Intermission: News and Reading

An event update, and some more

Hello readers. I apologise for clogging your inbox twice in a week, but I’ll be brief.

My event in Dublin in June, with Martin Shaw and Jonathan Pageau, has proved popular: it’s’ already sold out. So we’re running it for a second day, on Sunday 4th June. You can find out more and buy tickets here. Places are limited, and already selling.

I have some other speaking events on the cards this year too, incuding the Percy French Festival and Féile na Bealtaine in Ireland, and the Front Porch Republic conference in the US, though this one will only happen if nice Mr Biden lifts the entry ban for people who haven’t taken a vaccine that doesn’t prevent you catching or transmitting the illness it’s supposed to deal with. I will update you on these and others as time goes by.

My next essay should be with paid subscribers next week. In the meantime, I thought I’d recommend a few other bits of writing that have caught my eye.

Firstly, from Pilgrims in the Machine, a Substack well worth reading, comes an essay which dovetails beautifully with what I’ve been writing here recently. We may want to ‘flee the Machine’, but even if we do, most of us can’t. So what is the approach for those of us stuck inside it? ‘Disruptive spirituality’:

A Fire that Purifies

Meanwhile, the inimitable Mary Harrington nearly made me bring up my lunch with her description of lab-grown meat as ‘edible vat grown tumours’. This is, apparently, entirely scientifically accurate. It is also a good metaphor for what she calls our ‘metastasising culture’, in which we have lost the ability to create, and are endlessly rebooting everything. But this is not the final word. Shoots are growing through the cracks:

Culture as Metastasis

Incidentally, Mary’s first book Feminism Against Progress is out this week, and it contains some cracking material which will make everyone, man or woman, feminist or otherwise, sit up and think about what is going on out there.

I enjoyed this piece from Nick Cohen, about the recent cretinous censorship of Roald Dahl’s books, and what drives the kind of people who do it. We’re deep into the eruption of a new puritanism now, but it’s not so different from the old ones:

Weekend round up: Who wants to be a censor?

Ed West, meanwhile, is seeing the same thing happen to history books: exciting stories replaced with righteous political platitudes. The worst thing about all of it is how boring it is. And maybe this is the hope. How long can we stand being governed by puritans and hypocrites?

History should be a black comedy, not a morality tale

Finally, on an entirely different note, I’m excited to see a new Substack being launched by Graham Pardun, whose unique brand of wild Orthodox Christianity made his little book The Sunlilies one of my favourites. The subtitle of that book was ‘Eastern Orthodoxy as a radical counterculture’, and it looks like he will be fleshing that vision out here. Wild, mystical Christianity for the new times:

Until next time,
Paul