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Move Over Vagina Costumes: Fendi Debuts $990 Designer ‘Vulva Scarf’ By Megan Fox (!!!!????)

By on October 18th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/move-over-vagina-costumes-fendi-debuts-1300-designer-vulva-scarf/

Move over vagina costumes and pu**y hats! There’s a new ridiculously offensive genitalia-themed apparel on the loose thanks to designer Fendi.

Yes, just imagine! The Women’s Marchers have really got to be jumping on this one, although $990 for a hairy muff seems a little steep. But when you’re woke, no amount of money is too much to spend on protest gear.

The photoshop opportunities for this monstrosity cannot be underestimated, though.I don’t know what this says, but whatever it is, it’s super hilarious when you turn this scarf upside down. This tweet is proof that Fendi is reaching a worldwide audience with this horror of a fall “must-not-have.”

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Lionel Trilling’s Jewish Problem A leading light of the famous New York Intellectuals harbored deeply conflicted feelings about his own Jewishness, and exceptionally harsh views on Jews and Judaism. Edward Alexander

By on October 16th, 2018

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2018/10/lionel-trillings-jewish-problem/

Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) was the grand master of America’s “Age of Criticism.” A renowned literary authority who taught for many years at Columbia University, Trilling was an influential member of the grouping that came to be known as the New York Intellectuals, a highly respected voice in public arguments concerning matters social, cultural, and political—and a Jew with (to put it mildly) conflicted views on Jews and Judaism.

While a full biography of Trilling remains to be written, he makes a central appearance in numerous studies of intellectual and political culture in mid-20th-century America as well as in memoirs by his wife Diana Trilling and by many friends, colleagues, students, and sparring partners. There is also a collection of his major essays, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent (edited by Leon Wieseltier, 2000). And now, most recently, both the man and his work speak for themselves in Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling. The volume is edited by Adam Kirsch, an accomplished critic and poet and himself the author of an earlier brief study, Why Trilling Matters (2011).

Life in Culture, a kind of epistolary biography, consists of 270 letters culled from the thousands available. All of them but one were written by Trilling himself; there is none by his interlocutors, though Trilling does frequently quote passages from their letters in the course of grappling with their thoughts. Kirsch helpfully identifies these interlocutors, but the book lacks a glossary, and Kirsch’s own annotations are minimal—a possible obstacle for readers unacquainted with the persons, the issues, or the circumstances being addressed.

Trilling was a prodigious correspondent, who once estimated that he wrote about 600 letters a year. That he was also a generous correspondent I can testify as a former student whose letters he never failed to answer (and for whom he also performed two remarkable acts of personal kindness). Nor did he fastidiously decline to respond to non-literary people asking for advice about “writing” from a famous English professor; to the contrary, as Life in Culture demonstrates, they would get wise and feeling replies.

Many of the letters in Kirsch’s book are copious, and some are of enormous length, especially when Trilling is engaged in argument and quoting his adversary in full or near-full. From Kirsch’s selections, three major themes emerge: Trilling’s politics; his ambivalence about his own literary vocation (is he a critic, or a novelist?); and his permanently uneasy relation to Jews and Judaism. For our purposes here, I’ll focus only on the last.

In his magisterialintellectual biography (1939) of the great Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, begun as a Columbia doctoral dissertation, Trilling gave a detailed account of the strident opposition mounted by Arnold’s father, a prominent educator and liberal church leader, to the admission of Jews to London University. Thomas Arnold could not countenance a scheme that would mark “the first time that education in England was avowedly unchristianized for the sake of accommodating Jews.”

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Lionel Trilling: America’s Matthew Arnold Edward Alexander

By on October 16th, 2018

http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/7269/full

The recent publication of a selection of letters by Lionel Trilling — 270 chosen out of thousands available to an editor in the archives — affords an opportunity to reflect on the importance of this grand master of the Age of Criticism in the middle of the last century. Trilling rose to prominence in 1950 with the publication of his third book, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. It sold in numbers unprecedented for a book of criticism — 70,000 copies in hard cover, and 100,000 in paperback — and made Trilling the most influential mind in the culture of the Fifties.

But Trilling’s importance in the development of American literary culture and the place of Jews in that culture goes back to the time when he was a doctoral candidate at Columbia University in New York and to a now unremembered predecessor there named Ludwig Lewisohn. Lewisohn, a Berlin-born Jew who made himself into a southern Christian gentleman in Charleston, had to leave Columbia in 1903 without his doctorate because he was, in the eyes of Columbia’s English Department faculty, irredeemably Jewish. Like many a Jewish student of English after him, Lewisohn was told that he should not (or could not) proceed in his studies because the prejudice against hiring Jews in English departments was insuperable. Two decades later, reflecting on the appointment of a number of Jewish scholars in American colleges, he noted that in one discipline alone the old resistance remained firm: “Prejudice has not . . . relented in a single instance in regard to the teaching of English.” Perhaps this was because the study of English, unlike that of science or philosophy, was intimately bound up with the particularities of culture, for it was precisely the study of the mind of Western Christianity. What Bernard Berenson called the “Angry Saxons” who ran English departments were determined to protect Tennyson’s “treasure of the wisdom of the West” from barbarous Eastern (European) invaders. (I heard the very same story of rejection decades later from Irvin Ehrenpreis, who recovered sufficiently to become the consummate biographer of Jonathan Swift, but never got a PhD in English.)

Almost nothing of this part of Trilling’s story appears in this volume of letters (Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $35, edited by Adam Kirsch). But Trilling did tell it, and very sardonically, in his notebooks of April and May of 1936, when Columbia’s English faculty tried to discontinue his appointment. “The reason for dismissal is that as a Jew, a Marxist, a Freudian, I am uneasy. This hampers my work and makes me unhappy.” His colleagues would undertake to cure his unhappiness by dismissing him before he could complete his degree and thereby strengthen his claim on a tenured position.

Trilling, never one to avoid a fight, confronted his professorial “accusers,” indeed “made date to annihilate [them],” and particularly his dissertation supervisor Emery Neff, who reportedly complained that Trilling had “involved himself with Ideas,” that he was overly “sensitive,” and didn’t really “fit [in] because he was a Jew.” This was not the last time that Trilling’s mentor would abandon him. Twenty-three years later, after Trilling had given a famously “heretical” lecture about Robert Frost’s poetry that aroused a storm of controversy, he wrote to me as follows: “Since we speak of teachers and scholarship, you will readily understand that the startling — and grotesque — part of the incident was that my old teacher Emery Neff, who taught me most of what I know about scholarship, denounced me with no knowledge of the text of what I had said.”

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PC Culture The Word ‘Problematic’ Declared Problematic By Katherine Timpf

By on September 20th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/the-word-problematic-declared-problematic/

‘Problematic’ is problematic because it’s not specific enough.

According to an essay written by a Dartmouth student, the word “problematic” is actually in itself kind of problematic or something.

“The word problematic . . . gives people a way out, easing the burden of identifying exactly what about the state of the word gives people unease,” Steven Chun writes in an essay titled, “The Problem with ‘Problematic’” for the school’s newspaper, The Dartmouth.

Chun explains that although he does not think that people who use the word “problematic” are necessarily “in the wrong,” and although the word “captures so many of the ills that plague us: racism, ableism, twisted power dynamics, ignorance, discrimination, injustice, and the intersection of every one of those evils,” it is still “vague and incomplete.”

“It doesn’t tell us which injustice has taken place,” Chun writes. “In fact, it allows us to ignore the details completely.”

“Problematic means you know it’s wrong and that’s enough,” he continues.

According to Chun, however, simply knowing that something is wrong is not enough. Rather, you still need to know the answers to questions such as “Where does the injustice lie and what societal values has it violated?” and “Is it disrespectful to a culture or peoples? If so, are historical power dynamics at play?”

“These are the questions we must ask ourselves if we are to know how and where to respond to injustice,” he writes.

Chun advises that, instead of using the word “problematic,” people should stay silent until they have more specific words to describe what’s wrong before speaking.

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Paul Collits: Sanity Banished, Standards Cast Down

By on September 14th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/09/sanity-banished-standards-cast/

Western societies no longer exhibit true virtue, having traded the genuine article for the posturing which draws applause on Twitter. They no longer yearn for excellence. They do not seek truth. What we have witnessed is a wholesale collapse in the decency of our institutions.

That great culture warrior and conservative, Douglas Murray, recently observed, following a visit to Australia:

I cannot think of a time when more people have lost their minds — opponents and erstwhile allies alike. I am a minimalist in my expectations for this era. I think our main job is not to be driven mad. Or at least not to behave in ways that will make us feel shame in the future.

Well might we feel broad and deep shame for our era. Conservatives, many of us, have all but given up on the party of Menzies, as it lurches from crisis to crisis, unseats elected leaders at will, sidelines just about everybody to the right of Clive Hamilton, and engages in systemic fixing, branch-stacking, the career-destruction of enemies and lining the pockets of mates.

The once great Labor Party, the party of Curtin and Chifley, has upended its old, honest, defensible, socially conservative policies and embraced holus-bolus the core ideas of the post-1968 generation of post-modernist ratbaggery.

Those once trusted organisations, the banks, have their criminal acts and corporate idiocies paraded before us on a daily basis.

Sporting codes embrace cloying political correctness, especially as it relates to race and sex, and enforce it with sanctions.

Corporations bully employees who dare to challenge the party line of big (social liberal) brother.

Fake news abounds. The very term, newly coined to describe old, old practices, is itself used as a weapon. The media, once able to differentiate news from opinion, no longer does or can. The ABC is no longer the network of James Dibble, having adopted activism and partisan advocacy as its virtuous mission.

Institutions of higher learning stop (certain) people from speaking on their campuses, lest someone be offended. The universities accept money from all comers — save those who simply wish to teach literature, philosophy and history as they have been taught for a millennium. Police forces now charge (monetarily) the innocent while failing to charge (legally) the patently guilty.

Scientists, those supposed exemplars of Enlightenment thinking, have in large measure opted for groupthink and venal grant-troughing even when this means the abandonment of scientific method.

That foundational institution, the source of all others, the family, now cannot even be defined without bastardising its core characteristics. The family is now, to borrow from Paul Keating, two gays and a cocker spaniel. Or whatever we want it to be.

Institutions across the whole of Western society no longer have standards. They no longer exhibit true virtue, having traded that for the posturing which draws applause on Twitter. They no longer yearn for excellence. They do not seek truth. What we have witnessed is, in effect, a wholesale collapse in the decency of our institutions.

Melanie Phillips, in one of her excellent books, describes a world “upside down”. Murray talks of the “shame” of our era. The traditionalist Catholic rag The Remnant – no fan of the current pope, of course – featured a recent, “Vatican going bonkers”.

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The Diversity Delusion How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture Heather Mac Donald

By on September 10th, 2018

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/diversity-delusion

By the national bestselling author of The War on Cops: a provocative account of the erosion of humanities and the rise of intolerance

America is in crisis, from the university to the workplace. Toxic ideas first spread by higher education have undermined humanistic values, fueled intolerance, and widened divisions in our larger culture. Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton? Oppressive. American history? Tyranny. Professors correcting grammar and spelling, or employers hiring by merit? Racist and sexist. Students emerge into the working world believing that human beings are defined by their skin color, gender, and sexual preference, and that oppression based on these characteristics is the American experience. Speech that challenges these campus orthodoxies is silenced with brute force.

The Diversity Delusion argues that the root of this problem is the belief in America’s endemic racism and sexism, a belief that has engendered a metastasizing diversity bureaucracy in society and academia. Diversity commissars denounce meritocratic standards as discriminatory, enforce hiring quotas, and teach students and adults alike to think of themselves as perpetual victims. From #MeToo mania that blurs flirtations with criminal acts, to implicit bias and diversity compliance training that sees racism in every interaction, Heather Mac Donald argues that we are creating a nation of narrowed minds, primed for grievance, and that we are putting our competitive edge at risk.

But there is hope in the works of authors, composers, and artists who have long inspired the best in us. Compiling the author’s decades of research and writing on the subject, The Diversity Delusion calls for a return to the classical liberal pursuits of open-minded inquiry and expression, by which everyone can discover a common humanity.

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Ron Pike :The Darkening

By on August 31st, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/08/darkening/

I suspect many others share my grave concern for the Australia our grandchildren will inherit. Will they even know what has been lost, having been ‘educated’ to accept not the supremacy of history, logic, fact and rational argument but the doctrines favoured by their ‘educators’?

Growing up as I did in the Riverina in the Forties and Fifties, we had a large Aboriginal population and a huge influx of settlers after both world wars, mostly from Europe but mixed with smaller numbers of Asians from many countries. We were unaware of racism or division on ethnic lines so manifest today. Everyone was striving to build a better life and I warmly remember a great sense of unity of purpose.

We were building a better homeland after defending our freedom in two horrific conflicts. New arrivals were fleeing countries shattered and divided by war and most were prepared to start again, work hard, build better lives side by side with Aussies doing the same thing.

Our goals were similar because we were united by the vast land we shared and the opportunities offered by it. We went to school together, we played sport together, we helped one another at harvest time and worked with our dads most weekends. We fished the ‘Bidgee and shot rabbits in the hills. We trusted our ABC as the purveyor of our local, national and overseas news and never doubted its accounts of events far and wide, let alone the invaluable market reports and weather forecasts. We sat around the radio and listened to the ABC relay the Test cricket and Davis Cup. We trusted our national broadcaster and knew its local reporters as neighbours and friends. Respect cemented all those relationships, which flourished without regard to skin colour or ethnic origin.

Multiculturalism and diversity were words we never used and probably wouldn’t have understood had they been invented in those days. By the time we left school and went to work we all considered ourselves Australians and patriotic Australians to boot. We knew and understood that “the land of a fair go” meant equal opportunities for all. As to outcomes, we accepted that hard work and, yes, luck shaped them and our fortunes. We appreciated that this was our larrikin way of endorsing the same philosophy grandiosely expressed in the American Declaration of Independence – “that all men are created equal and are thus endowed with the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

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Save the Culture from the Modern Vandals By Michael Walsh

By on August 30th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/29/required-reading-

By now, it’s become a parlor game: which movies, even from the recent past, could and would not be made today? “Blazing Saddles,” for sure, and perhaps even “Pulp Fiction,” for their relentless use of the “n-word.” Any film with gratuitous female nudity: say goodbye to almost everything from the 1970s, ’80s and into the ’90s, including films as disparate as “Serpico,” “Species,” “Last Tango in Paris,” “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and “American Pie.”

Time was when Bowdlerism and pecksniffery were alleged to be characteristics of conservative Christians and small-town Babbitts: reactionary squares from Squaresville, who couldn’t handle a little overt sexuality or transgressive humor from the likes of Lenny Bruce. These days, the censorship comes almost exclusively from the perpetually outraged cultural-Marxist Left. Like their Soviet, Chinese, and Cambodian forebears, they cannot abide anything that does not conform to their world-view right this minute, and therefore must constantly update their “Index of Forbidden Books, Films, Words, and Cultural Artifacts.”

Whoops—there goes Dustin Hoffman’s star turn in “Lenny.” And Quentin Tarantino’s Oscar for “Pulp Fiction.” And Phoebe Cates’s magnificent bosom, which gave hope (however fantastic) to nerds across America that someday they, too, might actually see such wonders in the flesh. And pretty much everything else since the great cultural revolution of the late 1960s overthrew the Production Code and sent the Legion of Decency scurrying off into the sunset. If they can come for Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad, they can come for anybody.

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How to Think about Privilege By Graham Hillard

By on August 27th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/whiteness-meaningless-catch-all-progressive-epithet/

‘Whiteness’ is not a helpful shorthand.

Some years ago, a friend of mine who was employed by a state indoctrination center (all right, a public school) was made to participate in a faculty-development exercise whose ideological preoccupations are by now familiar. Facing each other in a circle, the assembled teachers were directed to take a step backward whenever they could claim one of the “advantages” read from an administrator’s list. Born in the United States? Take a step. Raised in a two-parent home? Step again. Fortunate enough to attend college? Step once more. Perhaps because my friend was forced to back nearly out of the building, he intuited quickly enough the activity’s message. His middle-class life was no longer to be understood as a product of his (and his parents’) diligence and sacrifice but as something undeserved, ugly, even oppressive.

My friend, reasonably enough, was horrified. But now I wonder if the era when that exercise took place should be regarded as the good old days.

One of the retrospective charms of the millennium’s first decade is the fact that the various privileges identified by my friend’s principal hadn’t yet cohered (at least outside academic circles) into the rhetorical catch-all of “whiteness.” Conversations about inequality could still be had — indeed, sometimes they were even useful — but the Left remained sweetly unaware of its ability to evoke a whole host of disparities with a mere sneering reference (“white people”) to 60 percent of the population. A single cultural turning point is impossible to mark, but one could do worse than to point to the progressive beatification of Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose contributions to public discourse are perhaps best summed up by his absurd remark to Evanston Township High School students that “when you’re white in this country, you’re taught that everything belongs to you.”

That such a claim is unfalsifiable using any tools currently in vogue — any tools, that is, except reason and observation — is only part of its appeal. The remainder derives from its usefulness as intellectual shorthand: It allows the speaker to substitute a threatening abstraction (“Boo! Whiteness!”) for an actual discussion of the hugely complicated inequalities that obtain in American society.

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Mark McGinness Leonard Bernstein: A Place for Him

By on August 26th, 2018

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/08/leonard-bernstein-theres-place/

The first US conductor/composer to conquer Europe and the man who made ‘West Side Story’ the remarkable and enduring achievement it is, his passing prompted friend and fellow composer Ned Rorem to observe how ‘Lenny led four lives in one, so he was not 72, but 288’.

A century ago today, the most famous, the most influential, the most versatile, the most restless, the most extraordinary American musician of the twentieth century was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Louis Bernstein was soon to astound his Ukrainian Jewish parents, Jenny Resnick, and Samuel Bernstein, a Talmudic scholar and supplier of barber and beauty products. In 1927, Samuel acquired the only local licence to sell the Frederics Permanent Wave machine for curling hair. Of course, he hoped his eldest son would follow him into the family firm.

When Louis was ten, his Aunt Clara, enmeshed in divorce proceedings, sent her upright piano to his parents’ house for storage. He apparently took one look at the instrument, hit the keys and then proclaimed, “Ma, I want lessons.” By his early teens, the prodigy had mastered it. He staged operettas with friends; he performed as a jazz pianist; he played light classics on the radio. This medium, and especially its successor, television, brought to America and the world Leonard (Lenny), as he officially became at 16, after his grandmother’s death.

He received a B.A. in music from Harvard in 1939, then studied conducting with Fritz Reiner at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute. Reiner apparently gave Bernstein the only A he ever awarded. In the summers of 1940 and 1941, he was a student of Serge Koussevitzky at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, Massachusetts. Koussevitzky became a close friend when Bernstein joined in 1942 as his assistant. He would succeed him as head of conducting at Tanglewood in 1951 and returned there to conduct his last concert in 1990.

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