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Conservatism as Modernism: The Aesthetics of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s In Praise of Shadows in Global Context
By Brian Hurley,
The English philosopher Roger Scruton observes that conservative thinkers who attempt to define and defend “conservatism” often find themselves trapped in a paradox. To the extent that they succeed in making their points through reason and argument, they ironically end up contradicting the conservative way of living in the world, which is supposed to be intuitive, unconscious, and natural, rather than reasoned, self-conscious, and philosophical. After all, Scruton writes, the classic tradition of “English conservatism is rooted in the patrimony of the English upper class, in the quiet common sense of the old English constitution and in the plain-man unassuming practices that are, in the life of an English Tory, a handy substitute for thinking.”
The Dispossessing of Sylvia Beach: Property, Autonomy, Personhood
By Robert Spoo,
Sylvia Beach was a woman of property. Her “passion projects,” as Melanie Micir calls the rich variety of “queer feminist modernist practice[s]” that Beach and other creative women engaged in, included the founding of her Paris bookshop and lending library; her role as publisher, seller, and distributor of James Joyce’s Ulysses; and the writing of her memoir, Shakespeare and Company (1959). Beach took pride in giving the same name to her memoir that she had given to her bookshop. It was the pride of a property owner,
Mystic Realism & Collage: Robert Duncan’s THE WAR (1968)
By Vincent Hiscock,
Robert Duncan’s “Introduction” was the final piece that he composed for his 1968 collection of poetry Bending the Bow. The effort preoccupied him throughout much of 1967, a year in which Duncan, alongside many other creative practitioners, recognized that his art was undergoing a formal crisis that stemmed from an increasing awareness of US atrocities in Vietnam. Duncan’s effort to reckon with this crisis of practice yielded a startling manifesto that, despite being positioned as the “Introduction” to the collection he had already composed, in fact theorizes an aesthetic orientation that appears only occasionally and nascently in the collection itself. The piece, written in a dense, vertiginous, and original prose, comes in five short sections.
The Lyrical Literature of Distant Listening
By Emilie Morin,
Distant listening—a practice born with radio amateurism, known as DXing among American radio enthusiasts—was the term used to designate an essential dimension of radio during the interwar period: the capacity to listen to radio stations far away. What this involved was not just the fine-tuning of a wireless set, but educated guesses about foreign identification signals, languages and speech patterns, and frequent battles against unwanted noise and distortions. As the British radio pioneer Peter Eckersley recalled in his memoirs, for the fleeting thrill of capturing a foreign broadcast one had to endure, in the early years at least, “long periods of virtual rigor mortis waiting for [an] identification signal” and much parasitic noise: