By A. C. CHILDERS [Open Letters] – The Somme offensive had originally been planned as the staging ground for the ‘one big push’ the allied high command – French General Ferdinand Foch and Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force – hoped would break through the German defenses in occupied France and bring the stalemated conflict to a properly businesslike end….
On the 24th of June the British 4th Army under General Rawlinson opened up an immense artillery bombardment of the German entrenchments – over a million and a half shells were lobbed across No Man’s Land, with the aim of pulverizing German resistance and destroying the miles and miles of barbed wire defenses. This bombardment lasted until the first of July, and then, at 7:30 a.m on a hot, pretty summer day, the shells stopped and the young men of “Kitchener’s Army,” most of them minimally trained civilians enjoying their first taste of warfare, went ‘up and over,’ clambering out of their trenches and marching in calm and orderly fashion toward the German positions around 900 yards away. These men had been assured by their commanders that the previous week’s shelling had broken the German’s line – they were told they’d have at most some light mopping-up to do before they walked on to Bapaume, a few miles from the front, and then on to Cambrai and final victory.
By DANIEL WALKER HOWE [American Heritage] – On February 13, 1819, 35-year-old Congressman William Cobb unfolded his six-foot frame from his chair in the chamber of the Old Brick Capitol building in Washington, D.C., and locked his gray eyes on James Tallmadge Jr. of New York. There was little love lost between the grandson of Georgia’s most famous patriarch and the accomplished city lawyer. They had tangled on issues before, Cobb eloquently if savagely attacking Andrew Jackson over his campaign in Florida against the Seminoles; Tallmadge had defended the general with equal vigor.
By RON SLATE [On the Seawall] – Born in Seville in 1902, Luis Cernuda left Spain in 1938 for permanent exile. He had emerged with Federico Garcia Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Vincente Aleixandre and Jorge Guillén in the Generation of 1927, avant garde poets influenced by surrealism. But his experimental urge had played itself out by the time the civil war began in 1936. Earlier that year, La realidad y el deseo (Reality and Desire), his first volume of collected poems, showed a poet who had tried out several poetic modes. Although he joined the Communist party in 1934, he never exerted himself politically. But he keenly felt the significance of Lorca’s murder in 1936 by Franco’s fascists, writing in “To A Dead Poet”:
By HARVEY SHAPIRO [Smartish Pace] – You can’t be a poet and be completely bourgeois; you’re basically leading this insane life, that is, you’re spending your energies creating objects that have no value in the bourgeois world. It can hardly be called bourgeois. It’s not going to get you a dime. I’ve never expected it to get me anything, once I left the teaching life. In the academic world it will get you something. Outside of the academic world it really buys you nothing.
[KU News Release] – Like an archeologist reconstructing the fossilized skeleton of an ancient species, a University of Kansas theatre professor has pieced together the bones of a form of English that has never been heard in North America in modern times — the original pronunciation of Shakespeare.
Thanks to the work of Paul Meier, audiences can get a sense of what it might have been like to eavesdrop on opening night of “Hamlet” or “Romeo and Juliet” at the Globe Theater in London or to listen in on a shipboard conversation on the Mayflower as it approaches the shores of the New World.
By ALBERTO MANGUEL [Threepenny Review] – One day in December 1919, the twenty-year-old Jorge Luis Borges, during a short stay in Seville, wrote a letter, in French, to his friend Maurice Abramowicz in Geneva, in which, almost in passing, he confessed to Abramowicz contradictory feelings about his literary vocation: “Sometimes I think that it’s idiotic to have the ambition of being a more or less mediocre maker of phrases. But that is my destiny.”
As Borges was well aware even then, the history of literature is the history of this paradox. On the one hand, the deeply rooted intuition writers have that the world exists, in Mallarmé’s much-abused phrase, to result in a beautiful book (or, as Borges would have it, even a mediocre book), and, on the other hand, to know that the muse governing the enterprise is, as Mallarmé called her, the Muse of Impotence (or, to use a freer translation, the Muse of Impossibility). Mallarmé added later that all who have ever written anything, even those we call geniuses, have attempted this ultimate Book, the Book with a capital B. And all have failed.
By URSULA K. Le GUIN [Ars Interpres] – Most writers, if they are honest, will tell you that the book they love the best is the one they are writing – or one they are going to write. As I’m not writing one at the moment and don’t know what I will write next, I will tell you about the one I just finished, which won’t be printed for nearly two years. The story was given to me by the Roman poet Virgil, in his epic The Aeneid.
It is the story of the Italian girl whom Aeneas marries. We know all about poor Queen Dido, but there is very little about young Lavinia in Virgil’s poem – only a few words. I began wondering what it was like for a girl to know it was her destiny to meet and marry a great hero.
My Latin is not good (I was learning Latin by reading Virgil’s poetry, really) – so I could not dream of translating Virgil, and in fact he is quite untranslatable, his poetry is so much like music. But I loved him and his poem: and writing this story was a way for me to “translate” something of that love and fascination into a form that might have meaning for other people.
By DAVID MUIR [New Statesman] – So how are progressives to beat this global right wing playbook?
First, understand that unless we develop a shared global story we will be picked off one by one. The right thrives on turning the financial crisis into a national disaster rather than a global emergency. When we elevated the financial crisis and explained that this was global and we could only get through it globally people would start to understand.
By RUPERT CORNWELL [Independent] – Far from being a springboard, the combined Democratic victories of 2006 and 2008 probably took the party to a high-water mark in Congress from which some decline was inevitable.
Since then George W Bush, that lightning rod of national discontent, has vanished from the scene. The Democrats’ decline has also been speeded by the performance of Mr Obama, who has simultaneously managed to disappoint much of the liberal base while alienating the centrist independents whose support carried him to power.
By DEIRDRE McCLOSKY [from The Bourgeois Virtues] – I don’t much care how “capitalism” is defined, so long as it is not defined a priori to mean vice incarnate. The prejudging definition was favored by Rousseau—though he did not literally use the word “capitalism,” still to be coined—and by Proudhon, Marx, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Luxembourg, Veblen, Goldman, Polanyi, Sartre. Less obviously the same definition was used by their opponents Bentham, Ricardo, Rand, Friedman, Becker. All of them, left and right, defined commercial society at the outset to be bad by any standard higher than successful greed.
Calamo looks into his lead-sodden crystal ball the morning of 1 November 2010:
Tomorrow, the Republicans will win an overwhelming majority of the US House seats up for grabs.
Approximately one week from now, they will demonstrate, with customary incompetence, why they will be unable to maintain that majority.
Two years from now, they will again be in the minority – third behind Democrats and whatever’s then passing for the Tea Party caucus.
Four-to-six years from now: All Republican office holders will have been retired and sent to fetch balls from water traps in Ohio golf courses. Sen. Jon Stewart will feud with fellow Democratic Senators Al Franken and Stephen Tyrone Colbert. It will be non-hilarious. Randy Quaid will fail in his effort to gain the Libertarian nomination for Connecticut state attorney general.
Greg Philo, the research director of Glasgow University’s Media Unit, argues, along with others, that we in Britain do not need to cut government spending because we are a rich country. Our total personal wealth is £9,000 billion. Yet we’re in debt. His solution (in the Guardian on 16 August 2010) is that we only need a one-off wealth tax of 20 percent on the richest half to pay off the national debt.
Click on a chart or image for easier viewing.
This completely misses the point. The government raises £520 billion in total taxation and spends £660 billion. Left to continue, the national debt will grow by more than 50 percent in 5 years (see table 1). The problem is not the national debt per sebut the fact that the government is spending 30 percent more than it is raising in taxes. Present value corrects the debt for future inflation and allows comparisons between the years.
[Classical Music Today] – The sheer novelty of this program was embodied by ‘Bach’s Electric Chords’, Nicholas Kitchen’s string quartet arrangement of Bach’s ‘Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor’, BWV 582, with electronic processing. Warning: If novel reworking of Bach inherently offends you, then read no further.
The passacaglia consists of twenty variations on a theme that Bach famously co-opted from André Raison’s Premier Livre d’orgue of 1688. Many have said that the double fugue in BWV 582 is really a twenty-first variation on that theme—a variation of prodigious, surreal length.
By FRANK JACOBS [Big Think] – Another solution to dealing with the potential divisiveness of diversity, and if done in good humour at least a lot funnier, is the great European Shouting Match. Let it all hang out! Air that mistrust! Calling each other names establishes three things:
(1) that nobody is exempt, neither from feeling superior to others nor from being looked down upon by others. At least in this, everybody is equal. In the Republic of Mockery, we are all both givers and takers.
(2) that familiarity breeds contempt. Most often, the deepest disdain is reserved for the closest neighbours, from whom distant strangers would have a hard time distinguishing us. Inversely, those distant and/or obscure members of the European family are damned with faint put-downs of the who-the-heck-are-they-variant.
By CLIVE JAMES [Poetry] – The threat posed by the spectacular expression that outruns its substance was a long-running theme in Shakespeare, and is surely one of the preoccupations that now make him seem so modern. Though he seems modern in every age—modern all over again—he seems especially modern in ours, when we look at him from the angle of analytical philosophy, a school of thought which has, at its tutorial center, a concern for scrupulosity of language: the scrupulosity that was incarnated by Wittgenstein, and as much in his likes as his dislikes. Continue reading “Shakespeare’s scrupulosity of language incarnate in Wittgenstein.” »
