The enduring fascination of Harry Potter
Every time I pass through King’s Cross I am reminded of it. Must be wonderful to be an author who made such an impact on people.
## Quote of the Day
”The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.”
- Bertrand Russell
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Alfred Brendel | Schubert Impromptu Op 90 No 3 D 899 G flat major
Long Read of the Day
Hegseth the Crusader
I am temperamentally suspicious of anyone who talks about a ‘crusade’ in an approving light. Yet the US Secretary for Defense, er War, has clearly never read the history of said Crusades, which, among other things took about 200 years and ended with Saladdin’s liberation of Jerusalem in 1187. What I hadn’t fully realised, though, was the extent to which he is a religious fanatic. Accordingly, I’m grateful to Frank Bruni for putting me right.
Hegseth volubly likened the rescue of an American airman shot down over Iran to the Resurrection of Jesus. “A pilot reborn, all home and accounted for, a nation rejoicing,” Hegseth said at a news conference. “God is good.”.
Hegseth has a tattoo on his right biceps that says “Deus vult,” Latin for “God wills it.” He has described that phrase as a battle cry during the Crusades, which, of course, pitted Christians against Muslims. He titled his 2020 book “American Crusade” — notice any fixation? — and wrote in it that Americans must fight “like our fellow Christians 1,000 years ago.”
He belongs to the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, which exalts patriarchy and descends from a movement that argues that the Bible’s edicts should prevail over secular law.
He tugs church into state. As Michelle Boorstein wrote recently in The Washington Post: “Every month at the Pentagon, Hegseth hosts evangelical worship services that legal experts say are unprecedented. His social media profile and public comments routinely espouse his understanding of Christianity, which is one that would dominate American life and cast those who disagree with him as God’s enemies. He has brought clergy from his small Christian denomination to preach at the Pentagon, including a prominent pastor who says women shouldn’t have the right to vote.”
How exactly did he become secretary of defense, to use the traditional title for the job?
How indeed? Especially given that a New Yorker investigation reported that he had been forced out of previous leadership positions for financial mismanagement, sexist behaviour, and being repeatedly intoxicated on the job.
Chart of the Day
What’s happened to the platform previously known as Twitter?
In other words, it’s become a freak-show.
“Without really wanting to comment on individual accounts,” writes Nate Silver,
the liberal-leaning accounts that remain prominent on Twitter aren’t much better. They’re partisan and combative, sometimes peddling misinformation. They’re almost like a dark-mirror-world, Waluigi version of the conservative “influencers”, crafted in Elon’s jaded image of what liberals are like. It’s no coincidence that one of the most successful ones is the Gavin Newsom Press Office account, which literally mimics President Trump’s style in a sometimes funny, sometimes cringeworthy way.
My commonplace booklet
Henry Oliver has a thoughtful post about Harold Bloom (accurately titled “The Man Who Had Read Everything”) which contains this endearing quote from a letter to the A.R Ammons in 1969.
An odd note, this—I came home just now from an exhausting Grad. Seminar in Poetic Influence—exhausting because a waste of spirit somehow—and I sat down—with cigar and scotch and soda—in my deep armchair in the living room—Daniel playing outside—David in the kitchen fingerpainting, Jeanne there too cooking chicken pilaf—and I turned to my downstairs copy of Ammons’ Selected Poems (I’ve got an upstairs copy for reading in my study—every house should have 2 Ammonses) and I read “Bridge”—because the book fell open to it—a poem I hadn’t been open to before—and Arch, it opened to me and found me—immensely beautiful, healing, Archie, as only Wordsworth and Stevens and Ammons can heal. I am very moved, very, very moved. It is a great poem, Archie, and if I had written it—rather than wasting my spirit (such as it is) in tiring seminars and exegeses we don’t need—I would feel blessed, Archie, as you must sometimes feel in spite of yourself.
Ammons was a poet an professor of English at Cornell. “Bridge” is the poem Triphammer Bridge:
I wonder what to mean by sanctuary, if a real or apprehended place, as of a bell rung in a gold surround, or as of silver roads along the beaches
of clouds seas don’t break or black mountains overspill; jail: ice here’s shapelier than anything, on the eaves massive, jawed along gorge ledges, solid
in the plastic blue boat fall left water in: if I think the bitterest thing I can think of that seems like reality, slickened back, hard, shocked by rip-high wind:
sanctuary, sanctuary, I say it over and over and the word’s sound is the one place to dwell: that’s it, just the sound, and the imagination of the sound—a place.
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Sheila Hayman’s documentary on Fanny Mendelssohn can be ordered here.
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