Reviews and News:
The untold story of the audiobook. In the 1960s the novel was considered too risqué to record.
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Cromwell in Jamaica: "Historians have a bad habit of glossing over the Protectorate. It just isn't interesting: no drama, no battles, all those drab Puritans cancelling Christmas. Traditionalists tend to lump the four and a half years of Oliver Cromwell's reign as Lord Protector in with the rest of the Interregnum, just another stage in that embarrassing aberrant gap between one Charles and another. Radicals dismiss it as a betrayal of the revolution and prefer to focus with longing on the Diggers, the Ranters and the Fifth Monarchy Men. These attitudes have been challenged over the past decade. One thinks of Little and Smith's Parliaments and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (2007), or Blair Worden's important essay 'Oliver Cromwell and the Protectorate' (2010). Now, in The English Conquest of Jamaica, Carla Gardina Pestana has taken a single event in the life of the Protectorate and produced a gripping study that sheds light not only on governmental thinking in the 1650s but also on the birth of the British Empire itself."
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What happened to Google Books? "Google Books was the company's first moonshot. But 15 years later, the project is stuck in low-Earth orbit."
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Switch-hitting wisdom: "Few players...feel at ease hitting from both sides, so switch-hitting requires constant struggle and discipline. The brain always wants to default to the familiar, the comfortable, especially in times of stress. Even after years of practice, Jones still has to override this impulse. Which is, of course, one of life's great, grinding truths."
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An amateurish attempt at "recovering" forgotten women writers.
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Human rights advocate Ayaan Hirsi Ali cancels Australian trip because of threats: "Anonymous protestors warned venues and insurers not to have dealings with the Somali-born, anti-radical-Islam activist if they wanted to avoid 'trouble.' The 'Council for the Prevention of Islamophobia, Inc.' accused Hirsi Ali of being part of the 'Islamophobia industry . . . that exists to dehumanize Muslim women.' Another group, 'Persons of Interest,' took to Facebook to describe her ideas: 'This is the language of patriarchy and misogyny. This is the language of white supremacy. This is the language used to justify war and genocide.'"
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Bret Stephens leaves The Wall Street Journal for The New York Times.
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Adam Bellow is looking for liberals.
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Essay of the Day:
Siobhan Phillips writes about the enduring appeal of personal letters in Aeon:
"Personal letters have long made the case that writing allows people to grow closer in ways conversation might not. That benefit continues: for example, an article on mental health hotlines in The New Yorker in 2015 notes fuller communication via text exchanges than voice calls.
"Other benefits do not, though. Fans of the personal letter are not satisfied with emails or texts because they want more than writing at a distance; they want handwriting at a distance. 'Basically: it's all about handwriting,' John O'Connell writes in For the Love of Letters (2012). Wonderful email correspondences – such as I'm Very Into You (2015) between the novelist Kathy Acker and the writer McKenzie Wark, or between the poet Max Ritvo and the playwright Sarah Ruhl – contradict this claim, but its hyperbole is important. Physicality feeds the letter's distinct appeal. Words on paper bring something that one person has touched to the touch of another; they metonymically figure the human body by transporting its combination of persistence and perishability.
"Words on a screen have no such power..."
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Photo: Lichtenstein Castle
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Poem: Stephen Kampa, "My Father's Father's Body"
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