Death, Sociology, Crime, Knowledge, Jargon, Novels, Men

The irregular review of reviews, vol XIII

Bach and Death

Heartbreaking. A must-read.

Bach’s genius is ours because it demands to be reified by us. At its summit in the Chaconne, his work intimately connects us to one another, in each of our particular variations of love and loss, triumph and sorrow, confusion and uncertain resolution.

Bach whispers to us from deep in the past: “It also happened to me.”

The Chaconne also works marvellously on the piano. I favour the Hélène Grimaud version. This music is always moving, but it is all the more so after reading

Evan Goldfine

’s piece. My thoughts are with Evan and his family.

(The other music writer I like on Substack is

Ulkar Aghayeva

. She’s also a great composer.)

Crime novels

SUSAN HILL

(yes, the, Susan Hill) recommends some crime writers. And here is my earlier list. Good stuff for this time of year.

Sociology of literature?

So many articles have been written about genius and scenius and all that jazz. None of them compares to this excellent discussion of Randall Collins’ A Sociology of Philosophies, by

Julianne Werlin

. Werlin offers an apt summary of the argument,

According to Collins, intellectual life, at its core, is conversation. No matter how solitary we think we are when we arrive at our ideas in the quiet of a monastic cell or the privacy of a study, we inevitably reproduce, reply, and react to the words of others. Language is social; so are its mental echoes, thought. In the case of philosophy, it’s not just any kind of conversation: it’s argument. Conflict, not agreement, propels ideas forward.

and a summary of what makes the book so worthwhile,

The human social world, where real conversations happen, blends seamlessly into the abstract world of philosophical argument without doing injustice to the complexity, abstraction, and autonomy of the life of the mind. It’s a sociology of intellectual life that doesn’t feel reductive.

I read A Sociology of Philosophies as part of my research for Second Act, and am intrigued by Werlin’s new project.

I’m in the early stages of thinking through a project on literary generations, in which I want to reflect precisely on the relationship between personal connections and literary change.

I based my section on literary groupings on Collaborative Circles, a splendid sociology of how groups of writers and artists begin by encouraging each other, forming new ideas and methods, before succumbing to the pressures of their group and departing to pursue their new originality. What I like about Werlin’s approach is that she makes the common reader central to the development of literature.

… there’s also something of the kind happening on Substack. There may not be another Voltaire or Diderot on here just yet. But I think we are seeing genuinely new modes of writing emerge among poets and fiction writers who are composing their posts largely for networks of others on the platform. It’s a model where there are few, or no, passive and silent lay audiences.

Read the whole thing. It’s excellent.

Knowledge and Jargon

James Marriott has been on a roll recently. First, he wrote this splendid column about the shallowness of social-media auto-didacticism.