Dalrymple writes at the New English Review of a recent conversation with a defender of modern architecture:

One of the things that most struck me about my interlocutor was what one might call his aesthetic pointillism. Each tiny portion of a townscape was for him individual and unrelated to any other. Thus for him it would not be a sacrilege to erect a Dubai-style skyscraper in the middle of Venice on the grounds that it would destroy the aesthetic unity of the city (which, of course, is very far from that of a unity of style of individual buildings). The loss would not be irreparable because the vast majority of the city would remain intact. Needless to say, no heritage could long survive this pointillism: it is aesthetic barbarism.

A critic of Dalrymple’s earlier review (here) of New York’s new Whitney Musem says to look at this piece in the Guardian for “a more balanced” view. Dalrymple’s reply in City Journal asks whether the review in the Guardian is really better or just more “evasive and cowardly”.

Does “trumpeting awkwardness” in some way cancel out ugliness, and if so, why? Does the boldness of a criminal make his act any the less criminal? Note also that the author refrains from saying whether he (as against, presumably, most people) finds the building shockingly ugly. Nor is there any explanation as to why the ability to read “thin slivers of sense” (would it be better or worse if they were thick slices instead?) from “the great industrial bricolage” should—whatever to do so actually means—be a virtue in a great public building ostensibly dedicated to art.

Why is a private toll road in Britain free of the litter that mars a nearby public road? Dalrymple has several possible answers:

Perhaps the private company that owns it takes care of it better than any British council would do. Perhaps the class of person using it is different from those who decline to use it because of its cost. Or perhaps the people who use it, having paid for the privilege of doing so, are rendered more reluctant to ruin the appearance of what they pass through.

Read the rest at the Salisbury Review

To what extent are Greeks to blame for their country’s debt crisis? Does the sending of a severed pig’s head to a policeman via the post amount to a crime or a gift? To what extent is a woman responsible for stealing money to pay (supposedly) for her father’s kidney transplant?

These questions are not as disparate as you might think.

At Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple makes a point about many of those putative nationalist movements in Europe which I had not heard before: they are really covers for a more centralized and powerful European Union.

All the nationalisms that threaten to break up long-established states – Scottish, Catalonian or Flemish – seems strangely in favour of ever-closer European union (another cant term for construction). Independence, however, makes sense only where there is a strong degree of sovereignty, but European construction or ever-closer union means ever-less sovereignty for national states until it disappears altogether. The nationalists appear to want to jump out of what they think is a frying pan into the fire.

Meet Yanis Veroufakis, Greek Minister of Finances and the man Libération calls “the pop-star of the left”: Just another rich and privileged politician pretending to be something he is not.

In fact, Mr Veroufakis is that most conventional of figures, the adolescent who cannot bear to be fully adult, who wants to be 18 to 20 forever. In a few years’ time, indeed, we shall see the first eighty-year old adolescents. I don’t envy the geriatricians of the future.

Read the rest at Salisbury Review

Left alone in a small, private library for a few minutes… Such are the small pleasures of a person possessing curiosity and imagination.

There was obviously enough in that one room to stimulate a person for a lifetime, especially with the help of the internet. Now more than ever is what Pascal said true, that all of Mankind’s problems derive from our inability to remain alone quietly in a room.

Read the piece here

Michel Houellebecq’s new novel posits a Muslim political party winning power in France. Dalrymple says that such a scenario is very unlikely but notes that such a party has just been formed:

…the Union des Démocrates Musulmans Français (UDMF), which has only 900 members—200 joined after the attack on Charlie Hebdo and the publication of Soumission—but 8,000 “sympathizers.” The UDMF will run candidates for eight of the 2,000 available seats in the forthcoming local elections.

Writing at Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple examines the public reactions to two earthquakes: London in 1750 and Lisbon in 1755. Why was the reaction to the London earthquake (there were actually two that year) so desperate and fearful even though the earthquakes were relatively mild? Because one’s reaction depends largely on one’s perspective, and he quotes Rousseau’s famous reply to Voltaire on the same subject:

I cannot refrain, Sir, from remarking on the striking difference
between you and me on these matters. Full of glory and
disillusioned by vain triumphs, living in the seat of
abundance and sure of immortality, you philosophise serenely
on the nature of the soul, and if you suffer in body you have
Tronchin as doctor and friend; nevertheless, you find nothing but
evil on earth; while I, an obscure, poor man, tormented by an
illness without cure, meditate with pleasure in my retreat, and I find
that all is good.

Read it here