Arts & Letters

While I can never hope to compete with the likes of Lex – who reads even while cooking – or Ginny, who can glean the subtlest moral from any tale and nimbly connect it to her own life’s experience; I did, for me, a lot of reading last year. Of all that I read two books stand out like flares amongst candles and I recommend them to you heartily.

No. 1: The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes.

I cannot, literally, praise this book highly enough. Published in 1986, it has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and if you read it, you’ll understand why.

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Michael Blowhard’s tribute to Antonioni’s The Passenger is interesting both because of his perceptions and the era he (and it) brings back. The first films we ordered from Netflix were Antonioni’s–I’d remembered loving them much as I loved the spaces in Pinter. We see them with a sort of ache: the music draws us in as does the minimalist plot through pauses. Little action, much space, much time – the very slowness mesmerizes. The world we enter through his eyes seems severed from the realistic, the humanist, the live. And so, across the screen, a heroine seldom strides but always seems to wander, moving around rather than toward. The hero ends up, somehow, in bed without pursuing. These solipsistic lives are punctuated by intense but, well, uncommunicative sex which only accentuates isolation. No wonder we so often felt, well, alienated. Watching them again this summer, we found they still embodied a remarkable aesthetic, a coherence I hadn’t recognized all those years ago.

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Butterflies & Wheels helps us advance our arguments with its “The Woolly-Thinker’s Guide to Rhetoric.” One useful ploy is Pave With Good Intentions: “Make it clear that you mean very well, that all the benevolence and right feeling and compassion and tolerance are on your side, and all [suspect motivations] on your opponent’s.” Bad Moves also is useful; for instance, Julian Baggin sums up Percipi est esse:

Some important truths are so simple that rock songs can not only express them, but do so with greater [clarity] than more sophisticated prose. Radiohead’s song ‘There There’, contains the line, ‘Just ‘cause you feel it, doesn’t mean it’s there.’ Since I can’t improve on this summary of the fallacy I want to describe, I’ve fallen back on an old trick: if you want to make your idea look cleverer than it is, use Latin. But, of course, just because if looks cleverer, it doesn’t mean it is.

(B&W can be interesting but the blog’s writing skills could be stronger.)

Emptiness within emptiness may be Pinter’s specialty, but now he has a Nobel Prize to keep him company.
Update:
Terry Teachout, in the WSJ (neither he nor they leftis), praises Pinter, while noting the reputation squandered in the last few years by the Nobel committee in his “Another Left Turn at Stockholm.”.

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Check out this great post by Helen Szamuely on the Anglosphere blog about Shakespeare’s history plays. “[T]he plays are more than anything a long meditation on the concept of England, Englishness and the English crown.” Of the plays she mentions, poor unlettered Lex has only seen the film versions of Henry V — Olivier and Branagh. Both great, but I guess I had better at least read the others she mentions.