August Diary
Hello,
Obligatory shilling. I wrote on Substack about the online and the real, if the English have culture, the nature of intelligence, online mountebanks, the satirical genius of Lewis Saunderson, dating discourse, my violent hatred for V-Shred and the ethics of doubt.
I wrote for The Critic about useless British cops, the persecuted church and the worthless Conservatives. I also wrote for The Telegraph offering advice to aspiring expats.
Against automaticity. A very interesting essay on the dignity of human consciousness from “a literal banana”:
My argument in this essay is that we are actually very rational, but managed to convince ourselves, for a variety of (perfectly rational) reasons using a variety of tactics, that we were helpless idiots.
(I’m a bit sceptical about the closing segment on phenomenology but that might be just because I have a bias against broad conclusions being drawn from any field that has the word “quantum” in the name.)
RIP Terry Funk. The legendary professional wrestler has died. This is a very sad loss — though given the frequency with which the great man retired and returned, it might soon be time for his comeback to the ring. I paid tribute to him for Countere a few years ago:
This is an age of superheroes: the Avengers, the X-Men, Batman, Spiderman. As a British outsider it is perhaps not my place to comment but I think these figures betray the American ideal with their stylishness, their glossiness. The American hero was the pioneer, the frontiersman, and the cowboy. Someone who spat. Someone who ate squirrels. Someone whose feet smelled. Of course, that vision had its flaws as well but it was more real. Terry Funk is that kind of hero: not the sort of bronzed Adonis Vince McMahon of the WWF fell off his chair for but someone who is recognizably human, with a level of toughness, experience, and wit one can aspire to emulate.
Rest in peace, Funker — if you can.
Let’s go exploring. Nic Rowan writes a fascinating piece for AmCon about Bill Watterson and Calvin and Hobbes (one of my childhood favourites):
By Watterson’s own admission, he cannot accurately recall a whole decade of his life because of his “Ahab-like obsession” with his work. “The intensity of pushing the writing and drawing as far as my skills allowed was the whole point of doing it,” he says. “I eliminated pretty much everything from my life that wasn’t the strip.”
It’s a great essay but I’m not sure Rowan is entirely correct here:
For my own part, Calvin and Hobbes consumed much of my childhood, as I am sure is the case for many other people who came of age at the turn of the millennium. But the attraction, I think, derived mainly from the fact Calvin thinks, speaks, and acts like no child in existence. Everything about his character is utterly alien to an actual six-year-old; yet his environment is so fully realized and the adults in his world so true to life that his own reality is almost completely convincing.
I think (and apologies to any readers who haven’t read the cartoons and don’t know what the Hell I’m on about) it’s more nuanced than that. Calvin has a child’s imagination but with an adult’s ability to express it. That’s what helped it to reflect the absurdities of childhood and adulthood at the same time.
A consistent and horrible vision. Will Lloyd writes excellently about Evelyn Waugh:
Instead of theory there is his lethally coherent worldview, expressed in novel after novel. A consistent and horrible vision, made much the worse for being persuasive. The meek will not inherit the earth. Collective endeavours always come to grief. Cheats and scoundrels will be lavishly rewarded. Falling in love is the first step to having your heart eaten. Pity is a less powerful force than contempt. “I believe that man is, by nature, an exile,” he wrote, “and will never be self-sufficient or complete on this earth.”
Alien and human. Samuel Kronen writes about illness, humanism and alienation. I’m a more cynical humanist that Mr Kronen but it’s a beautiful essay:
Nothing can ever truly separate us from this life, for we belong to life and life belongs to us. There may be nothing more human than feeling subhuman, except coming back from those feelings to feel a part of life again.
Grappling with life and death. Paul Laity writes movingly about his daughter’s death and the medical incompetence and complacency that allowed it to happen:
It’s been two years since my daughter, Martha, died in hospital, just before her 14th birthday. I divide my life into before her death, and after: nothing is the same and the change is permanent. Alongside Merope, Martha’s mum, I’m grappling with how to live.
Imperial miasma theory. The excellent Samuel Rubinstein sharply dissects a new genre of books:
Their project is a worthy one, which is why it is a shame that they have generally diverted themselves with a frivolous parlour game. The game, as I see it, works something like this. You pick a phenomenon, any phenomenon, real or imagined; then you try to explain, as best you can, how it is ‘rooted in’ or ‘suffused by’ the British Empire. The game rewards the nimble-minded. The possibilities are endless.
A demographic Ponzi scheme. Guy Dampier delivers what in a sane world would be a knockout blow to the idea that immigration solves demographic decline:
Even then, that wouldn’t solve the problem – because immigrants, too, get old. Assuming standards of medical care persist (or improve, as the science advances), it would only exacerbate the underlying problems. Rather like a Ponzi scheme, enormous movements of migrants would be constantly required in order to pay the bills of earlier waves.
Rediscovering the sacramental. Christopher Akers explores the work of the British poet and artist David Jones for us The Critic:
A key concern for Jones is the civilisational shift driven by modern technologies. This presents problems for our capacity to discover man-the-artist, with its eternal truths about man and art, in the ever-changing tides of modernity.
Jones’ In Parenthesis is one of my favourite books. I richly recommend it (as well as The Essential Calvin and Hobbes and Terry Funk’s “I Quit” match against Ric Flair).
Have a lovely month!
Ben