E.M. Forster, Byung-Chul Han, & Paul Theroux

Genius Loci readers:

Hello hello. After a few cold snaps, one of which brought snow to parts of Florida, it is safe to say that spring has sprung. The flowers are popping and a fine layer of yellow pollen has dusted everything. A dip into the pool is surely on the horizon. While the air conditioning will soon start its constant drone to mediate the humid inferno that will become of the Central Florida spring, let’s appreciate this moment for what it is.

If I sound uncharacteristically optimistic, it is because… I feel good. I’ve deleted social media apps off my phone, turned off the news, and given attention to my own work. When discussing Thoreau’s skepticism towards news and media consumption in Walden with my students, they were appalled. Some argued that it was important to consume the news as a way to stay informed about socio-economic and political issues. Yet, to acknowledge, oppose, and protest what one finds objectionable doesn’t require submitting oneself to an unrelenting deluge of doom and despair. In other words, to stay informed is not to stay inundated. When we divert our attention away from news cycles and media consumption, we create the space to engage with the immediacy of our own lives and experiences. I think that was Thoreau’s larger point.

Books

I haven’t read as many books as I had wanted in February due to stupid, last-minute work obligations. Though, I picked up E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), Byung-Chul Han’s The Disappearance of Ritual (2019), and Mountain Dialogues: from Antiquity to Modernity edited by Dawn Hollis and Jason König.

Picking up A Passage to India was a whim. It has been standing on my bookshelf neglected and unread for over two decades. This book was, I think, the very first second-hand book I bought online. It cost a cent, plus $2.99 for shipping. I remember how thrilled I was when it first arrived. But, for some reason, the joy didn’t last long. I stopped reading the book halfway into the fifth chapter. The index card I used as a bookmark so many years ago was still wedged between pages 44 and 45. I didn’t remember why I put the book down. That is, until I picked it back up.

After the first chapter, which draws a compelling parallel between the lives of British colonists and their imperial subjects through descriptions of place—showing how the realities of empire were obscured from the British just as the town was hidden from their elevated view by trees—, I found the book to be incredibly, mind-numbingly boring. Still, I gave it a chance. But after the first ten chapters, I gave up again.

Life is too short to trudge through books you don’t find interesting.

Far more interesting for me was a work of philosophy by the contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han. As its name suggests, the Disappearance of Rituals is a book about the loss of ritualistic practice in contemporary society. Han argues the loss is brought on by the “neoliberal regime,” a catchall term for capitalism, globalization, algorithmically mediated feeds, digital communication, and so on. His argument is a little-c conservative one. I wrote a review of the short book here.

I also started to read Mountain Dialogues from Antiquity to Modernity, an academic anthology edited by historians Dawn Hollis and Jason König. I don’t recommend the book to non-historians, Hollis’s more-recent Mountains Before Mountaineering (my review here) being the better choice for the general reading public. Broadly speaking, the book rejects the idea popularized by writers and historians like Marjorie Hope Nicholson and Robert Macfarlane (and countless others) that modern man was first to appreciate mountains… that, as one travel writer recently wrote, “For much of human history, mountains were avoided. They were a supernatural domain of monsters and gods, and only visited by prophets seeking commandments.” Statements like these are simply not true and, given the historical scholarship that has been done in the past decade or so, intellectually lazy.

Podcasts

Not much to report from podcast land except to say I enjoyed listening to Paul Theroux make the rounds in support of his new collection of short stories, The Vanishing Point. He spoke with Ryan Murdock on Personal Landscapes, which you can also watch on YouTube, and with Sophy Roberts on Gone to Timbuktu. If I am remembering correctly, Ryan’s interview explored topics related to reading and writing, while Sophy’s focused more on Orwell and Chatwin.

Some of Theroux’s reading/writing advice summarized from the two podcasts:

• What looks like “the end” is often just a false summit - there may be more ahead, beyond if you keep going.
• Write from lived, firsthand experience. Don’t write about topics of which you have no knowledge.
• Don’t chase literary fashion or trends.
• Make sense of your life through writing about it.
• Reading deeply and completely in an author’s work is more valuable than reading widely but shallowly - get to know the writer, not just individual books.
• Seek out great writers that are relatively unknown.

What else?

Over on YouTube, I posted a video of my trip to France last December to visit family. I use the trip as a way to chat about a camera, the Pentax 17 half-frame film camera (which I review here).

On my blog, I wrote about something called “post-documentary” photography. This is a newish approach to photography that has been growing in popularity of late, especially amongst photobook publishers.

I’m also working on a couple of new, mini projects about mountains. One is an essay, already at some 4,500 words, which I’ll likely publish here on my site. The other is a new podcast series on mountains, for which I’ve interviewed Dawn Hollis. More about this in the coming weeks and months.

That’s all for this month!

Farewell.