By MICHAEL KEYTON [Strange Horizons] – [Anthony] Trollope is best known for his Barsetshire novels and there is no finer or more subtle chronicler of English landed society during the 19th century. But he is less well known for The Fixed Period, the piece of speculative fiction he published in the very same year as Vice Versa...Early speculative fiction is filled with astounding things. Jules Verne would predict air conditioning, automobiles, the internet and television, helicopters, submarines, and jukeboxes; H. G. Wells, inner city decline and suburban flight, sexual permissiveness and the E. E. C. On the other hand, Trollope struggled. The future he envisioned remains dominated by the British Empire and landed power. His forays into technology are woeful, provoking the occasional wry smile or a shake of the head. Continue reading “• Anthony Trollope’s future-world: steam bowlers, hair ‘phones, and euthanasia.” »
After a series of unexplained resignations, the Poetry Society conducts a little business.
By Michelene Wandor.
Then.
I SAT IN THE coffee place, almost at the bottom of Kingsway and doodled.
ponder picnics procedure plan poems psychophancy poetry plaints plangent proper play perform peruse pontificate politics politic palpable perquisite perks post scriptum persona paean prologue prolong parking placate public ponder pond pool ploughshare possible probably probity past present pentagram pristine palaver pander pandemonium participle palimpsest parliament parlous print publication purse pagoda petty pert pelt part pong prang pad palette palatable panfry prelate perfection prepare preponderance pirates plagiarism picky prorogue personify patrol palate persists plague pestilential partridges peartrees piffle pretenders persiflage pub pickled penury psychotic purblind plot piratical privileged pushy power pall pram partner piffle peck prissy pretentious poseur
I looked round. A couple sat at a nearby table. He was balding, slightly paunchy, baggy jeans. She had a Stevie Smith haircut, loose, comfortable trousers and sweater. Were they poets? Did it matter?
Well, it did. On the other side of the urban thoroughfare, in the Royal College of Surgeons, visitors awaited an unusual operation. The body involved was the Poetry Society. There was a problem with its upper part, the Board of Trustees. There we gathered together, the grey and the good, the curly haired and the straitened, the wordsmiths and the wannabes. Continue reading “≡ Prêt à poetry in the Surgeons’ Hall.” »
By EUGEN WEBER [The Atlantic] – Hindsight suggests that the best characterization of Germany’s approach to occupied France was “Give me your watch and I’ll tell you the time.” But if the Germans looted with all the enthusiasm once shown by Napoleon’s armies, they also struck deals that could serve both sides. The new order was European. With French and German bankers, industrialists, and other businessmen meeting regularly, the idea of a United States of Europe was making its way, along with visions of a single customs zone and a single European currency. The European Union, its attendant bureaucracy, even the euro, all appear to stem from the Berlin-Vichy collaboration. Bureaucratic controls proliferated, administrative and business elites interpenetrated, postwar economic planning took shape—as did that greater Europe in which France’s Hitler-allotted role would be one of a bigger Switzerland, “a country of tourism … and fashion.” For the present France offered an economy to be milked at will, and a reservoir of labor. Continue reading “• The Berlin-Vichy parentage of the European Union and its troublesome coin.” »
By PETER OBORNE [Telegraph] – We live in a very troubling period. The situation is very bad in the United States, where ratings agencies are threatening the once unimaginable step of downgrading Treasury bonds, and Congress is consumed by partisan wrangling over raising the nation’s debt limit. But it is desperate in Europe, because the situation has been exacerbated by a piece of economic dogma.
Continue reading “• The single currency and the economic brutality of European bureaucrats.” »
[Daily Telegraph – Obituary] – So early was [Lucian] Freud’s reputation established – while he was still a teenager – that for almost all of his career he was able to paint on his own terms, and only what he was interested in. “My work,” he said, in a remark at once typically truthful and egotistic, “is purely autobiographical. It’s about myself and my surroundings.”
The results of this subjective outlook divided both the critics and the public. For many, Freud was a master of capturing the quintessence of a sitter, his paintings being, as he said, not like people but of people. Though his stature was perhaps increased by his having few great contemporaries, he was hailed as the heir of Rembrandt and Hals, both of whom he greatly admired. Continue reading “• Lucian Freud’s collection of ‘melancholy similarities’.” »
By WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ [The Nation] – Now we have The Pale King, not so much the “unfinished novel” its subtitle promises as the odds and scraps of one its prefatory note more candidly describes. [David Foster] Wallace had tugged at the manuscript for eleven years. His editor, Michael Pietsch, writes of finding “hard drives, file folders, three-ring binders, spiral-bound notebooks, and floppy disks” that “contained printed chapters, sheaves of handwritten pages, notes, and more,” and of having returned from California to begin his reconstructive labors with “a green duffel bag and two Trader Joe’s sacks heavy with manuscripts.” Continue reading “· Digging a David Foster Wallace novel out of a couple of Trader Joe’s sacks.” »
By BRENDAN O’NEILL [Spiked] – The notion that the cultural harrying of Murdoch has made British politicians ‘free at last’ – thank God almighty, free at last! – is based on two problematic ideas. First, that British politics was, until last week, dominated by Murdoch. And second, that the muddying of Murdoch’s name will allow our politicians finally to speak honestly and with conviction once more. Neither of these things is true. The fact that so many commentators believe they are reveals a great deal about the parlous state of public debate.
Continue reading “· The media’s Murdoch-mania and the madness of editors.” »
By HEATHER MacDONALD [City Journal] – When it comes to opera, most early music ensembles confine their pursuit of authenticity to the pit, ceding responsibility for the stage action to directors who lack any interest in history. The result is a bizarrely disjunctive experience in which the music emanating from the orchestra’s pre-modern instruments is as faithful a recreation of Baroque performance practice as the limits of historical knowledge allow, while the updated drama on stage features TV-addled housewives and evil shopping mall developers acting out the obsessions of postmodern consumer society, complete with twentieth-century body language and gadgets (cell phones required!).
Continue reading “· Being authentically in the world of Baroque opera.” »
By DEREK SCALLY [Irish Times] – In the cool, dry air of a Vienna crypt, Austria will today agree an uneasy truce with the late Otto von Habsburg, the man who would be kaiser.
After nearly a century connecting the old European order with the new, Dr von Habsburg, who died last week aged 98, will be laid to rest beside his illustrious forebears as Austria debates once more the unfinished business of their vanished empire.
Today’s funeral lowers the final curtain on the Habsburg dynasty, that using a strategic mix of wars and weddings held together a cosmopolitan mosaic of central European peoples for over six centuries…
Continue reading “· Otto von Habsburg: The grand old order knocks on heaven’s door.” »
By ELAINE SCARRY [Boston Review] – I have been working for many years on the problems that arise from the population being willing to suspend its own responsibility for self-governing actions. One of the things that has seduced people into giving up on their own actions is the claim of emergency—the government will often make the spurious claim that because certain things require very fast action, there is no time for ordinary processes of deliberation and thinking, and therefore we have to abridge our normal protocols.
Continue reading “· To paraphrase Dr Johnson: ‘Thinking and emergency action are deeply compatible.’” »
NOVOPRESS – En septembre 2011 paraîtra le nouveau livre de Reynald Secher intitulé Vendée, du génocide au mémoricide. Alors que bon nombre de nos compatriotes fêtent le 14 Juillet et “respectent” les traditionnelles célébrations autour de la révolution française, voilà un livre qui pourrait jeter un nouveau pavé dans la marre, 25 ans après la parution de La Vendée vengée : le génocide franco-français (du même auteur – English version here) .
Continue reading “• After the Bastille: ‘Vendée, du génocide au mémoricide’.” »
By JOHNNY WEST [Granta] –When I called Rifaat Eid, the man who can get 1,500 armed Alawis onto the streets, he told me to drop by in the evening. How will I find you, I asked. Just head to the Jabel Mohsen district and ask, he said. He was right…
He sat forward, hands woven together on the desk in front of him. He was in his early thirties, with close-cropped hair and a bull neck, wearing a button-down shirt and slacks. Although he told me his wife and children were US citizens and that he himself had a green card and travelled there every summer, Rifaat spoke almost no English.
Continue reading “• In Syria: ‘The Protocols’ are somewhere in Rifaat Eid’s drawers.” »
By DANIEL SWIFT [New Statesman] –Catch-22, Joseph Heller’s funny, sad and powerful novel, was first published on 10 November 1961. That day, an article in the New York Times reported: “Increased efforts by Washington to strengthen another part of the world against communist threats also became known. The US air force has inaugurated a huge supply and training programme in South Vietnam.”
These were the hot days of the cold war. Continue reading “· Catch-22: How pension plans are like bombing runs.” »
By JOHN LANCHESTER [London Review of Books] – The economic crisis in Greece is the most important thing to have happened in Europe since the Balkan wars. That isn’t because Greece is economically central to the European order: at barely 3 per cent of Eurozone GDP, the Greek economy could vanish without trace and scarcely be missed by anyone else. The dangers posed by the imminent Greek default are all to do with how it happens.
Continue reading “· The euro: the last great Greek myth.” »
By LAURA KIPNIS [Wilson Quarterly] – If anyone is qualified to rescue literature from the threat of irrelevancy, it’s [Marjorie] Garber, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at Harvard, and author of some 15 books on cultural and literary matters, including six on Shakespeare alone. She simply knows everything there is to know about the history and practice of literature and criticism. Yet despite having written a sizable chunk of her previous books on our most venerated writer, Garber is not a proponent of the Great Books approach—she’s no fetishizer of the canon or timeless notions of quality. Continue reading “· Follow ‘the critical arbiters of the moment’ and George Meredith won’t be a problem.” »
