Today at the editor’s glance: Happy Father’s Day. Never a father himself, Philip Roth could write as well about fatherhood as Flaubert could about women. From “American Pastoral”: “Mr. Levov was one of those slum-reared Jewish fathers whose rough-hewn, undereducated perspective goaded a whole generation of striving, college-educated Jewish sons: a father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases, and beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking that he isn’t as easy to escape from as he seems. Limited men with limited energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their sons. It was our job to love them.” Compare that to these arid words from Henry James, another man–probably gay but too horrified to admit it–who never fathered more than words: “The child a man begets and rears weaves its existence insensibly into the tissue of his life, so that he becomes trained by fine degrees to the paternal office. But Roger had to skip experience, and spring with a bound into the paternal consciousness.” It’ll take me until next Father’s Day to figure it out. But there’s also this lovely line from Bertrand Russell (in “Why I Am Not a Christian”), written in the heyday of Eisenhower’s reign on the golf links: “The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one–particularly if he plays golf, which he usually does.” At the theaters: The Dave Letterman and Jay Leno of local stages–City Repertory Theatre and Flagler Playhouse, respectively–have matinees today, “The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey” at 2:30 p.m. at the Playhouse, and CRT’s “It’s All in the Timing” at 3 p.m. at the black box theater next to the Flagler Auditorium. Here’s a typical line from that series of mini-plays: “So even an assassin can make the flowers grow.” Euro 2020: Italy v. Wales and Switzerland v. Turkey both play at noon. Not as torrid today: Partly cloudy in the morning then becoming mostly cloudy. Chance of showers and slight chance of thunderstorms. Highs in the upper 80s. Southwest winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 50 percent.
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Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
For the full calendar, go here.
“I can sum up by saying that it would be a good thing if the next generation of American leftists found as little resonance in the names of Karl Marx and Vladimir Illych Lenin as in those of Herbert Spencer and Benito Mussolini. It would be an even better thing if the names of Ely and Croly, Dreiser and Debs, A. Philip Randolph and John L. Lewis were more familiar to these leftists than they were to the students of the 60s. For it would be a big help to American efforts for social justice if each new generation were able to think of itself as participating in a movement which has lasted for more than a century, and has served human liberty well. It would help if students became as familiar with the Pullman strike, the Great Coalfield War, and the passage of the Wagner Act, as with the march from Selma, the Berkeley free speech demonstrations, and Stonewall. Each new generation of students ought to think of American leftism as having a long and glorious history. They should be able to see, as Whitman and Dewey did, the struggle for social justice as central to their country’s moral identity.”
–Richard Rorty, from “Achieving Our Country” (1998).
