Prufrock

In the Point, Agnes Callard explains that she frequently assigns novels and poems in her philosophy classes. Why? Not because they provide her students with “personal ethical guidance,” and not because they help her students become more empathetic. She assigns them because they do what no other kind of text can do. They teach her students about evil: There are many complex theories about the nature and function of art; I am going to propose a very simple one. My simple theory is also broad: it applies to narrative fiction broadly conceived, from epic poems to Greek tragedies to Shakespearean comedies to short stories to movies. It also applies to most pop songs, many lyric poems and some—though far from most—paintings, photographs and sculptures.

American culture has exhausted itself. It is running on fumes. It’s a dead man walking. The popular songs everyone talks about sound the same as the slightly less popular ones. The big movies are all remakes of previous big movies or next installments in never-ending series. When these movies aren’t atrocious, they get good reviews, but we all know the bar is very low. We just don’t want to be completely bored. Novelists recycle gimmicks learned in their MFA programs; poets have replaced arresting phrases with “transgressive” political ones, which, it turns out, are not so transgressive after all. Painters now only look backwards in their frantic search for something new.

“Why,” Thomas Pfau asks in the Hedgehog Review, “have death and dying been experienced as essentially incomprehensible” in the past 200 years? He continues: Death is experienced as the total absence of meaning and, consequently, as something not to be understood but merely to be managed by drawing on medical ingenuity, pharmaceutical resources, and the (increasingly limited) forbearance of insurance companies. The recent loosening of centuries-old restrictions on physician-assisted suicide is but one feature of a multipronged approach that seeks to manage and expedite dying. Writing in 1910, the German sociologist Georg Simmel may well have understood that he was fighting a rear-guard action when he warned against precisely this reductive conception of death as negation.

In the Smithsonian, Sarah Kuta writes about the man who invented waterskiing 100 years ago. His name was Ralph Samuelson. He lived in Minnesota and wondered one winter if you could ski on water the way you could on snow. At eighteen, he made his own skis and had his brother pull him on his boat: He unsuccessfully tried snow skis and barrel staves before realizing that he needed something that covered more surface area on the water. The ever-resourceful Samuelson went to the local lumberyard and found two eight-foot-long, nine-inch-wide pine boards, wrote Sports Illustrated’s Jim Harmon in 1987. Using his mother’s wash boiler, he softened one end of each board, then clamped the tips with vises so they would curve upwards.

On Thursday, I referred readers to an essay comparing the economies of ancient Rome and Greece. I am not the only one on an ancient Rome kick. In Aeon, Maggie Popkin writes about Roman tourists and the popularity of mementos and trinkets in the ancient world: In the Roman Empire, which lacked a print culture, let alone digital media, souvenirs were crucial in disseminating knowledge of places, be they cities, monuments, buildings or statues. For people who could not travel to such sites in person — which included the majority of the empire’s inhabitants — reproductions were a key means for visualizing their physical appearance and cultural significance.

“Recent research regarding ancient economic history,” the economist Rafael R. Guthmann writes in his Substack, “has suggested that Western Eurasia, during the time it was politically unified under the Roman Empire, achieved an extraordinarily high level of economic prosperity for a pre-modern society.” A comparison to decentralized ancient Greece, however, tells a different story. Greek cities, Guthmann writes, grew faster than Roman ones, Greek soldiers were paid more than Roman soldiers, Greek workers were paid more than Roman workers, and citizens generally had more free time: As a result of intensive political competition and experimentation among over a thousand sovereign city-states, political institutions developed to an impressive degree.

This year marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, better known as Molière. While it was decided that Molière would not be inducted to France’s Panthéon — he is not a republican and so is not eligible — the playwright has been celebrated in other ways in his home country. In the New York Times, Laura Cappelle reviews a handful of “wildly different” productions of his work in Paris and across the country: “While the Comédie-Française, whose 2022 program is entirely devoted to Molière, has invested in dark, offbeat productions, ‘Molière Month,’ a yearly theater event run by the city of Versailles, has delivered traditional gowns and breeches, to slightly dull effect.

Abraham Lincoln’s condemnation of slavery may seem insufficiently forceful to some today — as it did to some in his own time. But without him, the practice might have continued for decades or longer. In National Affairs, Ralph Lerner puts Lincoln’s abolitionism into context: In Lincoln’s time, as in ours, those who look for and demand a politics of purity have found much to disparage in his Fabianism. Lincoln’s constitutional scruples had kept him from dealing the institution of slavery the much-anticipated death blow. His readiness to compromise, and to seek expedient alliances, dismayed the anti-slavery radicals. His explicit distinction between the urgent and the important, as well as his strict adherence to that principle of action, was nothing they could admire.

In the Atlantic, Leslie Kendall Dye tells us what the placement of books on her shelves tells us about her interests, her associations and her opinions: Sometimes I stop in the center of my own home like a bird arrested in flight, entranced by the books that line my walls. I live in a small Manhattan apartment, and I, too, have books in the living room, the bedroom, the hallway, the closets. Often, I stare at them because I’m puzzling over their geography. I wonder if I’ve placed any book in the wrong spot, according to an emotional map I’ve made of my bookshelves. As I gaze at the titles, the associations come tumbling out. Tennessee Williams’s Memoirs is next to a biography of Patrick Dennis called Uncle Mame, because Williams and Dennis had many things in common: Pathos.

I have never taken our two German short-haired pointers hunting. If I did, it wouldn’t go well. The male (Hank) is afraid of loud noises. When it thunders, he follows me around the house, glued to my leg, shaking. We think leaving him alone at the house as a puppy one Fourth of July did him in. The female (May) loves chasing smoke and water. When I cook burgers, she yelps and flies through the air to “bite” the smoke from the grill. She does the same thing when we water the lawn. If I were to go duck hunting with them, I’d have to fetch the ducks myself. They are too old to go hunting now anyway and sleep all day. I have wondered, though, if they dream of hunting. Not the human sport we call hunting, since they don’t know what it is, but chasing prey.

Best-selling novelist James Patterson — yes, the one who has published ten books in 2022 alone — has apologized for saying that white male writers are being discriminated against. Sarah Polus reports in the Hill: In an interview with the United Kingdom’s Sunday Times published this week, Patterson said the phenomenon of white men not being able to get writing gigs represented "just another form of racism." "What’s that all about?" Patterson added, according to The New York Times. "Can you get a job? Yes. Is it harder? Yes. It’s even harder for older writers. You don’t meet many 52-year-old white males." The 75-year-old later backtracked his comments in a Facebook post, saying he supports diversity in the writing industry.

Every day, there are probably a good 50 articles published in major news outlets in the West on climate change. I just searched for “climate change” in the news over the past 24 hours and got over 200 results. Nearly all of them are about how bad the climate “crisis” is. Reuters reports, for example, that Asia’s Biggest Security Threat Is Climate Change, Not Conflict. In the New York Times we read: The Planet Is Burning. Are Billionaires the Answer? The Weather Channel tells us that Asian Water Tower Imbalanced Due to Climate Change. Climate change is ruining tourism, worsening and extending the allergy season, making ocean predators hungrier, keeping us up at night, threatening mental health, and doxing humpback mojo.

In The Atlantic, Jordan Kisner reviews Geraldine Brooks’s new novel, Horse, which follows two young Black men — one a 19th-century groom and the other a 21st-century Londoner who has moved to America to work on his dissertation on “stereotypes of Africans in British painting.” In the novel, Theo, the Londoner, is skeptical of the ability of white artists to represent Black figures as fully human. “This,” Kisner notes, “is a self-conscious—and bold—inclusion for a novel with not one but two young Black male protagonists written by a 66-year-old white Australian woman . . . Neither is this her first time writing across cultural divides. Her first nonfiction book, Nine Parts of Desire (1994), was about the 'hidden world of Islamic women.

Writers shouldn’t talk, Becca Rothfeld writes in Gawker — not to large groups of people, not on the television, not on podcasts. Why? They are bad at it and say stupid stuff: I have always thought that there is something peculiarly invidious, even offensive, about the expectation that writers talk, at least in their capacity as writers. No doubt I am biased by my own distaste for the exercise. I can imagine few horrors greater than an editor proposing the torment of a phone call, or a podcaster innocently inviting me to record a segment.

In the New Yorker, Roxana Robinson revisits the old story of Wallace Stegner’s use of Mary Hallock Foote’s unpublished memoir and letters for his novel The Angle of Repose. Stegner quoted thirty-eight passages from Foote’s letters (not her memoir, according to Jackson Benson’s introduction to the novel), which came to roughly sixty-three pages of text in a novel of over 600 pages. Stegner received permission from one of Foote’s granddaughters to use the letters and memoir as he saw fit. That granddaughter apparently hoped that Stegner’s use of the material in the novel might reignite interest in her grandmother’s largely forgotten life and writing, which it did. But the family wasn’t happy after the novel was published.

In a recent article in Science, Mike Kestemont and Folgert Karsdorp employ the “unseen species model,” which is taken from ecology, to estimate the number of medieval manuscripts that have been lost over the years. They estimate that we have lost a whopping 90% of medieval manuscripts containing heroic narratives. In the Guardian, Laura Spinney notes that it isn’t only medieval manuscripts we’ve lost. We have 543 early modern plays produced between 1576 and 1642, but these likely “represent a fraction of all those produced”: Another 744 that certainly existed have been lost, and hundreds more were probably written to fill the repertory calendar, of which no trace remains.

My wife and I bought our first IKEA Billy bookshelf twenty years ago. We now have fourteen in various shades of sun-bleached faux yellow pine. Whenever we needed more book space, we could make a trip to IKEA, whether that was in Allaman in Switzerland, New Haven, Houston, Charlotte or Virginia Beach. Not anymore. IKEA is apparently changing the design and materials of the cheapo shelf. Gone are the annoying finishing nails that might nick the shelves as you try to secure the flappy back. Gone, too, is the thin wood veneer glued to the medium density fiberboards (MDFs). Instead, IKEA will now use foil paper. There are other changes, but the point of the redesign is to make the shelves sturdier, easier to move and more ecologically “friendly.” Fine.

I have some thoughts on poetry and morality coming soon to a publication near you, but in the meantime, let me direct you to Alice Gribben’s wonderfully gripey piece in Tablet on how the contemporary art world is ruining art: Artworks are not to be experienced but to be understood: From all directions, across the visual art world’s many arenas, the relationship between art and the viewer has come to be framed in this way. An artwork communicates a message, and comprehending that message is the work of its audience. Paintings are their images; physically encountering an original is nice, yes, but it’s not as if any essence resides there. Even a verbal description of a painting provides enough information for its message to be clear.

Jill Lepore reviews three new books on the bicycle in the New Yorker. I know this because she mentions the titles in between long passages about the first bike she learned to ride, how many bikes she has owned, and how many times she’s been hit by a car. She also tells us that bicycles are machines of the left, though for some reason this hasn’t stopped them from being used in the service of war and colonialism: Bicycles and bicyclists veer to the political left. Environmentalists ride bicycles. American suffragists rode bicycles. So did English socialists, who called the bicycle “the people’s nag.” Animal-welfare activists, who opposed the whipping of horses, favored bicycles...

Ward Farnsworth’s writing guides  I am a big fan of Ward Farnsworth’s guides to writing. He has published three of them: Ward Farnsworth’s Guide to Classical English Metaphor, Ward Farnsworth’s Guide to Classical English Rhetoric, and Ward Farnsworth’s Guide to Classical English Style. Each is beautifully designed and printed by the publisher David R. Godine (whom I wrote about here). In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Colin Marshall surveys Farnsworth’s guides and his two books on philosophy. In the guides to writing, Farnsworth provides hundreds of sample sentences to illustrate his points. Almost all of these are from the nineteenth century.