Friday Links
March 1, 2024
Cecily, Sick Day by Caleb Kortokrax
Tara Isabella Burton: On Good Parties
Saint Samuel of Fleet Street: Dan Hitchens on Samuel Johnson Among the Modernists
The Sacred and Profane Love Podcast is back with Patrick Deneen on DeLillo’s White Noise
“Now You are Elsewhere”: Anecdotal Evidence on Henri Coulette
Poetica: “Dear March - Come in” by Emily Dickinson
Tara Isabella Burton: On Good Parties
This essay is taken from a longer piece published in 2021 in Compact:
Far from being frivolous (and, in many ways, because of its seeming frivolousness), the party – at least what I want to call a Good Party – offers us a vision of an affective polity, rather than an ideological or disengaged one. It is a practice for living.
Saint Samuel of Fleet Street: Dan Hitchens on Samuel Johnson Among the Modernists
Samuel Johnson Among the Modernists has its moments, but for the most part it struggles to go beyond showing us how they complimented him. Perhaps that is inevitable. Johnson is, in many ways, a defiantly pre-modern figure, seeing the world he knows slipping away. As John Wain wrote in the second-best Johnson biography, part of the drama of Boswell’s Life of Johnson derives from the sense that two eras are talking to each other.
The Sacred and Profane Love Podcast is back with Patrick Deneen on DeLillo’s White Noise
A great episode to kick of this new season, in which Frey and Deneen discuss DeLillo’s White Noise and “explore the novel’s undercurrents of existential angst in a world of distraction, amnesia, and unfulfilled longings.”
“Now You are Elsewhere”: Anecdotal Evidence on Henri Coulette
Patrick Kurp writes about the California poet, Henri Coulette with a link to A Boris Dralyuk essay in LARB that is also excellent.
Poetica: “Dear March - Come in” by Emily Dickinson
If you don’t subscribe to Shadowlands Dispatches, I would encourage you to do so. They
. . . look at the meaning of the world around us to perceive how Christ the Logos, “for whom and by whom all things exist,” is revealed in everything from fairy tales to Cubist art to AI. In the Shadowlands Dispatch, you will find articles, reviews, recommendations that will help you both identify culture that deforms the soul with distorted meaning and culture that moves the soul “further up and further in” toward the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.
