{"id":109095,"date":"2017-03-22T09:40:39","date_gmt":"2017-03-22T13:40:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=109095"},"modified":"2017-03-22T10:53:08","modified_gmt":"2017-03-22T14:53:08","slug":"were-a-nation-of-smirking-persons-and-other-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/22\/were-a-nation-of-smirking-persons-and-other-news\/","title":{"rendered":"We\u2019re a Nation of Smirking Persons, and Other News"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_109096\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/c7e0or-xgae5ylk.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-109096\" class=\"wp-image-109096\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/c7e0or-xgae5ylk.jpg\" width=\"1000\" height=\"643\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/c7e0or-xgae5ylk.jpg 1197w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/c7e0or-xgae5ylk-300x193.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/c7e0or-xgae5ylk-768x494.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/c7e0or-xgae5ylk-1024x659.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-109096\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Walt Whitman, famously unsmirking American.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Here\u2019s the problem with America, as Walt Whitman saw it: we\u2019re \u201ca nation of smirking persons\u201d when we should be one \u201cof sane and cleanfleshed men.\u201d For this, we may blame the restive, costive decadence of city life, which has produced \u201ca set of sickly milk-and-water men\u201d who \u201cbloat themselves with quantities of trash.\u201d This was true in 1858, when, under a pseudonym, Whitman wrote a series of columns on \u201cManly Health.\u201d And it\u2019s still true now, friends. Just last night, I bloated myself with quantities of trash, and I plan to do it again <em>immediately<\/em>. But fear not. There are a few things we can do, Whitman says, to reclaim our vigor: grow a beard, eat exclusively beef, sleep with the window open. His advice, as I\u2019ve written elsewhere, isn\u2019t always stirring, but it\u2019s hard to look away from the spectacle of masculine insecurity he presents: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/books\/page-turner\/lessons-on-male-insecurity-and-indigestion-from-walt-whitmans-mens-health-column\" target=\"_blank\">Where <em>Leaves of Grass<\/em> celebrates a man sublimely comfortable in his own skin, <em>Manly Health<\/em> is more likely to warn that skin is \u2018one of the great inlets of disease.\u2019<\/a> Whitman\u2019s column warns against potatoes, prostitutes, overthinking, hot beverages, and between-meal snacking, to name a few of his prohibitions. As for condiments: forget about them. Real men abjure catsup.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Christopher Benfey, writing on the German author Paul Scheerbart, has an important reminder: whatever you\u2019re building, build it out of glass. What, you think you\u2019re too good for glass? Get a clue! \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/daily\/2017\/03\/19\/a-well-ventilated-utopia-scheerbart\/\" target=\"_blank\">To bring our culture to a higher level, Scheerbart argued in\u00a0<em>Glass Architecture\u00a0<\/em>(1914), his marvelous utopian novel in the form of an aesthetic manifesto<\/a>, the heavy Wilhelmine buildings of brick and stone needed to be replaced with glass, \u2018which lets in the light of the sun, the moon, and the stars, not merely through a few windows, but through every possible wall, which will be made entirely of glass\u2014of colored glass.\u2019 One of his rhyming aphorisms might be translated: \u2018Without a palace of glass \/ Life is a pain in the ass.\u2019 \u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Laura Marsh remembers Bob Silvers\u2014and Bob Silvers\u2019s diction: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/newrepublic.com\/article\/141477\/magic-legacy-robert-silvers\" target=\"_blank\">During the years I worked at the\u00a0<em>Review<\/em>, our rituals were Bob\u2019s rituals and our vocabulary was his\u2014carefully edited\u2014vocabulary<\/a>. We flinched at empty descriptors like <em>compelling<\/em> and <em>massive <\/em>\u2026 The hardest words for me to let go of were <em>context<\/em> and <em>in terms of<\/em>. Once you stripped those away, you had to think about how one thing related to another (sometimes, you discovered, it didn\u2019t), and struggle to articulate it in more concrete language \u2026 He routinely worked late into the night, seven days a week, from behind a huge horseshoe-shaped control pad, piled disastrously high with manila folders.\u00a0It was not unusual to arrive at the office in the morning to find a haystack of memos in his outbox, and a desk strewn with blunted pencils and exhausted Wite-Out bottles.\u00a0If the\u00a0<em>Review\u00a0<\/em>was a rare place you could find rigorous thought, Bob made it that way not by magic but through an unwavering commitment to independence.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Tim Winton was born in Australia. It took a sojourn in Europe, with its radically compressed scale and \u201crelentlessly denatured\u201d environment, to bring his native landscape into sharp relief: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/placesjournal.org\/article\/the-island-seen-and-felt\/\" target=\"_blank\">Despite a peopled history of sixty thousand years, Australia remains a place with more land than people, more geography than architecture<\/a>. But it is not and never has been empty. Since people first walked out of Africa and made their way down to this old chunk of Gondwana when it was not yet so distant from Asia and the rest of the world, it has been explored and inhabited, modified and mythologized, walked and sung. People were chanting and dancing and painting here tens and tens of thousands of years before the advent of the toga and the sandal. This is true antiquity. Few landscapes have been so deeply known. And fewer still have been so lightly inhabited.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>\u201cSome dance to remember, some dance to forget,\u201d sang America\u2019s greatest poet, Don Henley. (NOTE: JOKE.) David Rieff is in the latter camp, as evidenced by his new book, <em>In Praise of Forgetting<\/em>. Phoebe Roy caught him at a debate recently: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.the-tls.co.uk\/articles\/public\/in-praise-of-forgetting\/\" target=\"_blank\">Rieff produced a polite but shocked murmur in the audience by describing George Santayana\u2019s maxim that \u2018those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it\u2019 as the dumbest thing ever said by a smart man<\/a>. His point was that although commemoration is respectful and right, whether or not it has a marked moral outcome is another matter. There is no evidence, for instance, that the memory of the Holocaust did anything to prevent Rwanda or Bosnia, or that it isn\u2019t used by some people as an exercise in self-absolution or, in the United States, as its own form of nationalism. Perhaps when we say that we have forgotten the lessons of any particular atrocity, an accusation leveled at many governments in response to the Syrian refugee crisis, what we mean is that we have found new ways to forget and reasons why this atrocity cannot be usefully compared to ones before it.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In today\u2019s roundup: Walt Whitman\u2019s precepts for manly heath; the many merits of glass; Bob Silvers\u2019s least favorite words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2512],"tags":[776,15217,12915,7881,22151,16957,2865,13874,4638,264],"class_list":["post-109095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-shelf","tag-australia","tag-forgetting","tag-glass","tag-landscape","tag-manly-health-and-training","tag-paul-scheerbart","tag-robert-silvers","tag-the-holocaust","tag-the-new-york-review-of-books","tag-walt-whitman"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Whitman Says: Quit Smirking and Eat Some Beef Already<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In today\u2019s arts and culture news: Walt Whitman\u2019s precepts for manly heath; 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