The winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Cormac McCarthy’s literary sources, on visiting Montenegro, the annual “First Things” poetry reading, and more.
Definitely acquiring Books Are Made Out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy's Literary Influences. Thanks for the tip. I hope all is going well in Asheville.
I haven't used social-media in five years, and the only comment I ever remember leaving for your Prufrock, was years back when you were leaving The American Conservative, and I wished you well and expressed the hope that you'd start the email letter again somehow. I've been following and recommending you more-or-less since, as one of the finest cultural and literary news digests in the English language.
I'm starting with a fan letter, to say thanks very much, first of all, and also I hope to make clear that I'm well familiar with your own leanings on certain political things which heretofore you have admirably neither signposted and flag-waved, nor excluded totally as though you were a bloodless robot.
But the Washington Examiner review of "Settler Colonialism" you wrote is enough to make me grind off what little enamel I have left on my molars.
The Universe is not obliged to fit or split itself into the current obsessions and delusions of: the American Democratic and Republican parties; their apologists in Anglo-American discourse; their courtiers and courtesans in the media; or their vassal elites in Europe. Nor for that matter, those of all of you in the Academic bubble, taking turns at playing Eloi and Morlocks, depending on whose political faction has temporarily scrambled to the top of the bucket of crabs.
A non-exhaustive list of things that are simply not the case:
- Criticising the Democratic Party makes one a Trump supporter;
- Criticising the US role in the Ukraine-Russia war makes one a Putin stooge;
- Criticising Wokeness or lockdowns, and being in favour of free-speech makes one a right-wing recidivist;
- Criticising - or condemning - Israel and its American backers makes one a Jew-hater.
Day Zero last year (7/10) has now replaced 9/11 as the cosmic number with which all history begins and ends, and whose eternal present we are all now locked into forever mindlessly repeating to the exclusion of any thought or action contrary to the official narrative of either Democrats or Republicans, whose only difference on this issue is who can deliver more bombs to get the job properly done, the Palestinians all well and truly dead and displaced - and who knows: maybe the Israeli Minister for Finance will get his stated wish for an Israel that stretches from Syria to Baghdad; and maybe the US christian fundamentalists will get _their_ wish for a nuclear conflagration that brings back Jesus.
A thought for you: a great many of us, who are not young and stupid American college students, nor professors egging on their stupidity, nor professors writing reviews about other academics criticising their stupidity and the professors egging them on, do not give a good-God-damn about it, but rather about the vicious slaughter of an entire people that has being going on retail for decades and now has accelerated wholesale across months. Any moral capital Israel had earned after WWII is now gone. We are watching a rotten, spiritually bankrupt and moral depraved hyper-nationalist golem-state cannibalise the ethical and philosophical soul of a former great world-religion, which in the future may be reduced to a cindered-lump of less import than Zoroastrianism after the Persian Empire.
You are no doubt a fine and decent human being as a neighbour and a regular person. I have no desire to punish or cajole you by cancelling my subscription, which frankly I treasure greatly and would miss greatly. But please: as you would no doubt expect someone who disagrees with you to put themselves in the shoes of a survivor of Palestinian attacks, will you please for the love of God try to do the same? Anybody who wants forceful criticism of Palestinian politicians and society could do no better than to talk to some actual Palestinians - but that would also require simultaneously hearing what it is like to live as a virtual non-person in a militarised prison-state from birth to a frequently early death, that would overload the fever-dreams of any Benedict-Option types as to what living in a totalitarian state is actually like in the flesh.
It's as though, say, 600 years of Britain trying to smash the Irish were telescoped into 60; but with Oliver Cromwell happening now, and with 1984 and Phillip K Dick levels of technological dystopia available for his toolkit.
And you actually believe, you really think, that the dumb _students_ are the problem for Israel and Jews? Do you not understand, can you not extend your moral imagination even slightly to grasp, that the primary source of Israel's delegitimisation, _is_Israel_itself_?
My family and I are living through what I can only call an Extinction-Level Event, regarding the Catholic Church and institutional Christianity in Ireland. It's more and more difficult to find out the schedule for masses, because there are less and less priests who have to combine more and more parishes - not just less priests joining I mean, but even just still alive and/or still in the priesthood; in my brother's secondary school class for example, there were 5 who went on for priesthood, and last we heard 3 had left - not even retired, but left altogether. When I was a dumb student in college, I really believed that sure, the church had some bad apples - but some of the people attacking the church were people I couldn't stand, and who had their own agenda. And that latter part was undoubtedly true - and also irrelevant to the truth of the institutional corruption and failure they were highlighting. I understand the psychological attachment and defensiveness of many Jews to Israel, because that in some ways analogous to my own regarding my church. And I also understand that the same intellectual corrosion and spiritual bankruptcy is also at work, on scales orders of magnitiude higher in terms of morality and historical import.
You can't all just blame dumb kids and wonky academic theory for people noticing that there's an ethnic cleansing going on, that were it taking place in a European nation with an Orthodox majority would be incurring full scale NATO bombardment.
Definitely acquiring Books Are Made Out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy's Literary Influences. Thanks for the tip. I hope all is going well in Asheville.
I hope all goes well in Asheville.
May your time with son in Asheville be helpful, repairing and rewarding.
From "Hamlet," in prose, 21st c. edition: "Horatio, the word 'trauma' makes my skin crawl."
I haven't used social-media in five years, and the only comment I ever remember leaving for your Prufrock, was years back when you were leaving The American Conservative, and I wished you well and expressed the hope that you'd start the email letter again somehow. I've been following and recommending you more-or-less since, as one of the finest cultural and literary news digests in the English language.
I'm starting with a fan letter, to say thanks very much, first of all, and also I hope to make clear that I'm well familiar with your own leanings on certain political things which heretofore you have admirably neither signposted and flag-waved, nor excluded totally as though you were a bloodless robot.
But the Washington Examiner review of "Settler Colonialism" you wrote is enough to make me grind off what little enamel I have left on my molars.
The Universe is not obliged to fit or split itself into the current obsessions and delusions of: the American Democratic and Republican parties; their apologists in Anglo-American discourse; their courtiers and courtesans in the media; or their vassal elites in Europe. Nor for that matter, those of all of you in the Academic bubble, taking turns at playing Eloi and Morlocks, depending on whose political faction has temporarily scrambled to the top of the bucket of crabs.
A non-exhaustive list of things that are simply not the case:
- Criticising the Democratic Party makes one a Trump supporter;
- Criticising the US role in the Ukraine-Russia war makes one a Putin stooge;
- Criticising Wokeness or lockdowns, and being in favour of free-speech makes one a right-wing recidivist;
- Criticising - or condemning - Israel and its American backers makes one a Jew-hater.
Day Zero last year (7/10) has now replaced 9/11 as the cosmic number with which all history begins and ends, and whose eternal present we are all now locked into forever mindlessly repeating to the exclusion of any thought or action contrary to the official narrative of either Democrats or Republicans, whose only difference on this issue is who can deliver more bombs to get the job properly done, the Palestinians all well and truly dead and displaced - and who knows: maybe the Israeli Minister for Finance will get his stated wish for an Israel that stretches from Syria to Baghdad; and maybe the US christian fundamentalists will get _their_ wish for a nuclear conflagration that brings back Jesus.
A thought for you: a great many of us, who are not young and stupid American college students, nor professors egging on their stupidity, nor professors writing reviews about other academics criticising their stupidity and the professors egging them on, do not give a good-God-damn about it, but rather about the vicious slaughter of an entire people that has being going on retail for decades and now has accelerated wholesale across months. Any moral capital Israel had earned after WWII is now gone. We are watching a rotten, spiritually bankrupt and moral depraved hyper-nationalist golem-state cannibalise the ethical and philosophical soul of a former great world-religion, which in the future may be reduced to a cindered-lump of less import than Zoroastrianism after the Persian Empire.
You are no doubt a fine and decent human being as a neighbour and a regular person. I have no desire to punish or cajole you by cancelling my subscription, which frankly I treasure greatly and would miss greatly. But please: as you would no doubt expect someone who disagrees with you to put themselves in the shoes of a survivor of Palestinian attacks, will you please for the love of God try to do the same? Anybody who wants forceful criticism of Palestinian politicians and society could do no better than to talk to some actual Palestinians - but that would also require simultaneously hearing what it is like to live as a virtual non-person in a militarised prison-state from birth to a frequently early death, that would overload the fever-dreams of any Benedict-Option types as to what living in a totalitarian state is actually like in the flesh.
It's as though, say, 600 years of Britain trying to smash the Irish were telescoped into 60; but with Oliver Cromwell happening now, and with 1984 and Phillip K Dick levels of technological dystopia available for his toolkit.
And you actually believe, you really think, that the dumb _students_ are the problem for Israel and Jews? Do you not understand, can you not extend your moral imagination even slightly to grasp, that the primary source of Israel's delegitimisation, _is_Israel_itself_?
My family and I are living through what I can only call an Extinction-Level Event, regarding the Catholic Church and institutional Christianity in Ireland. It's more and more difficult to find out the schedule for masses, because there are less and less priests who have to combine more and more parishes - not just less priests joining I mean, but even just still alive and/or still in the priesthood; in my brother's secondary school class for example, there were 5 who went on for priesthood, and last we heard 3 had left - not even retired, but left altogether. When I was a dumb student in college, I really believed that sure, the church had some bad apples - but some of the people attacking the church were people I couldn't stand, and who had their own agenda. And that latter part was undoubtedly true - and also irrelevant to the truth of the institutional corruption and failure they were highlighting. I understand the psychological attachment and defensiveness of many Jews to Israel, because that in some ways analogous to my own regarding my church. And I also understand that the same intellectual corrosion and spiritual bankruptcy is also at work, on scales orders of magnitiude higher in terms of morality and historical import.
You can't all just blame dumb kids and wonky academic theory for people noticing that there's an ethnic cleansing going on, that were it taking place in a European nation with an Orthodox majority would be incurring full scale NATO bombardment.