April 6th, 2024: Greetings from Austin. I’ve been taking a couple of weeks off from writing with my in-laws in town and it’s been a good way to get a bit of distance from the book I’m writing. I think I was putting too much pressure on myself to finish a new book ASAP and am realizing I need to let the process happen at its own pace just like the last one. I’m working with my former editor again
I love my Pathless Path hat. I'll be wearing it this summer and I'm hoping people will ask me what a pathless path is so I can tell them about your book. Great conversation started.
That AI song is scary good. Holy crap. It really sounds like some of the folk bands I've listened to over the years. My goodness. Where are we headed, Paul?
"Logically, a refusal to go home should validate, negatively, the very idea of home, rather in the way that Said's idea of exile validates the idea of an original "true home". But perhaps the refusal to go home is consequent on the loss, or lack, of home: as if those fortunate expatriates were really saying to me: "I couldn't go back home because I wouldn't know how to anymore."
""Recall Lukacs's phrase "transcendental homelessness". What I have been describing, both in my own life and in the lives of others, is more like secular homelessness. It cannot claim the theological prestige of the transcendent. Perhaps it is not even homelessness, homelooseness (with an admixture of loss) might be the necessary (hideous) neologism: in which the ties that might bind one to Home have been loosened, perhaps happily, perhaps unhappily, perhaps permanently, perhaps only temporarily."
“Some of the writing is pretty hard to read but most capture some element of the universal”
I feel this way about almost all pre WWII writing. Moby Dick, for example, is unreadable.
I wonder what they’ll say about my writing in the 2100s
I love my Pathless Path hat. I'll be wearing it this summer and I'm hoping people will ask me what a pathless path is so I can tell them about your book. Great conversation started.
How interesting about F. Scott Fitzgerald!
And wow, that Suno result is impressive.
Idling is a great topic for an essay. Hmm. Thanks! (And thanks for the mention. Always appreciated.)
That AI song is scary good. Holy crap. It really sounds like some of the folk bands I've listened to over the years. My goodness. Where are we headed, Paul?
Thanks for another great read🙏
One of my favourite essays: "On not going home"
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n04/james-wood/on-not-going-home
"Logically, a refusal to go home should validate, negatively, the very idea of home, rather in the way that Said's idea of exile validates the idea of an original "true home". But perhaps the refusal to go home is consequent on the loss, or lack, of home: as if those fortunate expatriates were really saying to me: "I couldn't go back home because I wouldn't know how to anymore."
""Recall Lukacs's phrase "transcendental homelessness". What I have been describing, both in my own life and in the lives of others, is more like secular homelessness. It cannot claim the theological prestige of the transcendent. Perhaps it is not even homelessness, homelooseness (with an admixture of loss) might be the necessary (hideous) neologism: in which the ties that might bind one to Home have been loosened, perhaps happily, perhaps unhappily, perhaps permanently, perhaps only temporarily."
Gosh I have 20+ quotes from this amazing piece.
The song is eerily catchy.
Great post. Love the music AI - there’s my Sunday gone 😂
Just wondering, have you come across any platforms or resources to help find newsletter sponsors?
I've only read the Golden Age of the American Essay anthology so far, but I really liked these:
- Gore Vidal - The Twenty-Ninth Republican Convention
- Richard Hofstadter - The Paranoid Style in American Politics
- MLK Jr. - Letter From Birmingham Jail
- Norman Mailer - An Evening with Jackie Kennedy
- Randall Jarrell - A Sad Heart At the Supermarket
- Elizabeth Hardwick - Boston
- Robert Merton - The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
- James Agee - The Nation: Democratic Vistas
Also everything by Joan Didion (one of hers is also in that same Lopate anthology).