An Open Letter to the London Review of Books
I did write this as a more “normal” letter to the editor, but evidently they were more interested in using their page space to let Emily Wilson nuke her own credibility for no good reason, so I'm putting it here instead. It's about Afghanistan.
Kristi “The Body” Noem
Kristi Noem, the United States Secretary of Homeland Security, has had so much plastic surgery and wears such heavy makeup that she no longer even looks like the same person as the Kristi Noem who first entered the House of Representatives fifteen years ago. She gets a lot of attacks and mockery for this, especially from the political left. I think there is a distinctly misogynistic tone to a lot of these attacks and a lot of this mockery, as is the case with other women in Trump’s orbit like Melania Trump and Karoline Leavitt. Yet the kind of hyperfemininity that people are reacting to when they launch sexist broadsides against the women of Trumpworld is off-putting for legitimate reasons. There is something Dorian Grayish about “Mar-a-Lago face,” in the sense that it is an active decision to physically, visually, outwardly represent the inward condition of the soul, only unlike Dorian Gray these people have to wear the portrait over and within their actual faces at all times.
Svengalis
I recently read the 1895 (give or take a year; I don’t feel like looking it up right now) novel Trilby, one of the most popular books of its time but one that is almost never read today. Even in 1946 George Orwell, who enjoyed the novel despite admitting that it is very bad, wrote a newspaper column lamenting that nobody was reading it any more. Orwell admitted this, though, in the context of also admitting the thing for which the novel is best-remembered, which is its intense antisemitism. Artistically, this isn’t even the biggest problem with the book, which is saying something. The book is by George du Maurier, grandfather of the much more famous Daphne; Daphne du Maurier, a writer I like very much, is more famous for good reason.
Bird of Paradise
Carole Lombard, the immensely popular comic actress who starred in movies like Nothing Sacred and To Be or Not to Be, died in January 1942 when a plane carrying her crashed into a mountain while returning to Hollywood from her native Indiana. She had been there selling war bonds, very successfully. America had entered World War II the previous month. Lombard died with her mother, to whom she was very close, and with the crew of the plane.
Calvin Coolidge and the Power of Kroll
This summer I’m working as a caretaker and docent at the Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site in Vermont; Coolidge is one of two American Presidents born in Vermont and is the one more closely associated with the state, although his political base was in Western Massachusetts (which is culturally, economically, and demographically tied to Vermont and has a closely linked political history). He was a small-government right-winger of the old school, albeit one of the least racist Presidents of the first half of the twentieth century; he is known as a man of few words, “Silent Cal,” although he was capable of holding forth at length in settings like formal speeches and the writing of his autobiography. The autobiography is very good; Coolidge is one of about half a dozen Presidents whom it’s possible to assess as a capital-W Writer, along with the Adamses, Jefferson, Lincoln, Grant, and arguably Obama. (Other countries have these as well; isn’t it interesting, and revealing, that although the Academie Francaise has had plenty of former Presidents of France on it, the two Writers who have held that office in living memory, De Gaulle and Mitterrand, were not among them?)
The Lesser Beauty
When I was studying Japanese in the languages, literatures, and cultures department at UMass Amherst in the early 2010s, I became enamored of a now-obscure school of medieval Japanese Buddhism called Ji-shū, the Time School. Ji Buddhism was in most respects within the mainstream of Pure Land Buddhist thought, whose characteristic features include the belief that final enlightenment in the present world is no longer possible and the best course of action is to pray to a cosmic buddha called Amida for a rebirth in his Pure Land, a universe in which practicing the dharma is easier. Pure Land is the most widespread and popular type of Buddhism in Japan but has historically not been appealing to Western converts. Where Ji and its founding figure, an itinerant monk called Ippen Shōnin, parted company with mainstream Pure Land was in the belief that by invoking Amida’s name, a practice called the nenbutsu in Japanese, one effected a sort of spiritual time travel back to Amida’s own enlightenment, in which one then partook. The school’s name derives both from this belief and from the related practice of chanting the nenbutsu at particular times of day, somewhat similar to the set times for prayer in Islam.
I attempted to induce something similar to this recently, for secular reasons and involving my own past. On the way back from a road trip to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania from my apartment in Upstate New York, my housemate and I passed through Bordentown, the New Jersey river town where I spent most of my adolescence after my mother and I relocated from rural Vermont. I have not lived in Bordentown for a decade and had not even been there for almost eight years; I had little idea of what to expect from returning, but I did expect—and want—for it to involve a powerful emotional and even numinous reaction. I went out of my way to elicit this reaction by putting on Riot!, a Paramore album from 2007 (an extremely influential year in my life), while approaching the Delaware River from the west on Interstate 276. It worked. The two hours or so that my housemate and I spent in Bordentown overawed me so much that now, two weeks later, I have found myself waking up and lying in bed for half an hour thinking about it, remembering.
“Anxious Not to Appear Unhappy”; or, Why Mansfield Park Is the Austen Novel One Never Knew One Needed
So-called “classic” art and literature comes into and goes out of fashion just as do popular culture trends. For most of the twentieth century Edward Elgar was considered a fundamentally unserious composer; today he has reentered the classical concert repertoire. Johann Sebastian Bach, unbelievably, went through the same rehabilitation in the early nineteenth century. Renaissance castigation of High Medieval art has gradually over the past several centuries given way to appreciation of that art’s numinous aspects. Post-World War II horror at Victorian architecture and interior design, as seen for instance in Shirley Jackson’s novels, seems itself quaint and dated today. In literature, too, we see such long-term trends. To the end of understanding why certain books spend decades or centuries in or out of favor, I recently read the Jane Austen novel Mansfield Park. For many years Mansfield Park was considered a contender for Austen’s best novel; today it is widely seen as her worst.