In which I write about the greatness of Baird Whitlock and the power of the movies.
There will be a series of these in the coming weeks (during which I’ll have little time to write): posts adapted from a book proposal that neither my agent nor any editor I talked to was interested in. Maybe I should use my big blog exclusively to post rejected book proposals. I have several. It looks like I’ll be going to my grave not having written any of the books I had most hoped to write — because if I want to do it, the rest of the world is indifferent to it. This is the unbreakable rule.
Here’s a post on why an argument about how humanists’ defenses of the humanities are bad is itself a worse argument than the ones it critiques. I’m gonna have to write a follow-up to this but … not soon.
Substack’s decision to turn itself into a social network has been successful in at least one sense: With a few exceptions (Austin Kleon for instance), Substackers only link and respond to other Substackers. For people deeply invested in that platform, Substack is the internet. They’re living in a tightly constrained world that they think is vast and open.
No þinge is meriar þen Ihesu to synge. — Richard Rolle
Austin in the 1950s. I saw the premiere of Malick’s A Hidden Life at the Paramount in 2019. Congress looks a little different now.