In the TLS, Austin Spendlowe says that my biography of Paradise Lost is βan enduringly readable work of intellectual history that will justify the ways of Milton to many.β
I’m not a Jacob Collier fan, but if you’re a guitarist, this conversation with Paul Davids is riveting and enormously generative of musical ideas. Now I’m wanting one of his five-string guitars. β«
I pity the fool who doesn’t have a subscription to The Hedgehog Review, because there are many cool things in the new issue, among the least cool of which is my review of a new collection of CzesΕaw MiΕosz’s post-WW2 poems. “If you read the poems collected here in chronological order, what you will see, primarily, is a man thinking about hope β what sustains it, and what happens when you lose it.”
Polish movie posters really are nuts.
The fine gentlemen at The Rest Is History struggled, in their new series on Queen Elizabeth I, to explain the religious differences that afflicted England in her time. As it happens, thereβs a biography of the Book of Common Prayer that succinctly explains many of the key points. Just saying.
Finished reading: Silent Spring Revolution by Douglas Brinkley. A fascinating book, though marred by its Heroes & Villains approach. I won’t say too much about it now, because I will have a long essay that draws on it in a future issue of The Hedgehog Review. But I will say now that we’ve seen a decline in effective environmental advocacy that’s due in part to overly abstract writing β too much about “the planet” and not enough about particular places β and also to a lack of focus, as illustrated by this NYT report on the collapse of the Sierra Club. It’s tough watching the big tech companies building these ecosystem-destroying datacenters with almost no coordinated resistance on behalf of the communities affected.
How cool is this? My friend and former colleague Shawn Okpebholo has just been nominated for a Grammy! The nomination in the Best Contemporary Classical Composition category is for his wondrous song cycle Songs in Flight.