February 21, 2006
Around the web #7
- At Slate, Daniel Akst asks a simple question: "You have $1. How should you spend it to do the most good?" The answer? "Given all this, it seems to me that the best way to spend a little money helping the world's poorest citizens is not to spend the money at all, but to lend it."
- At The Atlantic, Christopher Hitchens elevates his game in discussing Perry Anderson's Spectrum: From Right to Left in a World of Ideas. His often-dismissive tone is here replaced by what seems to be a considered, long-term engagement with Anderson's ideas. The review led directly to my purchase of the book, which arrived in the mail while I was away.
- The Boston Globe presents a brief interview with the critic and novelist William H. Gass, whose new essay collection, A Temple of Texts, has just been released.
It concludes:
IDEAS: Are there people you think do a good job of critiquing you?GASS: Yes, there are some. Mostly they live in Europe. European critics are much smarter. Some of the best critics of American literature are in Germany and France. They know what's going on. They keep up. They have a much better intellectual equipment, a firmer grasp of languages. When I go abroad I feel much more at home. It's that sense of all writing is in the same country, and that there's just one country now.
In November The Believer published a long interview with Gass, reprinted in full here.
- Last weekend's Guardian Review published an appreciation of Ted Hughes by Simon Armitage: "Hughes, for me, was the man from over the top of the hill, from the next Yorkshire valley, and his poems made me want to read. Later, it was homesickness that drew me back to his work, and by that time his poems were making me want to write. I think we shared a nostalgia for the same part of the world, even if that patch of the planet held a different significance for us."
- At World Hum, and in the wake of the James Frey scandal, essayist and short-story writer Tom Bissell re-publishes an essay on the subject of truth in travel writing.
- I greatly enjoyed James Lasdun's "diary", which describes his brief stint as an organic farmer twelve years ago, published in the last issue of the London Review of Books. It makes me want to read his novels, which have been praised left and right by critics I respect, but which have previously flown under my radar. Coincidentally, Identity Theory has just published a long interview with Lasdun conducted by Robert Birnbaum.
- Lastly, this morning I read Francis Fukuyama's eminently sensible essay printed in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine. Perhaps stung by the ease with which critics used the title of The End of History against him (and which he defends briefly), Fukuyama titles this piece "After Neoconservatism," though it's not without its own strong rhetoric:
"The End of History," in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.
It is an excerpt from America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy, out this week from Yale University Press.