James Hankins: “One clear change [in historical scholarship] was the coverage of what my colleagues call the ‘deep past,’ meaning anything that happened before 1700. In 1992, 17% of sessions were devoted to the deep past, in 2022 only 8%. History as it is done in 2022 is almost entirely devoted to the history of the 20th and 21st centuries.”
Here in Waco we get “SpaceX thunder”: reverberations from the rocket testing site fifteen miles away in McGregor. Last night we had the strongest thunder I’ve experienced in my eight years here – the entire house rattled. Maybe related to this?
Lovely New Yorker -ish image on the cover of the LRB.
I argue that how we configure the birth of the genre [of science fiction] has consequences for how we read the mode today. If we say SF begins with Frankenstein then we are saying that it is, at root, a Gothic mode, and that one of its shaping myths is the scientific advance and the unintended consequences thereof, ‘hubris clobbered by nemesis’ as Aldiss puts it. If we say: ‘SF begins at the end of the 19th-century and the beginning of the 20th’ then we’re saying SF is about modernity: industrialisation, technological acceleration and the deracinated nature of contemporary life.
By saying ‘SF begins with Kepler’ I am saying something with large consequences for how we read SF nowadays, for the way it figures — or so I believe. To be specific I am saying: SF is born out of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, and its rise coincided with two other things themselves closely tangled-up with that social and cultural earthquake: the scientific revolution, and the rise of Capitalism.
I’ve read Adam’s book, and he makes this case powerfully. I like to think that it converges in interesting ways with an essay of mine on fantasy.
New issue of my newsletter today – and as always, the version on the Comment website looks especially nice.
Let’s say Hogarth sees religion less in terms of mystic or transcendent aesthetic intensities, and more in terms of real-world life and engagement, social and human interaction, the moral logic of lived experience and the dignity and beauty of life as informed (actually, not idealistically) by the divine. Hogarth’s ‘scenes from the Bible’ paintings are busy, varied, human-populated scenes, and so are almost all his paintings. His is all religious art.
So: Hogarth didn’t fill exhibition halls with immaculately beautiful Virgins Mary in blue velvet dresses, but it strikes me as impossible to ‘read’ a masterpiece like ‘Gin Lane’ without understanding that the woman in the centre of the composition is, designedly, an anti-Madonna, her infant tumbling away, the sores on her legs parodic stigmata, a satiric engagement that works, as a sort of semiotic photographic-negative, to affirm precisely the religious meanings that are so dulled and diluted by the thousand polished perfected Prado Madonnas.
The Tufte theme by @pimoore is just amazing. With its shortcodes you could use micro.blog as a full-scale essay-writing environment – and a better one than anything you could readily get on other platforms. Tempting!
As someone whose guitar playing is severely compromised by damage to my fingers – thanks to decades of playing basketball – I have a lot of sympathy for these injured musicians.