Reviews and News:
That time David Bowie made a magic mask for an autistic kid: “‘He took it off his own face and looked around like he was scared and uncomfortable all of a sudden. He passed me his invisible mask. ‘Put it on,’ he told me. ‘It’s magic.’ ‘And so I did.’ ‘Then he told me, ‘I always feel afraid, just the same as you. But I wear this mask every single day. And it doesn’t take the fear away, but it makes it feel a bit better. I feel brave enough then to face the whole world and all the people. And now you will, too.’”
Regular readers will be sad to learn that Education & Culture, which was sponsored by The Best Schools, has ended. John Wilson started the review after Christianity Today shuttered Books & Culture in 2016 after more than 20 years in circulation. Education & Culture had a run of a little over 6 months. I don’t know how many reviews I’ve linked that John edited, but it must be close to 100. His intelligent and wide-ranging coverage of books and arts is needed now more than ever.
The childlike joy of Alexander Calder: “In the past 100 years, no visual artist has contributed more to...human happiness than Alexander Calder. If you think about it, this generating of happiness, to the extent to which it retains any cultural prestige these days, is seen as the domain of musicians and writers far more than of painters and sculptors; rather, since the rise of modernism, vexing the public has been the more likely mission of visual art. But if the works on view in the Whitney’s current Calder: Hypermobility exhibition, devoted to his kinetic sculptures, are among the most revolutionary of the past century, they present themselves with such grace and modesty and charm that even small children, knowing nothing of vanguardist aesthetics, respond with all the delight that Calder clearly wanted them, and us, to feel.”
The Smithsonian’s 1940s crime dioramas go on display: “For the first time all 19 surviving Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death are going on public view, with an exhibition opening in October at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery.”
Tom Shippey reviews Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne: “Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne looks, at first sight, for all the world like a post-apocalypse novel. This is a familiar sub-genre of science fiction, starting maybe with Richard Jeffries’ After London (1885). It has flourished ever since, but examples tend to come in waves, triggered by one form or another of anxiety. The A-bomb/H-bomb era produced a score of them, most notably (in very different ways) Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957) and Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz three years later. The general public by this time had learned a lot of new and alarming concepts, like ‘radioactivity,’ ‘fall-out,’ ‘mutant,’ and, worst of all, ‘Mutual Assured Destruction.’ It was only natural that authors should start to speculate, in fiction, about what all of this might actually mean. Mean for us, that is... Borne, it turns out, isn’t like that at all.”
Philosophers against frugality: “From ancient times to the present, philosophers, religious teachers, and moralists of every stripe have praised frugality and simple living.” But not all have.
Essay of the Day:
In The Nation, Samuel Moyn argues that James C. Scott, advocate of anarchy and “barbarian” virtues, is wrong:
“In his sparkling new book, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, Scott makes his case by tracing, step by unholy step, how human beings were led first into the agricultural fields and then into the domain of the state, bringing a vast set of conscripts into the army of supposed advancement. Starting with the fire that introduced ‘landscaping,’ Scott tracks how we domesticated not merely herd animals to do the grunt work of agriculture but also many human beings—notably slaves, who for a long time were conceived as beasts of burden within the human domain. In its own fashion, even the new ruling class became herdlike, tame animals who recast every facet of life in the grim service of their crops, which grew their humans as much as the other way around.
“With its dramatic leap backward into ancient Mesopotamia, Against the Grain is a departure for Scott, who before now has stuck much more closely to his expertise in 20th-century Southeast Asia. Yet the new book is also a kind of fulfillment. Like all of Scott’s work, it forces you to reconsider your most basic commitments about freedom and politics in response to his caustic doubts. But if his career reaches a climax in this book, it also makes clear the need to resist his conclusions—and not only for the sake of your daily bread.”
* * *
“That Scott presents as his major finding that eons separated the development of cultivation and the rise of the state not only cuts against any conclusion that the pathways into state bondage were inevitable; it also goes far to undermine Scott’s entire outlook. The fact that nothing about the innovations of fire and agriculture and ‘incipient urbanism’ necessarily required states and their iniquities means that many of the good things ‘civilization’ has brought are indeed separable from its greatest evils and therefore do not necessarily deserve the opprobrium implied by both the title and the argument of his book. Though Scott does not observe it, the first half of Against the Grain reads like a paean to a different style of agricultural civilization in the making: the best of a stateless hunting-and-gathering society tweaked in the name of bread. It also suggests a lesson that Scott would never draw: that the state itself has never been given on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. He acknowledges that there is no decisive moment when the state emerged and no single feature that defines it. In his challenge to the inevitability of the state after fire and even agriculture, Scott misses the chance to develop a theory of the variety of governments, not only in the past but also in the future.”
Photo: Da Lat
Poem: Andrew Motion, “Interior at Nice”
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