Intermission: Reading Matter

Some recommended reading, and other things

Greetings from the west of Ireland, where spring is arriving far too early. The bulbs are out, the birds are singing mating songs, the trees are budding. Well, it’s the 2020s: nothing works the way it used to, and this is both curse and liberation.

My next essay will arrive with paid subscribers early next week, but in the meantime I am sending you something that I like to put together occasionally: a list of other people here on Substack who I think are worth reading. For all the horrors of the Internet, this little e-cosystem is throwing up some interesting writers and thinkers who are challenging the assumptions of the Machine. Here are a few that I like:

* My friend Martin Shaw - mythologist, storyteller, Devonian mystic - has started his own Substack, The House of Beasts and Vines. He calls it ‘part care package, part spiritual provocation’, and it is developing into a wild telling of old Christian myths, seen through the branches of an old English woodland. Wild Christianity: it’s an idea for our times if ever there was one. He’s begun the project with his own telling of the story of St Brendan the Voyager.

* From wild Christian to post-woke pagan: I have recommended Rhyd Wildermuth’s newsletter, From the Forests of Arduinna before, but I’m going to do it again. Rhyd is currently unpacking the toxin of wokeness from a leftist perspective. So much writing on the ‘culture war’ is shrill, partisan or predictable, but this is thoughtful and well-informed, and at the same time uncompromising. His most recent post on ‘apex oppressors’ is a good read.

* Moving from left to right, but still speaking of wild things, here’s a more political take from The Postliberal Order, a Substack of broadly conservative American philosophical types, including Patrick Deneen, whose book Why Liberalism Failed I’ll be writing about soon. This essay, The Party of Nature, explores the failings of both right and left in their attitude to the natural world, and wonders what a political party focused on nature’s needs would look like.

* If the attempt to refocus politics on the needs of the natural world fails - and it’s not looking good so far - the good news is that there is an alternative: move ‘off-world’, live on orbiting space colonies, mine asteroids to meet our ‘needs’, and visit Earth for holidays. This curiously antiquated vision, which was probably cutting edge in about 1955, is currently being pushed by Jeff Bezos and other Silicon Valley overlords, in a classic case of utopia-as-dystopia. These people are in charge now, so it’s worth understanding just how broken their visions are. L. M. Sacasas, whose newsletter The Convivial Society I have recommended before, recently wrote a good dissection of the Bezos vision, called Earth Alienation As A Service. ‘Earth Alienation’ is a spot-on way to refer to the worldview of 21st century post-post-modernity.

* Speaking of alienation, and shifting gear a bit, I’ve long been enjoying the Substack of the Russian artist and musician Tessa Lena, who has been particularly vocal in her newsletter, Tessa Fights Robots, about the use of the covid pandemic to cement systems of control by newly muscular governments in the West. Tessa grew up in the USSR, and consequently is very clear-eyed about what authoritarianism looks like - and, crucially, how it develops from small seeds while most people are looking the other way. She is a storyteller, not a partisan, and her latest essay, On Soviet Men and the Groundhog Day, in which she wonders if we are living through ‘a resurrection of the Soviet man in the West’, is particularly thought-provoking.

* Finally, I enjoyed this recent interview by N. S. Lyons of The Upheaval with the ever-fascinating Mary Harrington, on reactionary feminism in the age of the cyborg. Sample quote: ‘We're running full-tilt at a nightmarish dystopia because our most idealistic thinkers aren’t paying attention and refuse to believe it’s not heaven on earth’.

Other things (briefly)

* While I’m here, I want to mention a course I will be teaching later this year, which might interest my Christian readers. St Basil College of Creative Writing is a new institution in the States, run by novelist and Orthodox deacon Nicholas Kotar. It runs courses which train creative writers to operate in a world of collapsing stories and crumbling systems. This, as those who have followed me for a while will know, is a notion close to my heart…

I’ve been recruited to teach on St Basils’ first course, which starts this summer, along with Jonathan Pageau, Katherine Hyde and Nicole Rocas. It’s a nine-month programme, which starts with a week-long writers workshop in upstate New York this August, and then proceeds online. I’ll be teaching a programme on reconnecting writers to the natural world; digging around for some of that wild Christianity, and seeing what we find in the leaves and the mulch. I’m excited about it. If you think you might be too, you can browse the St Basils’ website. The course is booking now, and places are limited.

* For anyone who likes the idea of rewilding their writing but isn’t a Christian, or just doesn’t want to spend nine months on it, my online course Rewild Your Words is permanently available, and covers much of the same ground. Those of you who are founder members should have received a code giving you a discount on this course; please let me know if you haven’t.

* And finally … this newsletter was longer than planned, but I do want to promote a project that I’ve just been alerted to. It’s for those of us who have found ourselves marginalised or worse for dissenting against the mainstream covid narrative, and especially people who have found themselves abused, attacked, silenced or simply alone due to their concern about vaccines, mandates, passports and the rest. Freedom to Care aims to bring people together to ‘share the heavy load’ that has been created by our newly-divided society. It promises to be a place where those who have been pushed to the margins for defending their choices can speak about how they feel and meet others who feel the same.

Many thanks as ever to all of you for reading.