You may have read about the Nation’s decision to apologize for a poem written in Black vernacular a few weeks ago. Why did they apologize? Well, you know why, even if this is the first you’ve read about it. The problem was that the poem was written by a white man, and, of course, that’s unacceptable. The editors originally thought the poem was a “profane...attack on the ways in which members of many groups are asked, or required, to perform the work of marginalization.” In other words, the poem’s Marxist dogma lived loudly within it. But after receiving complaints, they realized they could “no longer read the poem in that way,” whatever that means. I didn’t write about the decision at the time because I’m increasingly bored by these stories. I also have a hard time understanding how people who are obsessed with cultural appropriation (and the editors who kowtow to them—can I say that, or is that cultural appropriation, too?) can live in such a narrow world with such an impoverished vocabulary. Is this really how they want to spend the little time they have on this planet? It’s baffling.
The strangest aspect of the whole episode, as John McWhorter points out in the Atlantic, is that the writer was using a variety of English to empathize with—not mock—people unlike him. What’s wrong with that? “We often say that we want whites to understand black pain, the black experience, black difference. We want them to empathize. But upon achieving this understanding, white artists, as artists, will naturally seek to express it through their creations. Are we to decree that they must not? Would this muzzling of basic human creativity, as well as the fundamental drive to share between cultures, be worth something larger? I’m not sure what that would be, other than a sense of victory in having laid down and enforced the diktat—and the novelty of that would wear off fast.” Plus, McWhorter writes, he got the dialect just right.
Let’s get back to this manifold world, shall we? Did you know that NASA’s Endeavour shuttle was named after Captain Cook’s ship and that it took a small piece of the boat with it into space? “For readers not of a nautical persuasion, knowing that Captain James Cook’s famous expedition of 1768–71 took place aboard the Endeavour, and that the Endeavour was a type of vessel known as a Whitby collier, probably marks the limit of their interest in the ship that took him to the South Seas. (The really well informed may also know that the Resolution, the flagship for Cook’s second voyage to the South Seas, was the same type of vessel.) While the town of Whitby makes some capital out of its linkage with Cook via a museum, and while maritime historians and enthusiasts have researched the Endeavour exhaustively, the general reader has had no further reason to consider Cook’s ship. Until now, that is. Peter Moore’s elegant and entertaining new book offers us a fascinating biography of the Endeavour, using it as a window onto the broader world of the mid-18th-century English Enlightenment. Moore’s book traces the whole life course of the Endeavour, both as a physical entity and as an icon. The first chapter looks at the northern English oaks that, planted around a hundred years earlier at the time of the Restoration, would have been felled to build it. The final chapter looks at the afterlives of the Endeavour as a symbol for the exploration of the unknown, listing, among other things, NASA’s decision to name the first space shuttle built following the Challenger disaster after the ship. NASA’s Endeavour (which tellingly retained the English spelling) took with it on its first mission a small piece allegedly from the stem post of Cook’s boat. Moore shows us that this was in fact a part of the Resolution, but the point still stands that, like a fragment of the true cross, the Endeavour has come to stand for a broader faith in exploration.”
Japan is a modern, mostly secular, tech-savvy country. It is also one that takes ghosts seriously: “Japanese awareness of ghosts – yūrei – goes back centuries, rooted in ideas of justice and injustice, and in a fear of unfinished business. If a person’s spirit is looked after at death, by a family providing a proper funeral, praying for that person, and visiting the grave, then the deceased is able to pass peacefully into the next world. From there, the dead look out for their still-living relatives, providing help and protection. Every year, in summer, they return to this world, welcomed by their families at the festival of Obon with food and drink, fireworks and dancing. People who die suddenly, violently, wronged or alone are another matter. Their unpacified spirits might return to the world of the living in search of satisfaction. The spirits of women in particular have long been a prominent feature in Japanese stories, paintings, woodblock prints and kabuki plays: depicted with gaunt demeanours, empty eyes and long, tangled hair falling over their faces and down onto a white Buddhist burial shroud.”
Alicia Ostriker reviews Lea Goldberg’s last collection of poems: “ On the Surface of Silence, the final collection of legendary Israeli poet Lea Goldberg, is a book of splendor in more ways than one. With its large 10×10 format, a beautiful cover photo of a desert landscape, a selection of mystical pen-and-ink drawings by the poet, and the haunting poems themselves in Hebrew and English on facing pages, as if afloat in a world of silence (‘Silence the fence around wisdom? Perhaps’), it draws the reader into a state of meditation a bit like what we might feel reading passages of the Zohar.” (HT: Mosaic)
Matthew Landrus, a Leonardo scholar, challenges the attribution of the Salvator Mundi painting to the Old Master: “‘This is a Luini painting,’ Landrus said. ‘By looking at the various versions of Leonardo’s students’ works, one can see that Luini paints just like that work you see in the Salvator Mundi.’”
Well, I agree: “How newsletters can help you find your tribe and escape the chaos.” Though I’d just say “escape the chaos.” Newsletter can be a great way of escaping (or transcending) your tribe, too. By the way, if you enjoy Prufrock, why not recommend it to friends? They can subscribe here.
Essay of the Day:
Christopher Caldwell explains why the creation of the euro has been one of the worst economic and policy decisions of the 21st century:
“‘As of this evening,’ said Pierre Moscovici in Luxembourg in June, ‘the Greek crisis is over.’ Moscovici, a French Socialist politician who serves as the economics commissioner of the European Union, was making quite a claim. At the turn of the century, Greece was the weakest and most corrupt of the countries to join the euro, the currency of most E.U. member states. When the American subprime meltdown resulted in tightened credit markets 10 years ago, Greece’s entire economic system collapsed, threatening to take other European countries down with it. The episode revealed flaws not just in the way Greece’s government had run its economy but in the design of the euro itself.
“The single currency had already undermined Greece’s prosperity, albeit while making Greeks feel rich. The ability to borrow at rock-bottom interest rates more suitable to venerable corporations in Stuttgart had brought inflationary pressures. Greece’s manufacturing and export sectors had lost their competitiveness, with a couple of exceptions, like olive oil. The country’s economy was reduced to tourism and real-estate speculation. Once the crisis hit, an E.U. plan to rescue ‘Greece’—by which was meant the Western European banks that did business there—destroyed the Greek economy altogether.
“A currency of one’s own is a great thing to have in a crisis; a country can regain competitiveness by devaluing it. Lacking one, Greece was at the mercy of eurozone authorities in Brussels and the International Monetary Fund. Together they imposed a plan to strip government benefits, cut wages, and sell off assets. The Greek government sold the fabled Athenian port of Piraeus to the China COSCO Holdings Company and Thessaloniki’s port to a Russian tobacco oligarch who made the newspapers in March when he protested a referee’s call that went against the Greek soccer team he owns by descending onto the field with a gun. The internationally imposed austerity led, as a majority of economists had warned it would, to a dramatic shrinkage of Greek GDP. Greece handed over precious assets and wrecked institutions of long standing . . . and wound up owing more. Its debt-to-GDP ratio did not fall but rose, from 127 percent at the start of the crisis in 2009 to 172 percent two years later. Then Greece paid with its democracy. In November 2011, just as those numbers came out, the country’s prime minister, George Papandreou, announced a referendum on the E.U. austerity measures. German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy summoned Papandreou to Cannes to warn that they would shut off funds to Greece should he do so. He resigned.
“Today, despite what Pierre Moscovici and his colleagues said in Luxembourg, Greek debt, at 179 percent, is higher still. The latest E.U. deal requires Greece to run large budget surpluses until the year 2060 to repay the debts brought on by the E.U.’s own mismanagement. The country is in some respects worse off than it was when Greek protesters mobbed the parliament in May 2010, howling, ‘Let the whorehouse burn!’
“There is a profound mystery about the euro, according to the Princeton economist Ashoka Mody. ‘Why,’ he asks in EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts, his authoritative new history of the currency, ‘did Europeans attempt such a venture that carried no obvious benefits but came with huge risks?’ There is an answer to this: Often what economists call risks politicians see as opportunities.”
Photo: Moon and Mars over Mountains
Poem: Ashley Anna McHugh, “Burial Chambers”
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