Noteringar & excerpter - 8 september, 2025

Några noterade titlar:#

• Melanie Anagnos, Nightswimming
• Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages
• Patrick Ryan, Buckeye A Novel
• Gilles Deleuze, On Painting: Courses, March–June 1981
• Yuk Hui, Machine and Sovereignty For a Planetary Thinking
• Lisa Heschong, Visual Delight in Architecture
• Lisa Heschong, Thermal Delight in Architecture
• Robert Darnton, The Writers Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France
• Andrew Porter, The Imagined Life
• Claudia Durastanti, Strangers I Know

Warren Ellis:

But did you ever see Winston Churchill’s daily routine? Woke up at 730am, breakfast and a whisky and soda in bed, where he rotted for three and a half hours reading the papers, doing correspondence and working before he got up for a walk. He strolled around for two hours drinking whisky and presumably throwing things at servants before he sat down to lunch and drank a pint of champagne. After a two-and-a-half-hour lunch, he worked for ninety minutes with a glass of cognac before taking a ninety-minute nap. He farted around for another ninety minutes before sitting down to dinner. Which usually lasted til midnight, involving another pint of champagne and a few cigars. He then got up and worked for at least another hour, sometimes three, powered by more brandy. He lived to the age of ninety. He was Prime Minister twice and wrote more than forty books.

Excerpter#

Petrified factuality#

Author: Rob Horning URL: https://robhorning.substack.com/p/petrified-factuality Publication date: September 5, 2025

Capitalism has to produce ignorance and apathy to perpetuate itself; “AI” is merely the latest means of production.

Giuseppe Pezzini, ‘Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation’ (CUP 2025)#

Author: Adam Roberts URL: https://profadamroberts.substack.com/p/giuseppe-pezzini-tolkien-and-the Publication date: September 4, 2025

Giuseppe Pezzini, ‘Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation’ (CUP 2025)

Those three main aspects are: Tolkien’s originary nominalism, his theory of ‘sub-creation’ and his belief that artistic creation is a kind of discovering or uncovering something already extant, rather than confecting novelty from first principles. These three are inter-connected.

Nominalism is Tolkien’s storytelling practice of starting with a name, and then fleshing-out or accreting a character or identity, and thereafter a legend or narrative, around it.

So: there are a number of ways we could theorise, or explain, Tolkien’s belief that he was not inventing but actually discovering, or uncovering, his Fantasyland. A Freudian might say that he was cathecting material from his subconscious mind, which felt, to his conscious thought, as if it pre-existed and was ‘realer’ than anything he could delibierately invent—and, as a corollary, the things he thought of as discoveries had to do with the structure of subconscious apprehension and repression. Pezzini makes a passing reference to Freud, including a slightly baffling reference to Lacan as well (‘In contrast [to Freud] Lacan describes the “I” in more relational terms, as embedded in an intersubjective relationship with the Other’ [65]—a frankly jejune and indeed erroneous summary of Lacanian theory). But he does this only to dismiss its relevance here.

Was Tolkien, in ‘building’ Middle Earth, working like the Greek architects who constructed the beautiful temple Heidegger gives as a prime example of great art? Was JRRT’s making a poesis in the Heideggerian sense? Pezzini, who at no point mentions Heidegger, is not the person to answer these questions, though veiling and unveiling are the subjects of his nearly 60-page third chapter, ‘Cloaking, Freedom, and the Hidden “Divine” Narrative’.

God creates reality. An artist ‘sub-creates’, in a ratio inferior to the way God creates. ‘Sub-creation’ is Tolkien’s term for doing this, not Coleridge’s, and on it Pezzini gives us much from Tolkien’s letters and several lengthy engagements with his allegorical autobiography, and a long reading of the short-story ‘Leaf By Niggle’. What he doesn’t do is cite Coleridge, from whom this idea originates.

For Coleridge, the great artist—Homer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth—creates great art because he is imaginative rather than fanciful, which is to say he possesses the secondary imagination that is echoic of God’s primary imagination, the great I AM.

Pivot Season - by Karl Schroeder - Unapocalyptic#

Author: Karl Schroeder URL: https://kschroeder.substack.com/p/pivot-season Publication date: September 4, 2025

After Stealing Worlds I’d started a new novel: Nightless, the story of Frank Tanager, who’s the stressed-out cargo master of a freight airship in the far North in the year 2045. Nightless is a solar-powered next-gen zeppelin based out of Anchorage, and Northern Promise makes most of its yearly profit during the midnight sun, when the airship can haul cargoes 24/7 from Tokyo to Oslo, or Dublin to Seattle, across the pole without refueling. It’s been a bad year, though, and they might go bankrupt at any minute.

I had great fun writing this book, but the worldbuilding was done during the Biden administration, when the future of international relations seemed obvious: there would be the global trading order, and a rivalry between the U.S. and China. Russia would be a strong presence in the Arctic, but the melting of the icecaps would have made Canada a rising star because of the opening of the Northwest Passage. All very straightforward.

Then, this spring, the tariffs came and the whole international order as we’ve understood it was thrown into doubt. With the book nearly complete, I was forced to go back and completely reimagine the political and economic situation of my future Arctic. That was the situation when we headed up to the lake at the end of July. As we were so fond of saying during the pandemic, I had to pivot.