Category: Freebeacon.com
Witness to the Great Unsettling
The poet Marianne Moore is credited with describing what poets do as “the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” Perhaps that is why it has taken a poet, Paul Kingsnorth, an Englishman who now lives in Ireland, to craft a compelling portrait not of a toad in an imaginary garden, but of the relentless march of the machine in the human world. In Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, Kingsnorth offers a fresh take on an old question: How can we know when the technologies we have built to serve us instead end up enslaving us? Or, what happens when the toad destroys the garden?
The post Witness to the Great Unsettling appeared first on .
Rushdie on Death and Dying (While Remaining Alive and Well)
Through no fault of his own, the author Sir Salman Rushdie has become the English-speaking world’s premier purveyor of writing about death. The brutal reason for this is that, on August 12, 2022, Rushdie was stabbed several times in Chautauqua, New York, while preparing to give a talk—about, ironically enough, the United States as a place of safety for writers fleeing their home countries. Rushdie survived, miraculously, but lost an eye and the use of one hand in the process. His attacker, Hadi Matar, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for attempted murder, and now faces federal charges of terrorism under the auspices of Hezbollah.
The post Rushdie on Death and Dying (While Remaining Alive and Well) appeared first on .
Getting Intimate With Updike
Here’s a nice illustration of the personal and professional range of John Updike, the novelist, poet, essayist, critic, and short story writer who rose to singular fame (appearing twice on the cover of Time magazine, then the ultimate mark of celebrity) in the second half of the 20th century. During the year 1960, he volunteered to teach Sunday school at his local church. Meanwhile, he was fighting his publisher’s lawyers, who worried that the sex scenes in his latest novel, Rabbit, Run, were explicit enough to violate U.S. obscenity laws, which were still a thing.
The post Getting Intimate With Updike appeared first on .
A Kinder, Gentler Feminism
Leah Libresco Sargeant’s latest book, The Dignity of Dependence, carries with it the subtitle: “A Feminist Manifesto.” Where that word may conjure a certain harshness, however, Sargeant’s book illustrates something much more gentle: a humane vision of the givenness of womanhood.
The post A Kinder, Gentler Feminism appeared first on .
