Word: moderners
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Wallace committed suicide on Friday, at the age of 46. He might be remembered as the guy who brought footnotes back (his fiction is full of them), or the person who magnified Thomas Pynchon's reader-reaction paranoia into post-modern mega-epic. He did do those things. But Wallace was also the greatest horror novelist ever. In Infinite Jest a corporation-run unified North America of the near-future (dates have been replaced by sponsor names, such as the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar) is being decimated by a videotape so entertaining that people watch...
...agents of paternalism. Of course it follows that the trooper already conjured is predisposed to feel very differently about the speed limit. He likely has some incentive to racking up a certain number of dollars in traffic violations, reaching into the pockets of those very libertines—modern-day Patrick-Henries, all—whose tax-averse lifestyle the Granite State so loudly pretends to endorse. Perhaps this individual only likes seeing road-trip bonheur melt into something worse. There’s really no way of knowing. The point is that the power dynamic is such...
...Success in modern Europe, however, often comes at a price of diluting local tradition. Where once the launch of a new fishing vessel would have drawn hundreds of locals in their Sunday best to the quayside, the big draws at this year's Seafest were not fishing vessels but Viking warrior re-enactments, candy stores, carnival rides and a palmist called Amalia Lavengra. The largest boat in the harbor was not some weathered trawler, but the Donara II, a 34-foot yacht owned by Andy Stewart, Commodore of the Arbroath Sailing and Boating Club. "It's mixed emotions," says Alex...
...Small, all-but-forgotten towns like Arbroath capture in microcosm the tensions facing modern Scotland. Arbroath's hearts are tugged to the past, to tales of sea-faring greatness and also the Scottish identity-shaping myths of thwarted nationhood and lost sovereignty. An abbey overlooking the harbor holds the Declaration of Arbroath, a letter signed by local noblemen in 1320 demanding independence for Scotland. (The document is said to have inspired America's own Declaration of Independence). The dominant political party in Arbroath is the Scottish National Party (SNP), a left-leaning party that wishes to declare independence from...
...always this way. French Catholicism is known as the "eldest daughter" of the Church, for having pledged allegiance to Rome in the Second Century; and in the 14th century, the southern town of Avignon even served as the temporary home to the papacy. But France is also where modern anti-clericalism became ascendant with the 1789 Revolution, which eventually led to the thick black line separating church and state known as laïcité, and the arrival of humanist reason as the guiding principle in contemporary culture...