I wrote a post on viewpoint diversity in the university.
Post-hose happiness. That tongue!
This is a good season to re-read Thomas Pynchon’s 1984 essay on Luddites.
Working on a biography of Dorothy L. Sayers, I am regularly amazed that she could turn in a typescript of a novel and then hold the book in her hands six weeks later. Book publishers worked fast in those days, and largely mechanically: typewriters, Linotype, Monotype, letterpress printing. Zoom!
What if the chatbots just enter a state of transcendent bliss and end up ignoring us altogether? That’s a win/win, right?
The people at Fonts In Use are choosing the path of righteousness
Speaking of Robertson Davies: I only like seven or eight of the dozens and dozens of essays I have published, but one of those is largely about Davies.
I wrote about the physical counterpart of Lord Peter Wimsey … and some of his pupils.
Honored to be in my buddy Austin Kleon’s newsletter this morning. Me and Tolstoy.
Italo Calvino (1983):
I belong to that portion of humanity — a minority on the planetary scale but a majority I think among my public — that spends a large part of its waking hours in a special world, a world made up of horizontal lines where the words follow one another one at a time, where every sentence and every paragraph occupies its set place: a world that can be very rich, maybe even richer than the nonwritten one, but that requires me to make a special adjustment to situate myself in it. When I leave the written world to find my place in the other, in what we usually call the world, made up of three dimensions and five senses, populated by billions of our kind, that to me is equivalent every time to repeating the trauma of birth, giving the shape of intelligible reality to a set of confused sensations, and choosing a strategy for confronting the unexpected without being destroyed.
When you express concern about any new social or technological development, people will show up shouting “Moral panic!” But that’s not an idea, it’s a spell: they’re trying to banish bad thoughts. It’s a form of apotropaic magic, and it’s one of the chief activities on social media.
I discovered that the initial trauma of Arthur’s death was the coded cypher through which God spoke, and that God had less to do with faith or belief, and more to do with a way of seeing. I came to understand that God was a form of perception, a means of being alert to the poetic resonance of being. I found God to be woven into all things, even the greatest evils and our deepest despair. Sometimes I feel the world pulsating with a rich, lyrical energy, at other times it feels flat, void, and malevolent. I came to realise that God was present and active in both experiences.
Adam Mars-Jones: “Children’s books revisited in later life may disappoint, but they are immune to the embarrassment associated with outgrown toys. Even if their colours have faded, they expanded the world in a way toys can’t match.”
A coda to my Emperor Constantine series: The Emperor Julian.
And I’ve put the whole series on one page.
From an essay I wrote four years ago recommending our attention to an idea in Hesse's The Glass Bead Game:
To imagine yourself as you might have been in another place and time is to practice the dialectic of sameness and difference in a way that enhances your self-understanding, your experience of the human lifeworld, without risking damage to a neighbor. As I argue in my book Breaking Bread with the Dead, one of Thomas Pynchon’s characters was right to say that “personal density is proportionate to temporal bandwidth,” and reading works of the past is an excellent way to increase that bandwidth without suffering from the tensions associated with projects like John Howard Griffin’s. But to imagine yourself into another life can be a powerful application of the argument I make there, and I am tempted to argue that the writing of a Castalia-style Life would make an excellent senior project for every university student.
Every fall, the American Library Association publishes a list of banned books during its Banned Books Week campaign. No book on this list is actually banned in the United States. Every single one can be bought “wherever books are sold,” as the slogan goes. So, why does the ALA publish it? The short answer, I suspect, is to raise money.
Mattix points out that stories about these “banned” books usually include Amazon links for people who want to purchase them. I’ve long been annoyed by this: a library that chooses not to buy a particular book, or a school that chooses not to assign it, is not banning it — even when the book is wrongly or unwisely sidelined.