[gallery]
an update
… on some things:
-
A while back, I decided to ditch the New York Times — and I’m still regularly infuriated by the bigotry and ignorance of its coverage of religion. Twenty-five years ago Alasdair MacIntyre referred to the NYT as “the parish magazine of self-congratulatory liberal enlightenment,” and that’s as true now as it was then. But … but … I got so tired of clicking on links (Twitter, RSS feeds, random webpages) only to be told I had used up my quota and would need to subscribe if I wanted to read more … and eventually I weakened and resubscribed. I am a worm and no man. I would feel better if Get Religion would go full-time as an exposer of the NYT’s manifold abuses of reason, evidence, and charity.
-
I’ve complained a lot — too much, honestly — about Twitter, and even wrote a kind of eulogy for it. I now rarely visit what I call Big Twitter — which, by the way, explains why you are unlikely to hear from me if you send me an @-message there: I probably won’t see it. I have moved primarily to Little (i.e. private) Twitter and am much, much happier. I found myself on Big Twitter earlier this week and did not enjoy it at all. Why is it so hard for me to remember that that’s the way it goes?
-
I love writing for Books & Culture, so after a few months away I’m pleased to say that I will have some pieces coming in in the near future: reviews of Nicholas Carr’s The Glass Cage and Italo Calvino’s Complete Cosmicomics, followed (eventually) by my responses to Adam Roberts’s marvelous new edition of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria and Les Murray’s New Selected Poems. Keep your eyes peeled!
[gallery] austinkleon:
René Magritte with Dominique de Menil (and his dog Lou-Lou) at a rodeo in Simonton, Texas, 1965Today at the Magritte Museum in Brussels I learned that not only was Magritte a huge fan of the tv show Bonanza, he also visited the Menils in Houston, went to a rodeo, and picked up a big ol’ cowboy hat.
See also: George Grosz in Dallas
Filed under: Magritte
A final thought on the cultic. The word has a primitive feel. This is intentional. Christianity should be far better at foregrounding its exotic otherness. For it is interesting, and engaging – this business of worship. At least in theory! Why is it that religious worship seems duller than more limited cultural expressions such as art and literature? Why is that people are fascinated by dismembered aspects of religious worship – theatre, carnivals, icons, meditation, performance art – but seem to have little desire for the form that integrates these things in a supreme performance of meaning? Why have the churches not learned to be culturally exciting places? A reinvented liberal Christianity needs a new sacramentalism, which should seek the attention of the secular world. Perhaps the medieval feast of Corpus Christi should be the churches’ model: worship should spill out from churches into the streets and nurture busy amateur creativity. Why hasn’t this sort of thing happened to any large extent? There remains a strange failure to notice that religious worship is the highest possible state of cultural creativity and also, dare one say, of grown-up fun.
From these simulations, the logic of the game goes, you can abstract urban design principles. Where our cities appear unpredictably chaotic and impossibly complex, SimCity harmoniously tames this uncertainty into a manageable landscape. It offers a micropolis (as it was originally titled) to serve as a model for our own. It represents our cities not as they are but as they could be: calculated, optimized, controlled.That vision is rapidly becoming our reality. The game’s simulational thinking has restructured how we relate to our politics and ourselves, to our work and our play — in short, to our social space. So-called “smart” cities have already started to deploy its techniques as Silicon Valley — home to Wright as well as Cisco and Microsoft — moves into the business of constructing cities.
Finish That Book! - The Atlantic
Finish That Book! - The Atlantic
In that book I wrote, “For heaven’s sake, don’t turn reading into the intellectual equivalent of eating organic greens, or (shifting the metaphor slightly) some fearfully disciplined appointment with an elliptical trainer of the mind in which you count words or pages the way some people fix their attention on the ‘calories burned’ readout — some assiduous and taxing exercise that allows you to look back on your conquest of Middlemarch with grim satisfaction. How depressing. This kind of thing is not reading at all, but what C. S. Lewis once called ‘social and ethical hygiene.’”
I think “social and ethical hygiene” exactly what Lapidos is advocating in this essay. People who stop reading books are “lazy.” Dropping a book partway through is “wrong.” Wrong! After a brief (and, I think, appropriate) appeal to pleasure, she gets down to the main argument, which is that sticking with a book you don’t like is good for you. It can, for instance, “build up [your] ability to endure intellectual anguish.” As if there aren’t enough sources of intellectual anguish that we have to endure, so that we have to seek them out in our spare time.
We need in our lives realms of pure play. Why can’t our recreational reading be just that? (In the same way, why not talk a walk because you enjoy looking at your surroundings, not because you’re trying to get to the 10,000-step goal your FitBit says you need to meet?) We should feel free to read what gives us delight — yes, even if it’s YA fiction — and to stop when we’re not delighted. After all, we can always come back to a book later if we want to.
My suggestion would be to resist every attempt to dictate to you what you should or should not read in your leisure time. Read at whim! Don’t let our culture, especially our recreational culture, become one where everything that is not compulsory is forbidden.
Today we have a lot of technical innovation, but not a lot of political creativity. The ecosystem no longer produces as much entrepreneurship — mutations that fuel evolution.Data-driven candidates sacrifice their own souls. Instead of being inner-directed leaders driven by their own beliefs, they become outer-directed pleasers driven by incomplete numbers.
Last week my colleague David Brooks wrote a column on the decline of political imagination, and the way that data-driven campaigning, in particular, has made our politics more rigid and our would-be leaders less creative. I saw some criticisms of the column on Twitter, most of them suggesting that Brooks was radically underestimating the power of polarization, and the way it keeps our politicians in pre-constructed boxes from which even a genius would struggle to escape. To which I would only point out that as true as that may be, those boxes are still themselves the product of human imagination, of a particular way or ways of imposing a partisan order and a binary division on a society of 300 million souls. The imagination at work is collective, not individual — the collective imagination of partisan elites. But its rule over our politics is still not in any way inevitable, and the fact that it’s given us what seems like an increasingly meaningless see-saw is all the more reason to look for very different imaginings instead.
[gallery] architectural-review:
National Pantheon of Kazakhstan. Competition proposal 2014. Lara Lesmes, Fredrik Hellberg, Top Tachapol Tanaboonchai and Grace Suthata Jiranuntarat
a way of writing
There is a genre of writing to which I am particularly devoted, but whose name I do not know. I can only give examples. I think it may have been invented by William Hazlitt, in “The Fight”. Another wonderful instance is Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” — the essay, not the book that includes it. This nameless genre combines reporting, observation, social commentary, and deeply felt personal experience, though the experience is often subterranean, or refracted and indirect.
For some years now I have thought that the best current practitioner of this curious mode of narration is John Jeremiah Sullivan, to whom I was introduced when I stumbled on his moving account of attending a Christian rock festival. His “Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie” is a recent small masterpiece, though the mastery is not Sullivan’s own, since it is accompanied by photographs, recordings, and filmed interviews, and is presented beautifully. (It’s worth noting, perhaps, that this nameless genre is highly receptive to documentary supplementation.)
In any event, Sullivan is a fantastic writer, and I read everything of his I can find. But I think that in the last few years another writer has come onto the scene who works this territory as beautifully as Sullivan does, though in a different voice, a different register. His name is Brian Phillips, and you owe it to yourself to read his new essay on Sumo wresting, and several other things as soon as you can manage it. Take your time; read it slowly and with care.