Tuesday, September 7, 2010
By GEORGE PROCHNIK [Quarterly Conversation] – Some months before the suicide of Stefan Zweig in February 1942, Klaus Mann bumped into him on Fifth Avenue.
Zweig, whom Mann referred to as “the tireless promoter of striving talents,” held a special place in Mann’s imagination since his early youth. On the publication of Mann’s first books, Zweig’s was “the most heartening and hearty” voice enjoining him to courage. “Go ahead, young man!” Zweig urged in a congratulatory note. “There may be prejudices against you because of your famous parentage. Never mind. Do your work! Say what you have to say!—it’s quite a lot if I’m not mistaken.” Zweig’s high expectations proved inspirational, and Mann, like many other fledgling authors, came to see Zweig as an exemplary patron with a maternally solicitous streak. He heartened the anxious by cajoling them to self-expression and quietly deployed his ample bank account to dissolve logistical obstacles confronting the impecunious.
Continue reading “Noted: Encountering Zweig in Manhattan, near the end.” »
Monday, September 6, 2010
By DANIEL AKST [Wilson Quarterly] – Since Asimov wrote The Naked Sun, Americans have been engaged in wholesale flight from one another, decamping for suburbs and Sunbelt, splintering into ever smaller households, and conducting more and more of their relationships online, where avatars flourish. The churn rate of domestic relations is especially remarkable, and has rendered family life in the United States uniquely unstable. “No other comparable nation,” the sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin observes, “has such a high level of multiple marital and cohabiting unions.”
Continue reading “Noted: The 130 friends you have on Facebook hardly know who you are.” »
Sunday, September 5, 2010
By GEOFFREY HILL [Poetry Magazine] –
What is far hence led to the den of making:
Moves unlike wildfire | not so simple-happy
Ploughman hammers ploughshare his durum dentem
Digging the Georgics
Continue reading “Noted: How the ploughman digs his Georgics.” »
Sunday, September 5, 2010
By TAYLOR BRANCH [New York Times] – Glenn Beck did not adopt nonviolence explicitly for the “Restoring Honor” rally in Washington. That would have been too wrenching a leap for his followers and opponents alike. After all, nonviolent doctrines have been submerged, ignored or forgotten across decades of ethnic assertion and perpetual warfare, even by many heirs of the nonviolent movement themselves.
Mr. Beck obtained a simpler, tamer version from Alveda King last spring, when she recalled her childhood counsel from “Uncle Martin” that nonviolence boiled down to St. Paul’s three abiding guides in the Bible: faith, hope and charity. Continue reading “Noted: Where Glenn Beck went right.” »
Saturday, September 4, 2010
By HENRY OLSEN {National Affairs] – The populist spirit is back with a vengeance today. An economic crisis provoked partly by bankers who showed little regard for the people’s money, a response from Washington that lost sight of the proper limits of American government, and looming debt and fiscal crises have produced a deep unease that has yielded, among other things, the much-discussed Tea Party movement.
We do not yet know whether that movement will join the ranks of successful populist uprisings that appealed to American values and so led to enduring political coalitions, or whether it will come to be listed among failed populist efforts that couldn’t translate public disquiet into electoral success. But the history of American populism can at least give us a sense of this movement’s direction, and should help today’s populists figure out their next steps.
Continue reading “Noted: Populism's moment of truth.” »
Thursday, September 2, 2010
By JAMES POLCHIN [Writing in Public] – It takes a little over two and half hours to travel between London and Paris on the Eurostar. Racing between one 19th century capital to the other, I read Rebecca Solnit’s River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (or its UK title of Motion Studies: Time, Space and Eadweard Muybridge
). Solnit writes how the train, the telegraph, and even the camera forcefully annihilated time and space in the 19th century–and continues to today. Continue reading “Noted: Russia's lost days and nights, 1918.” »
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
By RACHEL SWIRSKY [Ideomancer.com] – From “Evening in Pompeii”:
Four days, we’ve gathered
in the ampitheatre
watching the death god’s children dance,
their enervated limbs drooping
through movements slow
as old women’s speech. Continue reading “Noted: Flowers erupt following disaster.” »
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
By GARY COX [from How To Be A Philosopher
] – I ran into a friend the other day in town while buying socks in M&S. I don’t know how we got onto the subject so quickly amongst all that 100% cotton but she told me she knew three people with cancer who were not very old. She said it made her think about life and death and what it is all about. We discussed the importance of making the most of life while you still can and how some people fail to do so. If this wasn’t a philosophical conversation I don’t know what is. Admittedly, we each had our own shopping to do, places to go and people to see, so the conversation didn’t last long enough to penetrate the thoughts of the great philosophers on the subject of making the most of life while you still can, but it was at least an informal philosophical conversation that could have gone further and deeper, become more structured and formal, had there been more time and fewer distractions.
Continue reading “Excerpt: Blessed with philosophy amongst the cotton socks.” »
By PHILIP ENDEAN [The Tablet] – Bit by bit, the Catholic Church has been edging towards the moment when the new English translation of the Roman Missal will be in use in English-speaking countries around the globe. On 30 April 2010 the Holy See gave its recognitio to what was thought to be the final text, while on 20 August the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops released an updated version of the Ordinary with confirmation that Americans will start using it in Advent 2011. Yet the text is apparently still being revised in Rome. Matters remain unclear.
Continue reading “Noted: Missals across the globe.” »
By DAVID WHEATLEY [New Statesman] – If posterity has consigned the poet-painter David Jones (1895-1974) to obscurity, it is an obscurity of a strangely enviable kind. Most writers in need of a revival have suffered critical neglect or have fallen out of print, but that has not been Jones’s fate. T S Eliot, Hugh MacDiarmid, Basil Bunting and W H Auden all garlanded him with superlatives; academic attention has remained steady; and his two book-length long poems, In Parenthesis
and The Anathemata
, have just been reissued. Yet Jones is an undeniably marginal figure, British poetry’s very own Easter Island statue, combining cultic mystery with apparent obsolescence. In Parenthesis 
is one of the masterpieces of modern war poetry, but much discussion of war poetry simply bypasses him.
Continue reading “Noted – but barely notable. David Jones, we hardly knew you.” »
By NICKY TRUP [Independent] – After more than two decades in production, the latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary may never make it to print, its publisher has said. Oxford University Press has blamed the rise in popularity of electronic publications and reference websites for a decline in demand for printed dictionaries.
Continue reading “Noted: Is 'ebook' in the OED? If not, it will be.” »
Saturday, August 28, 2010
By JAY THOMPSON [Kenyon Review] – Since, Searle says, computers perform only syntactic, switch-based operations, they’re the equivalent to John S. in the box, using inputs to arrange lexical content they don’t “understand,” but can sequence.
Google cross-references your search string and image tags to bring you that picture of a sneezing panda; the chatbot weighs your idioms and mood and aims straight for the middle in its prefab reply. But the brain, Searle stresses, does more than enact formal computations on symbols; thought requires semantics, the mysterious contentual something that Searle mostly characterizes by what it isn’t.
Continue reading “Noted: A chatbot is weighing your idioms.” »
By ALAN LIGHTMAN [MIT Communications Forum] – Over the years, my wife and children have grown accustomed to seeing me drift off into the world of my own thoughts — it might be during a car ride or listening to my daughter tell me a story, or I might even be talking myself — when, I’m told, my face dissolves, my eyes get glassy, I’m gone, useless to them, an absent father and husband. Being a person who works with ideas and books, an academic or a writer, is a terribly selfish activity, because it’s hard to turn your mind off — you’re always at work, to the suffering of your family and friends. So I’d like to say a few things in justification of this kind of life, put it in larger perspective. In short, what is the role of the intellectual in the world at large? Continue reading “Noted: Why intellectuals shouldn't be allowed to drive.” »
Thursday, August 26, 2010
By JONATHAN BROWN [Independent] – It appears that the Romans made a hitherto secret contribution to global civilisation by pioneering the wearing of socks with sandals.
It is a look which in recent years has become popularised – if that is the right word – by off-duty geography teachers and embarrassing dads, yet new archaeological evidence suggests that the Romans’ famous Italian stylishness may have been ditched to help the colonists cope with the chilly British climate.
Continue reading “Non totus miles militis es commandos: 'Paria udonum ab Sattua solearum duo et subligariorum duo.'” »
