By P. J. O’ROURKE [Wall Street Journal] – I would argue that the world doesn’t need more encouragement to think in zero-sum terms or act in redistributive ways.
Western Europe has done such a good job redistributing its assets that the European Union now has a Spanish economy, a Swedish foreign policy, an Italian army, and Irish gigolos. Continue reading “I say! What about British hospitals?” »
From the First Chester Nativity Play
called
THE WRIGHTES PLAYE.
[Scene 10]
EXPOSITOR: LOE! LORDINGES all, of this miracle here
freere Bartholemewe, in good mannere,
beareth wytnes, withowten were,
as played is you beforne.
[A]nd other myracles, yf I maye,
I shall rehearse, or I goe awaye,
that befell that ilke daye
that Jesus Christ was borne. Continue reading “‘That daye was seene verament three sonnes in the firmament’.” »
‘The History of Rock & Roll 1955-1974′, from Tufte’s ‘Beautiful Evidence’. Via Steve Duin, The Oregonian. Click it.
By DENNIS KOKS [Johnny Holland] – After one hundred twenty-one pages of critically analyzing images [in Beautiful Evidence], [Edward] Tufte comes with a number of (fundamental) principles for analytical design which are derived from the principles of analytical thinking. He emphasizes that these principles apply broadly and are indifferent to language or culture or century or the technology of information display: Continue reading “How PowerPoint violates the six universal laws of great chart-making.” »
By JAMES MEEK [interviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books] – It sometimes seems in this kind of northern European, northern American, post-Catholic world, you are either religious, in which case you are probably smug about having a moral code that has been given to you by God, by the Bible, or even the Koran, or you’re smug about not believing in that. But there’s a gap there, because if you are one of these nonbelievers, or almost-nonbelievers — agnostics, I suppose — then are you really just going to define yourself as somebody who doesn’t believe? Continue reading “James Meek: ‘Don’t get found out’ – America’s 11th commandment.” »
By DENIS BOYLES [Claremont Review of Books] – Greg Gutfeld takes in-your-face polemic to a new level altogether in The Joy of Hate: How to Triumph over Whiners in the Age of Phony Outrage. Continue reading “The smartest political pundit on the planet is a Moe among stooges.” »
by DAVID WEIGEL [Slate] – If losing the 2012 election was tough for movement conservatives, the month since the loss has been even tougher. They’re losing every internal power struggle that matters. On Nov. 14, conservative Rep. Tom Price lost a secret ballot election for a leadership post. The next day, the conservative Republican Study Committee gave its chairmanship to Rep. Steve Scalise, who’d been opposed by the group’s former leaders—like Tom Price.
Over the next two weeks, Washington bubbled with rumors of Republicans agreeing to raise taxes, and violate the pledge they’d made to Grover Norquist, if it got them a “grand bargain” that cut spending on entitlements. Huelskamp responded with a YouTube video in which he warned that “a lot of my colleagues appear ready to break their word,” but when he signed that pledge, he “meant it.” Continue reading “Republicans mount ‘a rearguard action against the party base’.” »
By ANTHONY GRAFTON [Daily Princetonian] – After World War I, Princeton had its own army ROTC artillery unit, with horses to pull the cannon and a course on hippology on the books for the hundreds of students who joined it. After World War II, Princeton’s administration planned for a future in which every able-bodied student would eventually serve. In the age of the GI Bill, Princeton joined its sister schools in educating hundreds of its own who had left to fight — and a good many other veterans who didn’t come from wealthy families or private schools and owed their educations to government and university support. It was the least that America and its professors could do to help those who had fought and to honor those who died. Continue reading “‘Princeton has just one American veteran enrolled as an undergraduate this year.’” »
By HANNA ROSIN [The Atlantic] – On a mild fall afternoon in 2011, I sat in a courtyard with some undergraduates at Yale to ask about their romantic lives. A few months earlier, a group of mostly feminist-minded students had filed a Title IX complaint against the university for tolerating a “hostile sexual environment on campus.” The students specifically cited a 2010 incident when members of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity stood outside freshman dorms chanting “No means yes! Yes means anal!” I’d heard this phrase before, from the business-school students, of course: on spring break, they had played a game called “dirty rounds”—something like charades, except instead of acting out movie or book titles, they acted out sex slogans like the one above, or terms like pink sock (what your anus looks like after too much anal sex). But the Yale undergraduates had not reached that level of blitheness. They were incensed. The week before I arrived, an unrelated group of students ran a letter in the campus paper complaining that the heart of the problem was “Yale’s sexual culture” itself, that the “hookup culture is fertile ground for acts of sexual selfishness, insensitivity, cruelty and malice.” Continue reading “Notes from a planet where the only women who matter have a beautiful tan, long dark hair, and a great figure.” »
From an article, “99 percent of donors from Princeton give to Obama”, by Stephanie Liu in the Daily Princetonian: [Psychology professor Susan] Fiske, also a large Obama donor, is another example of a faculty member who supports a candidate based on her own educational and teaching interests.
“A lot of my own work is on stereotyping and prejudice and diversity issues, and I think the Democrats are just hands-down better in that,” she said. Continue reading “Princeton prof demonstrates that education tends to make people less ironic.” »
Faber and Faber [from the online catalogue and commemorating 'National Poetry Day', the Jubilee, and 'some of the newest young talent around'] – ‘To mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II’s accession to the throne, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy brings together a dazzling array of sixty contemporary poets to write about each of the sixty years of Her Majesty’s reign.
‘An all star line up – which includes such celebrated writers as Simon Armitage, Gillian Clarke, Wendy Cope, Geoffrey Hill, Jackie Kay, Michael Longley, Andrew Motion, Don Paterson and Jo Shapcott, alongside some of the newest young talent around – address a moment or event from their chosen year, be it of personal or political significance or both.
‘Through a series of specially commissioned poems, Jubilee Lines offers a unique portrayal of the country and times in which we have lived since 1953, culminating in an essential portrait of today: the way we speak, the way we chronicle, the way we love and fight, the way we honour and remember.’
More: ‘To celebrate National Poetry Day 2012 [4 October, today!] Faber is giving away a free audio download of all sixty poems from Jubilee Lines, read by actors Dan Stevens, Samantha Bond, Lyndsey Marshal and Alex Lanipekun. Just a few clicks and the poems are yours! Download here.’ Emphasis added, though hardly required.
But wait! There’s even more! ‘Explore 60 Years in 60 Poems through sound recordings and film footage at jubileelines.com!’
There’s also more Chronicle & Notices.
[From the official announcement] – THE MEMBERS OF the Trollope Prize committee at the University of Kansas are pleased to announce the winners of the 2012 Trollope Prize.
The winner of the graduate competition is Rebecca Richardson, a graduate student at Stanford University, for her essay titled “A Competitive World: Ambition and Self-Help in Trollope’s An Autobiography and The Three Clerks.” Richardson will receive a $2000 honorarium. In addition, her essay will be published by The Fortnightly Review, which has also provided an additional monetary reward. Continue reading “Notice: 2012 Trollope Prize winner announced.” »
By ANTHONY GRAFTON [The Daily Princetonian] – What does Europe offer that New Jersey doesn’t? Manuscripts and books, thousands of them, not yet digitized. They’re heaped up in famous libraries like the Bibliotheque Nationale de France and in less famous ones like the Forschungsbibliothek in Gotha, a quiet — OK, a frighteningly silent — town in the former East Germany, mainly known for training tax collectors. Open a folder or turn a page, and suddenly you’re in direct contact with someone who lived and thought four hundred years ago. Continue reading “A Princeton professor answers a question nobody has ever asked.” »
By Anthony Howell.
WHO IN THE UK, Canada or America, or indeed elsewhere in the world, is breathing fresh air into poetry? At the conclusion of my essay about the Norton anthology American Hybrid, I suggested looking for the work that is marginalised by both the traditionalist camp and by the abstractionists – and by the post-modern post-divisionists in the aforementioned anthology.
I think of such poets as mavericks. Certainly it is a term that can be applied to Elizabeth Bishop, and F. T. Prince was just that – indeed he used the term to describe himself. He was a poet who reconciled the British lyric and narrative tradition with European modernism. Identified by T.S. Eliot as his successor, Prince was booted off the Faber list as the clouds of World War II were gathering, since his work was too ‘disengaged’, and the preference was for the socialist ‘commitment’ of W. H. Auden – not altogether surprising, since Pound’s defection to the Axis. Continue reading “F.T. Prince and other mavericks.” »
By NATHAN SCHNEIDER [Chronicle of Higher Education] – Descartes, in his monumental Discourse, presented a philosophy meant to be “the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences.” It would be hard to get more foundational than that. But closer to the prevailing view today is that of Bertrand Russell: Even while attempting to ground all of mathematics in philosophical logic, he observed that philosophy was only the “residue” left over after “those questions which are already capable of definite answers are placed in the sciences.” Continue reading “The cost of free will? $4.4 million.” »
By Thomas Conlon.
Nothing to see here.
KING LEAR SAYS to Cordelia, “Nothing shall come of nothing”. It may well be that the magpie in Shakespeare had purloined the phrase from a contribution to the millennia long debate on what, if any, meaning might be attached to the word “nothing”.
In the seventeenth century it was a debate over which the authority of classical antiquity still loomed. Aristotle took a rigorous view – nothing meant absolute nothingness. Not just was nothing a matter of the absence of any material substance, but also of any properties such as extension, location, ability to accommodate material bodies, or to facilitate their motion. One of the leading principles of his physics was that it was impossible that a rent could ever be torn in the plenum of substance to expose an underlying nothingness. According to him, everything that happens in the physical world was a consequence of the interaction of substances and nothing, indeed, could ever come of nothing.
The nature of empty space was one of the cruxes in the debate about nothing. Aristotle’s plenist views were, in great measure, supported by Descartes. Augustine was also of the view that space and time were not separable from matter – the words “when” and “where” could not meaningfully be applied to anything beyond the material universe. In The City of God he famously gave expression to his view with the aphorism “The world was not created in time but with time.” Another view, later more fully articulated by Kant, was that space and time arose solely from the human mind’s engagement with the world and, thus, they were not part of the objective furniture of the universe. Leibniz also advocated a variant of this general view. Continue reading “A brief note on Nothing.” »
Writers Museum, Dublin: tat and ephemera.
The youth tactic. | Edward Dorn – a two-part review. | What’s happened to ‘working-class’ poetry? | The ‘infinitely expandable’ minimalism of Anthony Barnett. | The prosaic declarations of ‘world poetry’. | Books received: Summer 2012. | Alistair Noon and the English Sonnet. | Peter Hughes and Oystercatcher Press. | Poetry Prize Culture and the Aberdeen Angus. | Denise Riley and the force of bereavement. | Poetry beyond the cults and enclaves.
By Roger Berkowitz, Juliet du Boulay, Denis Boyles, Stan Carey, H.R. Haxton, Allen M. Hornblum, Alan Macfarlane, Anthony O’Hear, Andrew Sinclair, Harry Stein, Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, and many others. Free access.
· James Thomson [B.V.]
Occ. Notes…
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.
