You should probably know what “originalism” means, Oliver Traldi writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education, before you dismiss it flippantly: “It takes a kind of overreach for an English prof to imagine that knowledge of novels provides a more probative perspective on the Constitution than a legal scholar’s knowledge of that document itself.”

The pen that changed how we write: “The new ballpoint was clean and convenient. What it wasn’t was cheap. The new Reynolds ballpoint cost $12.50 – convert that to 2020 money and it’s more than $180 (£138.50) . . . The pen was the first to go on sale in the US, but it was by no means the first ballpoint pen – the head of the US company that made it had in fact discovered a version during a business trip in South America.”

In defense of Philip Guston once again: “Never mind that Walker cannot distinguish between racist imagery and imagery depicting racists. The real tell is that in a statement he said that to mount the exhibition now would have been ‘tone deaf.’ That’s the language of corporate image control. To many of the people who run our museums—not art people but bean counters—art is merely branding for the institution.”

Dwight Garner on collecting sentences: “I began keeping my commonplace book in the 1980s, when I was in high school. In the 1990s, when I was working as the arts editor for an alternative weekly newspaper in Vermont, I typed the whole thing into a long computer file. I’ve moved it from desktops to laptops and now onto my iPhone, too. Into it I’ve poured verbal delicacies, ‘the blast of a trumpet,’ as Emerson put it, and bits of scavenged wisdom from my life as a reader. Yea, for I am an underliner, a destroyer of books, and maybe you are, too.”

Ian Hamilton fought against mediocrity in poetry by writing verse that “combined emotional intensity and intellectual precision,” David Collard writes, and by editing publications that skewered derivative work and celebrated excellence: “Hamilton’s disenchantment with contemporary poetry informed plans for his last magazine The New Review (1974-1979), which would focus less exclusively on verse. A glossy monthly publication with the highest production values and a dazzling roster of contributors, it was a lavishly-funded establishment flagship that was despised by its many vocal critics. That it ran for five years is a tribute to the editor’s commitment because, like its predecessor, The New Review had its own destruction built in. The whole project was doomed from the outset because Arts Council grants, although generous, were payable in arrears only after each issue appeared, which meant the publication was permanently mired in debt.”

Carcanet celebrates fifty years: “Fifty Fifty: Carcanet’s Jubilee in Letters might be described as a victory lap for what Harold Pinter has called ‘a great publishing house.’ It could also be read as a year-by-year epistolatory narrative of its publisher, Carcanet’s managing director Michael Schmidt . . . The story it tells is mostly one of poets and poetry. Schmidt, himself an award-winning writer as well as professor of poetry, has been since 1972 the general editor at PN Review (formerly Poetry Nation). A regular on BBC radio, he is the editor of numerous anthologies and surveys of British literature, and he has been a contributor to almost any literary review (as well as a participant in any literary festival) one might name. Such experiences have served him well as servant ‘to the servants of the muse.’ Nevertheless, as he wryly notes in his Lives of the Poets (brought out by Knopf in 1999), ‘publishers get written out of the story [while] poets live for ever.’”

Pico Iyer reviews Matthew McConaughey’s Greenlights: “‘I never wrote things down to remember,’ our hero tells us early on; ‘I always wrote things down so I could forget.’ It’s not a terrible line, and it prepares us for the mix of raucous anecdotes and bumper-sticker maxims extracted from 35 years of diary-keeping that follow. The fact that many of the aphorisms make no sense at all suggests that the actor really did write every last word himself. The runaway voice that keeps the pages flying past—‘I’ve had four concussions from falling out of four trees, three of them on a full moon’—reminds us that this is a frat-boy La Rochefoucauld who seems wonderfully impossible to embarrass.”

The idea that we should refer to Beethoven by his full name only because it is somehow more inclusive is silly, Daniel Lelchuk writes.

Photos: Mississippi