After watching a new production of Bellini’s Norma, Dalrymple muses on modern opera:

It often seems to me that the first qualification for producers of operas these days is proneness to severe lapses of taste, a kind of epilepsy of the judgment, or even a complete absence of aesthetic common sense. Orgies, if not actually a compulsory element of any production, are at least very frequent, however inappropriate they may be to the story or production as a whole. It is as if the plots of operas are not sufficiently melodramatic without the addition of a little light pornography.

Read the rest at Taki’s Magazine

Dalrymple writes at Salisbury Review on the beauty of finding the right word:

The morning after my arrival I was trying, without much success, to find main entrance [sic] and to go from thence to the room in which the conference I had come to address was being held. I came to a cross-road of two identical corridors and looked around me, trying to find some clue as to which direction to take. I must have looked bemused, for a guest was just about to enter his room, saw I was uncertain which way to go, and said, ‘Quite.’

What admirable concision! How much that one, beautifully-chosen word expressed!

Joseph Stiglitz is a celebrated economist, a Nobel Prize winner in fact. You would expect his public pronouncements to evince deep reflection and logical consistency on economic matters. Nope. It reminds Dalrymple of an interview he conducted with South African communist Joe Slovo years ago:

I had expected him to be able to fend off my question with ease by means of some sophisticated rationalization, the exposure of whose untruth and bad faith would have taken more time than I had at my disposal. But no, he was just not very clever.

Dalrymple at Taki’s Magazine

When it comes to politics, the internet and social media have created “not a Socratic dialogue but an outpouring of bile”, says Dalrymple at Salisbury Review…

This is a powerful reminder (and, as Doctor Johnson said, we need more often to be reminded than informed) that hatred is often the reverse side of the coin of humanitarian sentiment. Those who claim to wish humanity well often in practice wish their neighbour ill.

Read the rest here

TD weighs in at Taki’s Magazine on the burkini debate in France. He argues that it is usually difficult to tell when such religious restrictions are freely adopted or coerced, but in this case he thinks it’s the former:

…in the case of the burkini someone has made the rule that women on a beach must be dressed “modestly,” and that such modest dress is a precondition of permission to go on the beach. Permission from whom? The rule might be a mere diktat of men, but it might also be, and in my view probably is, a rule accepted by many of the women irrespective of its origin. In other words, to forbid such women from wearing the burkini would be an unjustified abrogation of their freedom, which is exactly the conclusion that the French courts reached.

Writing of European concern about further terrorist attacks from radical Islamists, Dalrymple says there is a “tendency to think of ‘radicalization’ as a kind of disease”, and now, in order to avoid the spread of the contagion, officials in France have built “five small, special penitentiaries for young radical Muslims found guilty of terror-related crimes”. But will the quarantining of these “patients” stop the spread or concentrate and intensify it?

Dalrymple at City Journal

My access to subscriber-only articles in the New Criterion is currently down, and while the techs look into it, maybe one of you can summarize this new piece by Dalrymple for us. The subhead indicates that it is about the “novelization of the life and death of Communist dissident Fernand Iveton”, whom Wikipedia informs me was executed for planting a bomb at a power station in Algeria, even though he intentionally set the bomb to explode at a time when no one would be hurt.

Read it here (subscription required)