Category Archives: Arts and Culture

Uncivilisation

Posted on by

The Dark Mountain Project recently published a paperback edition of their 2009 Manifesto.  You can order a copy here or read it on-line.  (I bought the paperback.)  In case you’re not inclined to follow the link, I’ll post sections over the coming days and weeks.   It starts with a poem:

Rearmament

 

These grand and fatal movements toward death: the grandeur of the mass
Makes pity a fool, the tearing pity
For the atoms of the mass, the persons, the victims, makes it seem monstrous
To admire the tragic beauty they build.
It is beautiful as a river flowing or a slowly gathering
Glacier on a high mountain rock-face,
Bound to plow down a forest, or as frost in November,
The gold and flaming death-dance for leaves,
Or a girl in the night of her spent maidenhood, bleeding and kissing.
I would burn my right hand in a slow fire
To change the future … I should do foolishly. The beauty of modern
Man is not in the persons but in the
Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the
Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.

Robinson Jeffers, 1935

 

The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved

Posted on by

The Derby was yesterday so I’m a little late with this but, in honor of Derby Day, driftglass posted an excerpt from Hunter S. Thompson’s 1970 article, The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved.   I miss Thompson.  He was as astute an observer and chronicler of American culture and politics as I can think of.  For all the controlled substances Thompson ingested, political writing doesn’t get more lucid than his Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972.

(If you’re not familiar with Ralph Steadman, Thompson’s artist companion at the Derby, his website is here.)

Franzen on choice

Posted on by

Yesterday I quoted a paragraph from Jonathan Franzen’s recent New Yorker article which resonated with me.  It’s a good paragraph but it’s simple and direct.  After praising Franzen for his nuanced writing it’s appropriate to provide an example.  One that comes to mind is something he wrote for Harper’s Magazine in 1992.   It was part of a collection of pieces for an article, “She’s come for an abortion.  What do you say?”  The lead-in to the article was

Few arguments in America inspire as much passion as the one about abortion. In the twenty years since Roe v. Wade, the debate has degenerated into the vocabulary of rage-shouted insults, angry chants, bloody pictures. Politics requires starkly drawn lines: we must be either pro-life or pro-choice; an abortion is either murder or an insignificant procedure.  But in our personal conversations about abortion, a more subtle dialogue is taking place-discussions of life and death, rights and responsibilities, hope and regret.  Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld most of Pennsylvania’s Abortion Control Act, including a provision that requires a woman seeking an abortion to listen to a doctor’s speech about the operation twenty-four hours before it can take place.  But what if this moment were used not for the exchange of dry, clinical information but to help us see the deeper truths buried beneath the partisan slogans?  With this in mind, the editors of Harper’s Magazine asked fourteen writers for the words they would speak to a woman who was a day away from her abortion.

Continue reading →

Misguided criticism of Franzen’s New Yorker article

Posted on by

In this week’s Weekly Digest I linked to a recent article by Jonathan Franzen in The New Yorker, “Carbon Capture:  Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation?”  He made a few statements that I’d challenge but, overall, it’s a very thoughtful and nuanced piece.  He speaks to the challenge that many of us feel in trying to make progress towards solving chronic problems while also dealing with acute ones.   He tells a good “think globally, act locally” story.   It’s a good read.  Unfortunately, over the past few days I’ve read some really out-to-lunch criticisms of the piece by people whose opinions I generally respect.  (Names omitted here to protect the guilty.)  I don’t know what to say about that beyond, “Read it for yourself.”

Continue reading →

Thought for the Day: 22 December 2014

Posted on by

Time to end the discussions of The New Republic as cultural phenomenon.  They were okay for a week or so after Foer and Wieseltier got sacked but enough already.   Quit the hand wringing.  Save your mental energy for debating the pieces which get published in it.   Better yet, save your mental energy for reading journals with superior content, e.g., Harper’s, The New Yorker, The American Prospect.

PS  Ta-Nehisi Coates’, The New Republic:  An Appreciation, should have been the end-all for TNR think pieces.

Susan Cooper, The Shortest Day

Posted on by

The Shortest Day

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us – listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!

– Susan Cooper