A January Feuilleton
Rittenhouse Square on a December evening.
Dear reader,
Happy new year to all! I had a pleasant, low-key evening, ordering takeout with a friend and hanging out with my downstairs neighbors on our stoop to celebrate the new year. Woo girls on the apartment roof across the street, menacing fireworks in the near-distance, and cowering dogs made it the usual new year’s eve in the city. Much like a pre-plague new year’s eve spent in Ottawa, I missed the clock striking midnight.
Bear with me as I figure out the shape and form this newsletter will take. Some friends have suggested it as a way to keep up with what I’m writing, but I’ll try to add something of more value here. If nothing else, I’ll try to offer a view that, if not persuasive, is understandable/of sociological interest.
A note on Midcentury: Cribbing this from a book title by the great John Dos Passos, exemplary of an American modernist style that lost out to Hemingway’s approach. (I have a draft on this theme if anyone’s looking for something to publish…). Dos Passos tried to capture a sense of the historical moment in what he wrote, taking newspaper headlines, adding short biographies of the famous and well-known, and integrating them into a non-linear plot. I’m trying to do something similar.
Recent work
In Philadelphia Weekly, my latest column is on the foolishness of the city’s vaccine mandate for eating at a restaurant and other cultural activities. Philadelphia is vaxxed to the gills. The target here is ensuring that children ages 5 and up are vaccinated. My argument against our comfort with the biomedical state to coerce or shun people until they do as The Science-Knowers think they should will fall on deaf ears, but it should be made anyway. Quixotic crusades are sometimes necessary.
This city does enough foolish things and blithely acquiescing to their brand of paternalism that obsesses over plastic bags and vaccination for extremely low-risk groups, while making little progress on tamping down the murder rate or the deprivation the poor in this city face, is infuriating. Philadelphia has such great potential, and yet.
Also for Philly Weekly, I did a q&a with the Districts, a great indie rock group with a new album dropping in February. Give it a read and give them a listen.
Pre-Christmas, I published my second article in National Review, a sentence my college self would find very odd to read. It’s on the rising murder tally in Philadelphia as a failure of political will, with each part of the city government responsible for controlling crime and protecting the public failing in its duty.
Recent-ish from September, my take on J.D. Vance’s Ohio Senate campaign, an opportunity lost.
Gimcracks and Tchotchkes
My evening walk on new year’s eve reminded me how good Philly is as a place for picking. I found a flower vase, my friend mooched a moka pot, and all was well. Previous meanderings have taken me to salt lamps, all sorts of books, and boxes of Harry Potter paraphenalia excorcised from a dwelling after Rowling deviated from the ever-moving line of left-leaning bourgeois respectability.
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Still miffed that neither Amtrak nor the country of Canada responded to my tweet lobbying for a return of the New York-Montréal rail service, suspended since the plague hit.
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The New York Review of Books fills its pages with the usual denouncements of Republican state legislatures, the rise of the right in central Europe, etc etc. Yet, when writing on Cuba or most left-leaning movements in Latin America, they avert their eyes. The latest on Cuba is another disappointing addition. And shame on the Latin American Studies Association for kowtowing to the socialists.
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I’m developing a habit of noting evocative names of roads, counties, and the like for use in the future. The latest from my drive home to Ohio:
Burning Springs Mine Road
Pleasant Valley Cemetery Road
Blue Front Hollow Road
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What I read this year:
How to Think Like Shakespeare - Scott Newstok
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Up Side of Down - Megan McArdle
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite - Gregor Von Rezzori
Sound Bites - Alex Kapranos
Beowulf
Disturbing the Peace - Vaclav Havel
Five Plays of Anton Chekhov
Early Anglo-Saxon Poems
Art and Life in Modernist Prague - Thomas Ort
Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers - Tom Wolfe
Tales of a Wayside Inn - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain
In Our Time - Tom Wolfe
Midcentury - John Dos Passos
Empire - Niall Ferguson
Metropolitan Philadelphia - Steven Conn
Conspiracy - Ryan Holiday
Selected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay
Wonder & Wrath - A.M. Juster
Complete Poems - Cavafy
A Cup of Coffee with My Interrogator - Ludvik Vaculik
The Return of Eva Peron - V.S. Naipaul
Voices from the Rust Belt - Anne Trubek
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Some books I haven’t finished:
Don Quixote
Postwar - Tony Judt
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found - Suketu Mehta
The Saga of Gösta Berling - Selma Lagerlof
The Portable Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Right and Left - Joseph Roth
Faust - Goethe
A Concise History of Russian Art - Tamara Talbot Rice
Afghanistan - Thomas Barfield
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A poem
W.B. Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium
An album
Third Eye Blind - Third Eye Blind
A Tweet
Helen Andrews: At this point a lot of irrational Covid restrictions are about trying to establish precedents. Build up as much surveillance as possible now, then in the future, if anyone questions some new coercive condition for participation in public life, you can say, “We did it for Covid.”
Some links
Katherine Dee on the decline of the sophomoric male/man-child in comedy
Joseph M. Keegin on the National Conservatism Conference and how the counter-elite elite in conservative circles still don’t offer the common man very much.
Kevin Sieff in WaPo reporting on the existential threat to bullfighting in Mexico. A great cultural loss if it disappears.
Kate Tsurkan, Words of the Living and the Dead.
All the best,
Anthony