Reading Around

 Some items that interested me and hope interest you.

Samjoko 

Samjoko Magazine is devoted to publishing exemplary work from content creators around the world. Focusing mainly upon the written word, we hope to create an immersive digital and print platform that stands out for its honesty and desire to take risks for the sake of artistic expression. We have no set aesthetic, though different themes will be focused upon periodically. Response times vary between 1 day to 4 months. Apologies in advance for form rejections. Our goal is to publish 10-15 pieces per issue.

The Case for ‘War and Peace’ and Rereading 

But I remember War and Peace. Maybe because I spent so long, well, reading War and Peace. I carried the still-like-new 1,386-page book daily to the subway station at 23rd Street, where I caught the downtown 6. One snowy morning, I was hustling to catch a train and slipped on ice near the subway entrance. I stayed vertical but the book tumbled down the steps; picking it up, I found an appalling tear in the cover. After the spill, I was angry with myself for weeks.

***

Recently, I went looking for the copy of War and Peace I carried around for months. I’ve moved four times since I read it, and it has had a place on a bookshelf in each apartment. Taking it off the shelf, I looked for the rip on the cover, the mark after I dropped it on the stairs long ago. But there was no rip on the cover of this book. How could this be? Turning over the book in my hands, I was confused until I found a jagged hangnail on the spine. Then I remembered: yes, this is the damage from that fall. My memory was correct in spirit, but the details I had stored up in my heart were troublingly wrong. A minor failure of recall. But still, a stumble. Another one. Flipping through the pages, I stopped at page 613 and read:

“The prince had greatly aged during the war. He had begun to show unmistakable signs of failing powers, sudden attacks of drowsiness, and forgetfulness of events nearest in time, and exact memory of remote incidents, and a childlike vanity in playing the part of leader of the Moscow opposition.”

Everything I love about Tolstoy is right there: the crumbling grandeur of a proud man, the insistent life force in the long strands of clauses that keep reaching, and the prose’s uncanny ability to capture the particular and the universal all at once. Indeed, this is how it is, as you age; you hold fast to what you know, sometimes so much so that the relentless newness of the world strikes and slides off you.

How the Federal Writers’ Project Shaped a Generation of Authors

Can You Name the Six Regions of Indiana?

I did not stop in on Sheila Kennedy enough. She is the best we have in Indiana for politics. Her latest, Those Alternate Realities, nails the MAGA crowd as living in a fantasy land. I thought the same when I heard Trump's inaugural speech, with its carnage in America tag-line.

I have a friend who watches the bond market, he thinks we are headed for another crash. I think we live in an era when the old verities of economics no longer are so certain. Reading Certain uncertainty in the US bond market, makes me think I am more on point here. Then, too, I have not heard back from y friend on this article.

I have not been able to get back to Pure Cosmos Club, but that is not my fault. No sense in not passing it along.

The same for Equality without compromise:

In 1958, the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch complained about the paucity of progressive thought in the Britain of her day in the essay ‘A House of Theory’, which appeared in a collection of radical political writings. Murdoch, along with her fellow contributors, bemoaned the decline of socialist conviction, the loss of energy and vision on the Left. Murdoch’s essay is largely forgotten among political philosophers, but her lament is no less relevant today. Recent trends in liberal egalitarian political philosophy, for all their influence in the West, have fallen short of adequately defending the ideal of equality, showing a lack of imagination in just the way noted by Murdoch. Furthermore, the influence of liberalism, in political philosophy, and in Western capitalist societies, is such that thinkers on the Left too often assume the necessity of these parameters.

In this essay I take up Murdoch’s call for a radical vision of egalitarianism as furthering equality of human flourishing, or wellbeing. I contend this will enable us to better understand and further what is at stake in the ideal of equality.

***

In sum, with his canonical treatise on justice, Rawls resuscitated political philosophy, but perhaps he did so by keeping it semiconscious. For in banning controversy about value from the domain of public debate, egalitarian political philosophy became curiously apolitical, burdened by an outlook of modest ambitions and imagination that seems ill-prepared to address the deep inequalities of capitalist societies or to motivate the activism necessary to facilitate social change. Cowed by the gains of the political Right and conservatives’ hostility to utopianism, still permeated by the legacy of scientistic philosophy, liberal egalitarianism is rather thin gruel for the aspiration to a society where people may flourish as equals. Murdoch notes her society’s ‘loss of religion as a consolation and guide’. Indeed, in the search for meaning in the largely secular societies of the West, liberal theory has left a void, leaving working people to find moral purpose in fundamentalist religion, Right-wing populism, xenophobic and authoritarian creeds. Egalitarians can and should do better.

I am Not Your Negro has been on HBO as I wrote up this note. How little has changed to make America live up to its promise of equality.

From The Intercept: Anti-Defamation League Maps Jewish Peace Rallies With Antisemitic Attacks:

A 2021 poll of Jewish voters, conducted by the nonpartisan Jewish Electorate Institute, shows that pro-Palestinian views in the American Jewish community are far from fringe. At the time, 25 percent of the Jews surveyed believed Israel was an apartheid state, 34 percent believed that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians was similar to racism in the U.S., and 22 percent thought that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians. These numbers are even starker for younger American Jews. This poll doesn’t reflect changes in how American Jews feel after Hamas’s brutal October 7 attack against Israel, or Israel’s subsequent massacre of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

Another poll, conducted by Data for Progress after the Israel–Gaza war broke out, shows that two-thirds of American voters as a whole support a ceasefire in Gaza, including 80 percent of Democrats, 56 percent of Republicans, and 57 percent of independents — despite President Joe Biden and most members of Congress, in both parties, opposing it.

 3 examples of Electric Vehicle misinformation

 House Democrat gives Marjorie Taylor Greene a quick American history lesson 

Debut Spotlight: Suzie Miller on Prima Facie:

What does your writing process look like? Any particular strategies or philosophies that help you find inspiration or put words on the page?

I write very intensely when I begin to write a story, be it a novel or a play, even a film or TV series. And once I begin I become obsessed with the particular form and story I am writing. People often say ‘the story wrote itself’ but for me I mull over it for a long time and then when it feels ‘cooked’ I start and cannot stop. I always talk about writing as being the process of diving to the bottom of the ocean and sitting on the seabed—you have to be in a particular mood with a sense of limitless time, a buffer from the real world in some way, a sense (real or otherwise) that there are no distractions to take you away. I write and write, then I walk around in the fog of the story, then write some more. It feels that the story then just flows out of me.

 

sch 11/12