The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin is hosting an exhibition entitled “On the Road with the Beats.” To live up to the billing, the show includes one of the most valuable literary manuscripts in the United States: the famous 120-foot scroll draft of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, a delicate [...]
In the L.A. Times, Salman Rushdie reminisces about a certain novel that he wrote more than a quarter of a century ago. There were minor catastrophes: Midnight’s Children took an unusually long time to be published because of a series of unfortunate events. Cape and Knopf had agreed to print jointly in the U.S. to [...]
At the Chronicle of Higher Ed, Britt Peterson revives Jonathan Gottschall’s Boston Globe essay “Measure for Measure,” which created a minor brouhaha a couple of months back. Gottschall’s essay argues that literary scholars ought to try out techniques that are informed by – and accountable to – the sciences. Peterson draws on this to highlight [...]
When I started this blog a few months back, I decided to stick to short essays on language, writing, rhetoric and arguments, in the spirit of George Orwell’s old hypothesis that there is a meaningful correlation between writing, thinking and politics. However, I also figured that I’d need some kind of imagery to break up [...]
Roger Ebert day-dreams of a life on the balcony, as things come to an end. “One of these days I shall tackle the rest of Baudelaire,” wrote Walter Benjamin to his friend Max Horkheimer, in a last letter from Paris. Samuel Beckett adamantly refused be taped. Against character, I decide not to watch this tape [...]
This is the final post in my series on Roger Scruton’s essay for Axess, “The Return of Religion.” In the essay, Scruton targets seasonal quarry: atheists who profess that religion persists as a way of explaining the world due to ignorance of the facts, an ignorance that stokes dangerous fanaticism. In my first post, I [...]
This is the second post in my series on Roger Scruton’s The Return of Religion, in which the philosopher goes after “evangelical atheists” such as Richard Dawkins and Chrisopher Hitchens. In my first post, I argued that Scruton set up his argument by undermining the credibility of his interlocutors, accusing them of irresponsible, bestial shrillness [...]
Conservative philosopher Roger Scruton attacks “evangelical” atheists, arguing that writers such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are fools to claim that ignorance alone has prevented the triumph of scientific explanations over religious ones. This debate flares up in one form or another on a quarterly basis, and has animated these particular writers for some [...]
At the London Review of Books, Thomas Jones makes fun of a help-wanted ad from Britain’s MI6, which explains ‘We can’t overstate the importance of a sense of personal integrity.’ Jones juxtaposes this apparent high standard with Devil May Care, the new James Bond novel written by Sebastian Faulks, “writing as Ian Fleming.” Wait a [...]
The DaD series on handwriting continues with a big brassy love letter from anarchist firebrand Emma Goldman to her longtime lover, the physician Ben Reitman, the “Hobo Doctor” known for treating venereal diseases among the poor in the early decades of the 20th century. Written August 15, 1909, the letter is archived in the Reitman [...]
At The New Republic, Josh Patashnik criticizes the way that Senator Ben Cardin talks about public transit to the environmental website Grist. Here’s the quote from Cardin: I’m a big, big supporter of dramatic change in public transportation. It includes more than just the bus and rail systems in our urban areas. It includes a [...]
I’ve been wondering about a post by blogger Nigel Beale, who wonders whether there’s anything to a problem that Somerset Maugham wondered about many years ago. Maugham: I wonder that people who are concerned for the survival of democracy are not anxious at the inordinate power it gives oratory. A man may be possessed of [...]
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