Reading, Watching 03.03.24
To think ill of mankind, and not wish ill to them
This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little about what I’ve recently been reading and/or watching. Hope you enjoy!
First, I must attend to a little gesheft: In case you missed it, my forthcoming book When The Clock Broke received its first review this past week from Publishers Weekly. It’s available for pre-order online or, even better, you can call up your favorite independent bookstore and ask them to stock it.
I also appeared with my friends Matt Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell on their podcast Know Your Enemy, where we had an extensive discussion about French literary theorist René Girard and the interest he holds for the contemporary right.
Speaking of envy, I recently took another look at the “Characteristics” of William Hazlitt. Hazlitt, who lived in the age between the revolution and restoration, is one of the greatest English essayists. He was the premier critic of the first generation of British Romanticism; he counted Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron as acquaintances. Unlike many of his contemporaries and friends who grew disillusioned and moved to reaction and legitimacy in their later years, he kept faith with the French revolution and wrote a rather worshipful biography of Napoleon. As a young man, he wanted to be a portrait painter and although he gave up that career for writing, he maintained a lifelong interest in visual arts that would result in him producing a good deal of art criticism. (It’s largely to Hazlitt that we owe the term “gusto” as applied to painting.) During one of the brief periods of peace between England and France, he was able to visit the Louvre, now opened to the public by the revolutionary government and swollen with the loot of Napoleon’s conquests. There he caught a glimpse of his hero Bonaparte who was roaming the halls. In Paris, he also became friendly with Stendhal, with whom he shares a lot, including a paradoxical combination of extreme cynicism and idealism.