[From the announcement online] – Seventy writers, mostly from the East Midlands, will be reading from their work at ‘States of Independence’, an events programme at the Clephan Building, De Montfort University, Oxford Street, Leicester, on 17 March 2012.
The event also features participants from independent publishers and writing organisations staffing bookstalls and displaying their work. Continue reading “Event: Independent Press Day in Leicester, 17 March 2012.” »
[From the announcement] – ‘Anthony Howell at Home’ is the name of an afternoon performance of readings by Deborah Dawkin, Rosalind Harvey and Anthony Howell of work by Lars Ramslie, Juan Pablo Villa Lobos, and Fawzi Karim at The Room in London N17, on Saturday, 24 March 2012, from 3pm to 6pm. Continue reading “Event: Reading from translations in N17, on 24 March 2012.” »
THE RECENT ‘debate’ between Richard Dawkins and Rowan Williams (with Sir Anthony Kenny serving as upholstery) was perhaps more a media event than a meaningful one. But it did give both men a chance to try to sell their respective positions. And selling matters. Dawkins has a shop; you can buy the trinkets of his atheism online. Yet there is no shop at archbishopofcanterbury.org. Surely another opportunity missed.
By TAEDE A. SMEDES [tasmedes.nl] – Have you ever looked at the website of the [sic] Richard Dawkins, and then I mean especially the store section? I recently noticed that “they” (I don’t presume Dawkins is selling stuff in person) sell jewelry.
In itself there’s of course nothing wrong with that. But notice that The Richard Dawkins store sells jewelry in the form of DNA-strands, and Darwin’s sketch of the tree of life. These apparently are adopted as the symbols of the atheism that Dawkins is preaching. It’s interesting to see how science and symbolism here go hand in hand. Continue reading “Skirmishes in the battle of Whence.” »
By ALAN BROWNJOHN [TLS] – The huge 1960s wave of poetry readings — by everyone, everywhere — was not discernible on the horizon, so younger poets met each other at a relatively small number of venues where the famous or notorious performed their work. Peter Porter was there on the night Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso gave their first London reading – I believe – at the humanists’ Contemporary Poetry and Music Circle just off High Street Kensington in 1957. But Martin Bell and Peter Redgrove were on the same platform, so they were making their mark. Continue reading “To know Peter Porter was to ‘delight in his company’.” »
By JONATHAN NEUMANN [Commentary] – Earlier this week, the director-general of Britain’s taxpayer-funded BBC, Mark Thompson, gave an astonishing interview, revealing that the BBC consciously and deliberately treats Muslim themes more sensitively than those pertaining to Christianity. A practicing Catholic, he treats Christianity with less sensitivity because it is ‘‘pretty broad-shouldered.’’ Islam, however, is a different story. Continue reading “To the director-general of the BBC, every Muslim listener carries an AK47.” »
By RAYMOND ZHONG [Wall Street Journal] – “People don’t see very often their death coming. . . . Look at the French Revolution: The king of France was thinking in the 1780s, ‘We’re doing rather better than my father in the 1770s.’” Few saw the end of the Soviet Union coming, either.
That’s the key, [Norman Davies] says, to coming to terms with the euro zone’s mess. He borrows a metaphor from skiing. “It’s like an avalanche, where you’ve got a huge frozen snowfield, which on the surface looks absolutely ideal. . . . All the changes in the ice field come from the sun shining on them, and the water melts underneath. But you can’t actually see it. And you equally can’t see which part of the snowfield is going to move first.” Continue reading “Among ‘Vanished Kingdoms’, whose is next?” »
From the announcement [Royal Institute of Philosophy] – Neuromania is based on the incorrect notion that human consciousness is identical with activity in the brain, that people are their brains, and that societies are best understood as collections of brains. While the brain is a necessary condition of every aspect of human consciousness, it is not a sufficient condition – which is why neuroscience, and the materialist philosophy upon which it is based, fails to capture the human person. Since the brain is an evolved organism, Neuromania leads to Darwinitis, the assumption that, since Darwin demonstrated the biological origins of the organism Homo sapiens, we should look to evolutionary theory to understand what we are now; that our biological roots explain our cultural leaves. In fact, we belong to a community of minds that has developed over the hundreds of thousands of years since we parted company from other primates. Continue reading “Event: Raymond Tallis – The Francis Bacon Lecture, 29 February 2012.” »
By DENNIS JOHNSON [MobyLives/Melville House] – In his later years, [Barney] Rosset’s East Village walk-up was a meeting place for lots of indie publishers, including the publishers of Melville House. He would hold court in a genial way — he was happy to tell war stories, but often enough he wanted to talk about your business with you. He wanted to talk numbers, percentages, how the distribution worked. It was a lesson — and often enough he wanted a lesson in return, as he sat on his sofa with an ever-present rum and coke. Continue reading “Barney Rossett finally quits publishing.” »
THE SECOND ROUND of fund-raising for Greece, announced this morning, is intended to lower the pressure for a political solution to chronic government overspending and inefficiency. Alas, the Greeks have a reputation for agreeing to demands for fiscal responsibility, then shrugging them off at the first sign of a street-corner crowd.
The solution finance ministers unveiled today is to back up the riot police in Athens with “an enhanced and permanent presence on the ground” of EU bureaucrats. The civilising mission of the colonial power is thus clear: teach the natives how to properly govern themselves.
By MATTHEW DALTON, STEPHEN FIDLER and COSTAS PARIS [Wall Street Journal] – Greece ended months of uncertainty by finally securing a new bailout and debt-restructuring agreement with euro-zone finance ministers, but doubts remain over whether Greece will be able to meet the ambitious terms of the accord.
The finance ministers agreed on the long-awaited €130 billion ($171.9 billion) deal after haggling into the early hours of Tuesday morning to settle the final details. Continue reading “The colonization of Greece.” »
By SAMIR RAHEEM [Daily Telegraph] – Every poet needs a Virgil. Wordsworth had Coleridge; Tennyson had Arthur Hallam; and Edward Thomas had Robert Frost. However, the best-preserved example of one poet editing another is Ezra Pound’s work on TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. The poem’s manuscript, first published in 1971 and now available on a snazzy iPad app, shows Pound’s boldness. On the first page of the second part, “A Game of Chess”, he wrote disapprovingly: “Too tum-pum at a stretch”; further down he complains a line is “too penty” – too regular a pentameter. Eliot redrafted the lines until he got an “OK” in the margin. Eliot acknowledged his friend’s role when he dedicated the 1925 edition to Pound, calling him Il miglior fabbro or “the better craftsman” – a phrase from Dante.
Continue reading “Every Eliot needs a ‘better craftsman’.” »
By PETER OSNOS [The Atlantic] – The New York Times dailies and Sunday Book Review are still the standard for mass media, although five precious pages of the Sunday section are now devoted to slicing and dicing of bestseller lists by format–print books, e-books, and combinations thereof. On the Internet, with a minimum of effort, readers can find ample reviews, by linking to a variety of online critics and websites devoted to books. Social media–Twitter and Facebook, among others–comprise a bustling community of like-minded readers numbering in the millions. Public radio–particularly Fresh Air and other major shows–have strong commitments to books as mainstays for their programming. So, all in all, the presumption that book reviews are being sidelined in the digital age is exaggerated. Continue reading “Of the mainstream American book reviews, which one gets the rave?” »
Leading article [Wall Street Journal – The fires in Athens are the result of the combustible mix of a desiccated welfare state and the burning embers of Keynes’s cigarette. Don’t expect those fires to be put out by this latest round of austerity. In theory, Athens has agreed to carve €3.3 billion out of this year’s budget (including €300 million out of pensions), slash the minimum wage by 22%, and eliminate 150,000 government jobs by 2015. Continue reading “Greek fire and the crowds in Athens.” »
THE VARIOUS newspaper accounts of the Greek euro crisis reveal less about what is happening in Athens, and more about what is happening in newsrooms.
Cheerful denial from RACHEL DONADIO at The New York Times – ‘Global financial markets received a reprieve on Thursday after Greek political leaders agreed to sweeping new austerity measures that should unlock the financing Greece needs to avert a potentially damaging default in March.’ Continue reading “The many ways newspapers say ‘Greek crisis’.” »
From a review by ANDREW ROBERTS of Ghosts of Empire [Wall Street Journal] – Overall, was the British Empire a good or a bad thing? Taken in the round over its half-millennium history—between John Cabot landing in Newfoundland in 1497 and the hand-over of Hong Kong in 1997—did the British Empire contribute or detract from the sum of human happiness? The standing of the empire is the most contentious historiographical battleground in British public discourse, and Kwasi Kwarteng has tossed a grenade into the struggle with “Ghosts of Empire.” He describes the book as “a post-racial account of empire, insofar as it does not regard the fact that the administrators were white, while the subject people were from other races, as the key determinant in understanding empire. There is clearly more to understanding the British Empire than racial politics, important though that was.” Continue reading “How bad was colonialism? Pretty good! Racial politics aside.” »
By PAUL LEWIS [Paul Lewis Money] – [Wilkie] Collins never did put Dickens in the top echelon of novelists. That honour he reserved for James Fenimore Cooper, Walter Scott, and Honoré de Balzac whom in 1883 and 1884 he called ‘the three Kings of Fiction’ and of those Walter Scott was ‘King, Emperor, President, and God Almighty of novelists’.2
Alan Wall: The Janus Face of Metaphor. | Clues and Labyrinths. | Ruin, the collector and sad mortality.
· Hugh Chisholm
· Elliott Coleman
· Robert Coover
· Ethel Dilke
· Anthony Howell
· Ann Lauterbach
· Lawrence Markert
· Myra Sklarew
· Martin Sorrell
· William Stafford
· James Thomson [B.V.]
· Paul Verlaine
· Michelene Wandor
· Stephen Wiest
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
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Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
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Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
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