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Monday, August 17, 2020

The Last Of The Hedgehogs, by Chris Fleming, Los Angeles Review of Books

In 1953, Isaiah Berlin published his long essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” outlining his now-famous Oxbridge variant on there are two kinds of people in this world. He drew the title from an ambiguous fragment attributed to the ancient lyric poet Archilochus of Paros: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog one big thing.” Written with the aim of pointing out tensions between Tolstoy’s grand view of history and the artistic temperament that saw such a view as untenable, Berlin’s essay became an unlikely hit, although less for its argument about Russian literature than for its contention that two antithetical personae govern the world of ideas: hedgehogs, who view the world in terms of some all-embracing system, seeing all facts as fitting into a grand pattern; and foxes, those pluralists or particularists who refuse “big theory” for reasons either intellectual or temperamental.

Reconstructing The Self Through Memoir, After Psychosis, by Catherine Cho, Literary Hub

It’s a plain gray journal, fabric with bound pages—my husband’s favorite, because they lie open flat. He was the one to leave the journal for me in the psychiatric ward. He’d asked the staff if I could have it. I’d found it tucked under my pillow.

The journal was a way of finding order after a psychotic episode where my sense of time and reality had been scrambled with visions of the apocalypse and the belief that I was experiencing a simulation, surrounded by animals and voices and demonic faces. The journal was also my first clue of what was real.

Feeling Deluged By News? Let 'The Daughters Of Ys' Wash Over You, by Etelka Lehoczky, NPR

Though M. T. Anderson couldn't possibly have planned it, his new book The Daughters of Ys feels like it was created for just this moment. The story's driving force and key image — a torrential flood of natural and unnatural origin that sweeps away a city — is the perfect symbol for our era. If you've felt your brimming anxiety about the coronavirus overflow as you've tried to keep up with the never-ending tide of news about it, you'll sympathize with Anderson's characters.

Like Standing Stones: On Vona Groarke’s “Double Negative”, by Declan Ryan, Los Angeles Review of Books

These are, for the main part, poems to do with a changing relationship with time; there’s a certain sense of loss, a questioning as to how it’s all come to this, but the dark feelings are borne with good grace and, often, good humor.

Alice Oswald’s Homeric Mood, by Judith Thurman, New Yorker

Light, time, water, weather, growth, and decay: transience is Oswald’s muse, and it inspires startling, almost fugitive leaps of syntax and perception.

The New Book From The Author Of H Is For Hawk Shows No One Describes Nature More Beautifully, by Laura Miller, Slate

In her introduction, Macdonald writes that she hopes this collection “works a little like a Wunderkammer,” a German word usually translated as “Cabinet of Curiosities,” but she prefers the more literal “cabinet of wonders.” It is that, but the treasures in it are mostly not exotica and relics collected from far-off lands. They’re all around us, just waiting to be noticed by the right person.

Like Flies To Honey: On Eric H. Cline’s “Digging Up Armageddon: The Search For The Lost City Of Solomon”, by Lydia Pyne, Los Angeles Review of Books

One would be hard-pressed to find a site whose name fires up the imagination more. But the site and its name are more than sheer sensationalism — the history of archaeological excavations at Armageddon is about how capitalism, science, and history came together to underwrite biblical archaeology in the first half of the 20th century.

Time Of The Magicians By Wolfram Eilenberger, Review: When Philosophers Go Wild, by Ivan Hewett, The Telegraph

We like to think of philosophers as “philosophical” – calm, undisturbed by sex or money, ambitious only in wanting to find the truth. This book gives the lie to that image. “Calm” is absolutely the last word you would use to describe any of the four philosophers in this book.

Catastrophe Is Next To Godliness, by Franny Choi, The Atlantic

Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe.
Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in.
I want an excuse to change my life.

Akwaba, by Kwame Dawes, The Guardian

Brown snow lines the roadways.
The still, grey city whispers