Recent Highlights

My pan of the absurdly overrated Lord of the Rings films has been published in the Press, the New Zealand Herald, the Sunday Los Angeles Times, and the Australian. Here is the complete version from which these different edits derive.

Ken Chen, an old friend who is now a student at the Yale Law School, has written a very funny and perceptive piece on the Jackson’s Rings. Read it here.

The importance of maintaining equality before the law is the topic of this recent column in the Press and the New Zealand Herald.

Human Accomplishment, by Charles Murray, was the subject of a long review in the New Criterion. Murray’s book is a splendid achievement, so full of facts and hypotheses that critics have had a field day poking holes in it. While I poke a few, there is much to admire in this provocative work.

The Washington Post also ran this review of Jenifer Michael Hecht’s Doubt: A History.

You may have seen this photo in a black and white version:

It used to appear in blow-up form in the Margaret Mead Hall at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It was also reproduced in an abysmal book called Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, by Marianna Torgovnick. Thanks to help from friends at the Museum of Natural History and across Central Park at the Metropolitan Museum, I am able to present the original color version of the photo. For an updated account of the controversy surrounding it, click here.

The article on “Authenticity in Art” in Jerry Levinson’s Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics is now available here. This article discusses authenticity in music and in indigenous art, and places autheticity in the context of audience response.

“Forgery and Plagiarism,” an entry for The Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics, has finally made it to this site. You can read it here.

Charles Rosen’s new book, Piano Notes, is more than a wide-ranging account of piano artistry: is is also a meditation of the fate of modernism in music. Here’s my review.

Courses

By the way, the Guardian has some interesting (and rather negative) coverage of Troy, including an amusing quiz. Be sure to look over the Troy links you’ll find by scanning down the right-hand column of Arts & Letters Daily. The New York Times has now run a second review, one worth considering. The Washington Post review, on the other hand, seems almost childish in its pose of cool sophisitication.

More reviews are now appearing. Here is one that says it is a cartoonish joke of a film. Roger Ebert urges Homer’s estate to sue the producers. The Australian has this backgrounder from the Times of London. Robert McCrum has done a nice piece on Homer for the Observer, while The Age delivers a stinging pan of the film.

Here are a couple more reviews: Troy is “a clunky bit of storytelling that rarely rises above its source material.” “ Touched by glory and grandeur, Troy is a good film.”

Here is a very spirited defence of the film. And from an academic, a checklist of what is right, what wrong in the films translation of the Iliad.

Here is yet another backgrounder.

One of the best sources I’ve come across are new articles on the real history of Troy at the website for Archaeology magazine. Check it out here.