Noontime roundup …

… Courtesy of Dave Lull:





… The progress of narrative:  Changing Our Stories by Tim Parks | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books.

… some writers do change their stories and their style quite decisively: Dickens shifted abruptly from optimism to pessimism, T.S. Eliot from a grumbling gloom to something approaching serenity, Joyce from relative simplicity to unspeakable complexity, Beckett from baroque English to the sparest French, Hardy from novels to poetry, or indeed, in the case of one of my favorite writers, Henry Green, from regular writing to silence. In each case, if one examines the life of the author, it becomes clear that the earlier approach no longer “worked” for the writer, no longer contained the tensions that need to be contained in order to go on living in a certain way. Some other story was necessary. Or alternatively, change had happened, had been achieved, for better or worse, and the previous story was simply no longer appropriate, because no longer required.

… In this corner: Charles Saatchi and Taki: the gloves are off.



Once, while in the competitive embrace of another, I (and he) crashed through a second-floor hallway bannister onto the floor below — just like in the cowboy movies. I was the fellow underneath. So I can't help regarding this as risible.



… Takedown: Why Be a Maker When You Can Be a Re-Maker? (Of Society According to Your Ideological Predilections).

Morozov has the usual problem of the socialist-leaning intellectual complainer of modernity--he doesn't really want to spend a lot of time spelling out what he does want (no one has to work, because, well, the state will take care of it) so he just moonily bitches about the ways other people choose to find fulfillment and joy.

That's because joy doesn't interest people like Morozov. Power, and exercising influence in relation to power, does. Oddly, joy does not appear to be one of the benefits conferred by power.



… Speaking of power: The Myth of Religious Violence.

The myth of religious violence should finally be seen for what it is: an important part of the folklore of Western societies. It does not identify any facts about the world, but rather authorizes certain arrangements of power in the modern West. It is a story of salvation from mortal peril by the creation of the secular nation-state.

… Showing us out: Other Selves, Other Souls?



… Learning from Edith: Edith Wharton and Loneliness in January.

No one is keeping track of my ritual but I have an idea something depends on my re-reading The Reef, or The House of Mirth, or Ethan Frome.

That something, I came to understand this year, is me. The birthday is the excuse; the truth is that these books are, to me, about my own loneliness. They are the way I get through Januaries. 

… Learning from George: Rebecca Mead’s ‘My Life in Middlemarch’.