Nice Work

"He graduated with a first from University College London before entering national service for two years. 'After about three weeks of basic training… I was quite sure that I wanted to go back to the academic life,' he said."

Ella Creamer at The Guardian writes an obit for author David Lodge.

"Using Art to Explain Cultural History, Rather Than the Other Way Around"

"Wonderful art objects get demoted to the status of illustrations. Both exhibitions are a big jumble of things brought to bear on cultural history, a subject better handled through texts. That's what illustrations are for--as adjuncts to writing.
"And, yes, both shows tuck some contemporary works into their historical displays, downgrading them as well. The artists will survive, and who can blame them for taking the opportunity? But it's a waste."

Christopher Knight at the Los Angeles Times reviews exhibits at the Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

At The Reading Experience, Daniel Green offers a similar view regarding literature.

"Eternal Exposure Is the Price of Enlightenment"

"And then there's the ever-present question conveniently ignored by anti-free-speech academics: Who is on the committee that decides what new speech restrictions to impose and how to define them? Do we trust the same Republican state legislatures or local school boards that are already banning books and prohibiting the teaching of The 1619 Project and critical race theory? It's one thing to write law review articles and books urging new limitations on offensive and hateful speech. It's a far different matter to empower government authorities at federal, state, and local levels, with civil, criminal, and administrative enforcement powers, or college administrators (with or without faculty input) with the power to grant, deny, or revoke tenure, to decide what ideas can be spoken, written, or taught."

Stephen Rohde at the Los Angeles Review of Books reviews Robert Corn-Revere's The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder.

"A Matter of Substance, but Also Style"

"In less apocalyptic terms, French philosophical rationalism has also been charged with creating a nation of individualists, with a crippling fetish for skepticism, and for challenging authority in all its forms. This trait has been deemed to have negative consequences of both a practical and theoretical nature. In the latter case, it has fostered a tradition of theoretical extremism (most vividly reflected in the vibrant radical movements in France both on the right and the left). It has hindered the emergence of a gradualist epistemological tradition of acquiring knowledge through a process of accumulation. And in practical matters, this French individualism has encouraged a cult of singularity and a resistance to state power: President Charles de Gaulle (himself one of France's great individualists) gave voice to this concern when he once wondered whether it was possible to govern a country that produced 246 varieties of cheese."

In a 2015 Aeon article, Sudhir Hazareesingh considers "How the French Think."

"When Theory Killed Literary Truth, It Doomed the Discipline"

"Fifty years ago, a university couldn't call itself 'Tier One' unless it had a renowned English department. No more: Abysmal enrollment numbers in the humanities at such universities prove the irrelevance of literary study. My colleagues around the country bemoan the decline, but they blame the wrong things. English did not fall because a bunch of conservatives trashed the humanities as a den of political correctness. It didn't fall because it lost funding or because business leaders promoted STEM fields. It fell because the dominant schools of thought stopped speaking about the truth of literature. Once the professors could no longer insist, 'You absolutely must read Dryden, Pope, and Swift—they are the essence of wit and discernment'; when they lost the confidence to say that nothing reveals the social complexity of the colonial situation better than Nostromo; if they couldn't assure anyone that Hawthorne's sentences showed the American language in its most exquisite form, they lost the competition for majors. Students stopped caring about literature because the professors stopped believing in its promises of revelation and delight."

Mark Bauerlein at First Things criticizes the state of English Literature.

"It Is a Difficult Habit to Kick"

"The contradictions have frequently been noted: he was a socialist intellectual whose finest achievements included a mordant critique of the hypocrisy and double standards displayed by the socialist intellectuals of his day; a patriot who held most of his country's institutions in contempt; a passionate defender of historical truth who chose to write under an assumed name and who occasionally told lies; a self-styled champion of decency who backed causes that, had they prevailed, would have produced outcomes in which decency would have been difficult to discern; an atheist who decreed that his funeral should be conducted by the Church of England and that he should be buried in a rural parish churchyard. It is often the contradictions in an individual's character that give it distinction; in the case of Orwell, these were more marked and more numerous than in most, but it is not clear whether he was even aware of them. Yet it is these which explain why he is claimed by those on opposing sides—by socialists and libertarians, by conservatives as well as radicals, by patriots and internationally minded progressives. In a sense, he is up for grabs. All sorts of people can identify with him and claim him—or almost claim him—for their own and are keen, even desperate, to do so. The 'almost' is important: many of his admirers feel that if only he had fully grasped the implications of the part of his work of which they happen to approve there would be no doubt about the matter. Admirers, including this one, are eager to read the latest interpretation of his thought in the forlorn hope that this will confirm that he really would have been on their side."

Gerald Frost at The New Criterion discusses George Orwell in Spain.

Boats Against the Current

"The American Dream is, of course, another of Gatsby's Big Themes, and one that continues to be misunderstood. 'Fitzgerald shows that that dream is very powerful, but that it is indeed a very hard one for most Americans to realise. It feeds them great hopes, great desires, and it's extraordinary, the efforts that so many of them make to fulfil those dreams and those desires, but that dream is beyond the reach of many, and many, they give up all too much to try to achieve that great success,' Cain points out. Among the obstacles, Fitzgerald seems to suggest, are hard-and-fast class lines that no amount of money will enable Gatsby to cross. It's a view that resonates with a mood that Cain says he's been picking up on among his students--a certain 'melancholy' for the American Dream, the feeling fanned by racial and economic inequalities that the pandemic has only deepened."

Hephzibah Anderson at the BBC calls The Great Gatsby, the "world's most misunderstood novel."

High Priest of Crime Fiction

"Willeford's novels portray the weird and evil as no more of a spike on the EKG of everyday life than eating breakfast or reading a magazine. With very few exceptions, the violence in his fiction has little psychological impact on those who commit it. It doesn’t break them, because there is nothing in them to break. Taken as a whole, his bibliography reads like his attempt to dramatize a quote from Blaise Pascal, which Willeford used as an epigraph twice, in New Hope for the Dead and Grimhaven: 'Man's unhappiness stems from his inability to sit quietly in his room.'"

At The Bulwark, Bill Ryan discusses the career of writer Charles Willeford.

"He Transformed Science Fiction's Position in American Literature During the 1950s"

"If you look at a similar list today, all but three of the top films—Titanic and two Fast and Furious sequels—are science fiction or fantasy. That is 94 percent of the hits. That means in a 70-year period, American popular culture (and to a great degree world popular culture) went from 'realism' to fantasy and science fiction. The kids' stuff became everybody's stuff. How did that happen? There were many significant factors, but there is no doubt that Ray Bradbury was the most influential writer involved." 

At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Sam Weller and Dana Gioia discuss the centennial of Ray Bradbury.

"One of Those Writers Whose Influence Is So Great It Extends to People Who Have Never Read His Books"

"Rodden gives a good account of the rise and robustness of Orwell's reputation, while suggesting that the author's early death might have been timely for it. That is correct, I think. Had Orwell lived even a few more years he would have been drawn into public discussions of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four and their meaning. And had he equalled his friend Cyril Connolly's longevity and lived into the 1970s, he would have become embroiled in controversies like the Cold War, nuclear disarmament, feminism, decolonisation, Vietnam, immigration and, who knows, Northern Ireland. He would also have seen his Labour Party move, not closer to socialism, but further away from it. The way he reacted to all of this would have affected the way we think of him." 

At the Dublin Review of Books, Martin Tyrrell reviews John Rodden's Becoming George Orwell: Life and Letters, Legend and Legacy.

"We Are Already Paying the Price in Greater Risk Aversion"

"This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won't defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn't expect the public or the state to defend it for us."

Harper's Magazine runs a "A Letter on Justice and Open Debate" from a variety of writers.

Damon Linker at The Week warns against "taking control of the boundaries of debate, narrowing them to verify our tidy certainties, protecting our sacred texts, and punishing those who dare to profane them."

And Jesse Singal at Reason reacts to the reactions to the letter, as does Jeet Heer at The Nation, as does Nick Cohen at The Guardian, as does Scipio Sattler at Collide.

"The Lines Between Justice and Injustice Are Crisscrossed"

"'The Star-Spangled Banner' nevertheless shares its conceptual DNA with the United States as a whole. It is a product of a time when the stain of slavery was clear on the nation and part of US law. To understand the anthem and its legacy, we need to know more than just Key's words. We need to understand their author's feelings and actions about slavery."

Mark Clague in a 2016 CNN article defends "The Star-Spangled Banner."

"To Deploy Literature in the Service of Their Respective National Interests, and the Willingness of Writers to Be So Deployed"

"In this context, Mary McCarthy comes off more poorly than most of the other writers chronicled in this account. With customary cockiness, she claimed that novelists could make a special contribution to the broader effort of understanding the Vietnam War amid its conflicting imperatives and narratives: 'What we can do, perhaps better than the next man, is smell a rat.' Yet even as ­McCarthy questioned the accounts she was given by the U.S. and U.S.-supported government officials in Saigon, she credulously swallowed the self-­presentation of the North Vietnamese. In addition to suffering from poor sales of pamphlet versions of her writing about the situation in Vietnam, McCarthy was criticized by the likes of Diana Trilling, in the New York Review of Books, for committing the mortal sin of any serious and self-respecting intellectual: ordering one's capacities for genuinely liberal and open inquiry and analysis to the affirmation of static ideological purposes." 

Randy Boyagoda at First Things reviews Duncan White's Cold Warriors: The Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War.

"The Making of a Writer and Self-Styled Political Prophet"

"While poverty is what inspired Beck and his common-law wife, Betty, to transmute his dark memories into a book, 'Pimp was also meant to be a contribution to the black revolution. Instead, it catapulted the pimp into American popular culture's pantheon of celluloid heroes and outlaws.'"

In a 2015 New Yorker article, Robin D.G. Kelley reviews Justin Gifford's Street Poison: The Biography of Iceberg Slim.

"A Villain Unlike Any"

"Has the Joker become such a massive pop-culture presence that moviegoers will find themselves compelled by a Clown Prince without the crimes? He started out as a colorfully deranged, stone-cold killer. Now he gets the spotlight to himself. We can't wait to hear the punchline."

Sean T. Collins at Rolling Stone presents "the madcap history of the Caped Crusader's deadliest enemy."

"1984 Is Watching You"

"We are living with a new kind of regime that didn't exist in Orwell's time. It combines hard nationalism—the diversion of frustration and cynicism into xenophobia and hatred—with soft distraction and confusion: a blend of Orwell and Huxley, cruelty and entertainment. The state of mind that the Party enforces through terror in 1984, where truth becomes so unstable that it ceases to exist, we now induce in ourselves. Totalitarian propaganda unifies control over all information, until reality is what the Party says it is—the goal of Newspeak is to impoverish language so that politically incorrect thoughts are no longer possible. Today the problem is too much information from too many sources, with a resulting plague of fragmentation and division—not excessive authority but its disappearance, which leaves ordinary people to work out the facts for themselves, at the mercy of their own prejudices and delusions."

George Packer at The Atlantic reviews Dorian Lynskey's The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984.

"The Blueprint for Artistic Rebellion"

"Between external sources and his own research and phone and email interviews, Rae creates a complex, rich picture of Burroughs' life, focusing on his meetings with musicians and the way his techniques and ideas infiltrated them and changed the way they looked at the world as well as their own work. While doing this, Rae stays true to history and always presents Burroughs' duality; shaman and madman, writer and hermit, traveling man and depressed genius. The mixture came to embody rock and roll:"

Gabino Iglesias at NPR reviews Casey Rae's William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll.

"Who Could Have More Riches Than That?"

"Burnett was something of a hot ticket on the academic circuit. In 1931, he and his wife, Martha Foley, had founded Story magazine, which they still ran, and their acumen for spotting new talent had made their hundred-page monthly a must-read for the big New York publishers. In its first few years, Story had featured debut works by William Saroyan, Nelson Algren, Conrad Aiken, Kay Boyle, John Cheever, Wallace Stegner, and Carson McCullers—an eye-popping list that would soon include Norman Mailer, Jean Stafford, Richard Wright, Joseph Heller '50GSAS, Truman Capote, and Tennessee Williams.
"But little did Burnett know, in the spring of 1939, that the writer who would become Story's most fabled discovery was seated in the back row of room 505."

Paul Hond at Columbia Magazine tells the story of J. D. Salinger's first publisher.

Excelsior

"He earned his first credit for a Captain America story in 1941. When Kirby and editor Joe Simon left due to a dispute with Goodman, Lee, then a teenager, was named interim editor. As Lee told the story, 'Martin looked around and said, "Hey, do you think you could hold down this job until I can get an adult?"'"

Brian Lowry at Variety reports the death of Stan Lee.

"Poll Finds Americans Still Fiercely Divided Along Charlotte Brontë–Emily Brontë Lines"

"At press time, researchers confirmed that the least surprising result of the poll was that the majority of Maine's population strongly preferred Anne."

From The Onion.