Of the Week | 1.17.25

Paradise Lost, classics publishers, and studiositas

Snow!! A measly covering of flakes on Friday night that barely covered the grass and melted the next morning, but for one evening it was magical. I pretended we had a real snow day and spent the morning in bed drinking coffee, working through the New Yorker’s Cartoons & Puzzles issue and reading Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. I could do this every Saturday, I know, but something about inclement weather makes everything feel cozier.

enjoying + link love //

O. Alan Noble’s piece on studiositas and Ross Byrd’s quick thoughts on intellectual sin go well together.

Jason Baxter contrasts letters by Mark Zuckerberg and W.B. Yeats to their daughters and thinks through what their use of language says about their outlook on humanity and the future. Just one quote:

Of the vast range of difficult, evasive, and fugitive spiritual impulses, could we be voluntarily cooperating in the simplification of our interior lives, and, by doing so, begin to lose the ability to feel the need for anything deeper in the first place? Are we closing the gap between the original emotions and fabricated responses?

(The above piece reminded of this one from a couple years ago about how to prevent an inhuman future.)

Naomi put together a comprehensive list of classics publishers (bookmarked to use as a reference!).

I put a couple of Brian Doyle’s books on hold at the library after reading this piece on the state of Christian literature.

Merve Emre pushes back on how moderns approach Paradise Lost:

But what is the difference between a radical reading and a misreading? How far can one go in making Milton speak to contemporary concerns—scanning his work for nascent arguments about religious terrorism, or police abolition, or anti-capitalist models of work—before the poem itself becomes irrelevant? Perhaps a more authentically radical way to read Paradise Lost is to insist on the scandal of its strangeness, to yield to its alien vision. By honoring its balance between freedom and obedience, we may resist the temptation to rewrite our present political disgraces as original sin.

this week //

Read: The Rest is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, Plough No. 42: Educating Humans, The New Yorker (December 23, 2024)

Watched: James Acaster: Hecklers Welcome, Juror #2, The Brutalist, The Usual Suspects

Listened: ~slower~ albums to match the weather — Jelly Road by Blake Mills, In the End It Always Does by the Japanese House, Javelin by Sufjan Stevens, Collapse List by Novo Amor, I Speak Because I Can by Laura Marling