By DENIS DONOGHUE [The New Criterion] – ‘I first met the word “modernism” when I was a schoolboy in the Christian Brothers’ School in Newry, Northern Ireland. One of the most informative books we had to read, or at least to consult, was called Apologetics and Catholic Doctrine, which explained, among other interesting questions, the social and religious considerations that impelled popes to issue encyclicals. For instance: in the last years of the nineteenth century, a number of dissident priests and some misled laity, calling themselves modernists, tried to force the Church to abandon some of its principles: to concede the primacy of science over faith; to acknowledge that, in the person of Christ, science and history encounter nothing that is not human; and to accept that everyone is, by definition and incapacity, an agnostic. Pope Pius X regarded those modernists as so pernicious that on September 8, 1907 he issued the encyclical “Pascendi” to rebuke them. This early episode in my education may account for the fact that I have been reluctant to use the word “modernism,” even when it evidently does not refer to a heresy.’ Continue reading “Noted elsewhere: Little modern magazines.” »
OBL FORUM – In Turkey, which is the canonical territory of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, there are very few Greek parishioners left. The Orthodox community has been supplemented to some degree by Russians who have taken up permanent residence there. However, there are also some Turks who have become Orthodox in the Patriarchate. Lately their numbers have grown. Orthodox literature is being printed for them in Turkish, and articles about the newly-converted are being published. Achmet and Nejla are two of the thousand or so Turks who have changed their faith; and unlike others, they do not hide this at all. They related their stories to one Bulgarian website, ”Dveri na Pravoslavieto”—their spiritual searches which led them to Orthodoxy, and what it means to be a Christian in Turkey. (Continued at OBL Forum | More Chronicle & Notices.)
The question is posed by Sarah Nash in the most recent issue of the Victorian Periodicals Review.
ABSTRACT – In an attempt to cleanse its book reviews of commercial and political overtones, The Fortnightly Review transformed critical writing by implementing an editorial policy of signature. Signed reviews no longer articulated the voice of a collective group but instead expressed the sincere evaluation of an individual. This change in format, however, destabilized conventional authority systems that had guaranteed criticism would not be read as personal opinions. This article looks at the methods used by George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, in their works published in the Fortnightly‘s first volume, to preserve criticism as authoritative while negotiating editorial demands for signature. Continue reading “Occ. Notes: 'What's in a name?'” »
TATE MODERN – In 1905 Derain had travelled with Matisse to Collioure in southern France where they had experimented with this brilliantly-coloured style – Matisse painted a portrait of Derain, and Derain one of Matisse. They tried to create dynamic compositions using complementary colours, such as red and green, which appear most intense when placed together. Rather than using Impressionist techniques of attempting to render light effects naturalistically, Matisse and Derain adjusted their colours to obtain the maximum intensity. (Coninued at the Tate Blog | More Chronicle & Notices.)
By JULIAN BARNES [The Times Literary Supplement] – In 1937, the American art critic Walter Pach edited and translated the first English-language version of Eugène Delacroix’s Journal. In his introduction he recorded a story told him decades previously by Odilon Redon. In 1861, the young Redon, yet to make his name, had gone to a ball at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris with his musician brother Ernest. When presented to Delacroix, the two hardly dared speak, so instead followed him round the room “from group to group in order to hear every word he had to say”. Famous men and women fell silent at the approach of the famous painter who, though not handsome, carried himself like “a prince”. (Continued at the TLS | More Chronicle & Notices.)
By PAUL LINFORD – ‘Messrs Harman, Mandelson, Johnson and Co have talked all night in language that suggested an attempt would be made to form some sort of Lib-Lab pact, but given how the two parties have performed I think it would be pretty politically unsustainable.
‘Although it is still possible the Tories may win an overall majority, a minority Tory government remains the likeliest outcome and, whatever the constitutional position, it would now seem sensible for Gordon Brown to put the ball of forming a “stable government” in David Cameron’s court.’ (Continued at Paul Linford | More Chronicle & Notices.)
THE TIMES [Leader] – General election day is a celebration of democracy. And on one of those rare election days — there have been only two in the past thirty years — when a change of government seems possible, it can feel like a day of liberation. Today, however, feels very different. The mood is sombre. And we will all exercise our democratic right with an unusual weight of responsibility.
Britain is in trouble. This election comes at a time when the quiet assumptions of our nation and its politics are in question. It is no longer clear that Britain will be able to remain a great power, or a harmonious society, or one prosperous enough to be able to guarantee its citizens liberty and justice. (Continued at The Times | More Chronicle & Notices.)
By VERNON BOGDANOR [New Statesman] – A hundred years ago, we seemed about to witness the strange death, not of Liberal England, as George Dangerfield suggested in his book, but of Conservative England. The hold of the Liberals on government, buttressed as it was by the Irish nationalists and the infant Labour Party, seemed unshakeable. It was not easy to see how the Conservatives could ever displace them. After the 1914-18 war, however, everything changed. The Conservative century began. In every election between the wars, the Conservatives secured more votes than the Liberals or Labour. Indeed, until the advent of Tony Blair in 1997, there were just two governments of the left with comfortable majorities – in 1945 and 1966. From a review of Parties and People: England 1914-1951
by Ross McKibbon. (Continued at New Statesman | More Chronicle & Notices.)
By CAROLYN MOYNIHAN [MercatorNet] – Former Harvard president Derek Bok is not sure that people even know what is best for them. In a recent book he observes that lawmakers using the findings of happiness research “are relying on persuasive evidence of what will make constituents happy instead of accepting what people mistakenly think will promote their well-being.”
A lot of that evidence, persuasive or not, comes from the new school of “positive psychology”, whose best-known exponent, Martin Seligman [shown here], claimed in 1998: “We can articulate a vision of the good life that is empirically sound and, at the same time, understandable and attractive. We can show the world what actions lead to well-being, to positive individuals, to flourishing communities, and to a just society.”
You get the picture. Any prole who thinks that a fancy house and an income to match equals happiness is not going to get much joy out of this new version of the good life. (Continued at MercatorNet.com | More Chronicle & Notices.)
by MELANIE PHILLIPS [The Spectator] – ‘If you look around you — with a mind that is truly open — you will see much evidence that the Western mind is currently snapping tightly shut. Indeed, the paradox is that some of our most noisy advocates of reason say a lot of things which are demonstrably absurd….
‘For example, Professor Richard Dawkins told me he was ‘not necessarily averse’ to the idea that life on earth had been created by a governing intelligence — provided that such an intelligence had arrived from another planet. How can it be that our pre-eminent apostle of reason appears to find little green men more plausible as an explanation for the origin of life than God?
‘The answer is that in certain areas science has overreached itself by trying to play God, and as a result has turned into an ideology.’ (Continued at The Spectator | More Chronicle & Notices.)
By CHARLES SIMIC [The New York Review of Books] – I’d heard about the endless reading tours of previous laureates, the elaborate projects they had devised and administered to make poetry more popular in United States, and none of it appealed to me very much. There’s a good reason why I have lived in a small village in New Hampshire for the last thirty-seven years. I like to hear roosters crow in the morning and dogs bark at night. “No way,” I told my wife. I was going to call them back and politely decline. But to my surprise, speaking to my children, I changed my mind. My son and daughter told me, separately, that if I refused this great honor I would come to regret my decision some day. I knew right away that they were right. I thought some more about it, but I kept going back to what they said. So, I accepted. (Continued at The New York Review of Books | More Chronicle & Notices.)
By JONAH GOLDBERG [Commentary Magazine] – Fourteen months into his presidency, in March 2010, Obama succeeded in muscling through Congress a partial government takeover of the national health-care system. That legislative accomplishment followed Obama’s decision a year earlier, without congressional approval, to nationalize two of the country’s Big Three automobile companies. In the intervening months, he had also imposed specific wage ceilings on employees at banks that had taken federal bailout money—the first such federal wage controls since an ill-fated experiment by Richard Nixon in 1971. Obama also made the federal government the direct provider of student loans, and did so by putting that significant change in American policy inside the larger health-care bill. In a September 2009 press conference, Obama suggested that a publicly funded health-care system might help “avoid some of the overhead that gets eaten up at private companies by profits and excessive administrative costs”—thus mistaking the act of making money, the foundational cornerstone of capitalism itself, with the generation of unnecessary expenses.
Given his conduct and rhetoric as president, we have every reason to reopen the question from 2008 and ask, quite simply, What kind of socialist is Barack Obama? (Continued at Commentary Magazine | More Chronicle & Notices.)
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
By ALGIS VALIUNAS [The Claremont Review of Books] – In the 1939 memoir “My Early Beliefs,”
John Maynard Keynes—perhaps the past century’s most influential economist, and a writer of elegant clarity whom Saul Bellow called the foremost English prose stylist of his time—describes the impact of the Cambridge philosopher G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica
(1903) on the young Apostles who sat at his feet.
Nothing mattered except states of mind, our own and other people’s of course, but chiefly our own. These states of mind were not associated with action or achievement or with consequences. They consisted in timeless, passionate states of contemplation and communion, largely unattached to “before” and “after.” …The appropriate subjects of passionate contemplation and communion were a beloved person, beauty and truth, and one’s prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge. Of these love came a long way first.
Keynes and his friends turned Moore’s philosophy into a religion—and one without morals. To have said so explicitly, however, would have offended their belief in the scientific rationality of Moore’s thinking and their own. (Continued at The Claremont Review of Books | More Chronicle & Notices.)
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By MARCUS TOMALIN [RaVoN] – ‘To summarise (all too briefly) just a few aspects of Hamilton’s scientific work, the method of general dynamics that he devised in the 1830s introduced the operator (later called the ‘Hamiltonian’ operator) which eventually provided a key analytical tool for Quantum Mechanics; his sketch of an algebra founded upon the notion of pure time largely anticipated Brouwerian Intuitionism; and his theory of Quarternions, which contributed to the development of non-commutative algebras in his own day, has recently begun to find extensive practical applications. However, despite sustaining an illustrious career as a professional physicist and mathematician, Hamilton repeatedly claimed that he was primarily a poet rather than a scientist.’ (Continued at RaVoN | Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net via Érudit)
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Wednesday, April 14, 2010
By LANE WALLACE [The Atlantic] – ‘In all the reminiscing and analysis that’s emerged following Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens’ retirement announcement last Friday, the piece that’s intrigued me the most is the explanation of how Stevens came to change his views on the death penalty over the course of his tenure on the court…The justices had been operating on a theory that, at least in Justice Stevens’ opinion, the messy reality of life had not matched. And so he came to change his opinion about the theory. That is, of course, what all good scientists are supposed to do.’ (Continued at The Atlantic | More Chronicle & Notices.)
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