Rand Richards Cooper reads Amherst College’s “Common Language Guide” and argues that its purpose is not to create “a common and shared understanding of language…around identity, privilege, oppression and inclusion” but to force members of the university to use the officially approved words to express officially approved thoughts: “Reading the guide is like stumbling into a trade-journal article, where specialized language demarcates territory and warns off intruders. Bristling with acronyms and niche designations, it elaborates a system of identity via a profusion of phyla: Latinx/o/a/e, QTPOC, AFAB (Assigned Female at Birth), FTM, MX, XTX (‘a response by trans folks who reject the terms “FTM” and “MTF”’). We wander into internal gender-politics squabbles, as when we learn that ‘Boi’—’a term describing masculine-presenting queer black women whose gender presentation can be more fluid and/or androgynous than completely masculine’—was ‘purposely coined to be different from “stud”/“AG” [“Aggressive Girl”] because of the rigid conformity to masculinity in those communities.’ Meanwhile, TERF—Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist—denotes feminists who reject trans women because they were once boys; while this view has been rejected ‘by most queer and trans communities,’ the guide notes that ‘TERF ideology still does infiltrate many women’s spaces.’” Oh, boi.

Michael Holroyd revisits the work of Frank Harris, the “weightlifting, stomach-pumping man of Transatlantic letters”: “Does anyone today know who Frank Harris was? Are his novels and biographies read at all now? A hundred years ago he was acknowledged ‘by all great men of letters of his time to be . . . greater than his contemporaries because he is a master of life’, or so wrote the critic John Middleton Murry. George Meredith likened his novels to Balzac’s, and Bernard Shaw his short stories to Maupassant’s – high praise which was somewhat deflated by the discovery that one story had actually been lifted from Stendhal. But no one would have been more astonished at his disappearance as a great man of letters than Frank Harris himself. ‘Christ goes deeper than I do,’ he explained, ‘but I have had wider experience.’”

A jeremiad against podcasts: “Forget the lousy microphones and the dinky interstitial stock music — the thing that derails most podcasts is the blab. There are two kinds, more or less. The first is that soft, inquisitive staccato popularized by Ira Glass on ‘This American Life,’ the source from which so much pod-voice appears to have sprung. The second mode is performative in a different way, and you hear it on most round-table podcasts — a tone that people use at parties when they want to be heard by people that they aren’t necessarily talking to. And it’s pretty much one or the other. Be podcasted to in a cozy, overly considered way, or be podcasted at in a hastier, less-considered way.”

Barton Swaim reviews Michael Brendan Dougherty’s My Father Left Me Ireland: “The book’s first half accords with the title’s first four words: My Father Left Me. The bluntness of the author’s indictment of his father, particularly when you realize that the man is still very much alive and living in Ireland, makes you wince.”

Judith Miller takes in a new production of Oklahoma! and is not particularly impressed: “Some of Fish’s innovations are brilliant. Set designer Laura Jellinek turns the stage into a modern-day community town hall, complete with festive streamers dangling from rafters, colored lights, and long folding tables topped with hampers, portable coolers, and pots containing corn that its main female characters shuck. The revival’s most successful feature is the re-orchestration of Rodgers’s gorgeous score. Daniel Kruger has reduced the orchestra from 28 musicians to seven and set the band on the far end of the stage. Led by Nathan Koci, the musicians play instruments not involved in the original version—a mandolin and steel guitar, for instance. The band’s banjo, double bass, fiddle, and accordion give its celebrated songs—‘Many a New Day,’ ‘People Will Say We’re in Love,’ ‘Out of My Dreams’—a fresh and authentic country-western spin. But, foreshadowing the doom to come, the creators could not resist racking rifles on the theater’s walls, unsubtle symbols of America’s gun culture.”

Joseph Bottum recommends James Agee’s 1951 novella, The Morning Watch: “It’s hard to know what to make of James Agee, looking back from this distance. There was often something convolutedly self-conscious about his prose. Thus, for example, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men he occasionally surfaces as a character in his own reporting—but always as diffident and agonized, worried about his role as a spy in the lives of his poor sharecropper subjects. The attempt to find a prose sufficient for self-consciousness probably contributed to his inability to finish A Death in the Family. (Agee was six years old when his own father died in a car accident.) But in that effort to develop a self-consciousness prose, Agee found a way to make The Morning Watch a success. Set at a high-church Episcopalian boarding school in Tennessee (Agee had attended St. Andrew’s School in Sewanee), the novella recounts the large thoughts and small experiences of a 12-year-old boy named Richard, in the early morning hours of Good Friday.”

Essay of the Day:

In Spiked, Andrew Doyle writes about Sark, the “weirdest and most wonderful of the Channel Islands”:

“I have come to Sark for the silence. I am so accustomed to the noise of traffic that it is quite thrilling to find myself in a place where cars are prohibited by law. There are cyclists, the occasional horse and cart, and every now and then a tractor. Waving to the drivers is futile, however. I’ve yet to see one smile.

“That is not to say that the islanders are inhospitable – far from it – but the distinction between native and tourist is always immediately apparent. In one of the shops I meet an elderly brother and sister who still speak Sercquiais, an old Norman dialect descended from those who settled from Jersey in the 16th century. The patois sounds like French to the untrained ear, but the number of people who still speak it would barely reach double figures. ‘I tried it on a taxi driver when I was in Paris’, the brother tells me, ‘but he didn’t understand’.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Gudauri

Poem: William Baer, “Auction”

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