Reviews

A Visit to Vanity Fair by Alan Jacobs

Posted on by Kevin Holtsberry / 1 Comment

It is hard to top the publisher’s description of A Visit to Vanity Fair:

These perceptive moral essays crackle with wit, intelligence, and a wide range of knowledge. A cultural hawk eye delivers relevant, down-to-earth meditations on the way we live now. “A Visit to Vanity Fair” blends personal reflection with cultural criticism to address such topics as reading with children, sitting with a dying friend, and watching TV documentaries.

I mean it really does “crackle with wit, intelligence, and a wide range of knowledge. and Jacobs is a “cultural hawk eye” who “delivers relevant, down-to-earth meditations” and “blends personal reflection with cultural criticism.

The sad thing is that I have had this book on my shelf for quite some time.  I have long been enamored with Jacobs and his writing.  I have read a number of his books and have followed his writing online for many, many years.  But like so many of the authors and topics I collect and mean to dive into, I get distracted and end up just dipping into a book here or there.  For the last year or so I have thought about trying to read as much of Jacobs catalog as I could but have mostly failed.  So I recently girded my loins, so to speak, and grabbed this book of the shelf and forced myself to concentrate and spend time reading until I finished.

And it was worth it. It truly is a wonderful collection of thought provoking and well crafted essays. Published nearly 20 years ago, it nevertheless feels as engaging and relevant as ever. Whether dealing with Bob Dylan or Harry Potter, Jacobs gets at issues that remain not frothy debates of the minute. Instead, philosophy, literature, faith and writing are explored with verve and wit.

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Reviews

Do Nothing by Celeste Headlee

Posted on by Kevin Holtsberry / 0 Comment

I have an on-again, off-again fascination with productivity and attention management. Which is what prompted me to request Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headlee from NetGalley.

It took me quite some time to really get into the book, but eventually I found my rhythm and enjoyed it.

One problem was its seeming simplistic view of economics (at least to me). The tone and approach seemed very anti-free market and at times even seemed to have a whiff of a conspiratorial philosophy that big business is and has been controlling our lives (corporations and marketers seem to be controlling consumers rather than seeking to meet their needs; although there is a tangent on why we became addicted to disposable goods too). Lastly, I had the feeling that as a journalist she was trying to pack as much information as she could into the argument and give it a respectable amount of depth and intellectual history.

In the end, this story is about how the industrialist desire to have fewer workers doing more hours of work merged with the religious belief that work is good and idleness is bad, along with a capitalist faith in constant growth.  When time is money, the need to get more time out of workers became urgent if profit targets were to be made.

Suffice it to say, that Headlee offers a lot of provocative and even interesting arguments about how Western society has viewed work and how the industrial, technology and knowledge revolutions have impacted that view in unhealthy ways.  But that is an argument that would take a great deal of unpacking just to get your hand arounds let alone make a persuasive argument about.

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Reviews

The Failure of Satire – The Cockroach by Ian McEwan

Posted on by Kevin Holtsberry / 2 Comments

For the last couple of years I have come very close to reading 100 books in a single year.  This year I decided to commit to actual doing it.  In one of my intermittent attempts to restart this blog, I had the idea of logging each book here not just on Goodreads (see here for #1).

With this in mind, and back when libraries were actually open, I would often look for interesting books that were relatively short in the hopes that I might actually achieve my goal (is this cheating? You be the judge).  In one such visit I stumbled on The Cockroach by Ian McEwan:

 

Political satire inspired by classic literature?  Sounds like my kind of read. Just over 100 pages? Even better!

Except, it left me very much unsatisfied.

My lack of understanding of British politics might be a factor but I was unimpressed by this supposed masterpiece of satire. The concept-a reverse Kafka if you will-is intriguing, hence my picking it up at the library, and in many ways well done. But I think the problem is that if you don’t believe that Brexit is an on its face stupid, disastrous policy then the satire comes off not as comic genius but as another example of the mindset that leads to populist revolts. The satire of politics is amusing but the story is so short that if you don’t buy the concept of Brexit as the equivalent of “reversalism” then there is a low level annoyance running throughout. Maybe my politics got in the way on this one.

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Views

You can have enlightenment for ninepence but you prefer ignorance

Posted on by Kevin Holtsberry / 1 Comment

Alan Jacobs offers some advice (that he is confident will not be taken but that is another matter):

What I’m asking you to do is to act like a grown-up.

Don’t just cherry-pick the one number that seems to fit your narrative. Do a comparative study. Look at numbers from all over. Add and divide.

Discover how many people have died in this country from COVID–19 and over what period of time. Now compare that to deaths in the last few flu seasons, and ask yourself this: How long is a flu season? This page might give you a hint. Do the adjustments to correct for differences in the lengths of time you’re looking at, because that’s what grown-ups do.

He ends this mini-rant with a literary flourish which I quite like (hence this post):

C. S. Lewis’s old tutor, whom he called Kirk or Knock or The Great Knock, was an irascible old Ulsterman who would regularly get exasperated by people who lacked intellectual discipline and even basic curiosity. He would sometimes say to such people, “You can have enlightenment for ninepence but you prefer ignorance.” That’s you. You can do better, and God help your sorry-ass soul if you don’t try.

As Jonah Goldberg has said, this virus should be known as “reinforces my priors” virus for they way everyone immediately began to use the economic, cultural, and political implications and potential impacts as further proof that they were right all along.  Social media has always been like this to some extent but the seriousness and stress of this seems to have ramped it up a couple of notches or ten.

I personally have no interest in trying to master the data or argue about it, but if you choose to wade into those waters then acting like an adult seems appropriate.

Views

The elemental beauty and depth that can be found only in great works of literature.

Posted on by Kevin Holtsberry / 0 Comment

I’m still not above watching vapid reality shows about meth-addicted Tiger tamers. Nor am I dismissive of the compelling fare we find on streaming media — we are living in a golden age of middlebrow culture. Certainly the world doesn’t need another writer praising the virtues of Moby-Dick. And that’s not my point. Sitting here in isolation, I come to praise the elemental beauty and depth that can be found only in great works of literature. Moby-Dick demanded my attention, imagination, and time. — David Harsanyi on reading Moby Dick