Some stuff for you all!

This is an incredible review—ten years old now—of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, a book about post-war American fiction writing.  Elif Batuman really takes on the book in a serious way, from a position of strong dissent, but she does not, I think, slander the book, trash or disparage it; she just disagrees.  It’s very much worth your while, though the book itself is, too.

Another review, this one of Edward Baring’s book Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy. Which seems to think that phenomenology is esoteric and hard to understand.  Hmm.  It’s an important book, anyway.

I think the reason I like Zadie Smith so much is partially what is gotten at in this review: not so much her optimism, as her capacity for empathy.  And I too appreciated her essay resisting the (by definition horrible) concept of “cultural appropriation.”  Also there’s this:

To read Zadie Smith is to recognize how few writers seem to genuinely love human beings the way she does, with such infinite curiosity and attention, even when they are behaving monstrously. Or, for that matter, how few are able to do justice to what, for want of a better term, we’ll call common decency. 

The reviewer seems to miss the way that Smith’s final piece—listing what she owes to other people—is actually an “appropriation” of the beginnings of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. 

Do we need worldviews?  A recent book by Raymond Guess suggests that we do not.  This review assesses the book’s arguments, and says things are maybe more complicated than that.  I like that thought, since my experience of Geuss has been that he’s clever but not very pleasant, and I want his view to be wrong.  I only wish the review had pointed out the way in which Geuss’s “pragmatism,” which may sound so theoretically supple, is also useful for not having principles or convictions of any sort, and so especially useful for living in an endlessly plastic consumer society.  Kind of like our own.

A brief essay that hangs a larger cultural observation on a series of new books—some translations, some theories. The new books are the collection of recent new translations of ancient or at least pretty modern epics — the Odyssey, Aeneid, Faerie Queene, Beowulf — intending to complicate at the reception of these epics. My own response to this is complex. On the one hand, I agree that the epics are more complicated than simple boosterism allows, and they need a complicated engagement to take them seriously. On the other hand, it is a bit facile to suggest that this complication is at all a new thing. Augustine's writing (esp the Confessions and the City of God) is a continual grappling with Virgil and the Aeneid, and what it represents. Indeed the Aeneid is itself a commentary on the Illiad and the Odyssey, challenging both. More recently, John Gardner wrote the novel Grendel in the early 1970s, giving voice to the monster in Beowulf.  One wishes that there wasn’t quite so much blindness to the past; it suggests a bit of moral superiority, even smugness. 

This is very helpful, about reading graphically-presented data.  

When he was 21, Jay Parini did a “Driving Mr. Borges” around Scotland.  Incredible.

What it would have been like to see:

In old age, Bernal Diaz, a Spanish foot soldier in that long-ago campaign and still our best and most engaging witness, remembered the impact of the “enchanted vision” of the magical city, with its “pyramids and buildings rising from the water . . . Indeed, some of our soldiers,” he reported, “asked whether it was not all a dream.”  

A good piece, by Inga Clendinnen, historian of the Aztecs and the Nazis, on the Aztec capitol Tenochtitlan.