Sunday Morning Thought

One of my great pleasures is reading really good book reviews.

No, not reviews of good books; well-written disquisitions on a book, its author, and its history, preferably the history of the writing, but the history of the time in which the book was written is always interesting and occasionally required. I learn a lot from essays centered on volumes of fiction and non-fiction, and I was looking forward, this morning, to pointing you at two lovely reviews in Harper's, one on The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard and the other on Bite the Hand that Feeds You: Essays and Provocations by Henry Fairlie, of whom I had never heard, but unlike the political reportage, the thoughtful work requires a subscription to read. As it happens, I have a subscription to the hard copy, but apparently I spaced the password.

Rats.

So I will give you the flavor of each and you can decide whether to pick up the magazine (library or purchase) or go straight to the website and subscribe, and then I'm off to church.

1. "Excited by the way in which television appeared to expose the viewer to different and simultaneous lives, Ballard came to see the box as a primary source of numbness and disorientation. He was featured in a number of documentary films for the BBC, and yet he apppears to have thought that such films were just another means of falsifying reality."


2. "He was singular for having a transatlantic career, or two separate careers, in the Old World and then in the New, and he might be said to have blazed a trail followed since by other English journalists, not least by showing how susceptible Americans can be to a certain kind of insolent swagger and the affectation of superior learning ... Presenting himself as a champion of true conservatism against the decayed American version, Fairlie picked fights with William F. Buckley and George F. Will, and he derided Ronald Reagan as a 'slippered pantaloon.'"

Enjoy your coffee!