Archives: briefs

Southern-UK student Simon Roper’s popular YouTube channel is a favorite of mine. Here he weaves some history around a shift rapidly overtaking in ordinary spoken English, in western-world English-language cultures at least, within roughly the half-century of my own lifetime — and very much still, without doubt, to various degrees a matter of low-grade mundane cognitive (and perhaps also social) discomfort for many of us.

Going to commend to you for viewing / listening a recent video, below, by Vlad Vexler, whose stuff I follow fairly casually and by no means uncritically, for the compressed and (in his own word) ‘cartoonish’ account it offers of the enduring idea of Russian civilization as Christian heir of Hellenistic-Roman imperial world and Hellenic root. Perhaps especially noteworthy in it, for me, is brief mention of 1930s & ’40s Soviet architectural neoclassicism. (Stalin, too, indeed, by a certain implication, belongs to the line of Christian princes — if I can be forgiven a following-on in the cartoonish mode much too rash probably for most folks’ toleration.)

Just to be clear, I’m not so interested in where Vexler is going with his story in the video’s last third or so. His analysis and hedged bets about what’s next for Putin & regime may or may not be worth considering, I don’t know. Likewise those of that yet more prolific and compelling content creator Timothy Snyder! If Vexler’s very compact ‘cartoon’ of a history of Russian national-imperial genealogy in the video appeals to you, though, I’d like to suggest also checking out some, at least, of Snyder’s semester of lectures on Ukraine, completed last month, in which this theme features throughout (and gets developed in less cartoonish fashion — arguably!).

At the time of this posting, by the way, Vexler’s video has been designated ‘age-restricted’ by YouTube and can only be viewed on their site. YouTube’s judgment could be reversed at some point, so I’m keeping the video in my post. Your guess as to why it merits (for now?) the badge of shame is good as mine. [UPDATE: YouTube has rescinded (for now?) the badge of shame, and the video will play below.]

I think the answer to ‘Can we all bring back blogging, together?’ probably has to be No.

I mean, for one thing, blogging never went away (see e.g. the site you’re looking at right now), it merely suffered diminishment. At a certain point a dozen or so years ago the world’s digitally-connected started to see blogging as something without much of a future of its own. And — for a second thing, then — this now more or less universally shared perception is unlikely to change by a great deal, ever, I would say, judging by how things stand at the start of 2023. (For a third thing, though: blogging really sort of made its comeback already a few short years ago, under the name of newslettering, with no want of fanfare.)

None of which is to say that I’m down on this little project from two designer-creators, Ash Huang and Ryan Putnam, to give blogging a boost while ‘social media’ appears to be on the ropes. Quite the contrary! I’ve signed up (just this morning, so a little late according to project setup bounds, I guess) to participate, in fact. I suppose this post itself qualifies as participatory.

Listening off and on today to video of a public event I knew of beforehand and might, a few weeks ago, have chosen to attend in person. (Still really only partly wish I’d gone, delight in many ways though it clearly would have been to experience first-hand. I’m a crowd-avoider.)

How many long-time spouses of men who have so little difficulty talking about themselves and their work, and whose habits in doing so are as set as Spiegelman’s evidently are, will very readily sustain the pleasurable creative effort Mouly pursues, live on stage here, in drawing him along from thought to thought? I suppose there’s professional remove, in part, that she’s able to bring to it in this setting. She sees him as someone — someone of his generation, it may be right to say — whose story and whose stories need to be heard (in this I’d agree wholeheartedly), and she makes the most of the conversational opportunity. In any case, what one imagines could easily have been an interesting older guy’s tedious, perhaps only occasionally illuminating holding-forth is here instead a measured exploration of memories and vital individual perspective.

A little late, I recently caught a good 10-min. interview that Daniel Warren Johnson gave this year to CBR’s Caitlin Sinclair Chappell at the annual mega-event comics convention in San Diego, held in summer. I regularly watch / listen to Johnson’s weekly YouTube ‘Friday with DDubs’ and am an appreciative though not exhaustive reader of his work. I don’t follow so closely that I could deliver a succinct account of his career as a popular comics creator if asked. (Not that anybody’s asking!) Chappell, happily, is a great interviewer. This short chat did a lot to stitch together a more cohesive picture of how Johnson thinks and works for me.

It’s not news (certainly to anybody who’s on Twitter, anyway) now, but for any less social-media-active or headline-attuned reader finding this, I’ll note that Elon Musk’s having expensively secured rights to wave big-daddy phallus over all twitterdom and have an ultimate liberal-order-culture-wars moment all to himself has pushed a lot of more-left-identifying users of the platform to seek alternative social media venues. I’m not leaving Twitter; intention at present is to keep both long-standing nobody-important accounts active and public. I’m certainly inclined, though, to regard this mass-flight development as on the whole a good one. Further with these thoughts in a longer post at some point, maybe.

I joined Mastodon via the social.coop instance several years ago when it was still a pretty new project and I was very new to cooperatives. I found it all a bit off-putting, I confess. (There being only a ‘dark mode,’ something since addressed, meant my eyes could only take the site for short periods, for one thing.) I stopped using the account, but over the last couple of years I’ve thought often of trying to find time to get reacquainted. Well, now’s the occasion to actually do it. I’m @pdbowman@social.coop if you’re looking.

Listening some this week to this recent talk for non-academic audience by Sarah Hammerschlag, professor of religion & literature at the divinity school of note down the street. I’m listening not because I know about Levinas and broader ‘continental thought’ but because, on the whole, I don’t.

Goes together well with Sam Aronow’s history series as developed over the course of this year, roughly — the episode I mention in a longer post a few weeks ago with the rest covering Europe and the challenges of Jewish emancipation in wider Enlightenment, revolution and nationalism contexts. There’s good food for thought, here in Hammerschlag’s snapshot of Levinas in address to Paris Colloques colleagues in the ’60s, about what persists and what doesn’t, what the turn comes to, in the move from the latter part of the nineteenth century to the latter part of the twentieth in European / Western societies.

I’m afraid I generally haven’t found Mike Mignola very interesting on the subject of his own work when I’ve had occasion to read an interview or listen to him talk a bit. It’s a while since I’ve bothered. And I guess the Cartoonist Kayfabe fellas’ chats with comics personalities only have much appeal for me, for various reasons, maybe half the time. As soon as I noticed it, however, this episode with Mignola as guest, run last week, struck me as a promising thing, and in retrospect I can say I don’t think the time taken with it at all a waste. It’s not that he’s really more articulate or penetrating, talking here, than he ever seems to me in address to what he does and to this oddly compelling modest edifice of story material accumulated around the Hellboy character over 25 + years. It’s just that he’s very much at ease with these guys, I expect, and that the conversation maintains good energy wherever it wanders. Together — for the listener who has a degree of familiarity with the territory, at least — they pull off something nicely filled-out and thoughtful.

My slow-progress dwelling on liberal and fascist ways of understanding and producing social / political order in connection with each other has found some juice lately with a series of short online lectures, a public-access version of an ‘American Ideologies’ course for undergrads, given by Pepperdine political philosophy prof. Jason Blakely.

Blakely is visible in circles of my acquaintance in part by way of his criticism of figures of the ‘national conservatism’ gaining notice in the last few years alongside Trump’s rise — as for example in an Oct. 2020 article for Commonweal, ‘The Integralism of Adrian Vermeule,’ where among other things he remarks on Vermeule’s appeals to Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt.

One thing Blakely’s about in this course is introducing the case for, and offering illustration of, an approach to the political drawn from the school of thought he identifies as his own philosophical home, known as hermeneutics — a school strongly associated, it has to be noted, with another Nazi, Martin Heidegger. The Nazis are always close at hand for us, I reflect (with no strong conclusion) in a longer post last year; no running or hiding from them, only confronting. That isn’t Blakely’s subject in these talks, but I would say that calling one another to courage to meet pasts full of ominous meaning is the spirit, at least, of his guidance through a catalog of perhaps falsely familiar terms for speaking of political existences in the modern period. It’s helpful material, prompting rather than settling questions.

Learned last night, courtesy of social-platform feed and a 2-min. CBS news bit from a couple of years ago, below, of the curious fact of the survival deep into the 21st century of grandchildren of John Tyler, single-term U.S. president in the first half of the 1840s. As of this summer, according to Wikipedia, the last of these grandchildren remains with us. His brother died last year, age 95.

Under Tyler, John C. Calhoun — about whose large unwholesome presence in the national life I posted brief items in March and May — held the second top-level federal appointment of his political career, as Secretary of State.

Anyhow, nice occasion for dwelling on something frequently on my mind, expressed in longer posts e.g. last October and in January: our tendency to think of events a century or two removed from the current moment as more distant than probably they really ought to be perceived. Here you have the whole timeframe of existence of the U.S. as a state, from the year after ratification took effect right to present, described in three-lifespan generational sequence within a single family.