Monthly Recommendations | The Living Philosophy
As I was talking about a few weeks ago there are changes a-brewing around here. I'm writing more than I ever have at the moment and have a lot more to share. And so I finally feel like I've got something I'm happy to offer Paid Subscribers here on Substack. There'll still be the same cadence with the regular articles (parallel to the videos on YouTube and Spotify) but there's just going to be more good stuff for Paid Subscribers.
A lot of this is very similar to the regular articles while some of it is playing around with other styles and voices (aphorisms and bluster). But there's also other content like the following — a few different things I've been consuming and that have caught my attention over the past month: books, articles, podcasts, music etc. If you like it and you'd like more of it in future and more articles in general then I honestly wouldn't mind if you chose to upgrade.
Hope you enjoy it, James
P.S. Also I'm going to be paywalling most of the archive this week. I know, I know, I know paywalling sucks but a man has bills to pay and doesn't know how to business so...paywall 🤷♂️
The Last Hours of Plato
We've all heard of The Last Days of Socrates thanks to Plato but now we finally get a glimpse into The Last Hours of Plato thanks to some hi-tech papyrus reading in Herculaneum — destroyed by the same volcanic eruption as Pompeii. I love the image of Plato critiquing this Thracian girl's lack of rhythm just hours before his death. For many this might evoke the image of an avuncular philosopher never done spreading his wisdom; for me, it evoked the nauseating image of a disagreeable aristocratic toff (don't worry Plato I still love you 💛). Would love to hear your impressions!
On a side note, the high-tech journey to reading the scrolls is well worth reading about itself (The Guardian article on it here); can't wait to read more of these scrolls — our first direct line to the Roman and Greek world. Very exciting. I wonder whether they'll uncover any dialogue of Aristotle's. A thought of Cicero's that's always stuck with me was that "If Plato's prose was silver, Aristotle's was a flowing river of gold." Would be nice to have the evidence to evaluate that ourselves. A classics enthusiast can only dream! Whatever comes out of it is going to be amazing.
Henry Jamison's 2022 "The Years"
I was introduced to Henry Jamison back in 2018 by a friend on the Camino who sent me Real Peach which is not only a spectacularly catchy song that I adore musically (the drop in his voice is kind of his signature move like Justin Vernon (of Bon Iver fame)'s falsetto) but I remember being delighted when I recognised homages to Rumi (and the dreamworld) in there. That whole album The Wilds is one of my all-time favourites (Jamison was my top Spotify person that year and I was in his top 1% for 2018).
Fast forward to 2024 and looking for a soundtrack to my Japanese trip, I downloaded Jamison's 2022 album The Years and I was not disappointed. I already knew a couple of songs on it but the whole album is another gem I'll be listening to throughout...wait for it...the years. Highlight for me is Nowhere (presumably an allusion to Utopia which translated directed from the Greek means "no place") — a typical Jamison love song laced with Biblical and cultural/political allusions that is about navigating life and love in the 21st century by drawing on old maps (or the insufficiency of doing so). Other gems include Witness Trees and Make it Out.
Still need to sit down and piece the whole thing together as a narrative rather than as a collection of songs I like but I'm in love with it at the moment so well worth a share.
Savannah Brown's Video "is the world getting worse"
YouTube Studio has this feature where it tells you the people that have publicly subscribed to you in the last 90 days ranked by subscriber count and after returning from Japan I noticed an unfamiliar name near the top of the list: Savannah Brown. And curious as I am I checked out the channel and clicked on her second most recent video what is love. baby you're hurting me and was immediately hit with the wave of Stendhalian awe that I had when watching Contrapoints. Some YouTubers make me feel like an artistic troglodyte and Savannah Brown is one of them. My god the beauty of her prose and the vocal delivery that goes with it, the visual aesthetic and that's all before saying anything about the content itself (I wasn't surprised to discover she's a prominent poet and novelist — I've since downloaded her poetry collection Sweetdark from her website. Will report back).
Intrigued, I watched her most recent video is the world getting worse. Why didn't I watch this first you might ask? Because I'm a sap (see: philosophy of romcoms — When Dostoevsky Met Sally. But also I guess I've consumed so much doomer-y sort of content and these days I'm more interested in a more constructive sort of content. Anyway I needn't have worried because this was very much not that. This video was something else. I'm toying with the idea of making a whole reaction video because it was a stone that hit many of the birds that have been nattering in my head. I've been feeling the past few months like I'm freefalling paradigmless — that the world can be (validly) seen through a million different mirrors and I've been burning myself out trying to figure this all out and communicate what I'm learning but then, in the end, is it just about being present and alive and letting a tree be a tree rather than something "meaningful" to me? It ties so many of the themes I've been struggling with together with a stylistic eloquence that all comes together in a little symphony of awe and beauty. Can't recommend enough.
Century of the Self
And last (as it turns out: not last) but (still certainly) not least I finally finished watching Adam Curtis's documentary series from way back at the start of the millennium "Century of the Self". IMDb's blurb:
"The Century of the Self is a thought provoking, four part documentary describing how Freudian and post-Freudian ideas about human nature were adopted by corporations and politicians to manipulate society and public values in the 20th Century."
I watched the first instalment a few months back on Freud's nephew Edward Bernays and the birth of Public Relations and mass advertising back in the 20s in America using Freudian theory but since getting back from Japan I've watched the other three and my oh my is it good stuff.
Most valuable to me was connecting a few dots together around the evolution of Neoliberalism and learning about the evolution of the 60s counterculture in America and the impact that Herbert Marcuse (of Frankfurt School fame) and Wilhelm Reich (famous Freudian I've never studied but who has come up a lot in my psychoanalytical readings) had on that movement. And then Curtis connects the Maslowian Hierarchy of Needs into it and we see how marketers used this to create the postmodern marketing culture of Neoliberalism (easy to draw the straight line from here to influencer culture) and finally how this merged into politics with Reagan, Clinton and New Labour in Britain. Exciting and shocking journey. I'm sure Curtis has smudged the lines a bit to create such a clear narrative (how cynical I've grown of documentary makers) but it's a useful frame that I'm sure I'll be drawing on. If you're looking for a documentary series that'll change the way you look at the world look no further.
Piranesi
I’ve been getting back into reading fiction more and trying to marinate in beauty and art a bit more rather than just the True and the Good. The first book I read was one a friend (Hannah Knowles who periodically posts stories and reflections on her Substack A Cup of Whimsy) had recommended a few months back called Piranesi by Susanna Clarke which was just an absolute joy. It reminded me of that 19th-century occult subculture that W .B. Yeats, Aleister Crowley, Madame Blavatsky and L Ron Hubbard were all part of. But then it was this classical magical journey and a psychological unfolding. Highly recommend.
Goodreads blurb:
"Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house."
An Image from Japan
And finally I was in Japan last month and took a lot of photos (trying to improve my camera skills) so I thought I’d share a random image from that beautiful country with you every month. This month is a random moment at the Fushimi Inari shrine in Kyoto:
Hope you had a good time during your stay!
Piranesi is a neat little novel! And she even wrote a better (and longer) one earlier, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.