Your life is empty, you say? The ennui of mid-November getting you down? Distract yourself from your imminent death with these fabulous links!! First hit's free.
We talk about the "police state," but we often don't realize that "the police" as an idea isn't that old. In fact it's just barely over 200 years old. Here's a neat article that tells the story of the first police force--interestingly, a private, business-supported, enterprise.
Studying the smell of old books for what those smells can tell us.
"Traversing both these energizing texts, then, is the curious impulse to write about Mormonism from the perspective of secular discipline—or rather, in sympathetic identification with the church’s own efforts to establish itself as distinctive but also hewing so closely to the norms of liberal sociality (familial devotion, yes, but also tolerance, free choice, diversity, generous pluralism) as to testify, still again, to Mormonism’s rightful place among the good religions of secular modernity. " A review of two books about Mormonism, gender, and secularity. Ever since Harold Bloom's The American Religion of a quarter-century ago, Mormonism has become an increasingly rich topic of attention and study.
An interview with Jedediah Purdy on, among other things, the idea of a "moral political economy" and the absolute essentiality of interdependence. I like this as well: "Fighting to live isn’t politics; politics is about how to live together."
T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" turns 100 years old! Happy birthday, Old Possum's most famous essay. And not a bad one at that. One of my favorite lines from that piece:
Some one said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely; and they are that which we know.
Also, this piece discusses Eliot as an early theorist of intertextuality, which is sort of true (he was a theorist of intertextuality) but sort of misleading (intertextuality is among the oldest of strategies for thinking about literature, extending at least back to Greek antiquity as a self-conscious critical strategy, and arguably authorial one). Plus this author doesn't seem to know that Eliot got a lot of this from Hegel via F.H. Bradley, on whom he had written a PhD dissertation. Sometimes I wonder if English professors (this author is an English professor) simply don't read enough. At other times, I'm quite sure of it.
John Hersey, author of the immortal work Hiroshima and also the almost-immortal A Bell for Adano (the kind of book almost every other author would have felt justified their lives, though Hersey's life was properly justified, in a literary sense, by Hiroshima), among other magnificent writings, has a substantial biography written about him. Here is a brief review of Hersey, masquerading as a review of the biography.
Enjoy! A blustery but pale-blue sky day here. I think I'll go outside now and gather wood for a fire from the woods around our house. For that alone, this will be a good day.