Episode 11: The Modern Essay and the Decline of Civilization

Park MacDougald joins Phil and Jake to discuss Virginia Woolf’s “The Modern Essay” and VS Naipaul’s “Jacques Soustelle and the Decline of the West.” Works referenced: Virginia Woolf, “The Modern Essay” “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” https://www.thoughtco.com/the-modern-essay-by-virginia-woolf-1690207 http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/MrBennettAndMrsBrown.pdf Max Beerbohm, “A Relic,” “Laughter” http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1956/1956-h/1956-h.htm#link2H_4_0001 Daniel Clowes http://www.fantagraphics.com/artists/daniel-clowes/#/category/967 Eliot Weinberger, An Elemental Thing https://www.ndbooks.com/book/an-elemental-thing/ Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/20086/kafka-was-the-rage-by-anatole-broyard/9780679781264/ Hegel, The Phenomenology Of Spirit, Terry Pinkard translation https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel-the-phenomenology-of-spirit/6FEDB42FDEF2E5FF97FEAE0EEEDABE8E woketoddler Claas Relotius’ In Eigener Sache https://magazin.spiegel.de/SP/2017/13/150231550/index.html (For those interested in Relotius’ lies about Fergus Falls, this is from Michele Anderson and Jake Krohn, residents of the town he fictionalized https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-messed-with-the-wrong-small-town-d92f3e0e01a7) Flannery O’Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374508043 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West http://people.duke.edu/~aparks/Spengler.html Naipaul, The Writer and the World (essays mentioned: “Jacques Soustelle and the Decline of the West,” “A Second Visit,” “Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad,” “Heavy Manners in Grenada,” “Our Universal Civilization”) https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/119643/the-writer-and-the-world-by-v-s-naipaul-edited-with-an-introduction-by-pankaj-mishra/9780375707308/ Mario Vargas Llosa, “El Odio y El Amor” https://elpais.com/diario/1991/12/30/opinion/694047611_850215.html Naipaul, A Bend in the River https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/v-s-naipaul/a-bend-in-the-river/9780330522991 Naipaul, Guerrillas https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/v-s-naipaul/guerrillas/9780330522915 Edward Said, “Intellectuals in the Post-Colonial World.” https://www.jstor.org/stable/40547786 Derek Walcott, Nobel Lecture: “The Antilles: Fragments Of Epic Memory” https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1992/walcott/lecture/ Pablo Mukherjee, “Doomed to Smallness: Violence, VS Naipaul, and the Global South” https://www.jstor.org/stable/20479287 Anatole Broyard, “What the Cystoscope Said” https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/20085/intoxicated-by-my-illness-by-anatole-broyard/9780449908341/ Lewis Thomas, “The Lives of a Cell” https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/535043/lives-of-a-cell-by-lewis-thomas/9780140047431/ Wesley Yang, “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho” https://nplusonemag.com/issue-6/essays/face-seung-hui-cho/ Audio clips: Excerpt from Kirsten Wever's Librivox recording of Max Beerbohm's "A Relic" https://librivox.org/and-even-now-by-max-beerbohm/ Snowpiercer https://youtu.be/3AIQdfW2Pds Edward Said - A Critique of Naipaul https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrcv3DbiIqQ