Chekhov’s Mistess

Latest Bookforum asks is God Still…

Dead?

In the October/November issue of Bookforum, Ronald Aronson looks at books on Atheism:

Taken collectively, the writing of the new atheists offers a set of promising ideas. Harris, for all his negative energy, provides a potentially rich idea about mysticism, as cultivated in Eastern religions, as a “rational enterprise.” In Buddhism, he argues, reaching beyond the self has been carefully and closely described and need not be left to faith but may be empirically studied. Baggini’s rejection of dogma and militancy on all sides is not only refreshing but intellectually important; Wielenberg talks about the possible contribution of neuroscience to a future secular ethics. But by far the most important idea contained in these books is Harbour’s effort to cast the discussion as a matter of worldviews.

Jesse Sheidlower, the editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary, looks at Samuel Johnson’s work:

The abundance and quality of the material are often overshadowed by the smattering of humorous definitions in Johnson, of which the most widely known is surely his entry for lexicographer, which begins “a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.” (This, its common form, is a selective quotation; the entry goes on more helpfully, “that busies himself in tracing the original and detailing the signification of words.”) A pension was “an allowance made to any one without an equivalent. In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country.” And oats is “a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.” All it takes is one or two such entries, especially when combined with the many witty comments Boswell quotes Johnson as having said, to give the impression that the whole work is a frippery. It is not. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary is one of the great intellectual achievements of any age. Praised from the moment of its publication, it remains an astonishing work, not least because it is the product of a single, extraordinarily perceptive mind. Johnson had the help of a half-dozen assistants—most of whom, by the way, were Scots—but their role was chiefly to help him manage the quotations, not to write definitions.

And Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, looks at Gabriel García Márquez the diplomat?

On the eve of the US publication of his new novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, a fresh dimension to García Márquez’s storied career has emerged—the writer as secret emissary. Revelations of his role as a special envoy between President Fidel Castro and President Bill Clinton are contained in what is, for all practical purposes, an unpublished short story of intrigue and back-channel diplomacy in the form of a classified report submitted to Castro in May 1998. (This past May, Castro publicized the document in a speech.)

These are a small sampling of the overall issue. BUY IT!

This has been a public service announcement of Chekhov’s Mistress. If you came here from some Google search on God stuff, please don’t leave me any weird comments, I’m down with the dude.

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: September 18, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Literary Journals

• Comments:0
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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