Friday Links 8/27/21
-
(Education) Agnes Callard wrote about the ideal, mostly invisible purpose of the American university, and the “real” scandal indicated by the public reaction to the bribery scandal of yesteryear. She asserts that “a university is a place where people help each other access the highest intellectual goods. A university is a place of heterodidacticism” (her coinage to describe people for whom learning and knowing is a social activity, as opposed to a solitary one). She goes on to point out that access to this place for the pursuit of intellectual goods is inequal not only across classes but across the phases of each of our lives. She posits that much of the vitriol against the University came from college graduates who had either failed to see its real point or were envious of the environment for intellectual growth they had aged out of. I miss the intellectual environment of my time in college, though it approached Callard’s ideal only rarely, and I wonder how we might create spaces to pursue this ideal free of the temporal constraints of being ‘college-aged’.
-
(International Politics) I found these two sources helpful for thinking about Afghanistan over the past weeks: a security assessment of central Asia after US withdrawal (recorded prior to the collapse of Kabul), and an assessment of the financial politics of the War on Terror by Adam Tooze. Here is his conclusion at some length:
“The tragedy is not that the War on Terror crowded out better projects (by its expense). The tragedy is that the better projects were never on the agenda of power at all. The tragedy is that the one thing that those with power and influence could agree on was war-fighting. In a profoundly divided polity, with deep divisions extending into the elite itself, national security is the one area where a degree of bipartisan agreement was still possible.
Other than making good the damage done by the frailty of the financial system, the War on Terror was by far and away the largest collective undertaking of the United States elite in the last twenty years. That is what the numbers so carefully compiled by the left critics of the war show. It is indictment enough.” - (Aesthetics) Resisting Oblivion is a compelling essay about possibilities and limitations of overtly political literature. Ryan Ruby introduces Peter Weiss, a twentieth century Swiss novelist whose novels center on working-class Europeans facing life-or-death choices between the towering ideologies of their time. By comparing this serious novelist with the “political” novels of the present, he deftly illustrates the latter’s moral and aesthetic weakness.
-
(Literature) Over the past two weeks I encountered so many references to the German writer WG Sebald that I finally bought The Rings of Saturn, the novel of his strangely dream-like walk along the coast of Suffolk (which is not really about this walk but about everything else it could possibly make him think of). The two best references were this touching podcast and this appreciative essay, but Sebald, in a quite Sebaldian way, keeps showing up anywhere I look, including in the Ryan Ruby essay above.
-
(Literary Criticism) Christian Lorentzen published a new piece about a minor controversy in literary criticism, which he mocks but also uses as the springboard to mount a rousing defense of his practice. His earlier analysis of literary criticism vs books coverage is also worthwhile.
- (Literature? Literary Criticism? Love?) Becca Rothfeld (who edited Resisting Oblivion above) introduced it with this charming reflection about editing or teaching as a “morally elevating activity”:
“I’ve been thinking a bit about how editing, like teaching, is a morally elevating activity, at least when you do it properly. I suppose it’s dangerous to suggest, in this fraught and paranoiac political climate, that teaching and editing are in any way reminiscent of anything romantic, but I think it’s undeniable that an editor or teacher is like a lover in at least one limited respect. To love someone well is at least in part to treat her interests as your own interests—and to edit well, or teach well, is to do the same, at least within some circumscribed domain. It is to take the writer or the student’s reasons as your own, rather than imposing your own agenda, or your own turns of phrase, or your own conclusions, upon the writer or student. A good editor sets aside her own convictions and favored formulations in the interest of helping the writer achieve something the editor would never think to attempt, the editor being, after all, a different person than the writer.”
Visual dispatches from August in Seattle: You can’t see it, but the air between us and Rainier is 40% mosquitoes Our weeknight picnic spot looking towards the Olympics Crescent Lake from the peak of Mount Storm King in the Olympics Portfolio diversification: Kirsten keeps a bird in the hand and two in the bush
Enjoy the weekend and ~love each other~
Alex
Some of my other writing can be found here.
If you’re not on the list and would like to receive periodic emails about books, writing, history and literature, please subscribe.