March 2025

Blood on the Doorposts

By in jests japes jokes jollies, the geist of the zeit

A sign of the times. The Lord hath lately released a plague of overmedicated green-haired locusts to visit vengeance upon those who would dare hold his chosen people, the federal bureaucrats, in bondage, but yea, if thou remember to mark thy bumper with righteous slogans, the Angel of Firebombing and Swastika-Carving will pass thee by.

I wish you could see the license plate as well, because it really does complete the tableau, but alas, ethics forbid it. Suffice it to say, it manages to combine smug self-satisfaction, a reference to Eastern spirituality, and a reminder, in case you need it, that you are in the presence of an electric vehicle. Pity the poor lib, secure in his zero-emission certitude, coasting in cruise control down the Right Side of History, only to discover in horror that the trickster god has actually placed him in charge of an Auschwitz shuttle. “‘It isn’t fair; it isn’t right,’ he screamed, and then they were upon him.”

Sages

By in books, the geist of the zeit

Oliver Bateman:

John Burn-Murdoch laments that the digital environment is sapping our sustained concentration, but we might recall that early modern and even our boomer relatives rarely read for hours at a stretch either. Even the modest expansions in literacy did not produce libraries in every home. In fact, the average person’s reading might have been quick, sporadic, or done communally: a local official reading a letter aloud to a crowd, a parson sharing the news from a printed pamphlet, or an older sibling reading a chapbook to younger ones. The rest of life went on in speech. Our modern version is scrolling bullet-point updates on social media, or listening to a 30-second audio summary or reaction on TikTok. The difference is that elites maintain illusions about some sort of golden era that preceded it. The truth is that the dense, contemplative reading we associate with the age of the novel was always a minority pursuit. Many people from roughly the mid-1700s onward were taught to read sentences from the Bible or sign a ledger, but they still gleaned most of their knowledge from conversation, from newspapers read or retold to them, from the radio or the television in the centuries that followed.

…As for the claims that “reading is dying,” we might ask if it was ever truly universal or unassailable. A vast majority of the population has always found extended reading burdensome, even in periods, like ours, that are widely regarded as “more literate.” Pre-modern society taught many its knowledge exclusively through spoken means, and if there were some “golden age” of universal literacy, historians have not pinned it down. Indeed, the historical record suggests that, by 1700, only around half the population could read more than just a few words. Even if the younger generation in the 21st century read fewer printed pages and prefer brief TikTok videos, that might not represent a cataclysm so much as a rebalancing. This rebalancing might be questionable in certain arenas — research has shown, for example, that consistent reading helps shape attention and fosters complex thinking — but it also might revive more social ways of learning, reminiscent of how neighbors once passed around songs, proverbs, and stories.

Obviously — I assume — I love reading. I’m also a little bit of a weirdo in general, though. I’m not under the illusion that many people share my weird interests, and I’ve never indulged in the masturbatory fantasy of moral progress beloved of the typical NPR/Atlantic/NYT midwit that reading makes one a “better person,” more empathic, more humane. It may possibly make one more interesting, which is not at all the same thing. But even that’s debatable. Many non-readers are far better company than me and easier to get along with. Thus I’m sanguine about the future of books and reading. For the remaining (possible) few decades of my life, I expect that studious literacy will retain a certain gravitas among the population at large, much like shamanism, and that’s good enough for me. “Don’t bother him. He’s a strange one, sitting in that study all the time, communing with imaginary and long-dead spirits.”

Personal Thoughts That Are Obvious Truths

By in books, foolosophy

I concur. I’m also greatly enjoying Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization series for the same reason. For example, here’s one passage I read last night in The Life of Greece:

Other cities huddled along the hills along the Corinthian Gulf—Aegium, Helice, Aegira, Pellene—now almost forgotten, but once alive with men, women, and children, every one of whom was the center of the world.

He does that often. It’s that little pinch of poetry at the end that keeps it from being a dry recitation of ancient names and events, a dash of memento mori that would have no place in a more objective scholarly book. I feel like the social science idiom has dominated non-fiction for as long as I’ve been alive. I wonder how long ago this more humanistic approach went out of style?

Reading, the Aristocratic Pastime

By in books

The picture is not much better for books. In 2022, for instance, the best-selling nonfiction title (a self-help book called Atomic Habits) sold 1.2 million copies. The number two bestseller, The Body Keeps Score, sold roughly half as many units (637,000). For context, there are roughly 258 million adults (eighteen years and older) in the United States. This means the absolute best-selling nonfiction title in the U.S. reached less than 0.5 percent of American adults, and the runner-up reached roughly 0.25 percent. Even the number one fiction book, It Ends with Us, only sold enough units to reach roughly 1 percent of American adults. For university presses, the numbers tend to be much lower. The typical monograph sells less than 500 copies. More trade-oriented academic press books tend to move around 5,000 units at the high end. At the pinnacle of the academic publishing world, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century has sold more than 2.5 million copies worldwide since 2013. As impressive as that sounds, it amounts to only 1 percent of the current U.S. population—and this statistic counts all units sold over the last decade, many in international markets.

And of course, as it relates to impact, many who buy books never read them (there’s even a Japanese word for this practice, tsundoku). Even those who start to read titles regularly fail to finish them. E-reader based estimates by mathematician Jordan Ellenberg suggest that the overall book completion rate for American readers may be as low as 3 percent— with Piketty’s bestselling Capital being among the least likely to be finished once started. With only around 1 percent of the population buying even the best-selling titles in a given year, and only a small fraction of purchases actually reading those texts to completion (if at all), even the most successful titles typically reach a miniscule share of the public and have a negligible effect on the social world.

— Musa Al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite

Some may find this disheartening. I think they suffer from a democratic romanticism. A world full of obsessive readers would be like a university English department writ large. Besides, how often do you get a chance to be in the top one percent of anything? Enjoy your aristocratic status, fellows.

Sometimes a Giant Penis Is Just a Giant Penis

By in foolosophy, jests japes jokes jollies

It is a longstanding delusion, in my opinion, that life is ultimately a very serious matter. The temporal distance of history seems to reinforce this delusion. Thus, for example, historians and anthropologists assure us that a hill figure like the Cerne Abbas Giant is a “fertility symbol” possessed of deep religious significance. Likewise with Venus figurines: Wikipedia says “There are widely varying and speculative interpretations of their use or meaning: they have been seen as religious figures, an expression of health and fertility, grandmother goddesses, or as self-depictions by female artists.”

As a devotee of the trickster god, I favor a simpler, more self-evident explanation: dicks and boobs are funny and interesting to a perpetually oversexed species. Some Stone Age Beavis and Butt-head thought it would rule to cover a hillside with a picture of a man with a huge boner. Likewise, some prehistoric beta male, denied access to the women of the tribe, carved a Venus figurine for, ah, private study. Should this Berlin rooftop survive nuclear war and/or an asteroid strike, you can bet that future anthropologists will gather around it with sober expressions, stroking their chins and inventing grandiose theories about how this was clearly painted in order to appease the gods, measure the changing seasons, and guarantee a bounteous crop.