Noteworthy reads from the last week:
“The Divorce Colony,” April White
“To read the front pages of the country’s newspapers or sit in its church pews in 1892 was to know that the United States was facing a divorce epidemic. By one estimate, more divorces were granted in the United States than in all the rest of the Christian world combined.”
“Antigone in Galway,” Anne Enright
“The living can be disbelieved, dismissed, but the dead do not lie. We turn in death from witness to evidence, and this evidence is indelible, because it is mute.”
“He Really Was a Camera,” Katherine Bucknell
“Isherwood’s ambition is large; if he is a camera, like Lewis, he considers himself an artist as well. He adopts the posture of the English gentleman amateur, who prefers that nobody sees just how hard he is working as he smuggles into what was to be his third novel an unrecognized, American, democratic perspective and marries it to the leftist ideas in which he was then immersed.”
“Product Placement,” Lewis H. Lapham
“Although I never qualified for full membership in the company of Yale’s bohemian elect—it was known that I played golf, that my father had been tapped for Bones, that I was blind to the genius not only of Ginsberg but also of Joyce—I was by no means at a loss for instruction in the casting of a cold eye on human affectation and folly.”
“When Nothing Is Cool,” Lisa Ruddick
“Is there something unethical in contemporary criticism?”