Month: September 2021

In another, perhaps better world, Ian Fleming would have been a food writer. Like few other authors, he knows how to describe the joys of gourmandise. But Fleming does not just dwell on the pleasure of eating. He insists on naming specific brands of salmon, champagne, and shampoo, or whatever else his character comes us across, in a clear attempt to shape the taste of his readers in more senses than one. The Bond books are Bildungsromane for a post-war consumerist society, where the upper middle class needed to be told what products to buy and what salmon to savor.

“Til bords med Bond” (“Chez Bond”), Weekendavisen (24 September 2021). Link.

Danish. For a special issue of Weekendavisen on the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, I wrote three pieces, including an essay on political polarization, where I argue that there is a divide within polarization itself. We know that we belong to one of two warring factions who disagree about almost everything, but we still strive to reach general conclusions about the world, as if that split did not exist. Nobody represents this divide better than Dante, who was incessantly polemical and just as ambitious in his intellectual schemes. His poetry is made great by that tension between a polarized passion and a worldwide vision.

“Bogholderiet” (“Bookkeeping”), “Uenstemmigt” (“Ununanimous”), “Polariseringens poesi” (“The poetry of polarization”), Weekendavisen (9 September 2021). Link, link, link.

Danish. In a review of Ole Meyer’s translation (heavily indebted to this article by Colin Burrow), I discuss the Latin poet Propertius, who deployed a masterful command of poetic shiftiness to engineer a political scandal, rejecting the Augustan celebration of soldiery and pious marriages in favor of extramarital affairs. “Making love not war” has since ceased to be provocative, but Propertius remains as irksome as he was in antiquity, as his romances are full of spite, spittle, and misogynist violence. Propertius is not a poet for the times, but then again, he never was.

“Bittert bløddyr” (“Spiteful softy”), Weekendavisen (6 September 2021). Link.