"When I brought up Jorie Graham, he claimed to admire her too"

1. Sam Anderson (NYT sentence-of-the-day guy) does a year-in-marginalia -- a form that is distinctly more natural for me than a Year in Reading (or a Month in Swindon); I particularly liked this Bolano passage:

And only then did I realize how eagerly, how recklessly he was exposing himself to the sun. He wasn't using sunscreen. And he knew he was dying and he was lying in the sun on purpose like a person saying goodbye to someone very dear. The old tourist was bidding farewell to the sun and to his own body and to his old wife sitting beside him. It was a sight to see, something to admire. It wasn't a dead body lying there on the sand, but a man. And what courage, what gallantry. 

2. Stephen Haven (a.k.a. Heaven-Haven) describes a dinner in Beijing with the wonderfully named Chinese poet Duo Duo:

Duo Duo said, “No, that is not the difference. The difference is something else. British and American poets always have to ‘tell the story,’ and at the end of their poems they sum the story up. In France and Germany poets don’t do that.” Duo Duo said he admired Rilke, Paul Celan, Apollinaire, Rene Char, André Breton. [...]  Maybe that is why modern, Continental poetry comes through better, because it is more powerfully built on imagery, especially when the imagery is surreal. Maybe Frost’s long narratives are untranslatable, I said, because they are so subtle [...] We talked about American and British poets Duo Duo admires. He said he loved Roethke, Charles Wright, R.S. Thomas, Ashbery, Mark Strand, Whitman, James Tate, James Wright, Dickinson. When I brought up Jorie Graham, he claimed to admire her too, and Hart Crane was also an important poet for him, many years ago.

3. Mark Lilla's review of The Reactionary Mind is awful in an exemplary way. (He thinks the book is awful in an exemplary way too, and perhaps it is; I haven't read it.) The book (by all accounts) argues that conservatives throughout history have really been driven by the desire to justify oppression and oppose equality. The review asserts that this is obviously incorrect because conservatives have disagreed with one another -- a non-sequitur if there ever was one; as if it weren't possible to disagree about the correct way to justify oppression -- and then goes on to restate a bunch of conventional tropes about conservatism and liberalism. (This story is evidently preempted by the argument of the book under review, which is that the metaphysics is a smokescreen for interest-group politics; but it is not clear if Lilla sees this. -- "Sees" is, incidentally, a palindrome like "eye" and its cognates.) However, I thought this antithesis of Lilla's was thought-provoking and not obviously wrong:

The quarrel between liberals and conservatives is essentially a quarrel over the nature of human beings and their relation to society. The quarrel between revolutionaries and reactionaries, on the other hand, has little to do with nature. It is a quarrel over history.

(I think the correct way to read "history" -- given the context of the rest of the article -- is as "large events"; i.e., you can unpack the claim as saying that reactionaries and revolutionaries are people whose views on politics hinge on the moral significance attached to specific historical events, rather than on a theory of human nature. It is not entirely implausible that some such distinction is behind some intra-left or intra-right squabbling. Lilla's attempts to apply this schema to contemporary politics are pretty weak, however.)

Three Lists from the LRB

Ordered by brevity:

1. Neal Ascherson on the "intelligent, leftish" types who went on delegations to China in the 1950s:

Weird as abroad often turned out to be, they were determined to find it familiar, recognisable, lovable. This must be the explanation for the funniest element in Wright’s story: everywhere was just like England, if you looked hard enough.

Stanley Spencer explained to Zhou that China was like Cookham. The Ming Tombs reminded him of the village of Wangford, where he had married his first wife. Morgan Phillips found that Beijing was much like Bedford. The physician Derrick James noted that Prague, visited on the way to Beijing, resembled Maidstone. Hugh Casson compared Moscow to Manchester a hundred years earlier; the great scientist Joseph Needham mystifyingly thought that Kunming was a bit like the vicarage at Duxford near Cambridge; the artist Paul Hogarth wrote that travelling from Beijing to Shanghai was much the same as going from Sheffield to Manchester. More perilously, the delegates tried to demystify the Chinese present by equating it with brave bits of the English past. The rural co-operatives were like the Rochdale Pioneers, the People’s Liberation Army was like Cromwell’s Roundheads.

2. Keith Thomas, reviewing a book about holy places in 17th century England:

In the 17th century the parson-poet George Herbert lamented that it was very difficult to get country folk to see God’s hand in the workings of nature. They thought that crops grew because of their own efforts, not divine providence. They knew the landscape around them in intimate detail but, for them, its associations were primarily connected with their own labours and those of their predecessors. [...] Topographical traditions were not just about saints and monks. More usually, they related to kings and queens, armies and battles, or folk heroes like Robin Hood, Guy of Warwick and, above all, King Arthur, to whom, according to the Elizabethan historian William Camden, ‘the common sort ascribe whatever is ancient or strange’. Cairns, cromlechs and barrows were believed to be memorials to ancient princes or tombs of great men slain in battle, usually against the Danes. Ruins were indiscriminatingly regarded as the work of Oliver Cromwell.

(Btw the pun on "reformation" has rarely been used so well as in the title of this book, The Reformation of the Landscape. I do not know if there is a specific term for this trick of using the direct, etymological sense of a compound word that has drifted away in meaning -- a sort of exposing of the etymological joints, as in the popular example "at-one-ment.")

3. Terry Eagleton on the Dublin theatrical scene:

In the years when the Gate and the Abbey were the two main theatres in Dublin, the former was run by a gay couple while the latter was noted for staging traditional Irish plays. The theatres were known as Sodom and Begorrah.