emulate a distant historical figure, the urge to ponder a concept such as Heidegger's ontic-ontological difference over and over and around and around until it breaks through as a transformative insight — those dispositions melt away with every 100 hours of browsing, blogging, IMing, Twittering, and Facebooking.
(via Arts & Letters Daily)
(on the book business)
Fifteen years ago, Philip Roth guessed there were at most 120,000 serious American readers—those who read every night—and that the number was dropping by half every decade.
(via Arts & Letters Daily) ¶ 9/28/2008 08:29:00 AM
