Finished reading: Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast by Patrick McGilligan. A fascinating book in many ways but Lang was such a despicable person that I feel I need a palate-cleanser of some kind. 📚
Kieran Healy has just become a citizen of the U.S.A.:
I know the nationalities of my fellow oath-takers because of the next stage of the ceremony. This was the Roll Call of Nations. I did not know this was going to happen. Every country of origin represented was announced in turn. As your country was named, you were asked to stand up, and remain standing. Afghanistan came first. Then Algeria. The last person to stand, immediately to my left, was from the United Kingdom. There were twenty seven countries in all, out of only fifty or so people. For me this part in particular was enormously, irresistibly moving. It perfectly expressed the principle, the claim, the myth — as you please — that America is an idea. That it does not matter where you are from. That, in fact, America will in this moment explicitly and proudly acknowledge the sheer variety of places you are all from. That built in to the heart of the United States is the republican ideal not just that anyone can become an American, but that this possibility is what makes the country what it is.
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.