“...to love the world so much that we think change is possible.”

When I first began work at the bookstore, I had just concluded some years working and living with people for whom Hannah Arendt was a matter of frequent discussion. Wrestling with Arendt’s ideas is like wrestling with the angel — the reader is the one who’s going to come out of it with a permanent limp.

During a lull on the floor, I asked my friend — a Jew — what she made of Arendt. She arched an eyebrow. “You want to know what I make of Arendt? I’ll tell you what I make of Arendt.” She marched over to the “Biography” shelf, pulled a trim, blue book and gave it to me. “That’s what I make of Hannah Arendt.”

"Go on and wrestle with that, sunshine..."

For my friend and for many Jews the late revelation that Arendt not only had a youthful love affair with Martin Heidegger, but returned to him after the war and remained his devoted and intimate friend, rendered her a sudden and complete non-entity. Her life’s work was now worse than chaff.

For me the matter is complicated — admittedly, largely because I’m not Jewish, but also because Arendt’s work continually re-frames my own politics and philosophy. Heidegger’s might too, if I were better able to comprehend it. To place the matter in some perspective, I will close with Leo Strauss’s observation: 

“Only a great thinker could help us in our intellectual plight. But here is the trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger.”

These thoughts are spurred by this terrifically frustrating interview with Ann Heberlein, author of On Love & Tyranny: The Life & Politics of Hannah Arendt — frustrating because it flits so lightly around this central complexity/difficulty/or, to use Strauss’s word: trouble. But, hey — it still acknowledges the trouble, which is a start. And it could well be that Heberlein “wrestles with the angel” in this work.

I am looking forward to reading the book, and for that I am grateful for the interview.

Other links:

• “As I watched the white riot at and inside the Capitol building unfold on television that appalling afternoon — thousands of enraged, clueless, and deluded Randy Quaid/Cousin Eddie clones, man-children staging a violent cosplay insurrection for selfies and their social media accounts — a couple of phrases kept running through my head. One was a line from Frank Zappa’s proto-rap number from his 1966 album Freak Out!, ‘Trouble Every Day’: ‘Hey, you know something, people? I’m not black, but there’s a whole lots a times I wish I could say I’m not white.’ You should listen to it” — Indeed, you should. You should also read Gerald Howard’s excellent essay, The Disappointed at LARB.
• Also: returning to Frank Zappa, CBC Radio Ideas recently re-ran a lovely three-part documentary on the man and his music. I am little more than a passing fan — the only Zappa I own is Strictly Commercial, which outs me rather damningly — but I found Dangerous Kitchen deeply engaging, entertaining and moving.

Things: helpful/interesting

Trustworthy amigos? ¡Muy helpful!

Helpful:

• I closed my previous post with this link to a conversation between slightly-right-of-centre journo-provocateur Andrew Sullivan and gender rights activist Dr. Dana Beyer, and it is worth re-posting. It was helpful for me to hear Beyer walk Sullivan through some of the science on the trans condition.
• Mary Strachan Scriver sent me to this Aeon piece by Mallory Feldman and Kristen Lindquist: What makes a woman’s body — a helpful meditation, not just for fellas (like myself) who take all kinds of things for granted, but really . . . for anyone. BTW, if you’re wondering whatever happened to “Prairie Mary” she remains a productive writer over at Medium. And yes, the old blog at blogspot indicates she is NOT at Medium, but Mary tells me she’s been locked out of her Google account and cannot post or change anything on the old site. At least her content remains intact and accessible — for now.

Interesting (and probably helpful in ways I can’t quite name):

• “This year made me believe China is the country with the most can-do spirit in the world.” From Beijing Dan Wang writes a year-end-summary of Chinese politics, industry and culture. It’s very long, but also a carefully studied and welcome contrast to the sort of “Klingon Empire” treatment our media reflexively gives this subject matter.
• Also on Wang’s site (which I only discovered today): Violence and the Sacred: College as an incubator of Girardian terror — this rates for me as one of the sturdiest applications of Girard’s theory of mimetic desire. Also, Wang’s treatment of Thiel is at once more generous than Smith’s, and more revelatory than David Perell’s. (Not that I’m trying to enflame anyone’s envy in this particular triangular configuration.)
• “It bothers me that writers can’t create audiences on their own websites, with their own archives, and their own formats. And they certainly can’t get paid in the process” — Robin Rendle explores, beautifully, the rise of the newsletter and the decline of the website, and argues for the latter’s resurgence.

The bedside table

Been a rough couple of weeks — happy to yack further, p2p, just drop me a line — so you get a photo.

Reading: Leonard Cohen Untold Stories: The Early Years. I am loving Michael Posner’s oral biography. It answers a ton of questions that every earlier biography has left me with. Just one example — Hydra: what the heck was up with that place? Posner lays it all out. I honestly can’t get enough and am thrilled to hear there are two(!) more volumes in the pipeline (A). 

Re-reading: Chance by Kem Nunn. Seems like the novel of this particular epoch, in some significant ways. More to follow, I hope.

Also: Daredevil: Born Again, Hellboy: Seed of Destruction, John Constantine Hellblazer: Marks of Woe. Hm — bit of a devilish motif going on here. 

Apropos of nothing: DIRE STRAITS: The Studio Albums: 1978-1991, recently released on this side of the pond by Rhino Records. It has been decades since I last listened to any of these albums. On Every Street (1991) has been the big surprise. Back in the day I gave it a “meh.” Today I’m wondering if it doesn’t rate as the band’s most accomplished studio album.

I might say more on the matter, but for now it’s worth noting what difficult competition this album was up against — Nirvana Nevermind, REM Out Of Time, Pearl Jam Ten, Red Hot Chili Peppers Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Dinosaur Jr Green Mind, Billy Bragg Don’t Try This At Home, Hole Pretty On The Inside, Soundgarden Badmotorfinger, plus some whopper albums from some whopper acts that don’t need any further nudging from anyone (especially not me). Thirty years later one wonders how Knopfler’s band, which was always somewhat stodgily at odds with radio playlists, even managed to get played at all.

1991 could count as its own Year of Egress, in some ways.

Also: this was a conversation worth dropping in on. Helped me chill out about a few things. And I know, I know: Andrew Sullivan, right? (Scott must be grinding his teeth.) But hey, true help often arrives via unexpected mediums.

More anon — be well.

One week later

Honestly, I have not missed this business of waking up in the morning and finding my newsfeed overrun with headlines generated by late-night tweets. Coincidentally, one of my friends behind the blue-and-white velvet rope has also been uncharacteristically mute these past seven days. This morning he returned to inform one and all it was not a self-imposed exile he endured. Lessons have been learned by all, I am sure.

The surest way we may know, for now, that the January 6 insurrection is a lost cause, is to see that capital is circling its wagons and consolidating a new post-Trump order. One would have liked peace to be made on other terms than this: cutting the deplorables off from their social-media, from their air miles, from their Olive Garden unlimited pasta passes. There is no real justice here; it is only capitalism’s enantiamorphic alternative to China’s state social-credit system. It is arbitrary, discriminatory, and undemocratic. Olive Garden can of course do what it wants, but when society is nothing but an aggregate of Olive Gardens, including the massively hypertrophied Olive Gardens that run the internet, when citizenship has disintegrated into a vast constellation of customer-loyalty rewards and there is no neutral space in which citizens can adjudicate their disputes with the managers, we’ve got a problem — JEH Smith

I’ve been trying to learn a few lessons myself, though I can’t quite put a name to the ignorance that besets me — I am beset by “unknown unknowns.”

If you were a forty-year-old in 1955, your life would have already spanned most of World War I, the Spanish flu pandemic, the convulsive birth of the Soviet Union, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, World War II, the communist takeover in China, and the Korean War; closer to home, you would have witnessed McCarthyism and the growing pressures for remediation of ongoing and unresolved racial injustice — for all of the manifest good of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Emmett Till was murdered in 1955. During those four decades from 1915 to 1955, the nation had faced crisis after crisis, and, had this been your life, you would have known little else but a nation on the brink. 

Then, as now, these national trials were rightly recognized as existentially momentous, and then, as now, there was wide and deep controversy over how to make sense of them. Over this span, sensible voices across the political spectrum — John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Lippmann, Richard Weaver, Peter Viereck, and Russell Kirk, among others — simultaneously worried that the normative resources that underwrote liberal democracy in America were flagging and committed themselves to addressing these challenges. They differed aggressively over how.

James Davison Hunter reassesses these voices and contrasts them with another — that of Martin Luther King, Jr. Reading this I can’t shake the notion that here are the lessons I need to learn. And none of them will be easy.

Custodial reveries

My weekly custodial rounds are just a tiny fraction of what used to be, of course. Mostly I’m trying to keep a couple of plants alive, and safe-checking against possible damage to the church structure.

Yesterday I headed up to the balcony. It’s an easy place to ignore — with the exception of a funeral for an especially prominent citizen, parishioners haven’t used it in years. It’s a storage space at this point. I checked the windows for cracks or breaks, the various joints for water damage, etc. The building is remarkably sound.

I took a seat in one of the pews and meditated for a few minutes. My eye fixed on the pew’s iron work — intricately moulded patterns of a Victorian bent (the church was built in 1895. These pews would likely be of that vintage).

My mind cast to another local balcony — Sunderland Town Hall, where I have attended many, many Sunderland Lions Music Festivals. Grandparents with mobility concerns typically received pride of place on the main floor, while the more able of us trudged up to the balcony. We swapped places with parents whose progeny had just finished their performance — the stomp of winter boots, the hiss of parkas sliding against each other as we traded places. When our kids finally graduated from all that I was relieved.

I don’t miss it — even the most benign gatherings put me a little on edge. But it was quite a privilege to participate in and be part of this encouragement of local talent. I miss that privilege.

Hopefully after a couple of jabs the privilege returns. Until then the balcony is closed.

“On The Hoof, On The Barrel. ‘On Prime Cut’” By Charles Taylor

“Bonkers” seems to be the euphemism I reflexively reached for in 2020, to the point of overuse, possibly. And yet I shall continue using it, I think. All the other synonyms for “insane” are, like the root word, tilted toward the tragic. If I have to endure the tragic, well, so be it. But where choice is permitted I will eschew the tragic whenever possible. After all, I’m not a kid anymore — “bonkers” it shall be.

Some years ago I picked up Michael Ritchie’s Prime Cut at the Dollar Store. Lee Marvin was the draw, also Gene Hackman and Sissy Spacek. And Prime Cut is . . . one bonkers movie. Beautifully shot, languidly paced, garishly festooned — and utterly, endearingly bonkers.

"And you may ask yourself: 'well ... how did I get here?'"

I’ve re-watched it a bunch of times over the years and it never fails to charm, primarily because Marvin sits at its centre, a placid and eviscerating Shaolin Buddha, serene in a maelstrom of insanity. Do I mix metaphors? I am compelled — this movie is just that bonkers.

Charles Taylor also loves this movie. He does a terrific job of situating its critical stance toward its particular epoch — the epoch of Nixon’s “silent majority,” which sent an entire generation of its corn-fed sons to carry out and be run through the meat-grinder of the Vietnam war.

On The Hoof, On The Barrel: “On Prime Cut” By Charles Taylor — one of those essays/reviews I wish I’d written.

My latest Dollar Store acquisition. Here's hoping it'll be...

In which J.E.H. Smith TOTALLY OWNS Peter Thiel and his Silicon Valley Girard-Bros!!

“It has been compellingly said of Jordan B. Peterson that he is a dumb person’s idea of what a smart person is like. I would not say the same of René Girard, at least not without modifying the formula: he is a practically-minded person’s idea of what a theorist is like.”

Justin E.H. Smith’s “Hinterland” is currently the newsletter I most look forward to reading on Sundays (usurping Warren Ellis’s, now self-cancelled in consequence of a rapaciously roving and blinkered libido). Yesterday Smith took on René Girard, whom I’ve gassed on about from time to time, often for reasons loosely akin to Smith’s — Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley venture capitalist extraordinaire, is a former student and vigorous evangelist of Girard’s, which is kinda, well ... bonkers.

I promised my wife that by post's end I'd tie Chuck Girard to René: keep reading!

Smith is a fun read — for a tenured prof he’s a surprisingly engaged and engaging hep-cat. In his newsletter he keeps his prose limned of academia-speak — it’s clean, like Orwell’s newspaper prose, albeit with frequent enough quotes in a given source’s native tongue to keep Smith’s pro bona fides from receding entirely from view. For newcomers Smith’s words-on-the-page will likely conjure clipped British tones: amused, peeved, aloof — dude’s an academic, right? But once you actually hear him, the voice never leaves your head. He’s Californian through and through, and his cadences and vowels stretch and flatten similarly to Erik Davis’s Sativa-burnished drawl.

And Smith is cheeky, which is a plus. Profs get grumpy in their 50s — Smith isn’t quite there yet, but he’s dropping hints he’s close. When Smith huffs, “If we were living in a culture dominated by grown-ups ...” well, who is the Chronicle of Higher Education to disagree?

Getting back to yesterday’s newsletter: I have but passing acquaintance with both Thiel and Girard, but the tie that supposedly binds them has always struck me as suspect. So it brings me great pleasure to watch Smith gore that particular hot-air balloon, causing it to founder on the hillside as its wealthy passengers rub their bruised noggins and search for the next source of uplift.

And yet, and yet . . . reservations rear their nettlesome heads.

Smith’s measured equating of Girard to Peterson is a canny near-perfect triangulation of mimetic desire (bravo, sir!). Neither Peterson nor Girard require my defending but I kinda feel like the average slobs grokking them do, just a bit — kids, mostly, College/University types in their 20s. Dudes, more often than not. Smart enough to read widely but not hardly practised enough to read well. 

“A dumb person’s idea of what a smart person is like” — sure, okay. And maybe Lenny Bruce is a humourless person’s idea of a funnyman. But these characters happen for a reason.

Reading carefully is an acquired skill, and a person doesn’t often learn it in university. Kids coming out of uni these days typically claim they have learned to read “critically,” which I take to be another way of saying they have learned how to sort out what they’ve read in a way that pleases their profs. Certainly that’s how it worked for me in '89.

When unaccompanied by adults most university texts — at least the ones in the Humanities — are primed to nudge young readers into depression or mania, or both. “It is however somewhat a shame that the everything-explainers, the hammerers for whom all is nail, should be the ones so consistently to capture the popular imagination,” sighs professor Smith. Fair enough. But in an age of perpetual anxiety everything-explainers like Girard and, yes, Peterson can throw a little sand under a kid’s tires.

The everything-explainer’s universe is explicable — threatening, horrible, terrifying to be sure, but also navigable and even reassuringly (if all-too-briefly) wonderful. In this universe a reader is not required to regard and discard 6000 years’ worth of competing histories, religions and literature due to their recently tarnished rep as aids to hegemonic class oppression. Within this shifting body of knowledge is, potentially, a key or two to wisdom and maybe even some consolation to be gleaned.

Smith suggests “practically-minded” has its limits, but hey it also has its uses. Let the kids keep reading these everything-explainers. With a little luck they’ll get to the footnotes.

Other reading: Rock 'n' Roll Preacher and fourth-cousin once-removed Chuck Girard breaks down triangulation of desire, and Christ the final Scapegoat. Alright, so I didn’t make good on my promise to my wife. But check this: David Perrell did a lot of legwork sorting out Peter Thiel’s Religion. Perrell is thrilled. I am ... horrified?

The Index Of Self-Destructive Acts, by Christopher R. Beha

The Index of Self-Destructive Acts by Christopher R. Beha
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It's quite the index. But since this is a star-rating system, let's index a few of those.

The book: I'll give it four stars. Had it been published a year earlier, I might have given it five. Complex characters, exercising individual quirks in a plotline that must correspond reciprocally. Well done!

The reader: one star: "****ing COVID, know what I'm sayin'?"

The reader's response: two stars: it requires some effort to dredge up sympathy for a (formerly) wealthy professional blowhard from the Manhattan three-martini-lunch set, even if he once had some insights into The Beautiful Game ... nevermind his doyenne investor wife ... or his Iraq veteran son or ...

... actually, my greatest reservations as a reader were in regard to the daughter -- something of a cipher, when it comes to her (autistic?) libidinal motivations.

In any case, had this been published just as '08 collapsed and prior to a global pandemic overseen by a gameshow host I might have given this book its proper due. It's the circumstances, dear reader -- occupational hazard, even for the most courageous and clear-sighted of novelists.

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The Problem With Everything: My Journey Through The New Culture Wars, by Meghan Daum

The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars by Meghan Daum
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There is a sub-cohort within my Gen-X cohort that, when confronted with the certitude of elders, peers, and now younger up-and-comers habitually asks, "Isn't it just a little more ... complicated?" Daum is a columnist of standing who recognizes her "day" was a short one to be sure, and just wants to leaven public inquiry with a little more doubt (and generosity) than is generally demonstrated. This isn't an air-tight intellectual platform by any stretch, but if it nudges the reader to check out her podcast and give gentle reconsideration to the most firmly held convictions ... not a bad thing, right?

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How To Think: A Survival Guide For A World At Odds, by Alan Jacobs

How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds by Alan Jacobs
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Any argument that places Bulverism as its central concern will get a passing grade from me. But this book could have been trimmed to a punchy article and not suffered the lack of material. Perhaps it reads better as an eBook -- I can imagine hyperlinks doing a superlative job of serving the content.

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The Year Of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism In An Age Of Crisis, by Alan Jacobs

The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis by Alan Jacobs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As WWII ground to its conclusion, a number of the West's intellectual luminaries expressed a common concern: in the fight against Nazism, the West was in fact embracing similar values and methods to get the job done and "win" the war. Alarmed at the prospect of further becoming the enemy we were fighting, these gents, and Simone Weil, thought it best to examine how public education might build a surer intellectual/mythopoeic/spiritual foundation for Western Civilization.

Alan Jacobs uncovers some interesting correspondence among the various figures discussed. Some of this book traces who thought what when. But it also enhances some of the personalities involved. I was particularly drawn to W.H. Auden, a poet I've not given much consideration prior to this -- an energetically "out" homosexual decades before that was an acceptable possibility (whose memory of the trial of Oscar Wilde must have been acute) who nevertheless hewed closely to a Christian orthodoxy of sorts, and vigorously espoused poetic means to counter the functional machinist philosophy taking over academia and the market.

And this was the first I'd heard of Lewis's abject terror as the war became a reality for England -- his public writing very much advocated a "Keep calm and carry on" posture.

Jacobs doesn't hammer home any grand conclusion at book's end, which I think is for the best. Most of the figures who survived this second global war quietly succumbed to resignation that the ship of state had sailed without them, and everything they might do next to promote what sustained their souls was going to be subtle work indeed. Jacques Ellul shows up at the very last chapter to do what he does (and did) so well, but the reader can almost see him raising his hands and asking, "Hey, where'd everybody go?" The draughtsman’s room had cleared. The work was just beginning.

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