Apropos the banner above, which everyone should visit and support, immediately, I am not sure that art is not terrorism after all. At least, it isn’t so clear if you adopt the language games of the Bush or Howard governments. Alexander Downer, when talking about Iraq, for instance, classes the insurgents as either Saddam loyalists [...]
Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road is a novel everyone should read. I’ve known nothing about Yates, really, apart from that work (I skipped Richard Ford’s introduction to the recently published Vintage edition I read)—but a biography has just been published, and it sounds good, judging by the review James Wood gives it over at the Guardian.
[...]There’s a nice review by Clive James in The Atlantic of the new translation of Madame Bovary—James is particularly harsh on the way in which the new translation renders, in places, Flaubert’s French as contemporary Americanized slang. I noticed exactly the same tendency in the Beth Archer Brombert translation of Svevo’s novel Emilio’s [...]
Mapping nicely onto my earlier post concerning esteem-based education is a review by Noel Malcolm of Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? by Frank Furedi, over at The Telegraph. Here’s a quote:
Last year an official report on public libraries declared that “New libraries should include cafes and chill-out zones where young people can watch [...]
So the Ig Nobel prizes have just been awarded, including one for a paper which argues that places with a lot of country music on the radio also have higher suicide rates. See Steven Stack and Jim Gundlach, “The effect of country music on suicide”, in Social Forces, Vol. 71, No. 1, September 1992, [...]
Ever wonder who the hell it is who votes for George Bush (neo-cons and evangelicals aside)? How about an American public raised on primary school textbooks produced by a near-monopoly of major publishers, held in thrall by the twin constraints of statewide curriculum standardisation and the pressure of lobby groups touting interests ranging from [...]