Just some literary pieces today, mostly.

A good older piece (from 2017) about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Americanah.  She’s right about the “cannibalistic ethos” of the American left, too:

It swiftly, gleefully, brutally eats its own. There is such a quick assumption of ill will and an increasing sanctimony and humorlessness that can often seem inhumane. It’s almost as if the humanity of people gets lost and what matters is that you abide to every single rule in the handbook of American liberal orthodoxy.

I suppose that’s why the article describes her as a “humanist,” but I would have liked to have had the piece get more deeply in the weeds on that.  I think she is, by the way; I just don’t think the NYTimes really recognizes what a humanist is, these days.

A great obit about a remarkable, and very, very idiosyncratic, person.  May we all grow up one day to be like her.   

An interesting profile of John Carey, an English literary critic who may be, among all the Englishman I know of, the most voluble about the chip he carries on his shoulder.  Almost all the others are completely silent about them.  For good and ill, he’s not.   

Laura van den Berg on writing by hand:

Even if I’m not able to generate real pages on a given day, I do handwrite every morning. It’s something I started to do on book tour, or on particularly busy days during the semester, just as a way to stay connected to my work and keep generating imaginatively. Some mornings, I open my notebook and think: Okay, there’s nothing here. I have nothing to write about. But I just keep at it. It’s a practice, and I believe in the power of practice. And it’s the most amazing thing: Something always comes out. The matter of story always comes up. I have a line, and then I have another line, and then I’m off. Even if it’s just a few short paragraphs, something has been committed to the page. Some kind of mark has been made.

And finally, here's a somewhat interesting piece complaining about mis-perceptions of the differences between American intellectuals and European intellectuals, and yet a piece that complains about stereotypes that it then sort of reinforces.

Be well be safe--