British author Hilary Mantel – two-time winner of the Booker Prize – died last week at age 70. She had had a number of physical ailments for most of her life. Her threeWolf Hallbooks are marvelous stories about Henry VIII and his chief man, Thomas Cromwell. Brian Dillon atThe Yale Reviewremembers Mantelas a singular prose artist.
One vivid childhood memory is my mother taking me to see the Walt Disney movies – Bambi, Dumbo, and Peter Pan, to mention only three. I also remember Pinocchio, the story of the wooden boy brought to life. (For some reason, my favorite character was Jiminy Cricket.) Jeffrey Overstreet at The Rabbit Room remembers Pinocchio, too, and what the story still means to him.
Chris Naffziger is a St. Louis photographer who documents the city’s surviving and not-surviving architecture. Recently, he went on vacation to France, and he took some photos of something most tourists miss – the foundations of the Louvre.
Well more than a year ago, I was pulled into a Facebook conversation between Belmonte and Liskey. They had been talking for some time about a collaborative effort. Belmonte is a poet, a blogger, and a management consultant specializing in non-profit organizational development. Liskey is a poet, author, and photographer and photojournalist. If you read Belmonte’s poems and study Liskey’s photographs, a collaborative effort is a no-brainer.
At the time, they were talking the basics of collaboration: what to include and exclude, how large a work, what publishing venues should be explored, layout and design, and related questions. Fascinated, I listened and offered only a word or two. The collaborators had this project well in hand.
If there were ever any doubt left about its status as a newspaper, The New York Times dispelled it over the op-ed article by U.S. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas. The senator’s opinion article made much of the NYT newsroom feel “unsafe;” the editor of the editorial page resigned, and the assistant editor was reassigned. Left-of-center journalist Matt Taibbi cites the story as an example of how the American press is destroying itself; Paul Roderick Gregory at The Hill says journalism is gone, replaced by moral denunciation; and Izabella Tababrovsky at Tablet Magazine suggests the newsroom has been replaced by a soviet. For its part, the Times doubled down and issued a memo to staff, describing the plan for forging ahead. It’s a brave new world out there, and journalism isn’t part of it.
We accepted the daily changes – often 180-degree flip-flops – from health and medical experts on the coronavirus. Wear masks! No, masks don’t help! Yes, they do! Follow the science, even if the science keeps changing its mind! Stay home! Avoid gatherings! Look at those evil people in the pool at Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri! Then came the protests over the George Floyd death, and the health profession completely discredited itself. “We often accuse the right of distorting science. But the left changed the coronavirus narrative overnight," says Thomas Chatterton Williams at The Guardian. Anthony Dimauro at The American Conservative put it this way: “I Warned About the COVID And Now I Feel Like a Fool."
Decades ago, Julian Symons wrote a much-admired biography of Edgar Allen Poe, entitled The Tell-Tale Heart. A new edition of the book has been published, and author Sarah Weinman has contributed an afterword. At CrimeReads, Weinman wonders if the life and work of Poe can really be separated.
It’s not fashionable these days to read the classics, when universities are dumping Western Civilization courses and it’s possible to get a degree in English literature without having even glanced at a play by Shakespeare. But there’s a reason why the classics endure; they speak to timeless truths even if their authors weren’t on Twitter or Facebook. Take my favorite poet, T.S. Eliot, for example. Douglas Murray at Standpoint Magazine explains why Eliot still matters – he speaks to what can be saved from the ruins. And Kay Clarity at The Imaginative Conservative describes how Eliot transcends the temporal.
We’ve all experienced it at the grocery store – something you took for granted suddenly disappeared during the coronavirus lockdown. Jake Edmiston at the Financial Post explains what happened to a particular snack food, investigating the mysterious case of the missing Cool Ranch Doritos. It explains a lot about manufacturers’ supply chains.
It was a good week for poetry. For the past few weeks, I’ve been exploring a site I tripped over, the Society of Classical Poets. Take a look at David Watt’s “Destiny in Blue.” And I doscivered a new site (new for me), The Chained Muse, a combination of poetry and articles about poetry. Daniel Leach’s “In the Deep of the Night” is an example of what’s posted.
In 1943, C.S. Lewis began a series of lectures at Kings College in London. The lectures were eventually edited and assembled into a book, The Abolition of Man. Matt Purple at The American Conservative says Lewis predicted the cultural and social dystopia we’re living in today.
Andrea Burke is a mother who had just seen her firstborn off to college, and she’s experiencing all the anxieties parents, and especially Christian parents, have. See “My Love Cannot Save You.”
Many Americans, particularly but not exclusively younger ones, seem mesmerized by socialism. Many were born or grew up after the fall the of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and don’t have any personal knowledge or experience with the Soviet version of socialism. And even though I would fall way outside the proposed limits, I see proposals like Bernie Sanders’ “wealth registry” for asset taxation purposes and think this will not end with the wealthy; there simply aren’t enough rich people to pay for all that free stuff. Perhaps we should all take a deep breath and read some Russian literature; Gary Saul Morson did, and he wrote about it for The New Criterion.
And speaking of the Soviet system, in October 1984, Jerzy Popiełuszko, the vicar of St. Stanislaus Kostka Church in Warsaw, was murdered by the Polish communist secret police. At The Imaginative Conservative, a former parishioner remembers and tells what happened.
Further extending the discussion, Scribner’s has published a new edition of Darkness at Noon at Arthur Koestler, first published in 1941. Adam Kirsch at The New Yorker calls the book the most important political work of the 20th century, and it put the lie to what too many Americans wanted to believe about Stalinist Russia at the time.
Twenty-six-year-old missionary John Chau attempted to bring the gospel to the Sentinelese tribe, and died in the attempt. The world’s news media heaped scorn upon Chau. Doug Bock Clark at GQ looked at what happened in a different way, and a very different story emerged than the usual caricatures and cartoons that pass as news stories today. See The American Missionary and the Uncontacted Tribe.
As something of an Anglophile and frequent visitor, it’s beyond disheartening to watch the news from Britain. Brexit is more than a controversy; it’s an upheaval, the likes of which haven’t been seen in a long time. And it affects more than politics, political parties, and big banks and corporations. David Martin Jones at Quadrant writes about Brexit and the decline of the English novel. I’ve read a couple of the Brexit novels, and I’m afraid Mr. Jones is spot on.
