I’ve been working for months on a review of Sven Beckert’s new book Capitalism: A Global History. It’s a monster of a book—more than 1300 pages, with notes and the index—and I’ve had trouble writing my way into the review. When I write, I label each draft with a number. If I’m writing an article, the first draft is Article 1, the second Article 2, and so on. I put a date on each draft, too, to remind myself when I started the draft. In this review, my Article 1 has a date—October 11, 2025—and then a blank page. Which means I circled around and around the piece for months and wrote nothing that I could even keep. Then the […]
Hazlitt’s essay on Coriolanus seems apposite to some of the themes I explored in The Reactionary Mind. Hazlitt suggests a deep and abiding affinity of poetry for power, an affinity that explains how the right is able attract a broad formation of followers from below. Hazlitt also hints at why an aesthetics of the left, at least one centered on the more pedestrian claims of the mass, is so often difficult to attain and sustain; indeed, why any aesthetics may ultimately serve as an argument for the arrogations of power: The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power. The imagination is an exaggerating and exclusive faculty: it takes from one thing to add to another: it accumulates circumstances together to give the greatest possible […]
We write for readers. But sometimes we got get caught up in our own words. We forget the reader. We are misled by our metaphors; we make meaning for ourselves. Shakespeare’s characters certainly did. They were self-involved. —James Wood, “Shakespeare in Bloom,” The Broken Estate
If you’re Tolstoy, you get to: Say that Shakespeare was a dreadful playwright. Tell Chekhov he’s worse than Shakespeare. If you’re Chekhov, you get to: Be told by Tolstoy you’re worse than Shakespeare. Be Chekhov.