#37: Writing lately enjoyed
New from me: Some reflections on the life and work of James C. Scott, often described (somewhat misleadingly, I will argue) as an “anarchist anthropologist,” in The Nation.
[Scott] was among the greatest plumbers in our lifetime of the “sinks and margins of the capitalist, industrial world,” finding in the agrarian villages and high-friction highlands of Southeast Asia a patchwork of concepts that has changed the way social scientists understand resistance, authority, and the state itself.
I wrote it in early August as we moved from Berlin to Cleveland, and have otherwise spent most of the past month setting up our new part-time lives in a country we have not lived in since 2014. The bureaucracy, particularly on the German end, has been about as bad as I feared it would be, so that’s nice — it’s always refreshing to have one’s fears confirmed. In better news, it turns out that online shopping has been more or less perfected in my decade-long absence, and is now a thrillingly seamless experience of desire and nearly instant satisfaction before which functional public infrastructure, thriving Main Streets, and the fabric of society itself seem a small price to pay.
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Some things I enjoyed reading recently:
-There are few subjects harder to write about than drugs: drug policy, drug experience, drug encomium, memoir of addiction, they all seem to defy novelty of thought. The Baffler’s drug issue Altered States is uncommonly excellent. Start with Zachary Siegel’s “Permanent Crisis” and don’t miss Dan Piepenbring’s history of recreational dissociatives. Maybe a new golden era of drug writing approaches?
-Emily Wilson’s short newsletter about four translations of the opening of the Odyssey, including hers, an elegant feint around a weird alt-right obsession with her work.
-Christian Lorentzen’s “Literature without Literature” in Granta Magazine, an essay against a certain ascendant sociological lens in literary criticism, pugnacious but also thoughtful.
-Thomas Meaney’s “Red Power” in the London Review of Books, an epic, heady review of some recent interventions into American history on the subject of Native dispossession.
-Hunter Dukes’s “Kojève & Cigarettes” in Cabinet, a witty, erudite, and oddly affecting essay about a rumor involving Hegel, Kojève, and American Spirit cigarettes.
xo
Ben