Reviews and News:
The magnificent Helen Andrews on the magnificent R. A. Lafferty: “The heritage of science fiction is, after all, not only anti-Christian but specifically anti-Catholic...But Lafferty the daily Mass-goer was a science fiction author and no other kind.”
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“‘Tis pity such a pretty maid as I should go to Hell”: Anthony Madrid on what kids want from poetry. “They adore scolding one another. They adore pulling rank. And they adore the idea that they (unlike the brutish, unlike the neighbors, unlike the damned) know what is appropriate and what is not. Watts spoke to this need, to this Passion of the Spirit—and so he was, for a hundred and fifty years at least, as popular as Dr. Seuss and J. K. Rowling combined. The key difference between Watts and his heirs in the art of writing for children is that Watts really did write for children directly. Literary artists had not yet risen to the task of dropping things in to amuse the wretches who are forced to read to the little droolers and mess-makers. In this way, most children’s books today are like ‘bank shots; in pool. You tickle the parents, and the kids get pleasure by contagion. Watts was more direct. ‘Nine ball in the corner pocket’—and bang.”
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Robert Burns may have written a lot of prose. What matters are his songs: “Robert Burns, ‘Rabbie’ to those who love him, sired thirty-six children with eighteen mistresses before dying of exhaustion at age thirty-seven. Everyone who is Scottish claims him as a forebear despite the whiff of bastardy this introduces into the auld coat of arms. We have a Burns Day. We do not have a Yeats Day. He is a national poet in a way no other modern poet is. His glory is his songs. For all the grandeur of the epic Tam o’ Shanter, the verse opera Jolly Beggars, and the major unscored lyrics, nothing equals the simple lyrics he set to the auld hieland airts.”
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Death and Jane Austen: “Austen covered sufferers of chronic illness... But Austen never killed off a major character. The absence is striking in light of the 19th-century works that followed hers, in the genre she helped pioneer — novels by Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot in which death begins as much as it ends.”
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Beyond Alberto Giacometti’s bronzes: “Granted unparalleled access to the Giacometti Foundation in Paris, curators Frances Morris and Catherine Grenier have assembled a staggering 250 works, including ample material with which to explore Giacometti beyond the bronzes.”
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Eugene Peterson—author of The Message, a popular paraphrase of the Bible—says he supports same-sex marriage in an interview with Jonathan Merritt.
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Exemplary biographer Carl Rollyson reviews a new life of William Faulkner and offers a few words of advice for the aspiring biographer along the way.
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“In April 1983, Irina Ratushinskaya was sentenced to seven years’ forced labor, shipped off to a camp in the Mordovian town of Barashevo, 300 miles southeast of Moscow. The 29-year-old’s crime, more or less, was poetry: ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,’ though Ms. Ratushinskaya described herself as apolitical and was more likely to pen verses about the view through her window than the repressive regime of Leonid Brezhnev. Ms. Ratushinskaya, who died July 5 at 63, was among the last political prisoners of the Brezhnev era, and among the first to be released under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who arranged for her release in October 1986, while flying to meet President Ronald Reagan at a political summit in Reykjavik, Iceland.” (HT: A. M. Juster)
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Essay of the Day:
In Aeon, the philosopher C. D. C. Reeve revisits anger and honor in the Iliad:
“A warrior hero such as Ajax, Hector or Achilles must be willing to fight in hand-to-hand combat day after day. He must be able, physically and psychologically, to plunge a sword into the body of another human being, and to risk having a sword plunged into his own. He must be brutal and ready to risk brutality. At the same time, he must be gentle to his friends and allies, and able to join with them in group activities both military and peaceful.
“Plato was well aware of the problem these opposing demands create, both in the soul of the warrior and in the society he inhabits: ‘Where,’ he asks, ‘are we to find a character that is both gentle and big-tempered [ megalothumon] at the same time? After all, a gentle nature is the opposite of an angry one.’ When, in the opening line of the Iliad, Homer asks the goddess to sing ‘the anger of Peleus’ son Achilles’, a large part of what he is asking her to do is to explore this opposition, its sources and effects.
“Anger or rage ( mênis, thumos, orgê) is an emotion, a mixture of belief and desire. It is not a somatic feeling, as nausea and giddiness are, though it is usually accompanied by such feelings – trembling and blushing, for example, and the sense of seeing red. It is, in Aristotle’s definition, ‘a desire, accompanied by pain, to take apparent revenge for apparent insult’.
“Anger is triggered by insult, then, and so is connected to worth ( aretê) and to honour ( timê). A person is insulted when the treatment he receives is worse than the treatment his worth entitles him to receive. He is honoured when he is given treatment proportional to his worth, and his worth is above or well-above average. When we speak of honour, therefore, we are in a way speaking of worth, since honour measures worth. Honour and insult are thus close to being polar opposites, and an insult is a harm to worth or honour.”
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Photo: Vietnamese sea village
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Poem: Paul Lake, “Dirty Laundry”
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