Movie Notes: “High Rise” (2016)
About a recent film adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel concerning a far-fetched dystopian future in which the rich and poor isolate themselves from one another by pervasive violence.
Author: Rufus F.
Notes on “Eating Animals”
On the book “Eating Animals” by Jonathan Safran Foer and the act of eating animals.
Madame Bovary and Me (and you too)
As Gustave Flaubert realized in Egypt, the dream of social engineering will never come true as long as human beings are yearning and irresponsible creatures.
French Hovels, Slave Cabins, and the limits of Thomas Jefferson’s Eyes
Jefferson’s powerful eyes constantly dissected and analyzed: especially for scientific reasons, Jefferson spied on people’s lives. He always wanted to see, and to see firsthand. During his famous tour of southern France and northern Italy in the spring of 1787, he saw examples of misery and wretchedness—especially where lower classes were concerned. He had entered the shacks of French peasants incognito. To peep into people’s dwellings was for Jefferson the best method to assess their identity and evaluate their circumstances. “You must ferret the people out of their hovels as I have done,” Jefferson wrote to his friend Lafayette, “look into their kettles, eat their bread, loll on their beds under pretence of resting yourself, but in fact to find if they are soft.”
Most likely, this Jeffersonian method of spying did more than just provide reliable sociological data: it enhanced his empathy. Reading this letter to Lafayette, the reader gets the impression that Jefferson drew himself closer to these hapless human beings, pitying them and caring for their conditions, seeing them for who they actually were. But in other ways, Jefferson’s eyes were blind: did he ever actually see his slaves’ cabins? Did he ever ferret slaves out of their shackles to observe and meditate about their condition?
Book Review: Discourses of Mourning in Dante, Petrarch, and Proust (2016)
A scholarly look at how literature can help us to understand the hard work of being human.
Don’t Blame Me!
Really, nobody is to blame for the unsustainable adjunct situation in academia. And so, nobody can fix it.
Commentary: Our Miserable 21st Century
The abstraction of “inequality” doesn’t matter a lot to ordinary Americans. The reality of economic insecurity does.
Book Review: Dystopia: a Natural History (Oxford, 2017)
A new book from Oxford University Press takes a lively and engaging look at that bleakest of topics.
Book notes: Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
Two scholars do a service for intellectual history in arguing how a distinguished thinker could have been so misguided.
Book Review: “A Matter of Honor” (Harper, 2016)
A book coming out next month turns the days leading up to Pearl Harbor into a nail-biter and exonerates the admiral who was made a scapegoat for the attacks.
No Sleep Till (We’re) Brooklyn
Rufus writes perhaps too many words on gentrification after finding himself living in “the Brooklyn of Canada”.
Narrative Tension
How we write stories mirrors the strange and uncanny ways we make sense of our lives.
The Coming Conservative Dark Age – Commentary
Buckley changed things when he founded National Review in 1955. He introduced the philosophers to the populists. He published the traditionalists, the libertarians, the Cold Warriors in the same pages. Not only did he aspire to fuse free markets with traditional values, he wanted to be taken seriously by the New York media and cultural elite. Dismissed in embarrassing fashion by Dwight Macdonald in the pages of COMMENTARY in 1956, National Review was unquestionably the tribune of an engaged, informed, and rising American conservatism by the time Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California a decade later.
Why the transformation? Part of the reason is that Buckley and his editors spent an enormous amount of time and energy during the early years of the magazine disassociating their conservatism from its atavistic and gnostic forebears. National Review is a great example of media gatekeeping theory: By exiling anti-Semites, Birchers, and anti-American reactionaries from its pages, the magazine and its editor determined which conservative arguments were legitimate and which were not. By denying a platform to quacks and haters, they broadened their potential audience.
And Buckley did more than exorcise demons. He welcomed converts. When a group of anti-Communist liberals began to drift from the Democratic Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Buckley and company lowered the drawbridge and welcomed the neoconservatives to the castle. “Come on in,” National Review editorialized, “the water’s fine.” The editors of the American Mercury never would have published writers with the surnames Podhoretz and Kristol. The editors of National Review did. The result was a conservatism infused with empiricism, with the densely reasoned argumentative style of the New York intellectuals. The Reagan administration would reap the benefits.
Respect Whose Authority?
Power, in the absence, of authority, can inspire some obedience, but no respect.
How Much for Oral Sex?
How does the unregulated “free market” determine the wages paid to prostitutes?
Book Notes: “Violence Girl” by Alice Bag
The memoir of an East L.A. barrio girl turned punk rock legend.
