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.
Consider the fact that it takes roughly one million spins on Pandora for a songwriter to earn just $90. Avicii’s release “Wake Me Up!” that I co-wrote and sing, for example, was the most streamed song in Spotify history and the 13thmost played song on Pandora since its release in 2013, with more than 168 million streams in the US. And yet, that yielded only $12,359 in Pandora domestic royalties – which were then split among three songwriters and our publishers. In return for co-writing a major hit song, I’ve earned less than $4,000 domestically from the largest digital music service.
The Concordat Analogy | R. R. Reno | First Things
The Concordat Analogy | R. R. Reno | First Things
“He finds the analogy unhelpful”
This is true!
“and suggests that I am blind to the imperatives of charity.”
This is not true: I said that the decision to offer such benefits would be “eminently defensible … on the grounds of charity.” To say that a position can be defended by appealing to a virtue is in no way to say that anyone who holds a different view is blind to that virtue.
“He assumed I’m making an analogy between Nazism and gays.”
Absolutely untrue! I imagined the headlines that would be written in response to your rhetoric, and (based on what I have seen online) I imagined correctly. Given the pervasiveness of the reductio ad Hitlerum in our discursive culture, any attempt to analogize the Nazi era to our own is going to be read in that way, and it seems to me that you should have anticipated that and sought a different analogy. In writing the sentence “Hitler in 1933 didn’t look so bad—and respectable gay couples don’t seem a threat to marriage or anything else” — in which the church is not mentioned and “Hitler” is grammatically parallel to “respectable gay couples” — you did as much as you could do to ensure that people would say “Reno thinks gays are like Nazis.”
I don’t accuse you of a lack of charity or moral obtuseness, but I think you were rhetorically very careless, and I don’t think that helps the cause of Christian social conservatives.
and one more note on politics
I’m a seamless-garment pro-lifer who strongly opposes foreign-policy adventurism, wants to see the total dismantling of the national-security-state apparatus, supports seriously Green policies at the national level despite being generally a strong proponent of subsidiarity, and cares most of all about the preservation — indeed the extension — of our eroding religious freedoms. So I have lots of excellent options this Election Day!
Look, I don’t expect the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but the stupidity and unseriousness of our politics is exhausting. It makes me think in more more uncharitable moments that if you want to serve in Congress, something must be wrong with you.