Jesse Hilson > Recent Status Updates

Also slow going. McLuhan is clearly excruciatingly well-read and his writing style is quote-heavy and dense. It jumps around chronologically. He’s not a strict historian. Many fascinating statements about thought, culture, and technology. And what typography and print all did to the medieval mind.

Slow going, and I’m going to let you know every step of the way. Basically, Russian lyric poetry of the Stalinist era was unique and special, and many western postmodern theorists of the “death of the author” sound mighty dumb when you reflect that Stalin was killing authors, both literally and in a might as well be dead civic sense (censorship, harassment, imprisonment, disappearance). Russia is different.

I do these things too backwards sometimes. I read the biography before I read the novels; I read the criticism before I read the poetry. Non-fiction comes first. Backwards.

Speedrunning through the last 100 pages, not even really picking everything up. Bruno has been burnt at the stake by the Venetian inquisition as a heretic. Some followers try to put forth other versions of his political reform ideas embodied in Hermetic magic. The scriptures of Trismegistus are proved to be forgeries…

Burning through this book. Not picking up every detail. Bruno was an in-your-face kind of guy, I take it. There are hints that he eventually ran afoul of the Inquisition and was burned at the stake although that isn’t fully “spoiled” for the reader yet. He gets questioned about his Elizabethanism after returning to mainland Europe

Frequent updates, sorry. This book is opening so many avenues of other books I want to read, including The Rosicrucian Enlightenment by Yates and Men of Mathematics by Bell. Science, philosophy, and magic used to be all one thing, more or less, it seemed.

Such a good book. Copernicus was a magician! Or maybe, magic and science were not yet sundered at the time. If the earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa, then the earth is animated, and if the earth is animated…then all objekts are animated too? With what? With spirits…?

Catholics. Protestants. Magicians. Kabbalists. Copernicus. Queen Elizabeth I. The Inquisition. It’s getting kind of hectic.

This will be slow and steady progress.

It was helpful to have read Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (if I have that title right) before reading this. It is interesting to see how much of Ficino’s and Pico della Mirandola’s energies are being put into trying to convince everybody that the magic they’re discussing is not demonic. And the Church got on their case about this to a large degree.

Hilarious

Fascinating and radical

Politically heterodox and theologically conservative. One gets the impression this was written on the cusp of New York City electing Mamdani — and hating it. It’s exhilarating. The flavors are hard to describe, but I don’t know if I have quite tasted them before.

Within striking distance of the end of this most fascinating and frustrating book. Why frustrating? Because I don’t have enough comprehension of Turkish, Persian, or Arabic to get deeper. The mystical sides, under Schimmel’s explanation, are golden teasers.

This isn’t the true percentage since I’m reading the plays out of order, but I’ve read two of the three plays and the introduction. They are very funny and clever and seem to my non-classicist’s eyes to have real literary merit as views into the Athens of this time period. Just like with other topics I’d have to read more

Want to be done reading this soon. It’s fascinating, if a little repetitive. Maybe repetitive is the wrong word. It’s hard to convey mystical ideas from history in new ways, it seems. Also, I’m sure the mystical poetry has a better effect in Persian, Arabic, and Turkish than in translation here.

Bit of a slog. But I will finish this book in time. The biographical details are more illuminating than the theoretical ones, but that’s just because I’m dumb. Marx is in London exile living in abject poverty; his children are dying off at a young age; Engels is writing his newspaper articles for him; they are isolated from the Continent.