Golf and Trump’s America
While America might seem tied up in that tiny white golf ball, it hasn’t always been this way. Golf is another of the New World’s ‘Old World’ borrowings. According to the OED the game is of “considerable antiquity in Scotland”. It lends power, lineage, and legitimacy, and so it lends presidency. Trump, despite his usual twitter-friendly lexicon, recently used the definition to his own ends at the Trump National Golf Course in Sterling, Virginia, where he went to play after President-elect Joe Biden’s projected win.[1] It’s one thing for a President to play golf, but what does it mean for a President to turn to the sport in the immediate aftermath of his failure to regain office? The usual claims that golf offers respite from reality, a smooth deflection from abrupt decision-making, or a strategic space to strike up business deals all take a sinister twist. Was Trump trying to […]
Review: North American Resources at the British Library
The day formed a sort of whistle-stop tour of a public institution that wants to be used. The organisers were more than forthcoming about the importance of human resources in finding material. For all the database searches possible, the subject librarians themselves have decades of experience and indispensable knowledge which they want to disseminate more widely. Like the promotion of analogue, the human face becomes a mascot for remembering how scholarship must seek to maintain a contact with material reality, as it then gains capacity to enrich both academic and public spheres.