Reviews and News:
The relevance of Lord Robert S. Vansittart: "Principal Private Secretary at Number Ten from 1928 to 1930 and head of the Foreign Office till the eve of war, then Chief Diplomatic Adviser to the government, his book The Mist Procession, published in 1958, has a lot to tell us not just about the 1930s but about the world today."
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The purpose of the university: "Salovey's claim that Yale resolutely seeks out and unmasks 'false narratives' is itself a false narrative. But is the routing of "false narratives" even an apt description of what a college education should ideally be? It is not, even though that goal, in different iterations, is widely embraced across the political spectrum. The most urgent task of any college is the transmission of knowledge, pure and simple. American students arrive at college knowing almost nothing about history, literature, art, or philosophy. If they aspire to a career in STEM fields, they may have already picked up some basic math and physics, and possibly some programming skills. But their orientation in the vast expanse of Western civilization is shallow; they have likely been traveling on a surface of selfies and pop culture with, at best, only fleeting plunges into the past. A postmodern theorist, the prime product of today's university culture, would immediately object that there is no such thing as neutral knowledge. But this hyper-sophisticated critique is irrelevant to the problem of widespread student ignorance."
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Life as a Lego master builder: "Nathan Sawaya stunned colleagues when he quit his job as a lawyer to play with Lego full-time. Now everyone from Lady Gaga to Barack Obama's a fan."
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What's it like to be a writer for late night comedy shows these days? Probably not that different from being a speechwriter or any writer, but what the heck: "In just the past two weeks, several major stories have dropped around crunchtime between 5 and 6 p.m.: the firing of the F.B.I. director James B. Comey; Mr. Trump's intelligence disclosure; the revelation of a memo by Mr. Comey that documented Mr. Trump's efforts to halt an investigation of Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser; and the appointment of a special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, to oversee the investigation into ties between Mr. Trump's campaign and Russian officials. With a mixture of speed, weariness and a growing acceptance that this is what their job now entails, comedy show writers are scrambling to satisfy the appetites of their news-savvy audiences. The frenzy reflects not only the pressure writers put on themselves to come up with the freshest, sharpest satire they can generate, but also their competitive TV environment, where several broadcast and cable shows are trying to put unique stamps on the same set of events."
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China has mined "flammable ice" from the South Sea: "The element, a kind of natural gas hydrate, was discovered in the area in 2007, but this is the first time the country is able to successfully extract combustible ice from the seabed, in a single, continuous operation on a floating production platform in the Shenhu area of the South China Sea, about 300km southeast of Hong Kong, state-run Xinhua news agency reports."
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Joseph Epstein on Evelyn Waugh: "Waugh funny was not always the same as amusing."
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Terry Teachout remembers Bunny Berigan: "If the name of Bunny Berigan is known at all today, it's as a one-hit wonder. Berigan was the singing trumpet player whose 1937 record of "I Can't Get Started" helped turn Vernon Duke's ballad, with its incomparably witty Ira Gershwin lyric, into a standard. To those with a particular interest in the big-band era, Berigan is generally regarded as one of the foremost trumpeters of the '30s. During his lifetime and for long afterward, he was universally admired by his fellow musicians, among them Louis Armstrong, after whose playing Berigan modeled his own style. Asked by Down Beat in 1941 to name his favorite trumpet player, Armstrong chose 'my boy Bunny Berigan,' saying 'To me Bunny can't do no wrong in music.' Berigan was also legendary for his drinking. Swing-era jazzmen delighted in swapping anecdotes about his alcohol-fueled exploits, many of which ended with his falling off bandstands. When asked how he was able to play so well while drunk, he allegedly replied, 'I practice drunk.' But there was nothing funny about the punch line: Berigan died in 1942 of cirrhosis of the liver. He was 33, a year younger than Charlie Parker."
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Essay of the Day:
In The New Yorker, Adam Kirsch reviews Czeslaw Milosz's life and poetry of "skepticism and sincerity":
"In July, 1950, Czeslaw Milosz, the cultural attaché at the Polish Embassy in Washington, D.C., received a letter from Jerzy Putrament, the general secretary of the Polish Writers' Union. The two men had known each other for many years—they had been contributors to the same student magazine in college, in the early nineteen-thirties—but their paths had diverged widely. Now the arch-commissar of Polish literature told the poet, 'I heard that you are to be moved to Paris. . . . I am happy that you will be coming here, because I have been worried about you a little: whether the splendor of material goods in America has overshadowed poverty in other aspects of life.'
"The language was polite, even confiding, but the message could not have been clearer. Milosz, who had been working as a diplomat in the United States for four years, was no longer considered trustworthy by his superiors. He was being transferred to Paris so that he would be within reach of Warsaw. Sure enough, a few days before Christmas, Milosz was summoned back to Poland, and his passport was confiscated. 'He is deeply detached from us,' Putrament observed, after meeting with Milosz in person. There was "no other option" than to keep him in the country, lest he end up defecting to the West.
"This scenario had played out countless times in Communist countries. In the Soviet Union, under Stalin, it often ended with the summoned party being sent to prison or shot. And the Communist regime in Poland, which had been installed by Stalin at the end of the Second World War, had reasons to be concerned about Milosz. For one thing, he had left his pregnant wife and their son in the United States, giving him a strong incentive to return. For another, he had never joined the Communist Party. He was allowed to serve the Polish government without a Party card, largely because his reputation—he had been a leading light of Polish poetry since the mid-thirties—was considered valuable to the new regime.
"Far more damning evidence of Milosz's disaffection with the regime lay in notebooks, full of poems that were not published until years later. What would Putrament have thought if he had read 'Child of Europe,' written in New York in 1946? 'Do not mention force, or you will be accused / Of upholding fallen doctrines in secret. / He who has power, has it by historical logic. / Respectfully bow to that logic . . . / Learn to predict a fire with unerring precision. /Then burn the house down to fulfill the prediction.'
"These lines mocked the Communist claim to rule, which was based on the theory of history as formulated by Marx. According to the concept of dialectical materialism—'diamat,' as its adherents often abbreviated it—the triumph of the Soviet Union under the leadership of Joseph Stalin was not a contingent event but the necessary result of an age-old process of class conflict. Milosz turned this presumption of 'historical logic' upside down: if Communism now ruled Eastern Europe, it was not because of the laws of history but because the Russians had burned the house down. 'Diamat is a tank,' Milosz confided to a friend in 1951. 'I feel like a fly which wants to stand up against that tank.'"
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Image: Borobudur
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Poem: A.E. Stallings, "Transitional Object"
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