Mediocre Talents

By in books, foolosophy, juxtapositions, nietzsche No Comments

The only fault one can impute to genuinely fine writings is that they are usually the cause of very many bad or mediocre ones.

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

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[Beethoven] quoted a contemporary comment on artists: “Unfortunately, mediocre talents are condemned to imitate the faults of the great masters without appreciating their beauties: from thence comes the harm that Michelangelo does to painting, Shakespeare to drama and, in our day, Beethoven to music.”

— Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

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Andrew Tate seems to fancy himself as a kind of Nietzschean Übermensch, a strong, powerful individual that has risen above society’s norms and become the best version of himself. But besides both men being accused of misogyny, there is nothing else the two share in outlook. Asceticism and a love for eternal, idealised archetypes at the expense of the ever-changing and evolving world of the senses would have left Nietzsche distinctly unimpressed.

— Alexis Papazoglo, “Andrew Tate, Nietzsche and the Matrix“

The Great Pretending

By in foolosophy 2 Comments

Charles C.W. Cooke:

Which is all a long way of saying that I think that we profoundly underestimate the importance of sports in our culture. I am often told—by progressives and “post-liberal” conservatives alike—that the classical-liberal worldview that I hold is too hollow to survive because, while it creates space for different sorts of people, it doesn’t believe in anything itself. I disagree with this assessment for many reasons, but the most important among them is that it spectacularly misses the point. The American system of government is not supposed to be the source of meaning in people’s lives; it’s supposed to provide a framework within which people can find meaning without being subjugated by the predilections of other people. That being so, the threat is not that the government will remain assiduously neutral and bore everyone into totalitarianism, but that, having been given the chance to take part in a host of unmolested institutions, the citizenry will politely decline to do so. When figures such as myself are asked which institutions we have in mind, we often rattle off a familiar list: families, churches, charities, book clubs, etc. But, perhaps because it sounds frivolous, we tend to leave out sports. We shouldn’t. Sports are a key source of meaning, and, more important still, they serve as a safe outlet for some of the least pleasant sides of human nature.

I agree with Cooke’s classical liberalism, but I’d go further and give voice to a thought that I’ve only considered in a unfocused way up until now: I think the whole point of life is to play, to be silly. Yes, of course, there’s all sorts of serious work that needs to be done first, so that we don’t starve or freeze, but I think humans have done a pretty good job of accomplishing that. Once all that is secured, though, it’s time to pretend. That might mean we pretend fictional characters in movies or books are real for a couple hours, or we pretend that it’s vitally important that the men in red shirts throw or kick the ball to one end of the field before the men in white shirts get it to the opposite end, or we pretend that we’re fighting in World War 2 by pressing buttons on a controller in front of our television. Even animals understand this. My dog certainly is concerned to make sure his bowl has food in it twice a day and that the perimeter is free of unauthorized intruders, but he’s never happier than when we sit on the floor, rolling his ball around the room for him to chase, pretending to desperately want it back from him while he pretends to warn us away from it.

I asked the Lady of the House what percentage of our daily conversations consists of inside jokes or other forms of silliness, and she suggested 70%. Seems reasonable enough to me. At the very least, you might say that the majority of our dialogue is an extended exercise in creative writing. Puns, allusions, zingers, bombast, anything but straightforward talk. It seems like one of the defining characteristics of your most intimate relationships is the amount of time you spend in a shared fantasy world, where little is exactly as it appears.

One Side of a Personality

By in books, foolosophy, literature as moral fiber supplement, moralizing No Comments

Experience offers proof on every hand that vigorous mental life may be but one side of a personality, of which the other is moral barbarism.

— George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

It is one thing in practice not to read books, or not to read them as much as one might wish. But it is something else entirely to despise the act in principle. Identifying as someone who categorically rejects books suggests a much larger deficiency of character. As Ye once riffed (prophetically) during a live performance, “I get my quotes from movies because I don’t read, or from, like, go figure, real life or something. Like, live real life; talk to real people; get information; ask people questions; and it was something about, ‘You either die a superhero or you live to become the villain.’” As clever as that sounds, receiving all of your information from the SBF ideal of six-paragraph blog posts, or from the movies and random conversations that Ye prefers, is as foolish as identifying as someone who chooses to eat only fast food.

Many books should not have been published, and writing one is an excruciating process full of failure. But when a book succeeds, even partially, it represents a level of concentration and refinement—a mastery of subject and style strengthened through patience and clarified in revision—that cannot be equaled. Writing a book is an extraordinarily disproportionate act: What can be consumed in a matter of hours takes years to bring to fruition. That is its virtue. And the rare patience a book still demands of a reader—those precious slow hours of deep focus—is also a virtue.

I would defend the practice of reading simply because it is, so to speak, my home. As Michael Oakeshott put it, “What is esteemed is the present; and it is esteemed not on account of its connections with a remote antiquity, nor because it is recognized to be more admirable than any possible alternative, but on account of its familiarity.” I have always been a reader and always will be, and as such, the aggressively illiterate types that Williams talks about are beneath my contempt — although, I would add, I didn’t need to know that Kanye West, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Sean McElwee hated books to gauge their lack of character; that should have been obvious to anyone beforehand. All that said, though, I have no desire to proselytize on behalf of the “virtue” of concentration and refinement, let alone witness to the heathens. I know many people who will cheerfully inform you that they haven’t read a book since high school, and yet they are still good people in all the ways that matter. Conversely, I would just point to any number of authors and academics as proof that a lifetime’s immersion in literature doesn’t necessarily do anything to develop character or general intelligence. By all means, spend your time reading. Just don’t fall prey to the conceit (that particularly seems to afflict writers for the Atlantic) that you’re “progressing” in any way by doing it.

If You Want to Be Perfect, Then Go and Donate Your Books

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Rhiannon Cosslett:

This phenomenon is best illustrated by a poster that for a while was following me around the internet in advert form, under the misapprehension that because I love cats and read books – and, indeed, have written a book about a cat – it had my taste in interior decor pinned down. The poster shows a cat and bears the slogan: “THAT’S WHAT I DO, I READ BOOKS, I DRINK TEA AND I KNOW THINGS.”

Apologies if you own this poster, but to me it encapsulates everything that is smug and middle class about the cult of book ownership. I don’t mean reading – provided you’re lucky enough to still have a local library, that is a pastime that is accessible to almost everyone. No, I specifically mean having a lot of books and boasting about it, treating having a lot of books as a stand-in for your personality, or believing that simply owning a lot of books makes one “know things”.

I understand that certain books can feel vital and precious. I grew up in a family where there were a lot of books on the shelves, though we couldn’t always afford new ones. I’ve never forgotten the privilege of that, nor of the position I’m in now, where I am sometimes sent books free of charge. Perhaps that’s why I find the idea of hoarding them rather sad – there’s even a Japanese word, tsundoku, for allowing books to pile up unread. Instead, I choose to donate mine to places where there are people who can most benefit from them, or leave them on the wall outside my house, where they always disappear.

I don’t mean to display my repulsive middle-class roots in front of my betters, but if Mrs. Cosslett spent a little less time humblebragging about how she transcended her privileged past and became a codex Communist, a Bodhisattva of book-donating, a one-woman welfare state for the literary indigent, and a little more time rubbing elbows with us fishwives and costermongers, she might have been aware that the whole “That’s what I do, I [blank] and I know things” meme template comes from Game of Thrones, and is generally used as, you know, a joke. (I even have a sticker on my laptop at work that says, “That’s what I do, I pick things up and put things down, and I know things.” See, it’s funny because I do indeed spend my time at both labor and leisure picking things up and putting them down, whether boxes or barbells, and also because…oh, never mind.) Ah, Guardian, you never disappoint.

If There Is Hope, It Lies In the Amateurs

By in foolosophy 1 Comment

Ed West:

That is why I’m proposing an idea, for a sort of club where people come and listen to talks about a particular feature of the western canon — Virgil, Goethe, Milton, Van Eyck, whatever — and fill in all these enormous holes in our knowledge. It would be a bit like an old-fashioned salon, or a Lyceum club. Although there are local salons still running, this would ideally be national. This canon club — I’m open to suggestions for a different name — would initially start in one city, presumably London, but if there was further interest we could help set up branches across Britain (and then even maybe abroad). Each local club would run semi-independently, but the wider organisation would help with arranging speakers and so on.

It might be useful for authors wanting to sell books, but the club could also hire enthusiastic amateurs to just spread their knowledge for the sheer sake of it. Maybe there won’t be any interest in the events, but maybe there will — and I think there is a tendency to underestimate the public’s enthusiasm for culture.

A lot of people want to learn more, there aren’t really any mainstream institutions directing them where to go, and if you don’t know where to start, it’s that much harder. They also don’t like being hectored and are put off by the intrusion of theory, not to mention a very predictable sort of politicisation that tries to fit old works of art into a modern framing. (Making it ‘relevant’ — shudder).

I have no idea if this would be successful, but, like Ed, I think there might be a surprising amount of latent appetite out there. If it catches on, it would surely attract the droves of underemployed theory-spouting entryists who are also out there, but I suppose that’s a problem for a different day. We just wanted to be left alone to read our books and spin our idle thoughts, but as the philosophical troubadour Kenneth Rogers sang, sometimes you’ve gotta fight to preserve your cultural space when you’re an amateur bibliophile. (Words to that effect, anyway. He made it rhyme.) Roll up your sleeves, gentlefolk. We’ve got a life of the mind to save.

My Friends All Are Boring and So Am I

By in foolosophy 4 Comments

Ross Douthat:

Still, when I look back on this music, there’s something about Grossman’s analysis that rings true. It’s not joy at the end of history, exactly, that defines the Hootie-DMB-Counting Crows aesthetic, but maybe it’s what you might call a sense that ordinary life suffices (a key stabilizing sentiment for a liberal society). That you can have a rich human experience, full of joys and sorrows, without the extreme premodern or 20th-century stuff, war and God and utopia and all the rest. (And without racial division, too: The multiracial makeup of the Dave Matthews Band and Hootie and the Blowfish is also important here.) That you can be a fulfilled human person just through the highs and lows of normal-seeming suburban American life. That tropes of early-adult male heterosexual experience like “the yearning to be famous” or “the awesome girl who lets you down” or just “hanging out with your friends and feeling a little sorry for yourself” are all sufficient as grist for the strong feelings that make up an interesting life. And that when those feelings get you down, you can be depressed in a way that’s personal rather than existential, that’s just about you rather than about everything that’s wrong with life under late capitalism or whatever.

I never listened to any of those bands, but I agree that the “ordinary life suffices” perspective was prevalent in the 1990s, and not just because I was young and the world was new, and bliss it was in that decade to be alive and all that. I only realized how much that apparent common sense had made up the background of my young adulthood, and what an anomaly that was, once the Great Awokening began, and I began to wonder what was wrong with all these weirdos who insisted on making everything about politics, one of the least rewarding aspects of the human condition. At this point, it almost seems like a radical statement to say that an ordinary life of simple pleasures is good enough. It’s true, though, and will still be true long after this spasm of political puritanism has burned itself out.

(For anyone encountering the paywall, look, you didn’t hear this from me, but…)

Here’s to Us! Who’s Like Us? Damn Few, and They’re All Dead

By in writing 2 Comments

Monique Judge:

Buy that domain name. Carve your space out on the web. Tell your stories, build your community, and talk to your people. It doesn’t have to be big. It doesn’t have to be fancy. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. It doesn’t need to duplicate any space that already exists on the web — in fact, it shouldn’t. This is your creation. It’s your expression. It should reflect you.

Bring back personal blogging in 2023. We, as a web community, will be all that much better for it.

This will not happen, not in 2023, not ever. How misguided is this? Let me count the ways.

Most people don’t read. Of those who do, most of them only read one or two books a year, and those books are mostly potboilers of some type. Hardly anyone reads lit-rah-chur or weighty nonfiction for pleasure. The liberal arts conceit of a large population of humanities majors and passionate autodidacts gathering in every coffeehouse to discuss great novels and the human condition is just that, a conceit.

If hardly anyone reads, how many people do you think write as a hobby? And if we can split that tiny fraction even further, how many of them are still hoping for some sort of eventual career in writing? Incidentally, this is mostly what became of the first generation of bloggers; they either got signed to book deals, or they got a paid gig for some established outlet, or they got bored and/or occupied with other responsibilities and gave up. I bet you can count the number of currently-active bloggers who started out in 2002 on your hands, with fingers left over. The devoted amateur who refuses on principle to sell out is more myth than man.

Human nature hasn’t changed in the last twenty years. Trolls, doxxing, and tribal stupidity existed in abundance in the old blogosphere, if not quite at the current industrial scale. But more importantly, people were and are just as dumb, lazy, and self-unaware as ever. Yes, people certainly do complain a lot about the “hellscape” of social media. That’s because bitching and moaning is easy, but changing your life is hard, and people will reliably choose the path of least resistance. Plus, as social animals, people want to be where the action is, and where their friends are. If that means logging onto Twitter every day, whining all the while, then that’s what they’ll do. What, like they’re going to voluntarily isolate themselves, start a blog, high-mindedly ignore all the prolefeed and clickbait on the web, and write short essays for an audience of fifteen or twenty other bloggers, when they could be getting viral attention on Twitter or YouTube? Not to mention, what happens after they do all that, only to discover that they’ve run out of things to say after six months and aren’t nearly as smart or interesting as they fancied themselves to be?

No, I’m afraid this is just a combination of nostalgia and New Year’s resolution, a double-scoop of ineffective wishful thinking. Anyone weird enough to keep a blog is already doing it, and once we’re gone, our ways will be forgotten.

I’ve Been Too Long, I’m Glad to Be Back

By in books, so many books, so little time 1 Comment

Ted Gioia:

Daunt also refused to dumb-down the store offerings. The key challenge, he claimed was to “create an environment that’s intellectually satisfying—and not in a snobbish way, but in the sense of feeding your mind.”

That’s an extraordinary thing to hear from a corporate CEO. Daunt wanted to run a bookstore that was “intellectually satisfying” and “feeds your mind.” The first time I heard an interview with him, I decided I trusted James Daunt. I wanted him to succeed. But the odds seemed stacked against him.

Then it started to happen—book sales at Barnes & Noble began rising again. Sales in 2021 quickly got back to pre-pandemic levels, and then kept growing. Readers regained trust in the company. The workers at the stores were more motivated and started genuinely acting like booksellers.

I recently visited a Barnes & Noble store, for the first time since the pandemic. I saw a lot of interesting books, and bought a couple. I plan to go back again.

I went to Barnes & Noble today, for the first time in about a year. Mainly, I wanted the irreplaceable experience of browsing among physical copies of books again. Library sales mostly went dormant after the pandemic, and by the time they started reappearing, work had changed and there wasn’t much time for traveling to them anymore. But in recent weeks, I’d begun to notice that I simply wasn’t encountering much in the way of interesting reviews online. Weeks and months would pass without me feeling excited to read anything new and different. Frankly, I was starting to feel a little brain-dead. But as I’d hoped, I found my visit to be a real tonic. Within a few minutes, I’d found a new book by my old pal Anthony Kronman that I didn’t even know existed, and I quickly added several others. Like sunlight and fresh air, a fellow needs to regularly browse in a bookstore to feel hale and hearty. I think we’ll even make some time to start traveling to library sales again in the new year. Retail stores are fine, but there’s nothing like the discovery of some old, out-of-print book being sold for one or two dollars to inspire you to take a chance on something different.

(The Lady of the House also got me another batch of Everyman Wodehouse for Christmas.)

All I Want for Christmas Is My Gym Routine

By in battling personal entropy No Comments

James Lileks:

The temperatures are expected to attain ludicrous depths. Will I continue to go into the office when it’s one below? I will. See, if I don’t go to the gym, I immediately deflate. One day. That’s all it takes. Like a punctured balloon. If I don’t do my daily pushups at home at the end of the night I fear I will wake with al dente limbs.

He jests, but I, I put this scenario to the test. You see, I am currently sicker than hell. For the second time this month. Previously, the last cold/flu of significance was in March of 2018. Four and a half years without a serious sniffle, and now this! I’ve spent the last two days in semiconscious delirium, nodding off for an hour or so during a seemingly-endless expanse of meaningless time. Needless to say, I had only just started to recover fighting form at the gym before this latest enforced absence. I have a nutrition session at the end of next week. I shudder to think how much lean mass will have decayed into fat by then. It’s going to be a blue Christmas, my friends.

UPDATE: Looks like Santa brought me a positive COVID test for Christmas.

Obiter Scripta, no. 125

By in books, obiter scripta No Comments

One of the things which make life on this planet more or less agreeable is the speed with which alarums, excursions, excitement, and rows generally, blow over. A nine-days’ wonder has to be a big business to last out its full time nowadays. As a rule the third day sees the end of it, and the public rushes whooping after some other hare that has been started for its benefit.

— P.G. Wodehouse, The Head of Kay’s

One of the smaller pleasures of this time of year is reading the year-end summaries of notable events and thinking, “Oh, yeah, I forgot all about that.” For three days, the fate of the world seemed to hinge on this thing, and now it’s just an afterthought. I admit I take a tiny satisfaction in seeing how many supposedly-momentous happenings passed into obscurity without managing to solicit any comment from me.

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