Thursday, August 11, 2011
Ken Lewis: rich man, failed man.
By ROGER BERKOWITZ [Democracy] – In spite of Obama’s call at his inauguration for a “new era of responsibility,” we are suffering a culture-wide crisis of judgment. And not just when it comes to torture. Those who employed fancy lawyers to evade taxes are offered amnesty instead of judgment if they return their money to the United States. We frequent restaurants knowing that affordable food is subsidized by underpaid illegal help in the kitchen and we pay nannies and construction workers in cash, rationalizing our violation of both the law and our moral beliefs that everyone deserves health care and other benefits. In academia, professors have so fully abandoned their duty to judge that more than 50 percent of the grades at Harvard University are in the A range. And no Wall Street firm that has received a bailout has fired its CEO.
Continue reading “• From Wall Street to Harvard, a lack of judgment, an excess of fear.” »
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
by ROBERT TALISSE [New Books in Philosophy] – If we are to have a society at all, it seems that we must recognize and abide by certain rules concerning our interactions with others. And in recognizing such rules, we must take ourselves to sometimes be authorized to hold others accountable to them. Perhaps it is also the case that we must recognize that states have the authority to enforce the rules. It has long been the aim of liberal democratic political theory to show that there is a form of social authority which is consistent with the intrinsic freedom and moral equality of all persons. Of course, there is plenty of room for skepticism. In fact, the skepticism goes back at least to Plato’s Republic: Maybe all social norms, all moral prescriptions, and all political rules are simply cases of some (the powerful, the clever, or the experts) pushing others around? In his new book, The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Gerald Gaus attempts to dispel the skepticism.
Continue reading “• Authority, morality, and mayhem in Liverpool and London.” »
The neighbours you don't know.
By GILLIAN ORR [The Independent] – The quintessential English village is often regarded as a lost settlement, a rural idyll from a bygone era where fathers play cricket at the weekend, the locals prop up the bar of the lone pub, grandmothers oversee a bake sale and children run down to the local shop to buy sweets. Does it really exist anymore?
It might be an idealised vision, but when the London-based photographer Eamonn J McCabe visited the village of Firle in the South Downs, he found it to be alive and well. Continue reading “• Is Britain’s civic life flourishing in villages, but dying in cities?” »
By TERESA CADER [Perihelion] –I do not see any individual as separate from history. Biography and history are completely entwined. In that sense, I have a very Emersonian view. Continue reading “• Teresa Calder’s DNA in history, culture, and language.” »
[From the British Library/Eccles Centre site] – Dinah Roe, the author of Christina Rossetti’s Faithful Imagination and, more recently, the editor of The Pre-Raphaelites: From Rossetti to Ruskin, will lead the third in the British Library Summer Scholars Seminar Series. The topic: The Rossettiis in America. The event will be held in the Foyle Room on Wednesday, 17 August 2011, from 12.30 – 14.00. Dr Roe’s forthcoming book is The Rossettis in Wonderland: a Victorian Family History. Continue reading “• Event: Dinah Roe at the British Library: The Rossettis in America, 17 August.” »
By DOUGLAS MESSERLI [L.A. Review of Books] – I published the essay [Marjorie] Perloff refers to in Content’s Dream (Sun & Moon Press). On the occasion of William Carlos Williams’ 100th birthday celebration, [Charles] Bernstein not only chastised the academy for embracing Williams while ignoring his ideas and more radical poetic contributions, but righteously objected to the kind of poetic reviewing that so often appeared (and still does) in the New York Times, wherein the critic, in this case Richard Tillinghast, praised the poet for “appealing to the senses in order to create convincing illusions of reality” that created a world wherein “all is comfort and contentment…Good wine and well-prepared food are frequently at hand.” Continue reading “• Charles Bernstein’s ‘official verse culture’ enemies list.” »
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
[Report – British Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology] – Peer review in scholarly publishing, in one form or another, has always been regarded as crucial to the reputation and reliability of scientific research. In recent years there have been an increasing number of reports and articles assessing the current state of peer review. In view of the importance of evidence-based scientific information to government, it seemed appropriate to undertake a detailed examination of the current peer-review system as used in scientific publications. Both to see whether it is operating effectively and to shine light on new and innovative approaches. [sic] Continue reading “• A review of peer reviewing: more transparency, please.” »
By CYNTHIA CROSSEN [Wall Street Journal] – Forty years ago, the writer and critic Mary McCarthy was already lamenting the decline of description in fiction. “We have come a long way from the time when the skill of an author was felt to be demonstrated by his descriptive prowess,” she wrote. “Dickens’ fogs, Fenimore Cooper’s waterfalls, forest, prairie, Emily Bronte’s moors, Hardy’s heath and milky vales, Melville’s Pacific.”
Most 19th-century novelists wrote about places and times of which their readers had no visual image. Today, if Charles Dickens wrote, “Fog everywhere,” as he did on the first page of Bleak House, most people could conjure an image of a London murk. Continue reading “‘Fog everywhere.’ In fiction writing, the long decline of description.” »
By Elliott Coleman.
Hardly a mystic…
MORALITY IS THE CONFORMING to the rules of right conduct, whatever any given society supposes them to be. Now Proust was not a systematic moral philosopher. He had contempt for the theorizing novel, going so far as to say once that a book of “theories” is like an article with the price tag on it; by “theorizing” he must have meant conscious a priori reasoning. He came to despise the idea that literature is a criticism of life in the sense that the literary faculty occupies a high place apart, from which it can sit in judgment upon the life that produced it. His distrust of the conscious intelligence as infallible guide to truth had the same base. The thing produced could not be the judge of its producer. Instead, he came to see literature and all art as the interpreter of meaning, as the translator of the truth about existence and purpose: a revelation. And he thought that this revelation came from another and deeper activity of the psyche than the rational intelligence, which continually missed the point, the reality.
Continue reading “Marcel Proust as heterosexual Christian moralizer.” »
By EDMUND WHITE [TLS] – This is not to say that Verlaine, in his more traditional way, did not want to be modern – even in the poems now translated by Karl Kirchwey as Poems Under Saturn. In fact Verlaine was always praising the “modernity” and “melancholia” of Baudelaire. In an article Verlaine wrote at the same time as the publication of Poèmes Saturniens he attacked the Romantic idea of inspiration and of “life” and “human nature” and came out in favour of a poetry completely mastered, controlled and formal. Nor did he in his best work present “themes” that preceded and were external to the actual poems; as we read we feel that we are watching those poems materialize under his pen, just as Chopin’s Nocturnes come to life under his improvising fingers. Nevertheless, since this first book brought together some very early poems written in his collège days as well as his most up-to-date experiments, it is something of a grab-bag, and anything but consistent or programmatic.
Continue reading “• Verlaine, in praise of Saturn’s modern melancholy.” »
[The Trollope Society] – We have been asking which Trollope you’d like to take on holiday. Of over 5,000 votes the overwhelming favourite is Barchester Towers, so this August we are holding a Barchester Towers Summer Read. Barchester Towers is Trollope’s most famous and best-loved novel. Following the intrigues and machinations of the clergy of cathedral city of Barchester; the story is of the contest between the redoubtable Mrs Proudie, the oily Mr Slope and the worldy Archeacon, Dr Grantly, for control of the diocese. Continue reading “• Event: If you ‘Take a Trollope’ on holiday, it won’t matter where you go.” »
By DAN MOLLER [Philosophy] – Suppose you are considering performing some act A that you are worried might be wrong. Perhaps someone has presented you with an argument which purports to show that A is morally objectionable. Suppose, further, that after due deliberation you ultimately conclude that the argument fails, as do all other anti-A arguments you know of. Is this the end of the matter? Should your deliberations be at an end after responsible consideration of the available arguments? Continue reading “• ‘Moral risks’ and those annoying reasonable doubts.” »
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON [National Review] – In hard times, as in war, questions arise that were once considered taboo. As we approach $15 trillion run up in aggregate national debt, and confront the reality of a welfare state that is predicated on flawed assumptions about everything from demography to human nature, a rendezvous with brutal reality is now upon us. Continue reading “• Hard questions for a flawed welfare state.” »
By JOSEPH EPSTEIN [New Criterion] – The best book on the art of writing that I know is F. L. Lucas’s Style (1955). Lucas was a Cambridge don, a Greek scholar, and an excellent literary essayist, especially good on eighteenth-century writers, who wrote a once-famous book called The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal. Style is filled with fine things, but the most useful to me in my own writing has been Lucas’s assertion that one does best always to attempt to use strong words to begin and end sentences. Straightaway this means eliminating the words “It” and “There” to begin sentences and dropping also the pompous “Indeed.” This advice also reinstates and gives new life to the old schoolmarmish rule about not ending a sentence with a preposition, for a prepositon is almost never a strong word. Continue reading “• Undangle that preposition! commands F.L. Lucas, a master of style.” »
B FREDERICK N. RASMUSSEN [Baltimore Sun] – When the Remington Book Store folded in 1986, it marked the end of one of the city’s best-known and most-reliable booksellers. It had been serving Baltimoreans since its founding in 1910 by Stanley G. Remington and William Wollstonecraft Norman, an Oxford-educated scholar.
Remington had entered the book business in 1894 working for Joseph M. Cushing, and after realizing he needed more money, took a job with a local railroad compiling statistics. Bored, he returned to the book business when he took a job at J. Edward Nunn on North Howard Street, and then shifted to Eichelberger’s Book Store at 327 N. Charles St.
The partners moved the Norman Remington Co. store in 1916 to the southeast corner of Charles and Mulberry streets, and remained together for the next 15 years until Remington bought out Norman in 1931… Continue reading “• In Baltimore, closing Borders is a routine part of the book business.” »
