2009-2018

By: Alan Jacobs

building

A book that I have returned to often over the years is Gabriel Josipovici’s The Book of God. Josipovici is an English (though born in France) novelist and critic who, at some point in the 1980s, learned Hebrew and Greek in order to read the Bible, and The Book of God is an account of what he discovered when he worked his way...

the fragility of platforms

In a comment on my previous post, Adam Roberts writes: In terms of human intermediation, facebook and twitter are radically, fundamentally ‘thin’ platforms, where things like the church or the family are deep-rooted and ‘thick’. FB/Twitter-etc are also transient—both relatively recent and already showing signs of obsolescence....

platforms and institutions

In the new edition of his book on the modern Left, which I review here, Roger Scruton writes, Occasional lip service is paid to a future state of ‘emancipation’, ‘equality’ or ‘social justice’. But those terms are seldom lifted out of the realm of abstractions, or subjected to serious examination. They are not, as a rule,...

the fool on the hill

Is this a stunt? Of course it’s a stunt, as it was when James Sturm did it a few years ago, though that was less Walden-esque, since Sturm has a family. Also, Thoreau’s life at Walden Pond was kind of a stunt too, since, despite the impression of absolute solitude he tried to give, he would regularly walk into town to visit...

rising up and rising down

Richard J. Evans summarizes Pankaj Mishra’s argument: “After a long, uneasy equipoise since 1945,” Mishra says, “the old west-dominated world order is giving way to an apparent global disorder.” We have entered an “age of anger”, in which established forms of authority and legitimacy, already seriously weakened by the...

Tolkien’s riddles

The Riddles of the Hobbit is a riddling book about a riddling writer, a philological exercise concerning the works of a philologist. I wish there were more books like this. Literary critics tend to stick firmly (ruthlessly) with the standard critical idiom even when the texts they’re writing about are fundamentally incompatible with...

Pynchon’s riddles

In the opening chapters of Against the Day Pynchon hints at certain oddities in the space/time continuum of the book. Consider this: The Chums of Chance could have been granted no more appropriate form of “ground-leave” than the Chicago Fair, as the great national celebration possessed the exact degree of fictitiousness to permit the...

recency illusions

In his book Days of Rage, Bryan Burrough writes, Imagine if this happened today: Hundreds of young Americans — white, black, and Hispanic — disappear from their everyday lives and secretly form urban guerrilla groups. Dedicated to confronting the government and righting society’s wrongs, they smuggle bombs into skyscrapers and...

reconstituting the Republic of Letters (or not)

Here I want to follow up on my previous post on academic publishing and the patronage system. First, just a note that the article by Stanley Fish that I cited in that post created an interesting conversation that can be found here, at least for those with JSTOR access. Now, back to the main issues raised by Wellmon and Piper: As I...

publication, power, and patronage

Here’s a PDF of an important article by Chad Wellmon and Andrew Piper, soon to be published in Critical Inquiry. And here’s what the journos call the nut graf: Historically, university reformers from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century have touted publication as a corrective to concentrations of power and patronage networks....