Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, in The Lost Week-End (1940), their generally fascinating and informative social history of Great Britain between the world wars, make a great many Olympian pronouncements. They say, for instance, that Auden “perhaps never wrote an original line,” a c … | Continue reading
The Five Spot, on St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan, hosted most of the great jazz musicians of the middle part of the twentieth century — Charles Mingus, for instance: It was also a block-and-a-half from 77 St. Mark’s Place, which is where for a long time Auden lived for about half … | Continue reading
My recent posts on how I choose what fiction to read and what’s going on with the publishing industry share a theme: perverse incentives. (Indeed, it seems that a lot of my writing is about perverse incentives, but more about that another time.) The intellectual/political monocul … | Continue reading
Elle Griffin seems to have carved out a niche for herself telling hard truths to would-be writers – which is an unpleasant but useful service, I think. But there’s one troublesome point I think she actually understresses — though it will take me a few minutes to get to that point … | Continue reading
I have an essay coming out in the July issue of Harper’s which I titled “The Mythical Method” but which will probably end up with the title “Yesterday’s Men: The Death of the Mythical Method.” It concerns the rise and fall of myth as a central, or perhaps at times the central, co … | Continue reading
Isaiah Berlin, “The Originality of Machiavelli”: The ideals of Christianity are charity, mercy, sacrifice, love of God, forgiveness of enemies, contempt for the goods of this world, faith in the life hereafter, belief in the salvation of the individual soul as being of incomparab … | Continue reading
Matt Crawford, on Substack: Probing his riding companions, Robert [Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance] comes to understand that John and Sylvia’s attitude of non-involvement with “technology” is emblematic of a wider phenomenon that was then emerging, a counterc … | Continue reading
The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but that is the way to bet. — Hugh E. Keogh There’s too much to read, right? Especially contemporary fiction. Too many choices. You have to develop a strategy of selection, a method of triage. I will always read … | Continue reading
The way we speak and think of the Puritans seems to me a serviceable model for important aspects of the phenomenon we call Puritanism. Very simply, it is a great example of our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the … | Continue reading
A brief follow-up to this post from last week: In our current climate of political assholery, no self-described “activist” can answer what I think of as an essential question: If you get what you want, what will be the costs? Every choice — every choice ever made by every human b … | Continue reading
N.B. This post is spoilerful. A few years ago I read a fascinating post by my colleague Philip Jenkins about Gene Wolfe’s 1975 novel Peace. I had read Peace many years ago but didn’t remember anything about it, and Philip’s post reminded me that there’s a complicated discourse su … | Continue reading
I think there’s a strong causal relationship between (a) the overly structured lives of children today and (b) the silly political stunts of protestors and “activists.” As has often been noted, American children today rarely play: they engage in planned, supervised activities com … | Continue reading
The Internet’s New Favorite Philosopher | The New Yorker: Maret is part of a growing coterie of readers who have embraced [Byung-Chul] Han as a kind of sage of the Internet era. Elizabeth Nakamura, a twentysomething art-gallery associate in San Francisco, had a similar conversion … | Continue reading
Beyond daylight ethics by Alan Jacobs. Originally published 7 Apr, 2023.This is really interesting on the Daoism and emptying in le Guin, and the not-so-light-and-dark elements of Tolkein.Reply to this link on my website → | Continue reading
One of the fascinating subplots of Kim Stanley Robinson’s great Mars trilogy — though it’s not so much a subplot as an evolving context — relates to the rise of what KSR calls the transnationals: v… | Continue reading