News, Events and Reading

And a big thank you to America ...

Hello readers. This is just a quick update on a few things going on - but before I get started, I want to offer up a big thank you to those American readers who responded to my recent request for book tour invitations.

I have to say, I didn’t anticipate how overwhelming that response would be. I have had over a hundred invitations to events, bookshops, universities, conferences, churches, monasteries and peoples’ front rooms, from all over your very big country. My wife and I have been reading every one of them and then passing them on to my publisher, who currently has the task of putting them all on to a very big spreadsheet. And I’m still getting emails.

All of this is genuinely moving, and I really want to thank everyone who has written to offer or suggest events. I’m happy that my writing is speaking to so many people. Of course, the reality is that I simply won’t be able to get to all, or even most, of what I have been invited to. If I had a free year and an unlimited budget I might well try, because it would be an interesting road trip. Alas, reality intrudes.

To all of you who wrote to me, then: thank you again for your time and generosity. We have read everything that has come in, but due to the sheer volume we’re simply not able to reply to them all individually. We will be getting in touch in the next week or two with people whose events may work. If you don’t hear from me, please consider this your reply. And who knows: maybe the future will bring another opportunity to meet you.

In other news

• At the top of this page is a new interview that has just been released in full. It was filmed in my home a couple of years ago, when I was in the thick of writing my Machine essays, so if you’d like to hear me talk about that, and see what I looked like with more hair on both head and chin, then this is for you.

• Against The Machine, the book which resulted from those essays, will be published in September but can be pre-ordered now. Go here to place your order in North America, and here in the UK.

• There are more films like this, and plenty of conversations, on my own YouTube channel.

Events

I’ll be speaking over the next couple of months in two places beginning with W:

• Walsingham, England, in mid-May will play host to the British Saints Conference, a celebration of the holy men and women who are the nation’s spiritual core. Come and learn more.

• Story, Wyoming, in mid-June, will see the Doomer Optimism Campout happening at the Wagon Box Inn, a weekend-long conversation with added fishing, camping and plunging into rivers.

Things worth reading

Here are a few things I’ve read recently that have interested me:

• An article on Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima, who I have long found fascinating. He has a new book out, many decades after his death-by-performative-suicide.

• A piece from Front Porch Republic on how Andrew Tate’s pseudo-‘masculinity’ exposes ‘the rot at the core of the dissident right.’

• Some bad news that we are all apparently supposed to be celebrating: the return of the ‘direwolf’, an extinct species supposedly (but not really) resurrected through cloning and gene editing. A certain type of ‘environmentalist’ gets very excited about this kind of thing. If you want to know what I think about it, here’s an essay I wrote about ‘de-extinction’ more than a decade ago.

• Ed West writes about how the new boss is the same as the old boss. The morality policing and censorship that prevail in Britain today would be familiar to anyone who lived a century ago: the only difference is which morality is being policed. Those of us who grew up between the 1960s and the 2000s experienced a brief flowering of freedom of expression before it all closed down again.

• Mary Harrington writes about the ‘post-place culture’ that is currently spreading across the globalised world. I have a chapter on this in my forthcoming book Against The Machine. Come to that, I have a whole book on it: Real England, published 17 years ago and unfortunately still relevant.

That’s enough from me, I think. It’s time to go outside and enjoy the spring.