Monthly Roundup VIII: Consoling the Resigned
Slow month at Silver Door
Welcome to the monthly roundup for May, 2024 at Silver Door, where perusal-worthy articles and poetry related happenings from Substack and beyond are highlighted alongside recent SD news and posts.
This month it’s our pleasure to publish the impressive debut poem Consoling Light by Joseph Teti, another young poet to keep your eyes and ears on in the coming years.
I don’t really know where the month of May went. I did have some time to reflect on the past year at Silver Door. And isn’t it the running gag on Substack that everyone just loves to read about Substack writers writing about writing on Substack? If that’s actually the case and you didn’t catch it before you can find that reflection below; I’ll just say I’m happy with our meager accomplishments so far.
As always, thank you for your time and attention, especially our paid subscribers who will be getting a special treat next month.
Around The Web
: Die Before You Die (It's cold in the river, it's cold in the ground)—Kingsnorth does his usual, highlighting the depressing grey grind of the machine while leaning into pathways of possible redemption. : What is A Man? Introducing The Idea of “Contest”— The preface: “It takes little work to demonstrate that men are in trouble. The very idea of the "incel" cries out that something is wrong. To help understand this idea of "man" I turn to the writing of Walter Ong.”When relatives of mine died back home, they were taken away by a paid undertaker we didn’t know, to be embalmed and then put on display in some small, cold room in the undertaker’s commercial premises, before being taken in a long black car to a newbuild crematorium on the outskirts of a suburban town. In this bland and passionless place, in a pre-booked thirty minute slot, there would be a short service with some recorded music and some brief eulogies, perhaps delivered by a priest we had never met and who had never known the ‘deceased’. Then the body was taken away to be burnt by an anonymous crematorium employee who we never saw. A few weeks later, we would receive an urn full of grey dust, which it was illegal to scatter in most places without a licence.
: Levelling Up (What got you here won’t get you there)—I’m not prone, at least I like to think so, to offering advice willy nilly; I tend to truck more in encouragement. That said, I’m not adverse to pointing others to people whose advice I take seriously. Renn, unlike myself, is a succesful Christian public intellectual who heads the kind of even-handed yet robust online operation worth emulating.One of the central characteristics of Greek culture, Ong argues, a feature that that helped make it great, was that it placed struggle at the centre of their way of life. The quest for ἀρετή, excellence of any kind, and the glory and fame resulting from its achievement through personal action meant the setting of person against person, testing themselves against the adversary who could provide resistance and then overcoming it. Logic, one of the great achievements of the Greeks, a development which changed the world, did not appear in a context of dispassionate thought. Rather, it was developed out of a need for winning verbal arguments. Logic provided an iron clad means for besting ones opponent in an verbal intellectual contest. Chinese culture, while sophisticated, emphasized conformity over individual difference and personal excellence, and thus did not develop their own system of logic because it was not needed. Logic deals in setting up hard oppositions in which one argument defeats the other. More generalized rhetoric, on the other hand, deals in soft oppositions which are often open to negotiation.
: Cedar Hill Nocturne—Higgins, a friend of and published poet at Silver Door, continues to crank out poems of earthy splendor. He has a prose series starting up sometime in June as well, I believe.What got you here won’t get you there. If you want to reach the level you aspire to in life, you have to change your approach along the way.
I mentioned once before the painful executive coaching feedback I received when I was rising senior manager in the consulting world. One of the points was, “Here’s the bad news. Aaron needs to wear a jacket, every day. That’s just what it is.”
At a certain point in the corporate hierarchy, you have to level up the way that you dress. People who don’t discern that and act accordingly hurt their ability to advance.
Follow the scent of burning salt and buzzing hum of dying moth in summer night down Church Street into manic show of cedar limbs in sodium light -
Silver Door Posts
A post subtitled: Resignation must be defeated
Oh Man
Silver Door's One(ish) Year Anniversary
Poems on Silver Door
Written by Joseph Teti:
Video of the Month
This couple has been a fascination of mine for a few months now. They’ve been making the rounds on the cool kids circuit of Youtube lately, mostly for their work on the collapsing fertility rates across the globe. Sharp as whips and stranger than transgender Trump supporter, here they tackle “the literacy illusion.” I’ve been tracking many of these trends for some years but they tie it all together rather neatly.