Currently reading: Henry James: Collected Stories Volume 2 (Everyman’s Library) by Henry James 📚
leopards
Fifty or sixty years ago, one of the most common genres of nonfiction book in this country concerned advertising. Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (1957) and The Naked Society (1964), Wilson Bryan Key’s Subliminal Seduction (1973), and the many books that addressed the effects of television generally but included advertising as an essential element of their critique: Marie Winn’s The Plug-In Drug (1977), Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), George W. S. Trow’s In the Context of No Context (1980), Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985).
This kind of book doesn’t get published any more, because writers and publishers alike know that those authors definitively lost the battle they were fighting. And the white flag of surrender was run up the flagpole when David Foster Wallace published his brilliant and still-relevant essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” in 1993.
DFW’s essay is the Kafka’s Leopards moment in the American response to television advertising. Here is Kafka’s little parable: “Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers. This is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.”
Ezra Klein: “A town square controlled by one man isn’t a town square. It’s a storefront, an art project or possibly a game preserve.” Yep.
Lovely choral Evensong this evening at St. Alban’s. “Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night, for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.”
Catastrophic tactical error by Southgate: After an Arsenal legend scored for France, he brought off his Arsenal man. Everyone knows that only Arsenal can defeat Arsenal. 🏴 🇫🇷 ⚽️
NYT: “As weird as the story [Pinocchio] is, it’s been made all the stranger by the decision to turn it into a metaphor about fascism, a conceit that is as politically incoherent as it is unfortunately timed.” A movie's not “a metaphor about fascism” when it actually has fascists in it (including Mussolini himself).
Leo Strauss and the Closed Society by Matthew Rose | Articles | First Things:
Strauss was not the only thinker who turned to questions of education in the darkest days of the war. A few months later, Jacques Maritain delivered the Terry Lectures at Yale, calling for the renewal of the modern university through a rediscovery of Christian philosophy. Maritain was joined by T. S. Eliot, Simone Weil, C. S. Lewis, and Dorothy Sayers, whose wartime reflections on education gave voice to religious ideas that would succeed in inspiring postwar democratic movements, if not postwar universities.
Fascinating! Someone should write a book about all that.
The Struggle To Be Human - by Ian Leslie - The Ruffian:
Whether it’s music, movies or politics, we seem to be creating a world more amenable to AI by erasing more and more of what makes us, us. Even if we think we have got the better of this deal up until now, we shouldn’t assume we always will. A little resistance is prudent. The bar for being human has just been raised; the first thing we should do is stop lowering it.