About Me

My photo
New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
Admire John McPhee, Bill Bryson, David Remnick, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr and James Martin (and most open and curious minds)

29.2.16

ART


THEODORE DALRYMPLE
Beauty and Ugliness
On the deformation of art
Winter 2016
BY KIND PERMISSION OF THE TRUSTEES OF THE WALLACE COLLECTION, LONDON/ART RESOURCE, NY
For eighteenth-century painter Joshua Reynolds (whose Miss Jane Bowles is depicted, above), the celebration—and creation—of beauty was the purpose of art; today, artists fear and reject beauty.
London is among the best cities in the world for art exhibitions, and whenever I go there, which is rarely, I try to see as many as time and energy will permit. Recently, for example, I saw two in a single day, the contrast between which seemed to cast a light on the soul of modern humanity, or at least of that part of it that concerns itself with art and aesthetics.
The first, in the Wallace Collection, was called Sir Joshua Reynolds: Experiments in Paint; the second, across the city, was called Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden. Reynolds, the most famous British artist of his day, was born in 1723 and died in 1792; Dumas was born in South Africa in 1953 and has worked in the Netherlands since 1976.
The Wallace Collection was once my favorite London gallery. My father had his office, where I worked during my school holidays, around the corner from it; I spent many a lunch hour in the collection, the run of which I often had almost to myself in those days. The courtyard had not yet been made into a restaurant, a transformation that altered the atmosphere of the collection profoundly. Nowadays, it seems almost like a restaurant with Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Velázquez attached.
It was in the Wallace Collection that I first tried (without success, which eludes me to this day) to work out why some art was better than other art, why some pictures moved me while others did not. The picture to which I always returned, and that I never miss a chance to view even today, was Woman Peeling Apples, by the Dutch painter Pieter de Hooch. This small painting of a Dutch interior shows a seated woman peeling apples for her small daughter, who stands by her. The daughter is not beautiful—indeed, one could describe her as almost plain—yet the picture never failed to move me, however many times and for however long I looked at it.
Why was this the case? Was it the obvious technical mastery, the pleasing composition (the main figures to the right of center of the picture), the exquisite taste of the coloration, the evident love of the mother for her child, the sense of quietude and contentment conveyed, the celebration of the glory of existence in itself that the choice of so ordinary a subject implies? Was the intensity of my response affected by my personal biography, by the lack of tenderness in my own early life?
I came to the conclusion that while no definitive criteria could be given to distinguish good art from bad (and every gradation in between), neither was it impossible to say something about the basis—or rather, the bases—of artistic judgment.
The Reynolds exhibition was small, designed (among other things) to show the artist almost as a scientific experimenter with the materials with which he painted. His experiments were by no means always successful: his paintings were known sometimes—but fortunately, not always—to fade before they left his studio.
Reynolds worked principally in portraiture, a division of the art of painting that he regarded as inferior to others. Doctor Johnson said of Reynolds that so equable was his temper that he was the most invulnerable man he knew because it was impossible to find anything with which to reproach him. Yet Reynolds was suspected of being an opportunist toady, a flatterer of the rich, famous, and powerful, whom, by and large, he painted—in the process becoming rich, famous, and powerful himself. Though Reynolds was undoubtedly both keen on money and disagreeably penny-pinching toward relatives and assistants, no man who became a close friend of Doctor Johnson, Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, and Edward Gibbon could have been a nonentity with merely a talent for flattery. Boswell tells the story of how Johnson and Reynolds became friends:
When Johnson lived in Castle Street . . . he used frequently to visit two ladies who lived opposite him, Miss Cotterells, daughters of Admiral Cotterell. Reynolds used also to visit there, and thus they met. . . . Sir Joshua, indeed, was lucky enough at their very first meeting to make a remark which was so much above the commonplace style of conversation, that Johnson at once perceived that Reynolds had the habit of thinking for himself. The ladies were regretting the death of a friend to whom they owed great obligations; upon which Reynolds observed, “You have, however, the comfort of being relieved from a burden of gratitude.” They were shocked a little at this alleviating suggestion . . . but Johnson defended it in his clear and forcible manner and was much pleased with the mind, the clear view of human nature, which it exhibited.
Johnson and Reynolds were close friends ever after, and Boswell dedicated his great Life to the painter. Reynolds’s “clear view of human nature” is evident in his best portraits, which penetrate the character of his sitters, while also remaining surface likenesses. The fact that he painted several people serially suggests that he was more than just a society portraitist (though he was that as well). The several portraits of Doctor Johnson, for example, do not make out that the great writer was a handsome or an elegant man and do not in the slightest seek to lessen his peculiarities—but the force of his character, the intensity of his thought, and the profundity of his religious and emotional struggles are conveyed with extraordinary clarity. Though Reynolds’s veneration of Johnson could not have been greater (it was, unusually for a relationship of veneration, entirely mutual), Reynolds did not think of Johnson as a saint; far from it. In the character sketch that Reynolds provided for Boswell when he was writing Life, the painter said:
The drawback to his character is entertaining prejudices on very slight foundation, giving an opinion perhaps first at random, but from its being contradicted he thinks himself always obliged stubbornly to support. . . . He thought it necessary never to be worsted in argument, though this disposition he spoke of as very weak; “as if,” says he, “the character depended on one evening.” He thus seemed to be schooling himself, but he never learned the thing.
Reynolds continued: “You will wonder to hear a person who loved him so sincerely speak thus freely of his friend, but you must recollect I am not writing his panegyric, but as if on oath not only to give the truth but the whole truth.” Here, then, was a man who could revere without blindness, who understood that even the greatest were not without flaws, but that the flaws did not obviate the greatness. There was no moral obligation to dwell on the worst. Reynolds was no mere flatterer; when an aristocrat condescendingly asked him how long it took him to paint a portrait, he replied, “All my life, my Lord.”
The best paintings in the small exhibition were of women and children. We know that when Reynolds painted beauty, he knew that he was not painting perfection but that imperfection did not render beauty inexistent. He thus felt free to portray beauty without feeling that he was thereby betraying reality or avoiding the unpleasant in a cowardly fashion.
Three of the women in the exhibition, all of whom Reynolds personally befriended (rumors circulated that he might have been the lover of two), were either courtesans or of morally dubious pasts. The actress Mrs. Abington, for example, portrayed by Reynolds in her role as Prue, the sexually inquiring country girl in Congreve’s play Love for Love, grew up in a slum and was widely thought to have been a prostitute before becoming the greatest comic actress of her day. She sits astride a Chippendale chair in an elegant pink silk gown with lace frills, staring straight ahead with her left hand raised to her mouth, her thumb resting on her lower lip. In Reynolds’s portrait, she is deeply alluring without vulgarity, a woman of outstanding beauty and also of intelligence and an inner core of goodness. We love her as Reynolds obviously loved her. He painted her at least three other times, suggesting a more than merely commercial commitment: each time differently but, on every occasion, to show her at her considerable best.
So it is with Kitty Fisher and Nelly O’Brien, two famous courtesans. There were two portraits of O’Brien in the exhibition: one formal, in which she is fully dressed; and the other showing her relatively dishabille. She is not only beautiful but also charming, refined, and intelligent; the fact that she is a courtesan and that, in the abstract, we do not approve of the métier fades into insignificance compared with her beauty—both outward and inward. The depiction of that beauty is unapologetic and, in a sense, unself-conscious: for the celebration and creation of beauty, including moral beauty, was self-evidently the task of art in Reynolds’s worldview, which was clearly a tolerant one.
Crossing London to see the exhibition of Marlene Dumas’s work was like traveling to another continent. Her art is figurative and, if I had to put a label on it, expressionist. She unquestionably is an artist of great talent and, interestingly, of academic training. One of the few advantages of South African backwardness in the early 1970s was that its art schools (she attended Cape Town University’s) had not yet abandoned formal instruction in technical artistic skills. This stood Dumas in good stead when she began to strike out on her own and convey her view of the world in her work.
It is an extraordinary view, its impact all the greater when you have just come from immersing yourself in Reynolds’s. There can be no doubt about Dumas’s power to disturb, brilliantly displayed in the Tate’s large spaces. That her work should disturb can hardly have been far from the artist’s mind and intention. Each and every room in the exhibition induced a state, at least in me, of anxiety—an anxiety not related to any particular aspect of existence but relating to existence as such.
Dumas’s subject is humans, hundreds of them, painted, as she herself says, from photographs, in the process transforming them into what she thinks they really are—apparently, pre-corpses. In some of her pictures, it is not certain whether the figures are alive or dead, and certainly they are never straightforwardly beautiful, à la Reynolds’s. Their blemishes, their defects, their deformities, and their expressions of despair or terror are constitutive, or what they are truly. The pictures show no laughter or unequivocal pleasure; the world is terrible, and ugliness is the new beauty.
It is instructive to compare Reynolds’s and Dumas’s view of children and childhood. Reynolds loved painting children, and the Wallace Collection exhibition includes his Miss Jane Bowles—a picture of a pretty little girl, sitting on the ground in the country, clutching her black-and-white dog to her, both of them facing the viewer. Miss Bowles is wide-eyed, depicted with just a hint of a smile on her otherwise serious face; the love and trust between the child and dog are evident.
To get Miss Bowles to sit for him, Reynolds invited her and her father, who had commissioned the picture, to come to dinner the night before. Reynolds charmed and delighted Miss Bowles by performing little tricks, such as removing her plate from the table and returning it without letting her see how he had done it. She was so delighted that the next day, when she was to sit for her picture, she was eager to do so. It is difficult not to believe from this anecdote that Reynolds was as delighted with Miss Bowles as she was with him; his painting exudes a tenderness that is not cloying because it is real and unaffected. It avoids sentimentality because it represents not the whole of reality but of an undoubted aspect of reality—which delights us unless we are wholly soured by life, for children really do have soft skin, bright eyes, a trusting manner, and pleasure in life—but also because the sensitive viewer is only too aware that what is depicted is but fleeting, that Miss Bowles will grow up and face many sorrows, that the dog will age and cease to be so important to her, and that she will never again be so charmingly innocent: “Ay, in the very temple of delight/Veil’d melancholy has her sovereign shrine.” Our delight is thus tempered by an awareness that, like all delight, hers must decay.
By contrast, Marlene Dumas’s children are not sweet or innocent, but knowing and scheming. They look as if they are pre-murderers, at best; she sheds upon them a cold, unsparing light, that of the extreme Calvinist preacher who demands a never-to-be-forgotten awareness of original sin, precluding the most momentary innocence. As her other paintings make clear, all pleasure is illicit, either sadistic or masochistic in nature, and only leads to trouble—to the mortuary table, in the end.
The picture that adorns the cover of the Dumas exhibition catalog is titled The Painter. It is of a naked girl, a little older than Miss Bowles, who stands up straight, facing the viewer. Her expression is of a defiant scowl, almost menacing. Her dark, deep-set, intense but indistinct eyes seem to express hatred, not of a particular object but of the world itself (inclusive of the viewer). Most of her torso is covered in light blue paint; far more disturbing, her hands, which hang by her side, are covered in paint: the right hand the color of dark, venous blood and the left hand the color of bright, arterial blood. One gets the impression that she has just come from the postmortem room or has perhaps murdered her mother. One is never too young to be a psychopath.
It is an extremely disturbing image, painted with talent. You are not likely to pass it by or to forget it. When I showed it to friends, not artistically inclined and unfamiliar with the notion of transgression as the highest good, they shuddered and said that it was sick and that it displayed a diseased imagination. Some will retort that outraged bourgeois have often reacted in this way to new art that subsequent generations took in stride and perhaps considered great. But it does not follow from the fact that a great work once caused outrage that a work that causes outrage is great. For myself, I have no difficulty in both admiring and disliking Dumas’s art.
What most interests me is the change in sensibility between Reynolds and Dumas: a change that I recognize even in myself, in that I think that any modern attempt to reproduce Reynolds-like tenderness toward childhood would end up as kitsch, to which the harshness of Dumas (manifest even in her pictures of her daughter) would be artistically preferable.
This profound change in sensibility cannot be a reflection only of a change in the world. It is true that the dress of the eighteenth century, at least of the upper classes, was vastly more elegant and gorgeous (but also more uncomfortable) than anything we wear now; the interiors of houses—again, of the upper classes—were of an elegance now vanished unless specifically preserved; and towns were infinitely more graceful than they are now. But up close, they would have appalled us: the smell, dirt, and destitution would have been greater than anything of which we had the remotest experience. In the London in which Reynolds spent most of his career, 50 percent of children died before the age of five.
So it is not that the world has become “objectively” worse in the interval between Reynolds and Dumas. In many respects, precisely the reverse is true, though many terrible things were done in that interval. Childhood is not less childhood than it was; children are not physically the uglier. Nor is it that we have become more intellectually sophisticated in the meantime, such that we have a better understanding of what human life is about and how it should be lived, or of the true wellsprings of human action. Reynolds painted for a society in which rising men aspired to join the ranks of the aristocracy, whose tastes they imitated wherever possible; but Dumas paints for a clientele just as restricted, economically and culturally.
As it happens, both Reynolds and Dumas are writers as well as painters, and the difference between their literary styles is as great as that between their respective painterly sensibilities. Reynolds’s most famous work is his Discourses on Art, a series of lectures delivered to the students of the Royal Academy of Arts, of which he was the founding president. In these lectures, Reynolds attempts to lay down the rules of art, unsuccessfully and often with self-contradiction, in my view, because the task was impossible and also because he often shows errors of judgment. Nevertheless, he expresses himself with elegance and has many still-valuable things to say (which, perhaps, is why the Discourses lectures remain in print, two centuries after they first appeared). Indeed, some of his remarks have become more pertinent with the passage of time and the deterioration of our art schools. Reynolds says, in the Sixth Discourse: “Those who have undertaken to write about our art, and have represented it as a kind of inspiration, as a giftbestowed upon peculiar favourites at their birth, seem to insure a much more favourable disposition from their readers, and have a much more captivating and liberal air, than he who attempts to examine, coldly, whether there are any means by which this art may be acquired.”
Reynolds adds: “Invention is one of the great marks of genius; but if we consult experience, we shall find, that it is by being conversant with the invention of others, that we learn to invent.” Finally, he observes: “The greatest natural genius cannot subsist on its own stock: he who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own, will soon be reduced, from mere barrenness, to the poorest of all imitations; he will be obliged to imitate himself, and to repeat what has often been repeated.”
In modern art schools, it is as if they have taken the Sixth Discourse as a blueprint of what not to do or to teach, so that students come to believe that art, like sex, began in 1963 (at the earliest). Marlene Dumas was indeed fortunate that, having attended art school in Cape Town, she was saved from the kind of provincialism now rampant in London, Paris, and New York. Her writing, collected in a volume titled Sweet Nothings (a title intended, one suspects, to ward off serious criticism), has an apodictic, take-it-or-leave-it quality: “Art is a low-risk, high-reward crime.” Or: “Now that we know that images can mean whatever, whoever wants them to mean, we don’t trust anybody anymore, especially ourselves.” This is a world without enchantment. The following words are revealing:
My generation cherishes loneliness
prizing it even above sex.
They are so sensitive,
they are allergic to each other.
One cannot help but suspect that there is bad faith in all this, that this is not so much how people feel as how they feel they ought to feel in order not to appear naïve. Dumas quotes a man called Kellendonk (I assume the Dutch writer of that name, who died in 1990): “Kellendonk makes a distinction between aesthetic emotion and ordinary every-day emotions. He said he could cope with seeing blood in every-day life but not on film or television.” I find this obviously insincere and exhibitionistic: the kind of self-promoting flatulence that Reynolds, no stranger to personal ambition, would have disdained as dishonest.
While some would no doubt accuse Reynolds of having avoided the less refined aspects of his society (a charge that could be levied against hundreds or thousands of artists), Dumas is guilty of a much greater evasion, caused by a fear of beauty. In a perceptive note in the catalog of her exhibition, by the critic Wendy Simon, we learn of this fear. Simon draws attention to “the extreme ambivalence we now feel towards beauty both within and outside art,” and continues: “We distrust it; we fear its power; we associate it with compulsion and uncontrollable desire of a sexual fetish. Embarrassed by our yearning for beauty, we demean it as something tawdry, self-indulgent, or sentimental.”
All that is necessary for ugliness to prosper is for artists to reject beauty.
Lenin abjured music, to which he was sensitive, because it made him feel well-disposed to the people around him, and he thought it would be necessary to kill so many of them. Theodor Adorno said that there could be no more poetry after Auschwitz. Our view of the world has become so politicized that we think that the unembarrassed celebration of beauty is a sign of insensibility to suffering and that exclusively to focus on the world’s deformations, its horrors, is in itself a sign of compassion. Reynolds was not tortured by such considerations.

Engines

Dane Stangler
Whither Capitalism?
Freedom and prosperity in the age of Trump and Sanders
26 February 2016
Capitalism: A Short History, by Jürgen Kocka, translated by Jeremiah Riemer (Princeton University Press 208 pp., $29.95)
Among pundits, the enthusiasm generated by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders can be explained by a breakdown of capitalism. Trump’s supporters—especially working-class voters—are motivated by anger at the economic harm they have suffered. Sanders is an avowed socialist and, according to the Wall Street Journal’s William Galston, his younger supporters “have no experience of a successful capitalist system and no memory of communism’s failure.” Meanwhile, Senator Ted Cruz and others have accused Trump of being a “crony capitalist.”
Given the severity of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, it may not be too surprising if the 2016 election turns out to be a debate on capitalism. Phenomena such as income inequality and the thinning out of middle-income jobs have caused many Americans to wonder just what kind of capitalism they want to have. Over the past few years, several publications have run series on “capitalism in crisis.” And, the debate isn’t confined to the United States. Debt crises and depression in Europe have renewed hostility toward capitalism, and recent economic troubles in China have led to questions about the future of capitalism there.
Debates about capitalism are nothing new—the word itself originated, according to German historian Jürgen Kocka, as a “politically tendentious term” in the nineteenth century. The concept of “capitalism” emerged in response to industrialization as both a tool of criticism and of scholarly analysis. Yet as Kocka demonstrates in his new book, Capitalism: A Short History, capitalism developed well before the 1800s. In a pithy synthesis of historical scholarship, he homes in on the three essential elements of capitalism: decentralization (as exemplified by individual property rights); commodification (which allows the market to allocate and coordinate resources); and accumulation (credit and investment for the future).
Using these “capitalist principles,” Kocka charts the course of capitalism’s development over many centuries. He begins with the rise of merchant capitalism—based on trade—in China and the Middle East. During the Sung dynasty (960-1279 A.D.), China experienced some measure of capitalist dynamism, and the spread of Islam helped strengthen trade routes. In both cases, there were strict political constraints on commercial activity. Strikingly, in contrast to the anti-commercial doctrine of the Catholic Church, hostility was not evident among Arab writers. Kocka quotes fourteenth-century Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun’s approving descriptions of commerce, profit-making, and the accumulation of capital.
Early capitalism really developed and expanded in Europe. In part, this was due to political fragmentation—political and economic competition worked together in Europe in a way they couldn’t in the more centralized states of China and Arabia. In northern Italy and Germany, a series of innovations in law, finance, and trade created “islands of capitalism” across the continent. Widespread suspicion of capitalist activity still persisted in many places, to be sure, but by the eighteenth century, capitalism was fully developed in England and the Netherlands.
This laid the groundwork for industrialization after 1800, which brought forth a “fundamental improvement of living conditions” and new types of capitalism. Kocka describes managerial—or organized—capitalism, as well as financial—or investor—capitalism, and looks at how they developed in the United States, Europe, and Japan. He is not a fan of the financialization of capitalism, in which investors and capital markets play an influential role in the management of companies, and he attributes rising indebtedness (both public and private) to this process. His most compelling analysis is of the commodification of work and the development of “wage labor.” Industrialization created new notions of jobs, working conditions, and the structure of work. Despite persistent complaints about the plight of workers in a system of wage labor, Kocka points out that, relative to all other historical forms of work, wage labor is the freest. “Only in capitalism,” he writes, “could autonomous labor movements become strong.” Bernie Sanders and his followers should consider that juxtaposition.
In capitalism, “change, growth, and progress are inscribed.” It has proved a superior system for freedom and prosperity because of its adaptability—capitalism looks different from place to place. Despite what some believe, the power of the state has been “indispensable” for capitalism’s survival and expansion. Yet Kocka concludes with a provocative question: How does global capitalism develop and adapt when it is outside the political boundaries of nation-states? So far, there is no good answer.
Kocka writes briskly and, as befits a “short history,” rarely dwells on a topic for long. His conclusions are balanced, and he treats capitalism’s challenges in a straightforward way, while also defending its record in generating prosperity. Kocka mixes broad discussion with fun facts. I didn’t know, for example, that Buddhist cloisters in medieval China “operated as centers of capital formation.” Perhaps inevitably in a translated work, some minor editing errors and clunky sentences creep in. Some key contributors to scholarship on capitalism are apparently left out, such as Albert Hirschman, Deirdre McCloskey, and William Baumol. A discussion of contemporary China should probably have warranted more than two pages; Kocka seems rather bearish on the future of capitalism in China, and mostly focuses on the negative role of the Communist state. But China boasts one of the highest levels of entrepreneurial dynamism in the world, and the next phase of what Kocka calls capitalism’s “immense mutability” will likely be played out there.
It’s doubtful that any candidate will take time out from the campaign to read this short book. For the sake of prosperity and freedom, and the future of capitalism, however, let’s hope their supporters can spare the time.

Baseball

Baseball Will Save Us
We need the national game—and it still is that—more than ever.
February 26, 2016
PHOTO BY ROB TRINGALI/GETTY IMAGES
According to RealClearPolitics, 63 percent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. In New York City, people are getting slashed in the face by strangers. In Los Angeles this weekend, activists will protest the racial makeup of the nominees at the Academy Awards. Across the country, friendships are being ruined by poisonous debates over transgender bathrooms, the Flint water crisis, the Supreme Court nominee, and the latest explosive pronouncements of a slightly orange businessman from New York. Both hemispheres of our political brain are inflamed by the unhinged passions of the presidential race.
What could save us from our slow-motion nervous breakdown? Why, baseball of course. Whether it’s an election year, a leap year, or the year the American experiment with democracy finally crashes, spring training always arrives right on time.
Some say baseball is no longer our national pastime. The games are too slow. The season is too long. The whole thing is too boring—just a bunch of overpaid bums on steroids. We’re football people now. We want to see concussions, not curveballs. We want to hear the breaking of bones, not bats. Even boxing isn’t exciting enough to hold our attention anymore. We want mixed martial arts. We want blood.
I don’t buy it. I think we still have a soft spot for our summer game. Sure, the nation’s demographics have changed since the glory days of Willie, Mickey, and the Duke. Our tastes have evolved, too. Ballantine’s beer, boiled peanuts, and a box of Cracker Jacks just won’t do. When we go to the stadium these days, we expect to wash down our sushi and barbecue with a hoppy microbrew. But these changes are cosmetic. Our baseball heroes still inspire us in a way that the icons of our other big sports can’t—and don’t.
The athletic feats of a Kobe Bryant, a Sydney Crosby, or a Cam Newton seem out of our reach. We may love watching J.J. Watt lose his helmet, beat a double team, and grind a quarterback into dust, but we can’t imagine ourselves doing it. Our eyes may bulge when LeBron James puts home a kingly dunk on his way to a triple-double, but we’re admiring an achievement out of our reach, in every sense.
Baseball is different. It still looks like a game that you or I could play. Fat guys still make the roster. You may be 42, but if you work all winter on your knuckleball, you might get the call. Baseball’s human scale and redemptive qualities bind us to the sport and the players in a special way.
Think of the reception given Derek Jeter on his farewell tour in 2014. To many, Jeter was the enemy—the golden boy of the New York Yankees’ evil empire. And yet, in every stadium in every city, he was greeted with sincere and sustained standing ovations. Baseball fans respected his success. They admired how he had carried himself, and they appreciated how he played the game. There’s still a right way to play baseball. You can’t say that of every game—or even of running for president.
This year will be another great player’s final season. David “Big Papi” Ortiz—the Yankee-killing, curse-reversing Boston basher—has issued an appeal to the notoriously unfriendly-to-visitors fans of the Bronx Bombers. He has politely asked for a standing ovation in Yankee Stadium before he retires. He’ll get it, and he probably won’t have to wait until the last regular season series between the Yanks and the Red Sox in late September, either. The Yankees’ bleacher creatures will surely salute him on May 6, during his first at bat of the year in the House that Ruth (or Steinbrenner) Built. That’s what baseball fans do. They give credit where it’s due.
Spring training won’t solve all our problems. We still have this election mania to deal with. New York’s subway slashers won’t put their knives away when the ball clubs come north. But just think about where we’d be without baseball. We’d probably be like every other country in the world, waiting every fourth year for the World Cup to come around. That would definitely put us on the wrong track.

Review: ‘Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart’ - The Washington Post

Review: ‘Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart’ - The Washington Post



28.2.16

Kurt Hahn: The man who taught Philip to think - BBC News

Kurt Hahn: The man who taught Philip to think - BBC News



Kurt Hahn

The Duke of Edinburgh is celebrating the 30th anniversary of a Cambridge University institute based on the ideas of his educational mentor, Kurt Hahn. But who was he?
"There is more in you than you think" was the motto Kurt Hahn used during his long and active life.
A German Jew who opposed and fled the Nazis and mentored the Duke of Edinburgh, his influence on education is all around, even if his name is not.
Hahn was instrumental in setting up the Duke of Edinburgh's Award scheme, which has introduced millions of 14 to 24-year-olds to outdoor adventure and community service.
He established Gordounstoun, the Scottish private school that has educated several members of the Royal Family, and inspired the creation of dozens more schools around the world. He co-founded the Outward Bound Trust, whose courses more than one million people have taken.
On Wednesday, the duke attended a reception in London commemorating 30 years of the Kurt Hahn Trust, which provides scholarships for German students to come to Cambridge University and vice-versa.
In a speech, Hahn once said freedom and discipline were "not enemies". He advocated "experiential" learning - putting young people in situations to challenge them mentally and physically. Hahn said he wanted to prevent the erosion of children's "inherent spirituality".
Gordonstoun boys on an obstacle courseImage copyrightGetty Images
Image captionGordonstoun boys on an obstacle course
"If you throw a glance at the boys of any public or secondary school you find them up to the age of 13 full of curiosity, courteous, animated by high and good spirits," he said. "Then they reach the awkward age. They often lose their freshness and their charm, sometimes forever. I belong to a secret society called the Anti-lout Society."
He diagnosed six societal ills:
  • lack of physical fitness
  • decline of initiative and enterprise
  • decline of imagination
  • decline of craftsmanship
  • decline of self-discipline
  • decline of compassion
To combat these he developed a programme for developing "moral independence", physical wellbeing and the ability to tell right from wrong.
Born in 1886, Hahn suffered severe sunstroke in 1904, and had to have the occipital bone at the back of his skull removed. Throughout his life he avoided sunlight and wore a wide-brimmed hat while outdoors, creating an air of eccentricity.
Hahn co-founded the Schule Schloss (Castle School) for boys in Salem, in the German state of Baden-Wurttemberg, in 1920. Pupils had to go for a run before breakfast, drank milk at mealtimes, did 45 minutes of athletics during their mid-morning break and, after lunch, lay flat on their backs for 45 minutes while a teacher or older pupil read aloud to them. They also helped with the upkeep of the school. On Saturdays, the boys formed "guilds" of explorers, farmers and artists, which Hahn said gave their eyes a "gleam".
A group of boys from Gordonstoun School helping to clear the moat during restoration work at Michelham Priory near Hailsham, Sussex, 11th April 1967.Image copyrightGetty Images
Image caption1967: Gordonstoun boys clear a moat as part of volunteer work
Philip, who had been exiled from Greece following a revolution when he was an infant, arrived at Schloss in the autumn term of 1933. It was a bad time for Hahn. In August 1932, five months before he became chancellor of Germany, Hitler had condoned the murder of a communist by Nazi stormtroopers.
Appalled, Hahn had written a letter to Salem's old boys, telling them to disregard Hitler or break off relations with the school. "Germany is at stake, her Christian civilisation, her reputation, her military honour," he wrote.
In March 1933, Hahn was one of many people arbitrarily arrested following the burning of the Reichstag. He was allowed to leave Germany in July only after the intervention of UK Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald.
The next year, he founded Gordonstoun school, taking over a stately home in Morayshire, an area where he had spent time while a student at Oxford before World War One. He ran it along similar lines to the Schule Schloss.
One of his first pupils was Philip, who had moved to the UK from Germany. At Gordonstoun, the boys rose at 06:30 for a cold shower and a run, the timetable for the day much like that in Germany. At 21:15 there was a quarter of an hour of silence to enable the pupil to "glean the harvest from his manifold experiences" before lights out.
"After a very difficult childhood, Gordonstoun gave Prince Philip a much needed sense of stability, says Philip Eade, author of The Young Prince Philip. "Hahn's spartan educational philosophy made an impression on the young prince that has remained with him throughout his life and has doubtless helped him in all sorts of ways as the longest-serving consort in British history."
Prince Philip as a pupil at GordonstounImage copyrightGetty Images
Image captionPrince Philip at Gordonstoun
There was great emphasis at Gordonstoun on learning seamanship, as it encouraged teamwork. Later, mountain and sea rescue were encouraged, activities Hahn thought would instil active compassion for others.
Several 1930s opinion-formers were impressed by Hahn's ideas and force of personality, including the Archbishop of York and the novelist John Buchan. But WB Curry, the headmaster of Dartington Hall school, Devon, was concerned his ideas were "incompatible with a really liberal civilisation" and "the product of the tortured German soul". "I also insist that his psychology has far more roots in his own emotional nature than in the nature of other human beings," he said.
Some later pupils complained that the regime at Gordonstoun was overly harsh, with bullying rife. Prince Charles, who attended in the 1960s, reportedly called it "Colditz with kilts", while the writer William Boyd likened being there to "penal servitude".
"It's clearly not suitable for everyone, as Prince Charles's miserable time at Gordonstoun showed," says Eade.
1962: Prince Charles arrives for his first term at GordonstounImage copyrightGetty Images
Image caption1962: Prince Charles arrives for his first term at Gordonstoun, an experience he described as "Colditz with kilts"
But Daniel Emery, a pupil from 1985 to 1989, enjoyed his time there. "There's more to life than pure academic achievement," he says. "It's important, of course, but Gordonstoun gave you a zest for life."
After founding Gordonstoun, Hahn set about spreading its philosophy beyond public schools. In 1937 he started the Moray Badge scheme, allowing children living nearby to get physical training, take part in expeditions and complete a project before earning the award. He wanted to extend this nationwide into a County Badge scheme, but the resources were lacking.
In 1941, Hahn started the Outward Bound School in Aberdovey in Wales, along the same lines, the wider-reaching Outward Bound Trust starting in 1946.
Sailing at the Outward Bound school at AberdoveyImage copyrightAlamy
Image caption1947: Sailing practice at the Outward Bound school in Aberdovey
And in 1956 the Duke of Edinburgh's Awards scheme began. Participants can gain bronze, silver and gold awards, in return for volunteering for community service, learning physical activities and skills and going on an expedition, such as a mountain trek or a sailing trip. Almost 2.5 million awards had been achieved by March last year.
"The duke has a a very clear view, which has come from Hahn," says the award scheme's chief executive, Peter Westgarth. "He's always seen the awards as a sort of self-help scheme for growing up."
Duke of Edinburgh's Awards are offered in more than 140 countries and territories. "The duke is driven by the idea that people should be compassionate and engaging young people in direct with people they wouldn't otherwise come into contact with." says Westgarth. "It was Hahn who encouraged him to set up the awards."
Another aspect of Hahn's thought was internationalism. "Nothing but goodwill between nations and classes can save this generation from wars and revolutions," he said in a speech in 1936. "And education can help to build this bedrock of goodwill as a foundation of the society to be."
Hahn died in 1974 and, in 1986, the Duke of Edinburgh co-founded the Kurt Hahn Trust. "He was an incredibly energetic man," says Nicola Padfield, Master of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. "He was really committed. A lot of the thinking behind the trust was to get people from different countries talking. It's a fantastic message and it's still appropriate today."
In 2007, the US book Leadership the Outward Bound Way described its philosophy, handed down by Hahn, as "a unique blend of two traditions: the Greco-Roman way of tenacity, physical challenge, courage, and perseverance, and the Judeo-Christian way of compassion, self-sacrifice, love, and tolerance".
Hahn, unlike other educational innovators of the early 20th Century, such as Italy'sMaria Montessori and Austrian Rudolf Steiner, claimed no originality in his ideas, arguing he had picked useful elements of the works of figures such as Plato and the 19th-Century British headmaster Thomas Arnold.
Since the 1960s, the Round Square organisation, with 150 member schools around the world, has promoted Hahn's experiential philosophy. And the enthusiasm of his best-known pupil has not dimmed, more than seven decades after he left Gordonstoun.
"You were meant to suffer," Prince Philip joked as he handed out gold Duke of Edinburgh's Awards at a ceremony in 2013. "It's good for the soul."

The Duke of Edinburgh's award

Duke of Edinburgh award participants trek through the New Forest
  • The Duke of Edinburgh's Award programmes take between one to four years to complete, and they must be completed by the participant's 25th birthday
  • Participants select and set objectives in each of the following areas - volunteering, physical activity, developing practical and social skills and taking part in an expedition; gold-level participants must also do an additional fifth residential section, involving staying away from home doing a shared activity
  • Each level - bronze, silver and gold - demands more time and commitment from participants - bronze, 3-6 months; silver, 6-9 months; gold, 12-18 months
  • Participants are required to show regular activity and commitment to the award for the duration of their DofE programme, which is usually at least one hour per week

What did the ancient Greeks believe? » The Spectator

What did the ancient Greeks believe? » The Spectator



The sacrifice of Iphigenia: Agamemnon’s crime was ‘impious’, according to Lucretius

The Oscars always get it wrong. Here are the real Best Pictures of the past 40 years. - The Washington Post

The Oscars always get it wrong. Here are the real Best Pictures of the past 40 years. - The Washington Post



The greatest | The Economist

The greatest | The Economist



Michael Bloomberg’s moment | The Economist

Michael Bloomberg’s moment | The Economist



27.2.16

What Frank Underwood and St. Francis have in common | America Magazine

What Frank Underwood and St. Francis have in common | America Magazine

Some complete genius has created a piece of music from 33 different classical composers – and it sounds amazing - Classic FM Music News and Features

Some complete genius has created a piece of music from 33 different classical composers – and it sounds amazing - Classic FM Music News and Features

Life -- Not all that difficult

Originally Answered: How do I live a happy life?
1.    Realize that people don’t think about you as much as you think they do.   Don’t waste time thinking about what people may or may not be thinking.

2.    Be who you are, no matter who you’re with. Always be true to yourself, even when it makes you uncomfortable.

3.    People don’t know how to navigate life.  Everyone makes it up as they go along. Some are better at faking it.

4.    Things are rarely as good or as bad as they first appear. Don’t take any situation at face value. Remain steady and calm.

5.    Appreciate others. There is something better than you in every person you meet. Look for that thing. Tell them what you see. They will feel valued.

6.    Give to others. You’ll find what you’re looking for by helping others.

7.    Don’t waste much time trying to figure life out. It’s been a mystery since the dawn of mankind. Greater minds have spent their entire lives trying to solve the same mystery. It’s unlikely to be solved in the next 40 years by yours truly.

8.    Practice gratitude. Remember that someone, somewhere, is praying for things that you take for granted. 

9.    Don’t be so serious. Laugh a lot. It makes your brain light up. Make sure every day is filled with laughter.  This usually happens when you’re surrounded by those you love, and who love you back.
 
10. Shy away from revisiting the past (regret) and predicting the future (anxiety).


Bill Buckley’s Lesson for Today’s Conservatives - WSJ

Bill Buckley’s Lesson for Today’s Conservatives - WSJ



William F. Buckley Jr. with the Rev. Jesse Jackson on ‘Firing Line’ in 1971.

Meagher of the Sword - WSJ

Meagher of the Sword - WSJ



A detail of Louis Lang’s 1862-3 painting of Meagher’s regiment landing in New York after Bull Run.

Brexit | The Economist

Brexit | The Economist



The last of Iowa's small-town synagogues: seven members still praying | US news | The Guardian

The last of Iowa's small-town synagogues: seven members still praying | US news | The Guardian



Iowa synagogues small towns Judaism

When Groucho Marx lectured T.S. Eliot » The Spectator

When Groucho Marx lectured T.S. Eliot » The Spectator



Groucho Marx (Photo: Getty)

26.2.16

What Kanye Has in Common With Trump. And MLK. -- Vulture

What Kanye Has in Common With Trump. And MLK. -- Vulture



POWER  0000

Peace

Buddha by Karen Armstrong. After practicing the asceticism of the holy men of his time and reflecting on a formative 'Nirvana' moment he had years before under a rose-apple tree, Siddhartha Gotama, the Buddha rejects pure asceticism for a middle way:

"Since he had left home six years before, Gotama had been fighting his human nature and crushing its every impulse. He had come to distrust any kind of pleasure. But, he now asked himself, why should he be afraid of the type of joy he had experienced on that long-ago afternoon? That pure delight had had nothing to do with greedy craving or sensual desire. Some joyful experiences could actually lead to an abandonment of egotism and to the achievement of an exalted yogic state. ...

aesthetic Buddha
Buddha of the middle way

"He had, of course, already been behaving along these lines by observing the 'five prohibition's' which had forbidden such 'unhelpful' (akusala) activities as violence, lying, stealing, intoxication, and sex. But now, he realized, this was not enough. He must cultivate the positive attitudes that were the opposite of these five restraints. Later, he would say that a person seeking enlightenment must be 'energetic, resolute and persevering' in pursuing those 'helpful,' 'wholesome' or 'skillful' (kusala) states that would promote spiritual health. Ahimsa (harmlessness) could only take one part of the way; instead of simply avoiding violence, an aspirant must behave gently and kindly to everything and everyone; he must cultivate thoughts of loving-kindness to counter any incipient feelings of ill will. It was very important not to tell lies, but it was also crucial to engage in 'right talk' and make sure that whatever you said was worth saying: 'reasoned, accurate, clear and beneficial.' Besides refraining from stealing, a bhikkhu should positively rejoice in taking whatever alms he was given, expressing no personal preference, and should take delight in possessing the bare minimum. The yogins had always maintained that avoiding the five prohibitions would lead to 'infinite happiness,' but by deliberately cultivating these positive states of mind, such exstasis could surely be redoubled. Once this 'skillful' behavior became so habitual that it was second nature, the aspirant, Gotama believed, would 'feel within himself a pure joy,' similar to if not identical with the bliss that he had felt as a boy under the rose-apple tree. ...

"Gotama was developing what he called a 'Middle Way,' which shunned physical and emotional self-indulgence on the one hand, and extreme asceticism (which could be just as destructive) on the other."
Buddha (Penguin Lives Biographies)
Author: Karen Armstrong
Publisher: Penguin Books