Aught for Naught
“An unbelievable asshole but a day ago, Scrooge is now the picture of human kindness. I, for one, don’t buy it.” Still, Morgan Meis does have terrific insight on hidden genius in Dickens’ prose …
If you’re following the health care debate, don’t miss this article from Reno News and Review. “We are living through the Californiafication of America—a country in which the combination of a determined minority and a procedural supermajority legislative requirement makes it impossible to rationally address public policy challenges.” Maybe the bill isn’t the story. Maybe the story is that we’re no longer able to pass transformative domestic legislation of any kind.
What’s the signature product of the decade? “The original white iPod is already on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and one can assume it will eventually take its place in the Smithsonian alongside the telephone and the cotton gin.” Why do I still read Vanity Fair? I’m a grown man.
“It’s what you could call a derivative, an egalitarian fantasy that gains appeal only once socially moulded notions of supremacy are brought to nought:” Aresh Shirali has finished reading Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice, and thinks that John Rawls’ theory of an Ideal State is still standing …
Happy Birthday to the Ottendorfer Library, the first and oldest free public library in New York City, where Max Ernst and Bertolt Brecht once lectured.
Just when Jeff Sypeck had strayed from his mission to discover unexpected manifestations of medievalism in everyday life, before him appeared a romanesque groined vault, complete with a tetrapylon, cunningly disguised as a bus stop in Maryland …
“His book, a collection of lyrical prose meditations on Melville’s Moby-Dick, redounds with collapsed binaries and aporetic splits, contradictions that reciprocally create themselves, terms that imply and give rise to their opposites.” This is B. K. Fischer reviewing Dan Beachy-Quick’s A Whaler’s Dictionary at Boston Review. “But the deconstructive move, the self-conscious trafficking in verbal paradox, becomes almost a tic …”
Finally, celebrate the end of 2009, the year of the tantrum, with Craig Silverman’s roundup of the year in media corrections. A sample, from The Guardian,
A comment piece about achievement and frailty in the lives of artistic greats mentioned Wagner’s reminder to his favourite Vienna chambermaid to wear purple knickers next time they met. A Wagner expert points out that the pants in question were pink (To understand genius, forget the purple knickers, 19 August, page 28)
Glad that’s settled.
