The new year is nearly upon us. We'd like to take this opportunity to thank our sponsor, Amazon.ca, and its staff, a truly fine bunch, for their continued support. We also want to thank Canada Council and Heritage Canada. Their generous support has ensured BiC's survival. They truly are champions of the arts in this country. We want to thank the Ontario Media Development Corporation as well for a hefty business development grant, and finally, our loyal contributors and readers. Not a single issue would be possible without them.

One can playfully connect T.S. Eliot and bullshit in this issue, but to see how, we'd have to work backwards. Hypocrisy denotes conduct that is wittingly based on a double standard-one set of rules for other people, another for oneself. This, and many other related concepts, are fleshed out in the noteworthy Hypocrisy: Ethical Investigations by BTla Szabados and Eldon Soifer. Not everyone who believes in the need for different standards is a hypocrite however. As Harry G. Frankfurt eloquently argues in his small book, On Bullshit, the majority of us have been so thoroughly 'educated' not to question the value systems of others, we no longer dare suggest we're speaking the 'truth'. Instead, we insist, defensively, that we're being 'sincere'. In this fashion, we not only absolve ourselves of the obligation to get at the truth (by implying that it is unattainable among so many competing versions of it), we also preemptively clear ourselves of the possible charge of hypocrisy.
With so much ambiguity surrounding this and that, it isn't surprising to see the publication of a book like John Carey's What Good are the Arts?. According to reviewer, T. F. Rigelhof, this "is a more-than-raw but not fully-baked polemic on behalf of the little man against purveyors of high art theories of pretty much every description." The arts, Carey argues, have been usurped by snobs, self-styled connoisseurs, and those they define as artists. Thus, art has more than its fair share of pretense or bullshit about it. The Waste Land is a case in point for Carey. Better to try and establish a real standard for assessing the value of art. But there are problems with what Carey's proposes. Quoted by Rigelhof, critic John Armstrong comments on Carey's standards:
"[Carey] defines 'art' in the most lax and empty way: it is whatever anyone has ever called-for whatever reason-art. Then he defines 'good' in the most stringent and demanding terms. 'Good', for Carey, means relieving world poverty and helping injured strangers. It is obviously out of the question that art (as he defines it) could be systematically connected with goodness (as he defines it) . . . A more relevant question is whether the best works of art have high intrinsic value. Is experience of appreciating such works valuable in itself? Carey rejects this line of thought; he holds that there is no scientific way of measuring the worth of an experience; and no rational basis for preferring one kind of experience to another."

Within this context, Lawrence Rainey's Revisiting the Waste Land, an in-depth look at the writing of T.S. Eliot's esoteric, allegedly "unintelligible" poem, acquires added dimension. Why read a poem with so many allusions to literature of antiquity, allusions even the learned reader cannot parse? Of what use is art that demands so much of its readers? There are several satisfying answers to this question in this edition. Start by reading Todd Swift's comparative review of John Banville's The Sea and Zadie Smith's On Beauty. Read Lyall Bush's piece on Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, and Ray Robertson's essay on Lewis M. Dabney's Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature. And before hitting the poetry section, take a look at Peter Yan's review of Stauffenberg, A Family History, 1905-1944 by Peter Hoffmann. There is an intriguing reference to the poet Stefan George, who is described as "a German hybrid of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound". His poetry and its Edenic vision of a lost but recoverable Germany "guided Stauffenberg's convictions and. . . acted like an antidote, rendering him immune to the Nazi ideology and propaganda of his time." It was Count Stauffenberg who tried but failed to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944.
Happy Holidays!