Just another non-manic Monday.

Sounds like a fun new book by Wendy Lesser on Scandinavian crime fiction:

Lesser is especially interested in how Scandinavia and Scandinavians stack up against America and Americans. “Crime, in Scandinavia, is rarely seen as the bad action of a single bad actor,” she writes, invoking a system that both believes in and denounces its social safety net. (What’s not to like? a reader wonders.) Yet she also finds a kind of superiority: “We are essentially good people, the Scandinavians insist, often with some justification. But that very insistence may be the thing that blinds them to their own moral culpability.”  

“The estimated share of renewable energy in global electricity generation was more than 26 per cent by the end of 2018.” That’s a pretty large change in just a couple of decades.  Interesting.   

Somewhat trivial, and predictable, not to say platitudinous; but still sound advice on how to revise your own writing.

Here, Frederic Jameson, a famous Marxist literary critic, engages Joseph Conrad.  It’s interesting to see him argue that one crucial inflection point in Conrad’s life was the shift from sail to steam, which Jameson argues took place in the 1870s and 80s.  I suspect that Conrad’s experience of that transition is not quite what Jameson thought—it was more a matter of the shock of his time off of the high seas and up river, in the Belgian Congo in 1889-90.  What looms behind the pages of this piece is Maya Jasanoff’s The Dawn Watch, a major reconsideration of Conrad from an historian of global modernity who has some real capacities to enter into Conrad’s imaginative world.  

An article that manages to align Zizek with Rusty Reno and Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick--the one who was ok with old people like himself dying for the economy.  Hmm.  But what they're really looking for is some kind of spiritual response to the pandemic, and they grasp at Zizek because they see nothing else there.  That's an interesting thought; perhaps the problem is that, at least on that part of the left that reads "The Point" magazine and Jacobin and other such places, there isn't much in the way of a spirituality.  (I was thinking this about the recent re-release of Vivian Gornik's THE ROMANCE OF AMERICAN COMMUNISM and the weirdly un-ironic response of some young reviewers to that self-critical book.)  What is to be done?   

This strikes me as quite a story.  Or at least, quite a podcast series.  Patrick Radden Keefe is a writer whose work has been fascinating me ever since I read Chatter.

Not fare well, but fare forward--