James Miller in Substack:
“It is not enough that you understand in what ignorance man and beast live; you must also have and acquire the will to ignorance. You need to grasp that without this kind of ignorance life itself would be impossible, that it is a condition under which alone the living thing can preserve itself and prosper: a great, firm dome of ignorance must encompass you.”
Last month, the cultural critic Naomi Kanakia, in her “Woman of Letters” Substack posted a long and impressively open-minded essay on the topic of “Little Magazines.” Proceeding methodically, as she always does, she chose a representative handful of little magazines, and then read, carefully and closely, the entire contents of each chosen issue. She then offered a variety of comments and observations, all cogently presented in clear prose that was effortlessly engaging, because written in a plain spoken style that had humor, intelligence and that indefinable fizziness of intellect that Pascal called l’esprit de finesse.
One of Kanakia’s arguments was that many little magazines seem to thrive on polemical essays, or editorials filled with spleen. She dissected a perfect example, a humorless diatribe recently offered by the editors of the magazine n + 1, warning against the threats to our species posed by AI: it augured, these editors proclaimed, the death of creativity, if not the extinction of the human spirit. Subtle the manifesto was not. Angry? You bet.
More here.
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