Randall Jarrell famously defined the novel as “a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.“ My books are prose arguments or expositions of some length that have many things wrong with them. In fact, the wrong things are the only things I remember about my books.
I’m delighted to see this review of Paradise Lost: A Biography — by the great Dana Gioia! Dana is absolutely correct to say that Malcolm X should have been in the book. He’s in my notes… I’m not totally sure how he didn’t make it into the final version.
There are young people spending the most carefree years of their lives mapping themselves out, categorising themselves for companies and advertisers. So much of their thinking is consumed by this. They don’t have memories anymore; only evidence, explanations, timelines of trauma. They don’t have relationships; only attachment figures, caregivers and co-regulators. And I think this is it, the cause of so much misery. We taught a generation that the meaning of life is not found outside in the world but inside their own heads. We underestimate it, this miserable business of understanding ourselves. I feel for the girls forensically analysing their childhoods while they are still in them, cramming their hope and pain and suffering into categories, reducing themselves down to trauma responses. It hurts to see this heartbreaking awareness we have inflicted on a generation, whose only understanding of the world is this militant searching, this reaching around for reasons. God, the life they are missing.
First post of a series on Dorothy L. Sayers, the emperor Constantine, and the Council of Nicaea.
Via Basic Apple Guy. I understand and in some cases approve of Apple’s move away from skeuomorphism, but I also think that every iteration of this icon gets worse. You want icons that communicate their meaning even before they’re consciously “read,” and for me the earlier versions do this better.
It’s crepe myrtle season here in central Texas.
Spending some quality time with the awesome Father’s Day present Wes got me.
I understand that many people work in soul-sucking corporate jobs that remind you of the uselessness of your efforts while keeping you shackled to doing them. And that sucks. But that’s a symptom of a much larger toxicity within late capitalism, and I can assure you that figuring out how to just do nothing is not going to fix your feelings of purposelessness and malaise. Indeed, many people find that they achieve escape from the drudgery of contemporary white collar existence through finding avenues to actually work in more intuitively meaningful and purposeful ways. Sometimes that means leaving their actual jobs for other types of employment that are more tangible and satisfying, oftentimes at the expense of making less. For others, this means embracing hobbies enjoyed in their off-hours that look an awful lot like jobs — building things, crafting things, fixing things. People get through “work” to then go engage in activities that many human beings once regarded as enervating labor. We’re a funny species like that. And yet alongside this persistent human attachment to various forms of effort and creation that sure do resemble an unpaid job, you have this seemingly limitless ambient sense that all forms of effort are best avoided, that if you can find a way to fob work off on someone (or some algorithm) else, you should, that we are all looking to find more time in which to be in a state of total leisure. But leisure is only really satisfying when it exists in contrast with purposeful effort.
A couple of years ago I wrote something along these lines.
