The current New Yorker is one that the circulation deparment should wish into your mailbox right before your subscription runs out--George Packer on Obama's Oslo speech, a story by Helen Simpson, Louis Menand on Arthur Koestler, and Joan Acocella on Chaucer. Something quick about each.
I have not read the speech Obama delivered that day. I expect Packer quotes the parts he found particularly strong but here is one sentence that makes it into his column that I wish had not made it into the speech: "For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world." Does the president imagine that some of his auditors disagree? Is it his view that critics of his Afghanistan policy think evil does not exist in the world? His conception of ambiguity may be over-simple.
The story by Helen Simpson, called "Diary of an Interesting Year," is hard to read. There has been a global disaster and the diary entries mercilessly describe a descent into a hell where life is nasty, brutish, solitary, and, the female diarist must think, not short enough. It isn't the worst, so long as the she can say, "This is the worst."
Koestler was the reason Cyril Connolly told Edmund Wilson, "Like everyone who talks of ethics all day long, one could not trust him half an hour with one's wife." Also, he (Koestler) believed in paranormal phenomena and bequeathed 400,000 pounds to the University of Edinburgh that it might establish in its psychology department the Koestler Parapsychological Unit, which, Menand reports, is currently studying "alleged poltergeist experiences." I'm with Menand about the title--Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic--of the new biography, by Michael Scammell, that is the subject of his article: the word "skeptic" does not belong. The peculiar enthusiasms and blind spots of geniuses must be an interesting topic.
I studied Chaucer at the University of Minnesota with Andrew MacLeish. We had to learn by heart passages from The Canterbury Tales and then, at an interview, recite for him in Middle English one of the assigned passages, we knew not which till he told us at the interview. It happened that my interview was in the afternoon of the morning on which we had all had to turn in a final paper that was to be a big part of our course grade. MacLeish gave it back to me at the interview. It looked just as it had when I turned it in a few hours earlier except now, at the end, was written: "Your paper is sensible though not particularly profound. B." I always wondered how many profound papers he read that day. Anyway, Acocella will make you want to read The Canterbury Tales. She suggests the interlinear translation of Vincent Hopper but the Middle English is really not that incomprehensible, honest. MacLeish required us to buy Robert Pratt's edition, which glosses in the right-hand margin the least familiar looking words. The tale of the Pardoner is really one of the best things in English literature.
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