May 2008
medievalists in Kalamazoo
There they spend up to four days delivering or listening to some of the 1,500 scholarly papers presented at the congress, roughly one paper for every two attendees, but mostly (because the 600-odd sessions featuring those papers are crammed into only 12 hour-and-a-half time slots, which means no single person can hear more than a handful of them) socializing, in relationships that range from the...
“The Creation is a perpetual Feast to the Mind of a good Man.”
– Joseph Addison (1712)
“When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly Southern...”
– Flannery O’Connor
washboarding
I was overjoyed that Congress refused to override President Bush’s veto of a bill outlawing the washboarding of prisoners, a technique that some have described as torture—a ridiculous notion if I’ve ever heard one. We’re involved in a war here, people, with some very nasty individuals who would like nothing better than to kill us, and the idea that washboarding—an ancient technique, used routinely...
an extinct world
When I joined The Observer in 1996, the world of books was in limbo between hot metal and cool word processing, but it would have been recognisable to many of our past contributors, from George Orwell and Cyril Connolly, to Anthony Burgess and Clive James. Everything smelled of the lamp. It was a world of ink and paper; of cigarettes, coffee and strong drink. Our distinguished critic George...
Arendt and the problem of evil
In 1945, in one of her first essays following the end of the war in Europe, Hannah Arendt wrote that “the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe—as death became the fundamental problem after the last war.” … [But] far from reflecting upon the problem of evil in the years that followed the end of World War II, most Europeans turned...
footprints and gardens
You begin to see that growing even a little of your own food is, as Wendell Berry pointed out 30 years ago, one of those solutions that, instead of begetting a new set of problems — the way “solutions” like ethanol or nuclear power inevitably do — actually beget other solutions, and not only of the kind that save carbon. Still more valuable are the habits of mind that growing a little of your own...
shaken, not stirred
Take the all-important issue of shaking rather than stirring the martini. In 1999, a group of students at the University of Western Ontario in Canada led by Colleen Trevithick (and overseen by her father John, a professor of biochemistry) decided to test Bond’s preference in a series of experiments on gin and vodka martinis.
They studied the martinis’ ability to deactivate hydrogen...
the Diggers
In 1997, not long after I had first arrived in Moscow, my friend Sergei told me about the Diggers. They were a group of sensitive, educated people who had turned their backs on modern life and retreated to the network of tunnels and secret bunkers beneath the city. There they had formed a new society that was fairer and more just than the surface one. It was dark, beautiful, surreal - precisely...
“To the extent that the establishment depends on the inarticulacy of the...”
– J. Mitchell Morse (1972)
Chris Adrian's tatoo
Inside, a young man, grumpy but not at all rude, was waiting. He was round and hairy and, appropriately, covered in tattoos. He asked me what I wanted for mine. I’d been thinking about this. The tattoo was supposed to remind me of what I tended to forget every day, to be less selfish, or less insular, to remember promises, to try to think less of my own largely imaginary suffering and devote some...
art that stank
Robert Rauschenberg, the man who once said he wanted to act in the gap between art and life, has departed this life, dying on Monday at the age of 82 in his home on the island of Captiva, off Florida’s Gulf coast. There are few things that the men and women who run the culture industry enjoy more than shedding some tears over the passing of a bohemian bad boy who lived a full life, and in...
the apostate
As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother’s Christian background is irrelevant.
Of course, as most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim. He chose to...
procrastination
Well, you’ve no doubt heard all manner of theories regarding the root cause of procrastination. Fear of failure. Crippling perfectionism. Abnormally low type-2 phloxiplaxitus levels.
I’m here to tell you that it was none of these things. The root cause of my procrastination, in technical terms, is this: I’m lazy. Extremely lazy.
Don’t judge, pal—you’re lazy, too....
Bach's notes
His music tends to work in all versions, I submit, because the notes-qua-notes are so good. Mozart, Beethoven, Stravinsky, or [your favorite composer here] were constantly concerned with the instruments that played or sung their work: great notes, too, but intimately bound to their media. In The Art of Fugue Bach didn’t seem to care what the medium was; it would work no matter what. A lot of...
“A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan...”
– Leszek Kolakowski
the end of a lexicographical era
The future is here, and the immortal O.E.D., the one that lives in bound pages last published micrographically in 1991, is obsolete — at least according to the folks who publish it. As of now, Oxford University Press has no official plans to publish a new print edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.
For some reason, the prospect of a Web-only O.E.D. made me nervous. Talking on the phone with...
do the math
Hillary Clinton, 60, Illinois native and Arkansas lawyer, became, retroactively, a lifelong Yankee fan at age 52 when, shopping for a U.S. Senate seat, she adopted New York state as home sweet home. She may think, or at least would argue, that when she was 12 her Yankees really won the 1960 World Series, by standards of “fairness,” because they trounced the Pirates in runs scored,...
why not to be a philosopher
In the late 1940s, as Richard Rorty was finishing his undergraduate studies and considering a future as a professional philosopher, his parents began to worry about him. This is not surprising. Parents worry; and the parents of philosophers, perhaps especially. But just why Rorty’s parents worried – well now, that part is surprising.
They were prominent left-wing journalists. His father, James,...
on the sadness of higher education
The academic world I so loved revealed itself best in an undergraduate course I’d taken on the history of Europe in the twentieth century. When the professor, a distinguished intellectual of the Left, returned the midterms to the hundred plus or so of us who were in his course, he said that we’d saddened and embarrassed him. “I gave you readings that allowed you to reach such diverse conclusions,”...
