Some links from hither and yon:
Earlier this year, I discussed a piece on George Steiner and what he did, and didn’t do. Today I share a kind, if mercifully general, encomium for Steiner. Yet this piece actually seems to me to have something to say: it identifies the peculiar challenges Steiner faced in the UK, with its historically quite parochial, anti-European intellectual culture. (Well, much of that culture was anti-European, but not all of it—there were always the George Eliots and the John Stuart Mills out there.) As it says:
More than any other British literary critic, he broke the silence about the Holocaust and introduced readers to a new world of European writers and ideas. George Steiner changed the cultural landscape of modern Britain.
And one last piece captures something of all of this—the provinciality, the intensity, the challenge of living in another parochial culture.
Brookings Institution report: White people still mostly live in segregated neighborhoods.
As we await the 2020 census results, these recent American Community Survey data suggest that segregation is still quite prevalent in the United States. More than a half-century after the civil rights movement and fair housing legislation, whites continue to reside in mostly (and often largely) white neighborhoods, even as the nation’s overall population becomes much more racially and ethnically diverse.
These patterns have changed only modestly since the 21st century began. While measurable progress in closing the nation’s racial divide has been made on many fronts— including in educational attainment, hiring, and the rise in multiracial marriages—race-ethnic segregation in American neighborhoods represents an area where historical patterns are slow to change.
Oooh a piece about “line editing”—the microscopic scrutiny of prose by a meticulous reader who is not the writer. It is painstaking, exquisite torture, but it feels like a full-body epidermal pore examination. After it’s done, you look at your prose like it’s both what it always was and as something entirely new and fresh. Makes a distinction between a copyeditor and a line editor, too, that’s helpful. And this seems right to me:
Line editors both rile and save writers.
The duality arises from the word: line. Line suggests a sense both mercurial and typographic. A line is poetic and literal; where the hope of intention meets the reality of the page. Line editing is the ultimate union of writer and editor; the line-edit means we cede control, and the pen, to someone else. It is a gift of trust, and it must go both ways.
“Small, well-run countries: so hot right now.” Daniel Drezner on the geopolitical consequences (so far) of the Coronavirus pandemic.
“There have been as many plagues as wars in history,” Camus writes. “Yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.” Not a bad sort of semi-potted summary of Camus’ The Plague, his second-best novel (the best was The Fall, imho).
And another piece on Camus: “…as a metaphor, translation is uncomfortably close to transmission.” Translating Camus’ The Plague in this time is strange. This piece explains how.
In response to the symptoms of war, Camus saw shared consciousness as a healing force, becoming particularly interested in how people could develop a global collectivity that would protect them against nationalism and fascism. Writing “The Plague” in the form of a historical “chronicle” was a hopeful gesture, implying human continuity, a vessel to carry the memory of war as an inoculation against future armed conflicts.
I do have a worry about her capacities, however, as her translated version of the final paragraph she shares is considerably less good than the English version I know.