Hello,
Obligatory shilling. I reviewed Jordan Peterson's new book Beyond Order for the magazine Athwart.
I wrote for Spectator USA about the emerging campaign against Substack.
Finally, I wrote for my paying Substack subscribers about trying not to be a hack.
Shameless pitch. THE ZONE is almost one year old. Thank you for reading this far! I can hardly let such an occasion pass without making a pitch to old and new paying subscribers. (Eh, I could - but I won't.)
Some of my pieces for paying subscribers at the start of this project were undercooked. Damp squibs. Duds. Since then, though, I have written detailed commentary on France, conservatism, anonymity, atomisation, utopianism and psychiatry, among other things, assessments of writers from Matt Yglesias to J.G. Ballard, and eclectic but I hope interesting pieces about Polish organised crime, serial killing, IRL streaming, NXIVM, Elevatorgate, British literature, American underground literature, my family, my writing and how the hell I ended up in Poland. The pieces I write here very much reflect my fluctuating interests. That imbues them with the flaw of inconsistency, but I hope they have the virtues of enthusiasm and originality. If you are interested then I would be honoured to have you as a paying subscriber. If you are not then I completely understand.
Their own hype. Helen Lewis writes for the Atlantic about “identity hoaxers”:
The inexplicable, and haunting, cases are those people who seem to believe their own stories: the sick patient tortured by the Gestapo, the little boy separated from his mother in a death camp, the white girls who decry “blackface” while curling their hair and passing as Latina or Black.
People prefer the pain of being interesting and victimized to the pain of being dull and privileged. (By their logic of course.)
Gerontocrazy. Sam Ashworth-Hayes writes for The Spectator about depressed and depressing living standards for young people:
Millennials spend a far higher proportion of their income on housing costs than the Boomers did at their age, with spiralling rental costs largely to blame. The typical family headed by a thirty year old today would take 19 years to save a deposit for a home. In the 1980s, it would have taken three years.
A lot has been written about leftist biases in media and education, and some of it was worthwhile, but take all of that bias away and you are still going to have young people drifting leftwards if they cannot afford a home.
Try to praise. Sad news from Poland, where the brilliant poet Adam Zagajewski has died. “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” is his most famous poem, but I also love the honesty of “Reading Miłosz”. It is to my shame that I cannot read such poems in their original language, and something I must strive to change.
The products. Feminist Current carry a disturbing, possibly NSFW, article by Jen Izaakson about the lurid dynamics of pornification:
Because of that mass proliferation, women making self-made porn need to specialize and cultivate a niche in what is now a saturated market. Belle Delphine has done this with her performative sexualized child-likeness. Other women will be pressured to partake in harmful and extreme practices to stand out from the crowd.
In the 2000s, porn mogul and wrestling promoter Rob Black was prosecuted in the USA for producing porn which seemed to show non-consensual sex. He spent a year in prison. Now that kind of material is knocking on the door of the mainstream. He must be annoyed.
“Woke capital”. The always interesting Matthew Walther refines the often abused term “woke capital”:
The teleology of globalized capital was always going to be wokeness, by which I mean the emancipation of men and women from every bond, custom, obligation, tradition, attachment, or harmlessly venerable practice they might once have held in common, sometimes more or less consciously—e.g., the moral dictates of the Christian religion—but more often than not simply as a matter of habit.
I think, and have argued, that a generational trend towards progressivism as a status-seeking concept is an influence as well. But Walther is absolutely right that conservatives who think the “woke” part of the term is the only problem are deluded.
The is-ness of us. Simon Evans, one of my favourite comedians, and also an excellent writer, reflects on the hard problem of consciousness:
Some speak in terms of an 'emergent phenomenon' as if that explained anything, beyond denying that it was planted by the Almighty, or a malevolent Demiurge. Some dispute that there is a ‘self', without explaining the nature of whatever it is that is wearing its mask. There are plenty of debates about the possibility of free will, or whether the conscious rider is dominated by a sub-conscious elephant. But quite how mind emerges from matter, we are no closer to grasping.
Montaigne to misery memoirs. The mononymous Jane of Ubique Naufragium Est writes about autobiography:
Drawing on some paradigmatic examples, I will make the case that while confessional writing has become more ‘shocking’ and frank in its depiction of the embarrassing, the taboo, the painful, etc., it has also become less honest.
I have written a few autobiographical pieces, and must admit that there is a strange temptation to equate sensationalism with honesty, and suffering with profundity, as if Christ displayed his wounds for the mere sake of it.
Have a lovely week,
Ben
I have always liked those two poems you mention, and as a native Polish speaker, I think the translations are excellent. Here is my favourite poem by Szymborska, which, I have to say, has a particularly pleasing rhythm in Polish which means it doesn't quite sound as beautiful in English, despite masterful translation: http://mrhoyesibwebsite.com/Poetry%20Texts/Szymborska/Critical%20Articles/Nothing%20Twice.htm