Greetings from the Porch,

This weekend I'm in beautiful Hamilton, ON for a conference titled "To Love This World: Receiving the Gift of Creation." And, of course, we're getting the final details in order for next week's FPR conference in Indianapolis.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about anger, isolation, and McCarthy.

• Jessica Burke reflects on the land she grew up on, which her parents will soon need to sell: "Will the new owners love that land as much as my parents? I hope so. But I know they won’t love it more."

• Morgan Kathleen Miller ponders failures of governance: "Two very different crises reveal the same failure: authorities had the power to act but failed those they were meant to protect."

• Charles R. Martelle distinguishes among different ways of valuing houses: "Americans have sacrificed meaningful homes and strong communities for market pressures."

• Geoffrey Kurtz looks for silence in New York City: "To see silence in this way requires a certain stillness in me and a trust that silence is there to be found."

• Jon Schaff isn't convinced by Samuel Moyn's proposals to unwind America's gerontocracy: "The rhetorical method of the book is, above all, snark."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about New Orleans this week.

I have been grateful for Rita Felski’s efforts to rein in the excesses of literary “critique” and to make a case that emotional responses to stories and poems are worth examining and valuing. Yet while I enjoyed parts of Uses of Literature, her discussion of enchantment is sorely lacking. She seems to argue that we can’t distinguish between good and bad art, high and low culture, because all of it can be engaging. But the point is not that Mozart enchants and Taylor Swift doesn’t! The question is whether either enchantment improves the subject. If her framing can’t distinguish between TikTok scrolling and rapt wonder at a Beethoven symphony, it’s missing something important. Clearly people can be enchanted by Mozart and be moral reprobates, so I don't subscribe to simplistic distinctions between high and low culture, yet she seems to say that as long as people get absorbed in the experience of a work of art, they are experiencing pleasure, and it is good. Again, long live TikTok, I guess. It's clearly what people indicate they want. One way of thinking about the quality of artistic enchantment, which Felski never addresses, is whether the art plays on our deformed sentiments or reorders them. Is it debauching or salutary?

The much heralded return to beauty is one attempt to reorient the critical conversation; beauty bespeaks a positive value, a presence, an enrichment, even if the precise nature of that enrichment often eludes our analytical grasp. The new writing on beauty thus overlaps at key points with the phenomenology of enchantment. And yet much of this new work rehearses some very old prejudices against commercial and mass-mediated art in its conviction that only an encounter with Matisse or Mozart can trigger rapture, wonder, or self-loss.

It is difficult to discern any real difference between Greenblatt’s description of being transfixed by the masterpieces on display at the Musée d'Orsay and Frankfurt School lamentations about shopgirls being mesmerized by Hollywood movies—apart, that is to say, from the pejorative adjectives with which the latter descriptions are decked out. What characterizes the phenomenology of enchantment simply is an intensely charged experience of absorption and self-loss. Given the sheer impossibility of getting inside someone’s head to judge the quality of their aesthetic pleasure, any attempt to create a moral taxonomy of types of reader or viewer absorption—to make sweeping distinctions between authentic enchantment and baleful bewitchment—would appear to be based on little more than the reflexes of prejudice.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro