When it rains, it pours: Philip Roth has died, joining Tom Wolfe and historians Richard Pipes and Bernard Lewis among the eminent men of letters who have passed away recently. The Times Literary Supplement has posted a selection of reviews of his work from their archives and his friends remember him in The Guardian. This is a good occasion to revisit Daniel Ross Goodman’s appreciation of Roth on his retirement from writing or—slightly off the beaten path—Roth’s own “Open Letter to Wikipedia”: “I am Philip Roth. I had reason recently to read for the first time the Wikipedia entry discussing my novel The Human Stain. The entry contains a serious misstatement that I would like to ask to have removed. This item entered Wikipedia not from the world of truthfulness but from the babble of literary gossip—there is no truth in it at all. Yet when, through an official interlocutor, I recently petitioned Wikipedia to delete this misstatement, along with two others, my interlocutor was told by the ‘English Wikipedia Administrator’—in a letter dated August 25th and addressed to my interlocutor—that I, Roth, was not a credible source: ‘I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work,’ writes the Wikipedia Administrator—‘but we require secondary sources.’”
I was also sad to learn that Mike Potemra, literary editor of National Review, passed away unexpectedly. He was 53.
Could there be a Christian case for taking psychedelic drugs? Yes, says Rod Dreher: “Michael Pollan’s new book, How To Change Your Mind: What The New Science of Psychedelics Tells Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence is terrific, and ought to be read by my fellow conservative Christians. Yeah, you heard me: this is a book about LSD and magic mushrooms from which religious conservatives can learn a great deal. I encourage you to read it with an open but critical mind... According to Pollan, when you’re tripping, the DMN is suppressed, and you lose the sense of a barrier between yourself and the world outside. You experience that world with a much heightened sense of wonder. Much of Pollan’s book is taken up with therapeutic use of psychedelics, and accounts of how they have helped people. Some who have been afflicted with addiction, compulsion, and depression find that a single psychedelic experience, under clinically supervised conditions, serves to ‘reboot’ their brain, and to break that harmful patterns of thinking. Others who are suffering from terminal diseases find that psychedelic experiences greatly ease, and even eliminate, their anxiety over death, easing their passage. There’s a powerful testimony in the book left behind by a terminally ill man who participated in NYU psilocybin trials. The experiences left him with a profound sense of peace and ultimate meaning, and helped him to meet his death with a sense of serenity. Based on these stories alone — and there are lots of them in Pollan’s book — it seems immoral to deprive psychiatrists of these medicines to use on the suffering.”
Freud was a fraud Frederick Crews argues in Freud: The Making of an Illusion. “So depraved is Freud’s villainy, so preposterous his assertions, so calamitous the human woe he left behind in his pursuit of status and money, that morbid curiosity commands the reader’s attention until the end. It is an exemplary piece of polemical composition. No one who came of age in the West before the mid-1980s escaped Freud’s baleful influence, and it is cathartic (pardon the word) to hear just how gullible we were. Freud didn’t heal his patients. He knew he didn’t, but he didn’t care.” So why did he become so popular? He was a great storyteller.
In Iceland, fiction is a family affair...literally: “Whenever you start dating someone in Iceland, it is normal within the first weeks to check into your social security account on islendingabok.is (The Book of Icelanders), a genealogical database containing information about 95 per cent of the population. Icelanders can trace their ancestry back up to 1,200 years, and see how (it is not a question of ‘if’) they are related to one another. For example: the current President of Iceland, Guðni Thorlacius Jóhannesson, is my sixth cousin once removed. Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, Iceland’s first female president, is my fifth cousin twice removed. A few years back I was attending a lecture on historical fiction at the University of Iceland, while surfing the online database, and discovered that I was descended from one of the most incendiary heroines of the Icelandic sagas: Guðrún Ósvífursdóttir from Laxdæla.”
Fuller Theological Seminary to sell its Pasadena campus.
Judge praises 30-year-old man's legal research as he loses his suit to stay in his parents’ home.
Essay of the Day:
In The New York Times, Craig Fehrman traces the enduring popularity of mystery writing in The White House:
“Next month will see the publication of The President Is Missing, a novel co-written by Bill Clinton and James Patterson. A collaboration between a president and a thriller writer might seem odd. After all, about the only thing their professions have in common is that both lead to books that sell in airports. But The President Is Missing belongs to a long tradition of chief executives devouring thrillers, mysteries and detective stories. Clinton isn’t even the first president to participate in the writing of such a book, though this requires some sleuthing to uncover.
“The president-mystery bond began with Abraham Lincoln and Edgar Allan Poe, who were born within a month of each other in 1809. Like a lot of 19th-century readers, our 16th president was wary of popular fiction. (James A. Garfield, our 20th president, complained in his diary about ‘sensational novel writers, who devote themselves chiefly to their plots.’) But Lincoln made an exception for Poe, reading his pioneering detective stories soon after their publication; he could quote full passages from classics like ‘The Gold-Bug.’
“Mysteries grew more popular as the 19th century gave way to the 20th, and presidents started keeping up. (Theodore Roosevelt also read Poe, along with contemporary practitioners like Mary Rinehart.) Yet they did so quietly, even guiltily. ‘I do not mind detective stories if I can get a good one,’ William Howard Taft admitted. But no public figure would go further than that, given the genre’s reputation for being puerile and pulpy.
“This changed with Woodrow Wilson, who emerged during his two terms as president as mystery writing’s defender in chief. Wilson had spent most of his life as a professor and author, steeped in history and political science. He also adored detective stories, keeping a volume on his nightstand and with him on train trips. After Wilson’s terrible stroke in 1919, his wife read aloud to him. ‘I read so many detective stories that one day I told Woodrow in a state of alarm that I had suddenly found myself thinking in terms of crime,’ she later wrote. ‘This amused him very much, and he said that he thought for his own safety we had better turn to something else.’”
Photo: Egret
Poem: Marcia Menter, “Futile Serenade”
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