Friends, I hate to tell you this, but I’m pretty sure we live in the dumbest first-world country. I’m grateful to be an American, like most of you I’m sure, but I read this yesterday, thanks to Matthew Walther, and, well, may I burn in Hell if it isn’t the most pigheadedly moronic thing I’ve read in a while. Imagine mistaking a photo of coal miners for men in blackface, determining that it is indeed a photo of coal miners, and still arguing that your local restaurant should take the photo down because what you “see” is men in blackface? Because “art is in the eye of the beholder”? Yeah…

The good news is that there are intelligent and interesting Americans, too. One of them is Lionel Shriver. In Harper’s she criticizes what she calls the “modern shaming mill” following the #MeToo movement: “What artists of every stripe care about most is what they have made. The contemporary impulse to rebuke disgraced creators by vanishing their work from the cultural marketplace exhibits a mean-­spiritedness, a vengefulness even, as well as an illogic. Why, if you catch someone doing something bad, would you necessarily rub out what they’ve done that’s good? If you’re convicted of breaking and entering, the judge won’t send bailiffs around to tear down the tree house you built for your daughter and to pour bleach on your homemade pie.”

Sure, they make mistakes, but modern weather forecasters are astonishingly accurate: “The polar vortex is just the latest example of how reliable five-day forecasts have become.”

The problem with opposing cultural appropriation, Graham Daseler writes, is that “it replicates the racial essentialism of decades and centuries past. Its foundation is a lumpy mixture of collective guilt (often coded as ‘privilege’), racial and sexual hierarchization (thus the pecking order of who can appropriate from whom), and, of course, segregation.” The good news: It’s here to stay: “Critics of the practice can’t even state their grievances without stealing the artifacts of at least half a dozen cultures. The expression itself is a prime example. The word ‘culture’ comes to us by way of French, while ‘appropriate,’ meaning ‘to take,’ was plundered from Latin by Middle English. This, if nothing else, demonstrates how futile it is to try to stop the tsunami of culture or to build fences around it. There is nothing more human.”

Next time you’re in New York or Las Vegas, visit Bauman Rare Books: “On a recent day, in a locked vitrine, were first editions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass in full leather pictorial bindings. Printed in 1866 and 1872, they sell together for $23,000. For $700 one could by a first edition of Margaret Thatcher’s The Path to Power, signed by her.”

Mike Aquilina reviews James Matthew Wilson’s The Hanging God: “In one sense, his Stations could not be more traditional. All track the meter and rhyme of the Stabat Mater Dolorosa, the Latin hymn customarily used for the devotion. But the language here is ours, and Wilson moves from images of that ancient cruelty to instances of cruelties more modern: a bullied child, a woman mocked at the pool, and even an “old pervert” in prison beaten bloody by his cellmates.”

Essay of the Day:

In The London Review of Books, Charles Nicholl writes about the wandering Petrarch and his complex relationship to his own time:

“He was indeed a restless traveller. We find him in Avignon, Montpellier, Lombez, Paris, Ghent, Liège, Basel and Prague, as well as all over Italy. A learned marginalium suddenly becomes a snapshot when he apologises for his handwriting – he’s writing while on a boat. But the peregrination he describes is more a metaphysical restlessness, as he moves among different interests, disciplines, languages and political allegiances; between different versions of himself – a man of no fixed abode, ‘without earth or sky to call his own’. This also has a bearing on exile. His father was of the conservative or ‘white’ wing of the Guelph party, whose members opposed papal influence, and (like Dante, whom he knew) had been banished from Florence in 1302; Petrarch was born two years later in Arezzo and spent his boyhood and youth in Provence. ‘A sense of exile,’ Celenza says, ‘permeated Petrarch’s psychology’ and ‘inflected his writing’. It also, paradoxically, fostered in him an early sense of ‘Italianness’, in place of the regional identity denied him by exile.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Meteor strikes Moon

Poem: Terese Coe, “Youth Becoming”

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