December 2007
obituary for an obituarist
Hugh Massingberd, a celebrated former obituaries editor of The Telegraph of London who made a once-dreary page required reading by speaking frankly, wittily and often gleefully ill of the dead, became the recipient of his own services after dying in West London on Christmas Day. He was 60 and lived in London. The cause was cancer, according to The Telegraph. The newspaper announced Mr....
Robert Lowell, "After the Surprising Conversions"
September twenty-second, Sir: today I answer. In the latter part of May, Hard on our Lord’s Ascension, it began To be more sensible. A gentleman Of more than common understanding, strict In morals, pious in behavior, kicked Against our goad. A man of some renown, An useful, honored person in the town, He came of melancholy parents; prone To secret spells, for years they kept alone— His uncle, I...
forgiveness
[Charles] Griswold tells us much about forgiveness, about the mental processes involved in it, and the way in which interpersonal relations are shaped by it. But he does not ask the question: what kind of a being is it that can forgive? Dogs don’t forgive, because dogs don’t resent. Forgiveness is unique to rational beings, and is a gift of metaphysical freedom. Only the accountable being, able to...
a Firefox developer on the imminent death of...
Here’s a perfect example of how we knew Netscape just wasn’t going to be able to make a great browser. Back when Mozilla was getting ready to ship Mozilla 1.0, the basis for Netscape 7, the Netscape browser team was required to remove the pop-up blocking feature that those same Netscape engineers had developed in Mozilla. The reason? Obviously because AOL and Netscape web properties...
orphaned objects and amateur sleuths
The internet makes each of us an amateur sleuth. There are lots of resources out there. The fact that I could find a Seattle phone book from the 1920s on line struck me as absolutely miraculous. But there is no reason why every phone book for every year for every city shouldn’t be available eventually. The resources are going to get steadily better. And this means small efforts at...
the Next Big Thing in word processing! Web 3.0!! →
on teaching literature at West Point
Out of class, they keep at it. Lieutenants in Iraq who took [Elizabeth Samet’s] course three years earlier write back to ask about her current syllabus. Another stationed in Korea tells her, “Someone once told me that ‘the most important book you will ever read is the first one after your graduation.’ I wish I could remember what it was—I have done more reading since...
W. H. Auden, "At the Manger"
Mary
Oh shut your bright eyes that mine must endanger
With their watchfulness: protected by its shade
Escape from my care: what can you discover
From my tender look but how to be afraid?
Love can but confirm the more it would deny.
Close your bright eye.
Sleep. What have you learned from the womb that bore you
But an anxiety your Father cannot feel?
Sleep. What will the flesh that I...
"The door of Jesus’s stable is open"
We still have this half-buried conviction that church is a place where, at least at this time of year, we ought to be able to feel at home. We turn up, tired and overwrought, perhaps, still thinking vaguely about what we haven’t done and need to do before tomorrow. And then the story unfolds. Yes, this is our story, and yes, we can for a moment believe that this birth makes a difference. Yes, God...
Catholic England
Roman Catholics have overtaken Anglicans as the country’s dominant religious group. More people attend Mass every Sunday than worship with the Church of England, figures seen by The Sunday Telegraph show. This means that the established Church has lost its place as the nation’s most popular Christian denomination after more than four centuries of unrivalled influence following the...
philosophers behaving . . . like philosophers
It is probably the most negative book review ever written. Or if there is a worse one, do let me know. “This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad,” begins Colin McGinn’s review of On Consciousness by Ted Honderich. “It is painful to read, poorly thought out, and uninformed. It is also radically inconsistent.” The ending...
Ron Paul, milk, and coins
Paul never outshines his message, which is unchanging: Let adults make their own choices; liberty works. For a unified theory of everything, it’s pretty simple. And Paul sincerely believes it. Most Republicans, of course, profess to believe it too. But only Paul has introduced a bill to legalize unpasteurized milk. Give yourself five minutes and see if you can think of a more countercultural...
Robert Alter's psalms
There is just one exception to Alter’s estranging and secularizing program, and it is a highly suggestive one. Like all previous translators, he refuses to translate the name of God as “Yahweh,” the very imprecise English equivalent of the way the Hebrew might be pronounced. Instead he substitutes “the Lord,” the equivalent of the Hebrew euphemism Adonai. In this...
Bea Miles (1902-1973)
Well-known in Sydney, she could be seen about city and suburban public transport wearing a green tennis shade, tennis shoes and a scruffy greatcoat over a somewhat ample body. She had a number of ingenious methods of obtaining goods, services and daily support. One method was to give recitations from Shakespeare, with a sixpence to three-shilling price range. She became notorious for refusing to...
Starbucked
By 1923, [Samuel Cate] Prescott [of M.I.T.] had zeroed in on perfection; his virtuosic coffee-making skills, he believed, simply could not be improved. That year, he announced his findings, a set of rules as unbendable as the laws of physics: 1. Use one tablespoon of freshly ground coffee for every eight ounces of water. 2. Force these grounds through water that is a few degrees short of...
Blade Runner, the Platonic cut
Pontifical dialogue aside, Blade Runner remains what is always was, an extraordinary and enduring work of Pop Art, one that calls forth the language of greatness in that poignant way many beautiful but flawed works do. The mystery of Blade Runner is not that early audiences were so put off by it, but that a quasi-sacred halo has come to surround it, a force field so powerful as to apparently...
the 3:10 to Pelargir
Well, yes, there are interesting tales to be told in the bridge years between the Battle of Five Armies and the Long-Expected Party. For that matter, there are interesting stories to be told about every epoch of Middle-Earth’s history, and they’re all helpfully written down in Tolkien’s copious appendices and histories and sagas. But none of them comprise readily filmable narratives in the way of...
Les Murray, "The Quality of Sprawl"
Sprawl is the quality of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce into a farm utility truck, and sprawl is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts to buy the vehicle back and repair its image. Sprawl is doing your farm work by aeroplane, roughly, or driving a hitchhiker that extra hundred miles home. It is the rococo of being your own still centre. It is never lighting cigars with ten...
ohmygoodness ohmygoodness ohmy o o o
ACADEMY AWARD-WINNER PETER JACKSON AND NEW LINE CINEMA JOIN WITH MGM TO PRODUCE “THE HOBBIT,” EAGERLY-ANTICIPATED FANTASY ADVENTURE EPIC
NEW LINE AND MGM TO CO-PRODUCE AND SHARE WORLDWIDE DISTRIBUTION RIGHTS
PETER JACKSON AND FRAN WALSH TO EXECUTIVE PRODUCE TWO FILMS BASED ON “THE HOBBIT”
Los Angeles, CA (Tuesday, December 18, 2007) Academy Award-winning filmmaker Peter Jackson; Harry Sloan,...
the decline of reading
There’s no reason to think that reading and writing are about to become extinct, but some sociologists speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special “reading class,” much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy, in the second half of the nineteenth century. They warn that it probably won’t regain the prestige of exclusivity; it may just become “an...
J. M. Coetzee, Australian citizen
Why would a novelist who has written so powerfully about the land of his birth pack up and leave? Were his 2002 move and his taking of Australian citizenship last year a betrayal of his homeland, or a rejoinder to a country whose new government had denounced one of his most important novels as racist? Was it just another example of the “white flight” that has sent hundreds of thousands of...
Rowan Williams's Advent hope
A great deal of the language that is around in the Communion at present seems to presuppose that any change from our current deadlock is impossible, that division is unavoidable and that any such division represents so radical a difference in fundamental faith that no recognition and future co-operation can be imagined. I cannot accept these assumptions, and I do not believe that as Christians we...
religious tests
This campaign is knee-deep in religion, and it’s only going to get worse. I’d thought that the limits of professed public piety had already been achieved during the Republican CNN/YouTube debate when some squirrelly looking guy held up a Bible and asked, “Do you believe every word of this book?” — and not one candidate dared reply: None of your damn business. Instead, Giuliani, Romney, and...
fabulous account of Pixar films' referring to... →
intelligence
The best way to understand why I.Q.s rise, Flynn argues, is to look at one of the most widely used I.Q. tests, the so-called WISC (for Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children). The WISC is composed of ten subtests, each of which measures a different aspect of I.Q. Flynn points out that scores in some of the categories—those measuring general knowledge, say, or vocabulary or the ability to do...
history is bunk
Appearing on National Public Radio’s quiz show, “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me,” this weekend, [White House press secretary Dana] Perino admitted a story she’d previously only shared in private: When a reporter asked her a question during a White House briefing in which he referred to the Cuban Missile Crisis — she didn’t know what it was. “I...
a word from your host
This tumblelog will be on hiatus for a few days while its onlie begetter pays a visit to Noo Yawk City.
knitting the raveled sleeve of care
Economists and bureaucrats who ventured out into the countryside after the Revolution were horrified to find that the work force disappeared between fall and spring. The fields were deserted from Flanders to Provence. Villages and even small towns were silent, with barely a column of smoke to reveal a human presence. As soon as the weather turned cold, people all over France shut themselves away...
three lectures by my friend Carlos Eire: "A... →
'I think I am a missing person'
A man who walked into a police station five years after he was presumed dead in a canoeing accident has told officers he has no memory of what happened to him. John Darwin’s clothes, paddle and red canoe were washed up on a beach in Seaton Carew, near Hartlepool, in March 2002. Search teams never found his body but it was assumed he had died until he turned up at a London police station...
Auden on criticism
Criticism is tradition defending itself against the three armies of the Goddess Stupidity: the army of amateurs who are ignorant of tradition; the army of conceited eccentrics who believe tradition should be suressed by the stroke of a pen in order that true art may begin with them; and the army of academicians who believe they maintain tradition by a servile imitation of the past. [to be...