Alan Jacobs

from Caught by the River

Edward Mendelson: 

Many academics are far too sophisticated to take seriously the thought that literature is a special form of intimacy. Academic discourse tends to think of literature in impersonal, collective terms, typically as something that almost everyone, it seems, calls ‘cultural production’. It is of course true that works of literature are artefacts of cultural production, but true in the same trivial way that persons are artefacts of genetic production. It omits everything that makes a work interesting in itself, everything that makes it matter. The whole idea of literature as impersonal production rather than as a form of intimacy seems intellectually self-defeating. 

Well, my abandonment of this blog lasted less than a month. Here’s why, in a word: tags. When I decided to move quotes and links, as well as photos, to my micro.blog page, I forgot that I have been tagging my posts here for a long time, and that anything I post to micro.blog, where that tagging system doesn’t exist, will certainly be forgotten and will probably become effectively irretrievable. And anything worth posting is worth finding. So I am going to be posting quotes and links here where I can read and use them later. I’ll continue to use micro.blog for photos. 

I still plan to take an extended break from blogging as such, that is, from using this site to develop my own thoughts. But I now think that someday I will return to real blogging here. That’s largely because of all the kind messages I got after I announced my hiatus. It turns out that people read what I write here and profit from it. Who knew? (Certainly not me! I estimate that 95% of the messages I have received about the site over the years have been significantly or harshly critical. I really didn’t think that more than a dozen people read this site and liked it.) 

I have reposted here on this site a number of my essays and reviews, originally published elsewhere, that I’d like to preserve:

• “Reverting to Type” (a long autobiographical essay)
• “Choose Life” (about what church might be)
• “Raising Kael” (on Pauline Kael and Citizen Kane)
• “From the Abundance of the Heart”
• “The Devil’s Bargain” (a groping-my-way-forward essay I still think about)
• “On Loren Eiseley”
• A review of Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road 
• “Against Stupidity”
• Reviews of the sixth and seventh Harry Potter books
• “The Re-invention of Love” (on Anne Carson and Sappho)
• A review of Michel Houellebecq’s Submission
• An assessment of evolutionary accounts of literary art
• An essay on the greatness of Les Murray
• An outline of an anthology I wasn’t allowed to edit
• A review of a delightful book on maps of imaginary worlds 
• An essay-review on dictionaries 
• An essay-review on Auden’s prose
• “Giving Up on Baseball”
• An essay on literary executors
• The introduction to a collection of my essays, in which I think about what the essay is and does
• “The Thrilla In Manila And The End Of Boxing”
• “London Letters” — written by Brett Foster and me
• “Beyond the Wild Wood” — an essay-review on two editions of The Wind in the Willows 

I’ll update this post whenever I add more essays, which I expect to do from time to time.

Here’s a terrific conversation at The New Atlantis about whether it’s possible to write good fiction about climate change.

A Christmas edition of the newsletter.

Renovations to our parish church continue apace, including a lovely new rose window.