Austen, Hating the Odyssey, Rooney and politics, Explaining Howl, Becoming Christian, Gilgamesh, Naipaul, Bradstreet, Shakespeare and maths, Panpyschism
The Irregular Review of Reviews, vol. XVIII
As well as the usual links and brief commentary, there’s a personal essay about my time in politics in this edition of The Irregular Review of Reviews, in the section about Sally Rooney. That’s not the usual format for this digest, but this is an irregular feature and I promise not to do it again…
A whole new way to read Austen?
If you are interested in narrative and Austen’s development of Free Indirect Style, you simple have to read this PhD thesis by Hatsuyo Shimazaki. I will be writing about it at length soon. I am astonished it hasn’t been more revolutionary to Austen studies and narrative studies.
My daughter hates the Odyssey
I was noodling around, trying to find out about Adam Smith’s reading habits (there’s a passage in The Theory of Moral Sentiments which reads like something out of a novel, so now I am on the hunt; yes, his favourite novel was Gulliver’s Travels (excellent taste), but he is channeling something else here, it’s quite striking), and I pulled up Shannon Chamberlain’s thesis about literary influence upon Smith’s philosophy. This is, to me, and I’m sure to plenty of you, exciting stuff. So I went searching to find out more about Chamberlain. And guess what. She’s right here on Substack!
is where writes. I especially enjoyed this essay about her daughter reading (and hating) the Odyssey very much.
Being a mother, maybe just being a parent, is a constant state of suspension, and your own wonder at your tortured ambiguity. You try to stand in a solid place while being tugged between wanting your baby to stay a baby and wanting her to grow up and gain the independence that Telemachus craves. You want to be the teenage hero who is slaying the giant or the invaders in your home. In your mind, you’re still that guy. (And it’s always a guy.) But you’re also a woman, and a mother, and you realize that this rebellion is part of the natural order of things. From the moment your child is born, you’re figuring out how to let go of her. The nurses take her away for her first bath. You hand her over to her grandparents for an evening, for this is their right. One day she comes home from preschool and says, “I don’t like the clothes you pick out for me. I want to choose my own from now on.” Then, in a cruel twist, you despair of her independence when she insists that you sit with her as she dons the new ones. You feel personally insulted when this little copy of you doesn’t like the same books you liked. Wonder. Miracle. Despair. Hope.
My daughter doesn’t like The Odyssey. Okay. What she does like, though, is the Demeter and Persephone story.
I am, to put it mildly, obsessed by the idea that literature is all about quests and enjoyed her reading of the Demeter myth as a quest. I loved this myth when I was about eight. We acted it out and the whole thing is perhaps more clear in my mind than anything else from that time. I am pleased to report that my own children do indeed love The Odyssey, helped by an audiobook called Odysseus. The Greatest Hero of Them All. When I tentatively suggested that Odysseus might be a complicated man, maybe something of a liar, they rounded on me. HE’S THE GREATEST HERO OF THEM ALL. Good for them. He is.
This line was the most heartbreaking from Shannon’s essay, but maybe the most important thing a parent can know?
To get Persephone back, she has to give her up, at least a little.
Let’s hope she starts blogging about Adam Smith also…
Rooney and politics
For nearly two years, around 2012, the time of Osborne’s “pasty tax”, I worked for an MP. Liz Truss was a backbencher when I went to work for her and a junior education minister when I left. I fulfilled a mixed role: researcher, administrator, manager. I wrote briefings, replied to letters, tried to get Liz to do her paperwork. Once I carried her shoes to a train station. Another time I went looking for white spirit when she was travelling to work with paint all over her arms.
I spent a few months trying to get a parliamentary job. Law school had been a bad fit, and legal blogging was interesting but limited. Parliament fascinated me. It was, in many ways, a rich and interesting two years. In the mornings, I read Mises and histories of the House of Lords. I read a biography of Salisbury and books of Austrian economics. Weekends I watched economics lectures.
I went to events and talks. I read the pamphlets. I lived in a haze of news and blogs. I was finally around people for whom my Margaret Thatcher obsession was, almost, normal. It was no longer so unusual to discuss political diaries.
Parliament was something romantic in my imagination. I loved being there. I loved giving tours to notable constituents (all too small a part of the job, alas) and talking to them about the history of Westminster Hall, the old House of Commons before the fire, Charles the Martyr.
But I was also around a lot of ideologues. I was learning a lot and changing my mind a lot (and believed plenty of contradictory half-thought-out things) and I was an ideologue too. Before I got the job with Liz, I nearly, oh so nearly, became a party speechwriter, which I thought was my dream role. As I was leaving Westminster, I made a half-hearted effort to get a job in HQ.
But love had died between me and politics. I didn’t get the job and had hardly tried. I went off to do other things.