The Monthly Digest - August 2024
Snobbery, washi, simplicity, Mrs Dalloway, oh my!
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What’s happening at Walking Away?
This was a good month for Walking Away: growth is slow yet steady, I’m publishing regularly, and I can feel the way a small community is forming. Our members-only Zoom calls, for instance, are quickly becoming a highlight of my month. In the future, I’d love to have guests on the calls (maybe some other philosophers) and have discussions that aren’t only about the books we’re reading; I’m excited for what the future holds.
Not including this post, I published 15 articles this month. So, we’re keeping up our pace of an article roughly every two days.
I do have a question for you: do you, as a reader, like this? Or do you prefer more infrequent publishing? As a writer, I can go either way — no matter what, I’m writing every single day. Walking Away is my works-in-progress, thoughts-as-they-form outlet. It is my way of testing out ideas and seeing what you all think. But I know that 15 emails from just about anyone can be overwhelming. Let me know down below.
My favorite piece from this month was “It is good to be a slob.” This started as a piece about science fiction and fantasy — really, it was just going to be a round-up of books in the speculative fiction that I think punch above their weight. But then it got me thinking about snobbery, elitism, or even just having well-developed tastes. There’s a tension, and I love to explore those tensions: on the one hand, it is easy to be an asshole about art, but on the other hand, in the name of being nice many are too quick to abandon having aesthetic standards at all.
The next read-along
I ran a poll to find our next read. There were three options: The Lathe of Heaven, Dead Souls, and Mrs. Dalloway. I am pleased to report that the people have decided: our next read-along will be Mrs. Dalloway. This is the edition I’ll be reading.
The runner-up by a wide margin was Dead Souls. I cannot commit to anything in advance, but I expect that since there was enough interest either Dead Souls or another Russian novel will be the next fiction read-along — though after Mrs. Dalloway, we’ll read another work of philosophy together.
I like this cadence: philosophy, literature, philosophy, literature, and so on.
One reader, Greg, made a great suggestion which will be implemented into future read-alongs: we’re going to have catch-up and/or rest weeks. So, let’s say we’re reading something in December. We might have a post on December 2, December 9, and December 16, and then we’ll take a week off and have our next post on December 30. (This is a strange example since we might skip that week, too, due to the holidays.) Roughly one week per month will be dedicated to taking a break, catching up if you’ve fallen behind, and so on. I think it will make future philosophy read-alongs much more manageable.
The full schedule for Mrs. Dalloway will be posted in the next few weeks. We’ll start reading the novel in mid-October.
Out of curiosity, what philosophical works would you want to read together? (The next one, whatever it might be, will not be Aristotle, and ideally, we’ll not do any Greeks or Romans for a spell.)
The best of Substack
One of my favorite posts on Substack this month was from
. Stephenson is not only one of my favorite writers of science fiction – readers may know just how much I love Anathem – but also a compelling writer of non-fiction essays; the format here on Substack, to my mild surprise, really suits him.In this post, Stephenson takes on the word ‘deeply’, the new moralistic alternative to ‘very.’
Sophisticated readers thus came to understand that “very” was a marker for lazy writing. Users of “very” were trying to bring you around to a certain point of view without earning it. That’s why editors and English teachers hated it.
“Deeply” has inherited all of the badness of “very” but piled on some additional noxious qualities.
The piece is short, and so I really shouldn’t say much more. You can read it here.
Stephenson’s essays made me want to write my own, and so I did.
Another great piece, which I read in August but was published in July, was from
at Mostly Aesthetics: ‘Confessions of a Completist.’ It’s a nice, brief piece on typists of completism — that urge some have to read, listen, watch, etc. everything an artist has produced. I admit, though, that I’m not one of these types. I regularly fall in love with an album, say, and don’t even bother to listen to the band’s next release. For me, it was a nice glimpse into another way of looking at art.I also want to mention
for two different projects. First, Simon runs .Footnotes and tangents hosts a growing community of readers exploring books together at a gentle pace. Slow reading allows time and space to savour the words and explore the stories behind the writing.
I write book guides to accompany these readalongs. The guides are published in weekly posts and newsletters, packed with analysis and discussion to help you get the most from your reading.
Our book groups are currently reading Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy. Subscribe to find out about future slow reads.
Tolstoy and Mantel? That’s quite the combo. Maybe some of you will want to hop in and read something with him?
He also included Walking Away in his directory of book groups. (Simon, if you’re reading this, we’re nearly done with Aristotle and reading Mrs. Dalloway together next!)
I was on a podcast
Unfortunately, my hair looked ridiculous the whole time. I had just gotten a haircut, we recorded in the evening, the demons and spirits that haunt my home were conspiring, and so on.
2 To Ramble is a bookish podcast, mostly interested in science fiction and fantasy. They asked if I would come on and discuss the idea of being human and how it is explored in science fiction; we ended up talking more about personal identity and philosophy of mind than, say, Neuromancer.
Still, it was a fun time. Just ignore my hair.
Making progress on simplicity
And now, for a bit of a personal update.
As a good Midwesterner, I was raised to believe that you should never talk about money, politics, or religion at the dinner table, and ideally, you should never talk about them at all. Just assume everyone is getting by, voting for the winner, and making it to church often enough. Today, I’ll break that rule and talk a little bit about money. (But I promise there is a larger point to this.)
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