Some years ago Stewart Brand, of The Whole Earth Catalog fame, wrote a fascinating book called How Buildings Learn, which was later made into a BBC series that, wonderfully enough, can now be seen on YouTube. My question is: If buildings can learn, why not books? And why not think of the rise of electronic publishing and reading as a stage in the education of books?
Alexander Woollcott’s 1939 portrait of [Alice in Wonderland] as a “gay tapestry” and of Dodgson as a “shy, retreating man who left so much bubbling laughter in his legacy to the world” is still pretty much the popular perception (witness the number of filmmakers who have come to grief pursuing it), but one rather at odds with the intellectual intensity of the Reverend’s magic kingdom. How many extracurricular smiles can there be for a child, after all, in a tale whose heroine must reason and argue as hard and as fast as she can for her very survival? Alice laughs but three times. On each occasion her fancy has been caught by some minor absurdity — the antics of a footman, the flamingo she must use at croquet, and the news that the Duchess has boxed the Queen’s ears. Against these weigh her unending puzzlement and the frequency with which, like a startled eye, this puzzlement dilates into apprehension, dismay, even terror. Add to these moments the four occasions she is provoked to actual tears and the seventeen to defensive fits of temper. A common epithet in the book is the word “poor” — “Poor Alice!,” “Poor little thing!” If Wonderland is the recess bell in the history of children’s literature, to what strange playground have we been excused?
There will be disagreement about which is [Frank] Kermode’s best book. His most Kermodian is The Classic, first delivered as the Eliot lectures at Kent in 1975. Kermode’s starting point is, dutifully enough, TS Eliot’s lecture entitled “What Is a Classic?” given as an address to the Virgil Society in 1944. While accepting Eliot’s main contention that a classic is the mature cultural product of a mature civilisation, Kermode adds a typically complicating spin. If Shakespeare (to take the least disputable example) is a classic, why does every age interpret Shakespeare differently? Is Dr Johnson’s interpretation less right than Coleridge’s, or Coleridge’s than William Empson’s, or Empson’s than Stephen Greenblatt’s? If one interpretation is more right than the others, why do we still equally revere all those Shakespearians? Put another way, why – with the passage of centuries – don’t we get cleverer at making sense of our classic texts?In a brilliant critical move Kermode argues that it is the very pliability of the classic, its unfixed quality, that is its essence. It “accommodates” – makes itself at home – wherever and whenever it finds itself. It is the classic’s ability to be both antique, yet modern, its infinite – but never anarchic – plurality that categorises it as classic. A work such as King Lear, Kermode argues, “subsists in change, by being patient of interpretation”. The word is beautifully chosen. Every generation will read, or understand, King Lear differently insofar as every generation is different from its predecessors. No final version, or interpretation, of the play can be achieved. But every generation will find its own satisfactory interpretation. And the classic is tolerant of each and every different explanation of itself.
I remember telling myself little fantasies as a child and a young man, that my home, peaceful and harmonious if strapped, was probably better than the bickering and arguing and probable divorce that came with having two parents around. As if the only alternative to homes like mine are ones filled with resentment, yelling, and domestic abuse.Writing checks, delivering take-out dinners, and trying to fit in 20 minutes of quality time with my empty-nester mom shook those fantasies out of me. We told ourselves all sorts of things while I was growing up. But my mother would have been happier, healthier, and more secure with a man to love, and with one who loved her. She would have had more of that if she had more children too.
So do I wish there were more social stigma, the “retrograde and ugly moral judgements” that surround decisions about sex and family? Absolutely. And yes, it would have cost her something if she indeed fell on the wrong side of those taboos. And it would cost me something to be a “bastard” if that word could still wound. People are nasty about social taboos, and I don’t sanction that. But my mother faced plenty of indiginities without those moral judgements. If we got do overs, I’d be willing to risk it.
From my perspective the sexual revolution liberated men to abandon the mothers of their children, defining fatherhood down to an alimony payment and maybe state-defined visitation. Women like my mother were expected to raise families entirely on their own emotional and financial resources, however meager. The answers given to the problems that this social revolution caused tend to be curt and unhelpful: contracept better. Or as my mother was ominously told by some upon my conception, “Just take care of it.” Those seem like the “retrograde and ugly” moral sentiments to me.
Just because I turned out fine doesn’t mean that everything is fine.
Joe Paterno’s family on Monday vowed their own investigation of the Jerry Sandusky scandal, rejecting the findings of a special investigator who concluded the late football coach and other top Penn State administrators concealed Sandusky’s sexual abuse of children in order to shield the school from bad publicity.“Our interest has been and remains the uncovering of the truth,” the family said in a statement.
Over the course of his 29-bout professional career, Amir Khan has vacillated wildly between clairvoyance and a thudding, dull-headed myopia. He has stood in, ably and eloquently, as the great hope for millions of Muslims, both in England and around the world. He has acted priggish and entitled and has been involved in every sort of motor vehicle trouble, including a 2006 accident that shattered the leg of a pedestrian who would later drink himself to death. His fighting style — aggressive, fast-as-all-hell, but ultimately light-fisted — is strangely reminiscent of a lesser Thomas Pynchon novel, in which the prose sparkles and the plot tunnels itself into unexpected, thrilling spaces, but the characters and the heart of the story never quite make it off the page.
More than 50 percent of the United States is under drought conditions right now, putting 2012 in the same category with some of the worst droughts in the nation’s history. The 54.6 percent figure (not counting Alaska and Hawaii) makes this year’s drought the sixth worst on record in terms of area covered, behind only the brutal droughts of the mid-1950s and the “Dust Bowl” era of the 1930s. Other more recent droughts — such as 2000, 2002, and 1998 — saw a greater percentage of the country suffering from the “severe” or “extreme” drought categories. However, even by that standard, June 2012 still ranks among the top 10 worst droughts of all-time.
The “upper class,” as defined by the study, were more likely to break the law while driving, take candy from children, lie in negotiation, cheat to raise their odds of winning a prize and endorse unethical behavior at work, the research found. The solution, Piff said, is to find a way to increase empathy among wealthier people.“It’s not that the rich are innately bad, but as you rise in the ranks — whether as a person or a nonhuman primate — you become more self-focused,” Piff said. “You can change that by reminding upper-class people of the needs of others. That may not be their default, but have them do it is sufficient to increase their patterns of altruistic behavior.”
That theory will be the basis of his next study. Piff is curious to know how to change patterns of greed and selfishness when they emerge.
But the city has, to its credit, lavished money on parks in all boroughs, not just Manhattan and Brooklyn. One of its most ambitious projects is the conversion of Fresh Kills Landfill, on Staten Island, into Freshkills Park, which will be almost three times the size of Central Park.The New York story is a national one. In the center of Oklahoma City, a revitalized park complex, Myriad Botanical Gardens, recently took root. In downtown Houston, there’s Discovery Green. Dallas is building a park on a deck over a downtown freeway, and Los Angeles is looking at how to gussy and green up an old concrete river bed.
“We’re living in an era of re-urbanization,” said Catherine Nagel, executive director of the City Parks Alliance, which is sponsoring the conference in New York. And the increased population density means that “we need green space,” she said. Amazingly, we’re getting it: because citizens have demanded as much; because governments have made it a priority; because public and private partnerships have been cultivated. New York is the bright flower of all that.