Noteworthy reads from the last week:
“I'm Not Dante or Milton, but Won't You Remember Me, Too?,” David Wheatley
“I love minor poets. Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, Amy Levy, Charlotte Mew, Robert Fergusson, James Clarence Mangan, and Robert Garioch, are all poets I read with admiration and reverence.”
“The New Devil’s Dictionary,” T.C. Sottek
“transhumanist (n.): Someone so enamored with the misery of a natural lifespan that they wish to make it endless.”
“A Science of Literature,” Ben Merriman
“The statistics used in these works are mainly descriptive, and the faith placed in these descriptions is limited. A table or graph is treated as an object to be interpreted. In this and many other respects, distant reading remains a recognizably humanistic practice.”
“The Bully’s Pulpit,” David Graeber
“Our first instinct when we observe unprovoked aggression is either to pretend it isn’t happening or, if that becomes impossible, to equate attacker and victim, placing both under a kind of contagion, which, it is hoped, can be prevented from spreading to everybody else.”
“I used to wonder whether Americans can pretend to analyze, act, or claim Shakespeare alongside the English. These days, however, I’m more concerned with whether love—unconditional and emptied of ego as it repeatedly emerges in these plays—can find a place among us, British, American, or otherwise. Can it even be understood, let alone valued?”