I have a lot of translating to do, so I though I'd do a round-up of my favorite essays, on many topics, floating around on the web:
The best essay yet on a politician I enthusiastically support.
"Shelby Steele ridicules institutions obsessed with diversity, but they, like Obama, are right to be inspired by the civil rights movement. The youth vote that gave him such a margin of victory in South Carolina, and kept his campaign going on Super Tuesday, missed the Sixties. Here is their chance."
An amusing and fascinating look at the major role of barbers in the Opera, beginning with Tim Burton's latest film Sweeney Todd, which I highly recommend!
"As Sweeney Todd croons to his razor, "My friend, my faithful friend," more in love with its sharp blade than with Mrs. Lovett, his partner in crime, you may find yourself wondering what it is about opera and its ubiquitous vengeful barbers. "
Steven Pinker writes about reconciling morality and neurology
"Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend. As Anton Chekhov wrote, 'Man will become better when you show him what he is like.'"
A dense, but fascinating examination of Joyce's major works
"The alternatives that Joyce suspends, the nihilistic and creative potentialities that now confront us, keep us in an ambivalent state of mind. He himself kept the balance by moving from a negative position to a positive accomplishment. But, because his self-portrait was so explicit, and his masterworks were so elaborate, this development has not clearly been understood. "
James Wood writes this beautiful, beautiful essay on a new translation of the Psalms - it's just wonderful.
"The Book of Psalms is the great oasis in which a desert people gathers to pour out its complaints, fears, hopes; the Psalms are prayers, songs, incantations, and perhaps even soliloquies. In them, the supplicants invoke God as their light, their water, their warrior, their scourge, their buckler, their rod, and their staff. But these images, these human metaphors, also expose the frailty of such supplication, since just as God is conjured into words he seems to disappear..."
Another Wood piece, expect more, on the new translation of War and Peace. Again, just lovely.
"Readers always feel that Tolstoy is both an intrusive narrator—breaking in to explain things, telling us what to think, writing essays and sermons—and a miraculously absent one, who simply lets his world narrate itself. As Isaac Babel put it, 'If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy.'"
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