Author: Newley

Bananas as installation art.

Outside La Paz, Bolivia, “el camino de la muerte,” or the highway of death, has become a tourist attraction (New York Times; free registration required).

BBC News: “The enigma of Liverpool’s labyrinth: Tycoon Joseph Williamson dug a vast, bizarre network of tunnels under Liverpool almost 200 years ago. Were they the city’s first job creation scheme, a rich man’s whimsy or a shelter from the end of the world?”

David Brooks. Man, is he good. In his newest article, “Superiority Complex,” he examines the democratization of elitism in our country:

“‘Know thyself,’ the Greek sage advised. But of course this is nonsense. Truly happy people live by the maxim ‘Overrate thyself.’ They are raised by loving parents who slather them with praise. They stride through life with a confidence built on an amazing overestimation of their own abilities. And they settle into an old age made comfortable by the warm glow of self-satisfaction. Each of these people is a god of self-esteem, dwelling on a private Olympus.”

If you’re into social criticism, check out Brooks’s excellent book “Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There.”

Good news: Arts & Letters Daily is back. The site has been purchased by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

News.com: “Google, the world’s most popular search engine, has quietly deleted more than 100 controversial sites from some search result listings.”

This week’s New Yorker contains two fascinating articles. The first, by Jeffrey Goldberg, which, unfortuntely, isn’t posted on the magazine’s site, describes the increase in fundamental Islamic terrorist activity in the “Triple Frontier”–the border area shared by Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil. The second article, Jerome Groopman’s “Dying Words,” is a sad, revealing look at various methods doctors use to break the worst kind of news to their patients.

“The American way of snacks.”

BBC News: “Plans are afoot to try and emulate the travels of a Chinese eunuch who is believed to have discovered America more than 70 years before Christopher Columbus.”

The other day, I started reading Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms.” I was in the mood for some muscular prose and some violence. I made it all of 20 pages before putting the book down in disappointment. Most recently, I read Hemingway’s “To Have and Have Not” when I was in college, and I liked it. I didn’t remember, though, that Hemingway’s prose is so spare–it’s naked to the point of being, for me, ugly. His writing is devoid of lyricism; his words and sentences and thoughts are pieced together so haphazardly that I found it unbearable. Granted, I didn’t give it much time, but “A Farewell to Arms” seems like a hurriedly-written, adolescent jumble of fragmented words strung together without care for the way they might be encountered by the reader. I’m struggling, now, to understand why Hemingway’s so revered, although this short piece helps put his writing in the context of American literature, and explains just why it’s so timeless.

So, my with my delicate aesthetic sense craving something refined, I picked up a novella by one of my all-time favorite writers, Truman Capote: “The Grass Harp.” Wow. I can’t believe I’ve never read it. I’m not even halfway through it, but so far, it’s the perfect antidote to Hemingway’s clunky prose–it’s clever, funny, and, most of all, beautifully written. Listen to the way the narrator, Collin Fenwick, describes, on the very first page, a field near his small Southern town’s graveyard (and gives rise to the title of the book):

Below the hill grows a field of high Indian grass that changes color with the season: go see it in the fall, late September, when it has gone red as sunset, when scarlet shadows like firelight breeze over it and the autumn winds strum on its dry leaves sighing human music, a harp of voices.

Now that’s good writing.