Clik here to view.
Repost-P.G. Wodehouse, Uncle Fred Flits By
If you have an hour or so, and you want to read one of the funnier short stories ever written, then read Uncle Fred Flits By, by P.G. Wodehouse. I could not find it for free, but you can check out the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Brian Stewart At The American Interest: ‘The Boy From Bombay’
Full piece here. We have strong and vigorous free speech laws and traditions in the U.S., and as we see in Europe, radical, marginalized imams and multiculturalists can make strange bedfellows,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Repost-From Poemshape: ‘Let Poetry Die’
Full post here. ‘The best thing that could happen to poetry is to drive it out of the universities with burning pitch forks. Starve the lavish grants. Strangle them all in a barrel of water. Cast them...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Short Culture Wars Essay-Two Links On Detroit &‘Ruin Porn’
This will be a slightly longer post, so thanks for hanging in there with me. From Land That I Live: In Defense Of Ruin Porn: ‘So what is ruin porn? Take yesteryear’s environments, our forgotten...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Repost-From NPR: ‘Author Louis Menand On Reforming American Universities’
Full audio here. (around 5:00 min) Is it just the humanities? STEM seems to be doing ok, but how is our culture doing relative to others in a global marketplace? Menand wonders in his new book, why it...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Megan McArdle At The Daily Beast: ‘The Absurd Lies Of College Admissions’
Full post here. McArdle links to an open letter in the Wall Street Journal, written by a college-bound girl, to all the colleges who rejected her. Worth a read. So much for the blissful averageness...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Michael Dirda From The Sunday Times Via The A & L Daily: ‘H.L. Mencken At...
Full piece here: “As a student of his native literature, Mencken favours writers with the authentic American yawp – Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, the humorists George Ade and Ring Lardner. Huckleberry...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Repost-From The Spiked Review Of Books Via The A & L Daily: ‘Rescuing The...
Full review here. Tzvetan Todorov is primarily a literary theorist, but it’s often worth highlighting the following: “Or take the current fetishisation of The Science, or as Todorov calls it,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Repost-’Steven Fuller In Project Syndicate: Who Needs The Humanities?’
Full article here. “This enabled first him and then her to command authority regardless of birth, resulting in the forging of networks and even institutions whose benefits cut deeply across...
View ArticleClik here to view.
From Kenanmalik.com: ‘Introduction: How Salman Rushdie Changed My Life’
Full piece here. Malik is British, the son of East Asian immigrants, and offers quite a bit of insight about his experiences and the culture that received him: “The Rushdie affair gave notice not just...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Peter Berkowitz At The Hoover Institution: ‘Tom Wolfe’s Miami’
Full review here. What are you looking for in a novel: Ideas and the deployment of ideas? A reflection of your life/times/society? Good prose? Characters that pop into your life? Glimpses of the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Repost-Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: ‘Farewell To...
Full article here: So what’s lacking in the humanities? Roger Scruton has some keen insights: “The works of Shakespeare contain important knowledge. But it is not scientific knowledge, nor could it...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Repost-From Slate: ‘MFA vs. NYC’
Full post here. Of the MFA (Master Of Fine Arts): ‘Staffed by writer-professors preoccupied with their own work or their failure to produce any; freed from pedagogical urgency by the tenuousness of the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Repost-’From Stanley Fish At The NY Times Blog: What Should Colleges Teach?’
Full post here. Fish reminds us of a simple idea: college writing courses ought to focus primarily on writing…: “…the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tuesday Quotation: Mark Twain
-”By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity — another man’s I mean.” -Mark Twain
View ArticleClik here to view.
Repost: From The NY Times Via A & L Daily: Helen Vendler On Wallace Stevens...
Full review here. Vendler reviewed John Serio’s new “Selected Poems” of Wallace Stevens. “Stevens’s conscience made him confront the chief issues of his era: the waning of religion, the indifferent...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Repost: Now Not-So-New Book On Raymond Chandler Reviewed in the L.A. Times
When I went looking for a good hard-boiled detective novel, I found Chandler’s High Window. Here are some quotations of his, if you’re interested. A lot of writers end badly; and according to the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Andrew Delbanco At The NY Times Review Of Books: ‘The Two Faces Of American...
Full piece here. Delbanco sets up a dichotomy between long-time education reformer Diane Ravitch, who’s drifting into a rather closed defense of public-schooling as is, and Michelle Rhee, who led the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
From Strange Maps: ‘Gingers Of The World – Unite!
Full piece here. Even in more recent times, redheads were considered behavioural outliers – more temperamental and libidinous than ‘normal-haired’ people. A 19th-century survey ‘proved’ that 48% of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Repost-Stanley Fish At The NY Times Blog: ‘The Last Professors: The Corporate...
Full post here. If you’ve studied in a humanities department, you’ve probably noticed a divide between what you read and wrote there and the culture at large: movies, videos, music videos, songs,...
View Article
