King Lear in New York - Steve Kogan - I HAD A strange and disconcerting night at the theater this spring, when my wife and I saw Derek Jacobi in the title role of Shakespeare's King Lear at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. On our subway ride back home, my feelings ran so high that we began to quarrel over their intensity, and it was only after we apologized to each either in the morning that I was able to express exactly why my emotions had been roiled. What follows grew out of what I said to her and what I later discovered when I read a review of the production in the New York Times. In my last two years of college, I took a one-year course on Shakespeare and a senior semester on Lear, which we read scene by scene and line by line. There was a time in my life when I went to the theater to see whatever works of his and his fellow dramatists were being performed in the city, and I developed a way of turning even mediocre acting to advantage by supplying my own imaginary performance as I let the familiar words sink in. When the acting was good, my absorption was complete. I also came of age when New York's museums were as quiet as a library, which is to say when libraries themselves were shelters for quiet study and reflection. Times have changed,…

Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918-1963 is a new book by Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher based on interviews with 89 men and women who married in the first half of the twentieth century. Bel Mooney writes about it in The Daily Mail:

From our perspective, the people telling their stories (many of whom must have died since) led repressed lives. Again and again old women recall their lack of knowledge about the sexual act, and their nervousness on the wedding night. (more…)

I WAS unfamiliar with the “My Fellow American” campaign until today. A spokeswoman named Elizabeth Potter politely urged me to ask my readers to take the pledge. Here it is:

Muslims are our fellow Americans. They are part of the national fabric that holds our country together. They contribute to America in many ways, and deserve the same respect as any of us. I pledge to spread this message, and affirm our country’s principles of liberty and justice for all. (more…)

A FORUM in The New York Times entitled “How Can We Get Men to Do More at Home?” is a classic illustration of the feminist program to remake human nature through state control and brainwashing. Participants in the discussion come right out and say that people must change their thinking. Equality is good even if people do not want it. Government should even “force” men to change.

“Mentalities generally change much more slowly than legal codifications and institutional policies,” Ute Frevert, director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, says. Communists repeated the same line until the very fall of the Berlin Wall. What can Ute tell us about life in her home?  Why would you listen to Ute more than, say, your great grandmother, who never welcomed the emasculation of her husband and would have been horrified to see him make a pie? Who knows more about men? (more…)

APPEARING AT the “Capitol Fourth” concert on the Mall in Washington, D.C. yesterday, the pop singer Josh Groban sang Simon and Garfunkel’s “America,” a paean to ennui and alienation. To the crowd gathered on the mall, and the millions who watched at home, it was perhaps enough that the melody was about their nation. This is an Americanism so automatic and unreflective, so perversely narcissistic, it does not even care when America is viewed as empty and meaningless – as long as it is the center of attention. Here are the lyrics, which describe a British couple traveling across America:

Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together
I’ve got some real estate here in my bag”
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner’s pies
And walked off to look for America (more…)

GREG JINKERSON writes:

Regarding the thread about black culture under modern liberalism, I agree wholeheartedly that the Great Society scheme, particularly the Civil Rights Act of 1964, amounted to a huge step in the wrong direction for blacks politically. (more…)

WITH the charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn almost certain to be dropped within the next few weeks, the question arises as to why management of the luxury hotel, Sofitel, vouched so strongly for the maid’s character.

According to some reports, the maid was engaging in illicit activities at the hotel. Even if the management did not know this or even if she was not earning money as a prostitute, it strains belief that she was the exemplary employee the hotel management insisted she was. (more…)

TEXANNE writes:

Emily Hall in this previous entry rightly admires her mother for the way she managed the household and children during many long absences of the father. Her description of her mother as being “both father and mother,” immediately struck a chord because, in a way, it seems to give short shrift to the reality of her father’s genuine significance and active role as head of the family. Even if he happened to be away fulfilling his obligations to his family,  they knew their father was real, knew who he was and why he was away and that he would come back.  (more…)

I HAVE been away from my computer for two days, celebrating my son’s graduation from high school. At VFR, there are many entries on the latest developments in the case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, which appears to involve stunning prosecutorial ineptitude and prejudice. The credibility of the victim, a black African maid, appears to have been only superficially investigated before Strauss-Kahn was indicted, suggesting an overeagerness to  believe her and to accuse a famous man. The latest entry can be found here.

At Galliwatch, a blog devoted to current events in France, Tiberge writes of the new revelations: (more…)

THIS RECIPE is from Roy Finamore’s excellent book One Potato, Two Potato. The cake is unconventional because the batter includes potato, which makes it moist and earthy. It is best if made a day ahead of time. For Fourth of July, you can make this a flag cake in a 9×13 sheet pan and top it with vanilla or boiled icing. Make red stripes with food coloring applied to a small amount of icing and use blueberries for stars. My mother always made a flag cake on July Fourth. 

When my husband was a child he misheard the name of the holiday. He thought July Fourth was “July Force.” That makes sense in a way. The day has all the force of July.

Farmhouse Chocolate Cake
Makes one 10-inch tube cake

3/4 pound all-purpose potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
Coarse salt
Cocoa powder for dusting
5 ounces unsweetened chocolate, chopped
2 tablespoons honey (more…)

THE Rev. James Jackson writes:

With the beautiful paintings you’ve been posting lately, I thought you might enjoy this poem.
 
TO AN OAK TREE

           — E.C. Wells

Three hundred changing summers, winters too,
Since first the quivering sapling struggled through,
A hundred thousand days since you were born,
And took to earth from out the green acorn.
Survived the pounding hoof and rooting pig,
Put out first fragile arms, and then the big. (more…)

AN ANONYMOUS reader wrote this to Washington Post columnist Carolyn Hax:

I hope this doesn’t sound too pathetic. My wife asked me what I wanted for Father’s Day this year; I said, “sex.” I figured it would be free and not too much trouble. (more…)

EMILY HALL writes:

A very good friend of mine recently introduced me to your blog. Since then I haven’t gone a single day without perusing your archives. I am writing for two reasons. The first is to provide you with a link to my blog in which I have mentioned you. The second reason requires a much lengthier discussion.

I’d like to thank you for helping me solve an issue I was wrestling with. (more…)

JOHN E. writes:

There is in the statement of Christine Lagarde’s that you quoted, a refusal to accept the world as it is, and a shaking of the fist at God’s creation, albeit in a “personally charming and likable” way. (more…)

CHRISTINE LAGARDE, the French finance minister just appointed to replace Dominique Strauss-Kahn as head of the International Monetary Fund, told journalist Christiane Amanpour last October, in a remark typical of the Feminine Superiority Complex, that women are more suited to major financial deal-making because they “inject less libido and less testosterone into the equation. … It helps in the sense that we don’t necessarily project our egos into cutting a deal.”

But, wait, isn’t the claim that she has no ego egotistical? NPR reports further on Lagarde, who is the first chief executive goddess in the post and who thus will bring a startlingly new perspective to global finance, a perspective that has nothing to do with self-interest:

Edwin Truman, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, has met Lagarde on several occasions. He says her style is both politically forceful but personally charming and likable.

“She is an aggressive spokesperson for the advancement of women in everything,” he says. “And indeed the truth of the matter is [that] in the economic and financial area, women are for a variety of reasons underrepresented.”

How does one promote the advancement of women in everything? Better yet, how does one do it without showing rank favoritism? And when would the advancement of women in everything achieve its goal?

Something tells me this everything does not include the realm of housewifery. I may be wrong; it’s just a hunch. Let me propose an end point for this project. The campaign for Worldwide Female Advancement must not end until every woman is head of the International Monetary Fund. That’s a fair and modest goal.

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WRITING AT VFR, Sage McLaughlin responds to a commenter who says that blacks were better off under slavery than they are in communities that are violent and chaotic. McLaughlin writes:

American blacks after Reconstruction and before the civil rights era made fantastic progress in terms of education, productivity, and overall well-being. (more…)