By ZYGMUNT BAUMAN [The Hedgehog Review] – What is secret is, by definition, the part of knowledge the sharing of which with others is refused or prohibited and/or closely controlled. Secrecy, as it were, draws and marks the boundary of privacy—privacy being the realm that is meant to be one’s own domain, the territory of one’s undivided sovereignty inside which one has full and indivisible power to decide “what and who I am” and from which one may launch and re-launch the campaigns to have and keep one’s decisions recognized and respected. Continue reading “· It’s no secret that we’ve lost the will to guard our privacy.” »
A Fortnightly Review of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
by Benjamin Britten
English National Opera, Coliseum.
Through 25 June 2011.
By Michelene Wandor.
I BEGIN WITH TWO confessions. I am not a Britten enthusiast, and neither am I able, with equanimity, to listen to the singing of Peter Pears. The libretto to this opera was cobbled (and I used the word advisedly, rather than Rude Meckanically) together by Britten and Pears from the Shakespeare play of the same name. Judging from what I could grasp from the very-sur titles, way up above the Coliseum stage, they did a pretty random hatchet job, playing with bits of the story line, moving words and phrases around, and inventing language. Nevertheless, the complex crossed-lovers basic story line seemed to be fairly intact. Two pairs of lovers are alternately helped and hindered by magic potions; a group of workers (the afore-referenced Rude Meckanicals) provide light relief. Continue reading “· Benjamin Britten’s Midsummer Camp.” »
By SCOTT F. AIKIN and ROBERT B. TALISSE [3QuarksDaily] – Within the community of contemporary advocates of “classical” pragmatism there is a prevailing narrative according to which Dewey and pragmatism were marginalized, dismissed, or “eclipsed” in the years following Dewey’s death in 1952. According to the Eclipse Narrative post-war professional philosophy in the United States fell under the spell of a style of philosophizing imported from England and championed by Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and the early Ludwig Wittgenstein, a style generally called analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy, with its pretensions to logical rigor and scientific precision, deemed pragmatism “soft” and unserious, driving pragmatist ideas and texts out of the professional mainstream and ultimately underground. Continue reading “· Can there really be a pragmatism so perverted it’s practically useless?” »
By ESSIE FOX [The Spectator] – Victoria Woodhull was quite a gal. Having once been an actress and prostitute in Gold Rush San Francisco, she moved on to New York and was ‘reborn’, becoming the first female broker on Wall Street, then founding her very own newspaper to promote her political dream – which was to stand for the presidency in 1872, fighting under the banner of suffrage, free love and equal rights for all. She was undoubtedly persuasive, being hailed by the Women’s Movement and vast numbers who followed the Spiritualist faith…even the famous Henry Ward Beecher, who led New York’s Plymouth Brethren church. Continue reading “· Those were the days, when prostitutes dreamed of the presidency and preachers pushed abortions.” »
By SCOTT C. REYNOLDS [McSweeney’s] – Your entire life was carefully constructed with the sole purpose of not merely passing an intelligence agency background check but indeed making the checkers fall to their knees and thank God above that you, the perfect spy candidate, were a born and bred Midwesterner and not some useless foreigner. Continue reading “· The downside of freelance espionage. (Yes, there is a downside.)” »
By SIMON LAYS [New York Review of Books] – On the Hebridean island of Jura, in the solitary, spartan, and beloved Scottish hermitage where, in the final years of his life, Orwell spent most of his time—at least when not in hospital, for his failing health had already reduced him to semi-invalidity—he used a small rowing boat equipped with an outboard engine both for fishing (his great passion) and for short coastal excursions. Returning from one of those excursions with his little son, nephew, and niece, he had to cross the notorious Corryvreckan whirlpool—one of the most dangerous whirlpools in all British waters. Continue reading “· George Orwell, out of the whirlpool and safe on dry land.” »
By NILE GARDINER [The Telegraph] – In an historic speech to Parliament today in Westminster Hall, President Obama paid tribute to the Anglo-American Special Relationship, the first time he has done so in a major address during his presidency. Only the third US president to speak to both the House of Commons and House of Lords, after Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, Barack Obama placed great emphasis on the enduring friendship between the United States and Great Britain:
I come here today to reaffirm one of the oldest and strongest alliances the world has ever known. It has long been said that the United States and the United Kingdom share a special relationship… Continue reading “President Obama’s ‘special relationships’ – wherever he may roam.” »
By GEORGE STEINER [Paris Review] – Let’s do a little history. The man of letters represented a kind of consensus of taste and of interest in his society. People wanted to hear about literature, the arts, from a cultivated nonspecialist. Macaulay, Hazlitt—the ranking men of letters—almost made a book of a review; they were that long. There was time for that kind of publication. The man of letters might also write poetry and fiction, or biography, and in England the tradition has not died. We still have Michael Holroyd, my own student Richard Holmes who is now so acclaimed, we have Cyril Connolly, Pritchard, who is an exquisite short-story writer, a constant critic, a constant reviewer. And I’m not one who sneers about J.B. Priestley. Continue reading “· What happened to the ‘man of letters’? Ask George Steiner.” »
By JAMES LONGENBACH [The Nation] – The time is 1917; the place, London. The war is on. You are a young woman, attractive, well-off, fluent in French, German and Italian. Since no adequate translation of Pico della Mirandola exists, you translate the Renaissance Neo-Platonist’s Latin yourself. But while your interest in esoteric philosophy leads you to become a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, your eyes are wide open. You volunteer for the Red Cross. You are immersed in London’s literary avant-garde. After all, your best friend is married to the American poet Ezra Pound. Your friend’s mother was once the lover of W.B. Yeats, whom Pound considers the greatest living poet—hardly an idiosyncratic opinion.
Continue reading “· Mrs Yeats and her husband, old and grey.” »
ONE THING LAW ENFORCEMENT agencies, especially in America, cannot resist is premature triumphalism. In this, the press is an eager accomplice. In big cities, such as New York, it’s the infamous ‘perp walk’, a melodramatic collaboration of the police department and the press to parade an arrested person before the cameras to show the law got its man. The media stampede is on – followed, after many months, by the selection of a jury who has seen the perp do his walk hundreds of times. In federal cases, the theatrics are more nuanced and suspenseful. The FBI leaks information about a ‘person of interest’ to the media. Reporters then hound a person who hasn’t even been arrested. In almost every case, the law is degraded and the press further despised, whether or not the alleged perp is guilty or innocent.
By CHARLEMAGNE [The Economist] – Perhaps inevitably, given the fame of Mr Strauss-Kahn and the anonymity of the chambermaid, more attention has been paid to the tribulations of the former IMF chief than to the plight of his alleged victim. Indeed, the images of Mr Strauss-Kahn in handcuffs during his “perp walk” are regarded by many in France as an assault on the defendant’s dignity, part of a flawed system of justice that places too much emphasis on retribution at the expense of the rights of the accused. Continue reading “· Following the media on a ‘walk of shame’.” »
By PAUL SALOPEK [American Scholar] – A musty anti-colonialist in Saville Row suits, Mugabe likes to wrap his cudgel in a veneer of bureaucratic normality. Lawyers defend torture victims in the courts, but judges are arrested when they rule against the government. A policeman berates Godwin for blocking traffic, then goes back to cracking women’s and children’s skulls with his stave. And two Anglican bishops—one legitimate, the other a pro-Mugabe usurper—duel, prissily, with their ceremonial crosiers inside a sedate Harare cathedral.
It’s government as cargo cult. Continue reading “· In Zimbabwe, bishops duel in the cathedral. Plus, the government is a cargo cult.” »
By JOHN TALBOT [New Criterion] – In the 1820s, Wordsworth Englished a fraction of the Aeneid, but aside from that abortive attempt, what major Romantic or Victorian poet can show a great translation to set beside Dryden’s Virgil or Chapman’s Homer? I can’t think of a single example of a major poet translating a Classical author in that high creative mode that Keats so admired in Chapman. The poets of the nineteenth century let that tradition slide.
Into the breach stepped a different breed of translator, producing a very different kind of translation. Continue reading “· The Classics, please, straight up and hold the art.” »
By KEVIN CAREY [Chronicle of Higher Education] – The concept is simple: Community colleges that compete for federal money to serve students online will be obliged to make those materials—videos, text, assessments, curricula, diagnostic tools, and more—available to everyone in the world, free, under a Creative Commons license. The materials will become, to use the common term, open educational resources, or OER’s… Continue reading “· Breaking the regional accreditation monopolies.” »
Before…
FOR THE LAST 48 hours, the French press has been dominated by the disheartening news of the arrest in New York Saturday of IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn for allegedly assaulting and attempting to rape a hotel maid. Strauss-Kahn’s attorney has said his client denies the charges.
The arrest has thrown France’s political class into disarray. The conventional narrative, up until May 14, was that DSK, as he is known in France, had not only overcome a history of problems with women and corruption, he had survived a defeat by Ségolène Royal in his effort to run as the PS candidate in the 2007 presidential election. Until this week, he was the comeback politician the Left needed if it were to exploit disenchantment with President Nicolas Sarkozy and finally return to power. Continue reading “DSK and the French conspiracy’s woman.” »
By ANTHONY GRAFTON [Washington Post] – In 1947, the radio producer Dan Golenpaul issued the first Information Please Almanac. In 1938, he had started the popular radio quiz show “Information Please.” Listeners submitted questions, which a panel of performers, newspapermen and writers had to answer quickly and wittily. Those who stumped the panel received small cash prizes (or, in the early 1940s, war bonds). The Almanac, which traded on the show’s popularity but did not rival its comic flair, compressed a vast number of facts about American government, history and geography, official statistics and popular culture into a single book. That was what information meant in the late ’40s to pretty much everyone from high school debaters to professional journalists (my family included both, and they fought over each year’s Almanac). Continue reading “· Claude Shannon, reading the messages hot off the wire.” »
