Reviews and News:
Bryan Caplan says what all professors spontaneously pronounce under their breath in hallways across America, especially at this time of year: Not everyone should go to college. In fact, most people probably should not go to college. “The vast majority” of students “are philistines.”
Jason Guriel complains about advising aspiring writers to “read widely.” Instead, they should read wisely: “At its most obnoxious, the command to ‘read widely’ reflects the more-is-more ethos that courses, like an energy drink, through our literary culture. My Twitter feed is full of writers and critics who relentlessly strive to be up on their field, logging every literary debut like librarians, returning from writing conferences with shareable jpegs of their book-engorged tote bags, or lighting out for yet another reading, the stacks on the book table like some mountain range, the promise of a horizon. Here’s hapless omnivore Aleksandar Hemon, a novelist and critic who will eat anything: ‘I read compulsively—preferably a book of my choice, but anything would do. I’ve read, with great interest, nutritional information on cereal boxes. I regularly read wedding announcements in the New York Times.’ Some real talk: most writing isn’t worth consuming. That includes cereal boxes and New York Times wedding announcements. More real talk: most people urging you to read widely probably have a hard time ranging outside their comfort zones.”
Speaking of reading, you may be surprised to learn that we provincial dullards here in the South read more world literature than in any other part of the country (at least according to sales at Norton). Here’s Martin Puchner, editor of The Norton Anthology of World Literature: “The popularity of world literature in the South was so surprising to me—and to pretty much everyone I have talked to—that I decided to visit some of our adopters. When I asked them why their institutions were so invested in world literature, they explained that while many coastal elite universities had given up on Great Books courses during the canon wars, the more conservative southern colleges had held onto them. But gradually those institutions transformed what originally would have been Western literature courses into world literature courses.”
Danny Heitman takes a look at Charles Dickens’s other Christmas stories: “After publishing Carol in 1843, he produced four other Christmas novels in quick succession, deeming some of his handiwork even more appealing than his iconic account of Ebenezer Scrooge. When he published The Chimes, a follow-up to Carol for the 1844 holiday season, Dickens was sure he’d topped himself. ‘I believe I have written a tremendous Book; and knocked the Carol out of the field,’ he told his friend Thomas Mitton. ‘It will make a great uproar, I have no doubt.’”
In her final column for the New York Times, Jennifer Senior writes in praise of acknowledgments: “I love the acknowledgments sections of books. I love what they say and what they do not say. I love what they accidentally say. I love the ways families are discussed, and how the truth about the wretchedness of book-writing finally comes tumbling out, and the combination of neuroticism and relief, pride and latent terror.”
Kyle Smith writes an open letter to the “Cat Person” girl: “Hi. You don’t know me. But like many others, I feel as if I know you, after reading the crushing short story about you that went viral after appearing in The New Yorker.”
Listen to the Hillbilly Thomists.
Essay of the Day:
The West is no longer Christian, but it is still religious, Mary Eberstadt argues in First Things, and that faith is secularism:
“According to the dominant paradigm shared by most people, religious and secular alike, the world is now divided into two camps: people of faith and people of no faith. But this either-or template is mistaken. Paganization as we now know it is driven by a new historical phenomenon: the development of a rival faith—a rival, secularist faith which sees Christianity as a competitor to be vanquished, rather than as an alternative set of beliefs to be tolerated in an open society.
“How do we know this? We know it in part because today’s secularist faith behaves in ways that only a faith can.”
Photo: Meridiani Planum
Poem: Stephen Kampa, “Wasted Time”
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