Desh Amila organized an Australian mini-tour on feminism featuring Roxane Gay and Christina Hoff Sommers earlier this year. It did not go well: “Here, in a charged public setting where, not unlike Twitter, every utterance was met with immediate audience feedback, there was no room for that. Instead, the debate was dumbed down, almost immediately, to a hero-vs.-villain caricature: There was Roxane Gay, who is Good because she wants men to stop raping, versus Christina Hoff Sommers, who is Bad because she, on the other hand, blames women for being raped. As though Gay doesn’t want young women to speak up and say, ‘I don’t feel comfortable — please leave my room right now.’ As though Sommers doesn’t want men to stop raping.” (HT: Helen Andrews)

Anthony Burgess’s unfinished work on the reception of A Clockwork Orange following Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of the novel has been discovered. “The manuscript of The Clockwork Condition, which Burgess describes as a ‘major philosophical statement on the contemporary human condition’, had been left by the author in his home in Bracciano in the 1970s. When Burgess died in 1993, the house was sold, and the archive moved to the Burgess Foundation in Manchester, where director Andrew Biswell came across it in the process of cataloguing.”

The Satanic Temple is now a 501(c)(3): “It is reportedly the first satanic religion in the United States to be officially granted such a status.” I don’t know about that…

Kyle Smith reviews Avengers: Endgame. It is “more or less what we were all looking for. Regardless of whether the Avengers saga goes on, this one satisfyingly closes the book on its first era, eleven years that remade the movies.”

A short history of the curveball: “Long before cameras and websites could classify every pitch into a type, many of the offerings intended to deceive a hitter—in-shoots and out-shoots, in- curves and out-curves and drops, in the old parlance—were largely known as curveballs.”

Paul Beston reviews a boxing memoir that shows us not every dream should be followed: “In this age of intellectually high-powered writing about sports, it’s still surprising to learn how much of what athletes do depends on their minds. Every fan knows that great fighters must have ‘heart’—the inner strength and will to carry on—but fewer understand how a degree of concentration that resembles meditation is also required. In these respects, along with its demanding intricacies, boxing can be regarded as an art, and like other arts, it is a relentless sifter of souls. Punching from the Shadows is the story of one man’s attempt to prove himself an artist in boxing, and what happened when he learned that he could not be. Campaigning in the early 1980s, Sharp logged three professional bouts before giving up—but he makes a good case that nearly everything that happened to him in the ring reflected what was already going on in his head.”

Essay of the Day:

Why are we bored with Henrik Ibsen? His once radical ideas are now commonplace:

“Prior to A Doll’s House, 19th-century drama throughout the West had degenerated into a species of light entertainment dominated by melodramas, frivolous farces, and the ‘well-made’ plays of such commercial hacks as Eugène Scribe and Victorien Sardou. As Shaw wrote with annihilating contempt in an 1896 review of one of Ibsen’s later plays: ‘The active, germinating life in the households of today cannot be typified by an aristocratic hero, an ingenuous heroine, a gentleman-forger abetted by an Artful Dodger, and a parlormaid who takes half-sovereigns and kisses from the male visitors. Such interiors exist on the stage, and nowhere else.’

“It was Ibsen who showed the world that it was also possible to write realistic plays about contemporary life that dealt with serious matters in a serious way—and that these plays could attract paying customers in the way that the novels of Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Anthony Trollope appealed to mature minds who longed to see real life portrayed on the page.

“Because Ibsen’s later plays give the impression of dramatizing the effects on their characters of such political concepts as feminism and capitalism, they came to be known as ‘plays of ideas,’ just as Ibsen himself was seen as a spokesman for progressive thought. But to watch any of them is to realize that they are political in no more than the broadest of senses, and that their implicit ‘ideology’ is far from consistent. On the one hand, A Doll’s House portrays Nora as a woman in need of a fulfillment that she cannot achieve while she is trapped by marriage, motherhood, and the ghosts of received ideas about truth and virtue that haunt all of his protagonists. ‘I believe that first and foremost I am an individual,’ Nora says. ‘If I’m ever to reach any understanding of myself and the things around me, I must learn to stand alone.’

“Conversely, the title character of Peer Gynt is a vain young adventurer who travels around the world in search of himself but in the end finds nothing but emptiness within. Kenneth Tynan summed it up well when he said that Peer Gynt ’remains unrivaled as a study of the fallacy that is inherent in total dedication to self-fulfillment.’

“It is fairer to say that Ibsen was not so much a feminist, much less a progressive, as he was an anti-populist. For him, the Victorian-era hypocrisy he decried was a manifestation of the power of the mob to stifle the imaginations of the handful of great men and women who were born to leaven the loaf. As he declares in An Enemy of the People: ‘The majority is never right….The strongest man in the world is the man who stands alone.’ Within a few years of his death, it had become a critical commonplace that these ideas, far from being radical, were (in Mencken’s words) ‘simply what every reasonably intelligent man thought.’”

Read the rest.

Photo: Cows

Poem: Alfred Nicol, “The Guitar Maker”

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