You are surely right about cultural elites. The idea that "if you like it, it is good" is usually applied to safe areas like books and music. People who admire the egalitarian idea that all books are worthy would be aghast at the application of their principle to things like smoking, excessive alcohol and sugar, drugs, junk food, pornography, bigoted television programmes, the sort of political hatred that is now widespread, etc etc etc.
Of course, many other good reasons can be given for objecting to these things, but must we not ask if beauty is the in eye of the beholder, why not other qualities too?
What this idea fails to account for is knowledge. Someone who lives, Robinson Crusoe like, on an island with little art and few people will find their taste insufficient to the metropolis, and will soon be expanding their taste as their knowledge grows. the democratising cultural force of the internet enables this *as well as * enabling human-produced slop. We shy away from calling it slop, but the reasoning that leads us there is more ideological than rational.
The real problem is not that we have elites, but that they are insufficient. Elites have two functions: to instruct, and to inform. They often, of late, fail at the second, Public health elites are the worst, delivering very little serious information to back up their claims, and allowing one ideology to take precedence over the data. But literary elites are not so far behind. When Zena Hitz praised 4chan readers for reading Moby Dick, the Bible, and Dostoevsky, several literary elites chided her for not talking about modern canon theory, women writers, and so on. The tak of simply telling people that yes, in fact, Tolstoy, Dante, etc are the very best, and should be read, has been too often abandoned.
While we live under such a philistine supremacy (teachers arguing against teaching Shakespeare, book section editors not reading Middlemarch, professor putting Taylor Swift on the syllabus) democratisation will feel chaotic and diminishing. Better elites can turn it into a positive cultural force. This is why Substacks like your are flourishing. Readers just want to know!
James - I was a close friend of Larry Siedentop and he would often speak admiringly of your columns in the Times. He would have been delighted that you enjoyed his book.
Larry used to say that there are two intellectual temperaments: those who want to say something which is true, and those don’t want to say anything which is wrong. For Larry, the latter were to be avoided, because they are a bore.
I believe he saw in you someone firmly in the former category. It was this quality that he found so energising in your writing. Clearly he is not alone in his opinion.
That's genuinely quite thrilling to hear as I admired his writing so much. Inventing the Individual is a complete masterpiece. Thank you for letting me know. If only he were still around and working on another book!
Another fascinating read, James. Thank you. I thoroughly enjoy starting my Friday with Cultural Capital, and look forward to its return after your holiday. Have a good break. Two points:
1. Donne. I do think Katherine Rundell's Super-Infinite was a rewarding and accessible way to understand Donne, but I definitely finished it wanting something richer. I'll be ordering Carey's book this morning. I understand your point about Donne being difficult to like, but I disagree. I find him to be so flawed, so human that it's difficult not to find a connection with him which I find endearing. Perhaps to a fault!
2. Reading. I'm always impressed by the quantity, variety, and speed of your reading. I read every evening, but it's never enough and my tsundoku is piled high. Shy of giving up work (very tempting), I wondered if you had any advice or a view on improving reading speed etc.?
Thank you very much. I'm so pleased you're enjoying the newsletter.
1. I feel the same about the Rundell book. She was very enthusiastic about the poems but with a poet as complicated as Donne I think you need someone who is pays more attention to the poems and their context.
2. I definitely read more since getting rid of my smartphone. Surprising how odd moments on the bus etc add up. I've also decided to read whatever interests me not what I feel I should be reading. There's a Samuel Johnson quote - "a man ought to read just as inclination takes him". It was always when I was reading for duty not pleasure that I would get stuck on a book and avoid it and read less. Something else I have recently realised is very helpful is having friends who are constantly reading interesting books and talking about them which means there are always things I feel excited about reading. I wanted this newsletter to be a bit like one of those friends!
There's a good comparison of Donne to Dylan (and other modern songwriters) in Michael Gray's pionnering work of Dylanology, Song and Dance Man (early 70s). Gray finds a similar quality of directness verging on the brusque, especially in their opening lines: it is quite easy to hear Dylan singing 'For God's sake hold your tongue and let me love', for example, or to imagine a Donne poem beginning 'I hate myself for loving you'. More subtly and I suppose contestably he finds a similar attitude to prosody, with Donne's famous 'awkwardness' foreshadowing Dylan's idiosyncratic phrasing: "The vibrant and intricate changes of rhythm in each occur through the investment of different words with different degrees of feeling."
We are very lucky to have John Carey full stop. No fan of Wyndham Lewis, I think - many years ago he ended a review in The Sunday Times consigning WL to the bin. He might just have meant the man and the paintings; I can’t remember. A long 3 weeks now till the next Cultural Capital.
I agree. I saw someone tweet that it is Carey's 91st birthday tomorrow so this post was accidentally well-timed. Yes I think Wyndham Lewis is also one of the many writers who come out very badly from The Intellectuals and the Masses
I've really enjoyed your post this morning James...so thrilled that you are a fellow Donne fan as well as Larkin and Amis!! I very precociously (and probably a bit pretentiously) got into Donne at school in a big way...I haven't read Carey on him but will immediately buy his book after I finish typing this comment!! I absolutely love that phrase " zooming among the absolutes" !!!
Ah thank you - very glad you enjoyed. I hope you like the Carey book - please let me know how you get on. My favourite fact about Donne is that because most of his poems circulated as anonymous manuscript copies the best way to track his popularity among his contemporaries is to measure the number of times they copied out his poems into commonplace books etc to read later. And what researchers have found is that Donne's poems were copied out many, many more times than those of his contemporaries. Even though the people doing the copying had no idea who the author was. He was a huge viral celebrity but also completely anonymous.
So I don’t know if this book precisely addresses your speculations, since it’s some years since I read it, but I do remember enjoying it enormously: Daniel Dennett’s Breaking The Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon
Ah very interesting thank you. I tried to read Dan Dennett's last book and found it a bit turgid. But will try this one if you promise it really is readable
His memoir? Or From Bach To Bacteria just before? I liked the latter! But one person's turgid is another person's compressed, I suppose. Definitely Darwin's Dangerous Idea is his masterwork.
The argument that christianity is at the heart of liberalism always struck me as a bit of a misnomer. I think Sidentrop makes a more interesting case than Tom Holland for it but I've never been massively convinced. This is especially the case given liberalism today is somewhat significantly different from its earlier predecessors and even writers such as Mill did not preach equality as much as is oftentimes claimed.
I do enjoy reading your weekly thoughts. I don’t remotely claim much deep knowledge of Hinduism but I wonder about the extent to which what you saw written on the temple walls originates in the Hindu reform movements that were a response to British colonialism in India and the efforts of Protestant missionaries. The reformers sought to stress the ethical and moralising elements of Hinduism over folk elements and to claim it as an unequivocally monotheistic religion. Put crudely, they made Hinduism more “Protestant” and (whether or not this was a main aim) more intelligible to the colonial power. Look up the Ayra Samaj movement for instance.
How could Donne not be the rockstar of his time? That face, that look, that darkness...
I too have been reading Holland's Dominion and though it articulates what I have thought for a while - that Christianity is the moral rock on which liberal life has grown - I also feel that so many other religious faiths are built on similar moral principles, but perhaps Christianity is the oldest, or maybe I am being a sort of 'imperialist' liberal, in wanting the great western religion to be to the foundation....so many thoughts, so many questions...
Your comparison of Donne with Bob Dylan feels right on lots of levels - but he could also have been the Leonard Cohen of his time…
Yes! - gloomy and religious
But Donne is more catchy and quotable. I had to read Death Be Not Proud at a memorial, and it still felt edgy…
Yes, forgot to mention that I concur re Dylan and I remember my mother suggesting that Donne was the rockstar of his time....
You are surely right about cultural elites. The idea that "if you like it, it is good" is usually applied to safe areas like books and music. People who admire the egalitarian idea that all books are worthy would be aghast at the application of their principle to things like smoking, excessive alcohol and sugar, drugs, junk food, pornography, bigoted television programmes, the sort of political hatred that is now widespread, etc etc etc.
Of course, many other good reasons can be given for objecting to these things, but must we not ask if beauty is the in eye of the beholder, why not other qualities too?
What this idea fails to account for is knowledge. Someone who lives, Robinson Crusoe like, on an island with little art and few people will find their taste insufficient to the metropolis, and will soon be expanding their taste as their knowledge grows. the democratising cultural force of the internet enables this *as well as * enabling human-produced slop. We shy away from calling it slop, but the reasoning that leads us there is more ideological than rational.
The real problem is not that we have elites, but that they are insufficient. Elites have two functions: to instruct, and to inform. They often, of late, fail at the second, Public health elites are the worst, delivering very little serious information to back up their claims, and allowing one ideology to take precedence over the data. But literary elites are not so far behind. When Zena Hitz praised 4chan readers for reading Moby Dick, the Bible, and Dostoevsky, several literary elites chided her for not talking about modern canon theory, women writers, and so on. The tak of simply telling people that yes, in fact, Tolstoy, Dante, etc are the very best, and should be read, has been too often abandoned.
While we live under such a philistine supremacy (teachers arguing against teaching Shakespeare, book section editors not reading Middlemarch, professor putting Taylor Swift on the syllabus) democratisation will feel chaotic and diminishing. Better elites can turn it into a positive cultural force. This is why Substacks like your are flourishing. Readers just want to know!
James - I was a close friend of Larry Siedentop and he would often speak admiringly of your columns in the Times. He would have been delighted that you enjoyed his book.
Larry used to say that there are two intellectual temperaments: those who want to say something which is true, and those don’t want to say anything which is wrong. For Larry, the latter were to be avoided, because they are a bore.
I believe he saw in you someone firmly in the former category. It was this quality that he found so energising in your writing. Clearly he is not alone in his opinion.
That's genuinely quite thrilling to hear as I admired his writing so much. Inventing the Individual is a complete masterpiece. Thank you for letting me know. If only he were still around and working on another book!
Another fascinating read, James. Thank you. I thoroughly enjoy starting my Friday with Cultural Capital, and look forward to its return after your holiday. Have a good break. Two points:
1. Donne. I do think Katherine Rundell's Super-Infinite was a rewarding and accessible way to understand Donne, but I definitely finished it wanting something richer. I'll be ordering Carey's book this morning. I understand your point about Donne being difficult to like, but I disagree. I find him to be so flawed, so human that it's difficult not to find a connection with him which I find endearing. Perhaps to a fault!
2. Reading. I'm always impressed by the quantity, variety, and speed of your reading. I read every evening, but it's never enough and my tsundoku is piled high. Shy of giving up work (very tempting), I wondered if you had any advice or a view on improving reading speed etc.?
Thank you very much. I'm so pleased you're enjoying the newsletter.
1. I feel the same about the Rundell book. She was very enthusiastic about the poems but with a poet as complicated as Donne I think you need someone who is pays more attention to the poems and their context.
2. I definitely read more since getting rid of my smartphone. Surprising how odd moments on the bus etc add up. I've also decided to read whatever interests me not what I feel I should be reading. There's a Samuel Johnson quote - "a man ought to read just as inclination takes him". It was always when I was reading for duty not pleasure that I would get stuck on a book and avoid it and read less. Something else I have recently realised is very helpful is having friends who are constantly reading interesting books and talking about them which means there are always things I feel excited about reading. I wanted this newsletter to be a bit like one of those friends!
Thanks for the reply, James. This newsletter is definitely achieving your intended effect! Please keep them coming!
‘A bracelet of bright hair about the bone’ is just one of the best lines in English poetry. End of.
“The upsurge towards the unmatchable…” What a magnificent phrase. It opens up so much about about Donne’s work.
Isn't it great. Wish I'd read it earlier!
I must read it. Worth it for that passage alone. I liked the Stubbs bio, but the Rundell did nothing for me.
There's a good comparison of Donne to Dylan (and other modern songwriters) in Michael Gray's pionnering work of Dylanology, Song and Dance Man (early 70s). Gray finds a similar quality of directness verging on the brusque, especially in their opening lines: it is quite easy to hear Dylan singing 'For God's sake hold your tongue and let me love', for example, or to imagine a Donne poem beginning 'I hate myself for loving you'. More subtly and I suppose contestably he finds a similar attitude to prosody, with Donne's famous 'awkwardness' foreshadowing Dylan's idiosyncratic phrasing: "The vibrant and intricate changes of rhythm in each occur through the investment of different words with different degrees of feeling."
very interesting thank you. You are quite right that you could imagine Dylan singing those lines
We are very lucky to have John Carey full stop. No fan of Wyndham Lewis, I think - many years ago he ended a review in The Sunday Times consigning WL to the bin. He might just have meant the man and the paintings; I can’t remember. A long 3 weeks now till the next Cultural Capital.
I agree. I saw someone tweet that it is Carey's 91st birthday tomorrow so this post was accidentally well-timed. Yes I think Wyndham Lewis is also one of the many writers who come out very badly from The Intellectuals and the Masses
I've really enjoyed your post this morning James...so thrilled that you are a fellow Donne fan as well as Larkin and Amis!! I very precociously (and probably a bit pretentiously) got into Donne at school in a big way...I haven't read Carey on him but will immediately buy his book after I finish typing this comment!! I absolutely love that phrase " zooming among the absolutes" !!!
Ah thank you - very glad you enjoyed. I hope you like the Carey book - please let me know how you get on. My favourite fact about Donne is that because most of his poems circulated as anonymous manuscript copies the best way to track his popularity among his contemporaries is to measure the number of times they copied out his poems into commonplace books etc to read later. And what researchers have found is that Donne's poems were copied out many, many more times than those of his contemporaries. Even though the people doing the copying had no idea who the author was. He was a huge viral celebrity but also completely anonymous.
Your posts are costing me money…
So I don’t know if this book precisely addresses your speculations, since it’s some years since I read it, but I do remember enjoying it enormously: Daniel Dennett’s Breaking The Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon
Ah very interesting thank you. I tried to read Dan Dennett's last book and found it a bit turgid. But will try this one if you promise it really is readable
His memoir? Or From Bach To Bacteria just before? I liked the latter! But one person's turgid is another person's compressed, I suppose. Definitely Darwin's Dangerous Idea is his masterwork.
The argument that christianity is at the heart of liberalism always struck me as a bit of a misnomer. I think Sidentrop makes a more interesting case than Tom Holland for it but I've never been massively convinced. This is especially the case given liberalism today is somewhat significantly different from its earlier predecessors and even writers such as Mill did not preach equality as much as is oftentimes claimed.
I do enjoy reading your weekly thoughts. I don’t remotely claim much deep knowledge of Hinduism but I wonder about the extent to which what you saw written on the temple walls originates in the Hindu reform movements that were a response to British colonialism in India and the efforts of Protestant missionaries. The reformers sought to stress the ethical and moralising elements of Hinduism over folk elements and to claim it as an unequivocally monotheistic religion. Put crudely, they made Hinduism more “Protestant” and (whether or not this was a main aim) more intelligible to the colonial power. Look up the Ayra Samaj movement for instance.
How could Donne not be the rockstar of his time? That face, that look, that darkness...
I too have been reading Holland's Dominion and though it articulates what I have thought for a while - that Christianity is the moral rock on which liberal life has grown - I also feel that so many other religious faiths are built on similar moral principles, but perhaps Christianity is the oldest, or maybe I am being a sort of 'imperialist' liberal, in wanting the great western religion to be to the foundation....so many thoughts, so many questions...
I love your weekly missive. It is unique from the other also excellent newsletters I get. It slows me down and makes me think of different things.