Texty and Readerly
Here’s a video explaining the making of the Library of Nonhuman Books. And you may purchase some of those nonhuman books here. As for me, I think I’ll save these for the day when I run out of human books.
Heads up: At the end of this week I’ll be taking a few quiet days at Laity Lodge, so there will be no newsletter next week.
My book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction came out nine years ago, and yet in the past few months I’ve done two podcasts about it — which is really gratifying. The first is Sarah Mackenzie’s Read-Aloud Revival and the second, just a couple of weeks ago, is Brett McKay’s Art of Manliness. Both of these were fun for me to do and I hope will be interesting to listeners.
This is a marvelous profile of Jan Morris, who would have lived one of the most fascinating lives I know of even if she hadn’t transitioned from James to Jan more than forty years ago. She is best known for her travel books, or place books really, and for good reason — I think her best in that genre is Venice — but for me her masterpiece is the Pax Britannica trilogy. One of my most treasured possessions is the Folio Society edition of it, long out of print and something of a collector’s item now.
I’m teaching Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home right now, and was about to add a quotation from it — but then I remembered that I used the very quote I have in mind in a newsletter from a few months ago.
I have some thoughts about Ross Douthat’s new book.
For the last year or so, I’ve been reading a great deal of political philosophy, classic and modern. As I do so, I often find myself remembering this passage on Thomas Hobbes by Michael Oakeshott:
And it is characteristic of political philosophers that they take a sombre view of the human situation: they deal in darkness. Human life in their writings appears, generally, not as a feast or even as a journey, but as a predicament; and the link between politics and eternity is the contribution the political order is conceived as making to the deliverance of mankind. Even those whose thought is most remote from violent contrasts of dark and light (Aristotle, for example) do not altogether avoid this disposition of mind. And some political philosophers may even be suspected of spreading darkness in order to make their light more acceptable. Man, so the varied formula runs, is the dupe of error, the slave of sin, of passion, of fear, of care, the enemy of himself or of others or of both … and the civil order appears as the whole or a part of the scheme of his salvation. The precise manner in which the predicament is conceived, the qualities of mind and imagination and the kinds of activity man can bring to the achievement of his own salvation, the exact nature and power of civil arrangements and institutions, the urgency, the method and the comprehensiveness of the deliverance — these are the singularities of each political philosophy. In them are reflected the intellectual achievements of the epoch or society, and the great and slowly mediated changes in intellectual habit and horizon that have overtaken our civilization. Every masterpiece of political philosophy springs from a new vision of the predicament; each is the glimpse of a deliverance or the suggestion of a remedy.
STATUS BOARD
- Work: Crawling towards Spring Break at the end of this week, but taking great delight in teaching Le Guin.
- Music: I told my son the other day that I think the best pop song of the 2010s was probably Spoon’s “Inside Out”; he suggested “Dance Yrself Clean” by LCD Soundsystem, which is also a good call.
- Viewing: Been too busy even to start Better Call Saul — what a nightmare!
- Food and Drink: Whatever I can fit into my mouth, that’s how things are going.
