Lewis at Oxford. The dying magazine.
Lewis at Oxford. The dying magazine.
Two Things returns! Plus, Thursday night course, biblical archaeology, and more Holy Places.
Coffee is back.
Let’s meet this Friday, August 23, at 6:30 am at Loyal North (Voyager/Ridgeline). It will be good to see many of you, catch up on your summers, and learn what fall has in store. We have some incredible newcomers who will be welcome additions to our number.
Remember our guiding principle of 0-1-2: zero commitment, one hour (or so), and Two Things. Let’s get to it.
(1) Lewis’s Life at Oxford
Given our love of Lewis, it seems only appropriate to inaugurate this season’s Two Things with a new book on his life as an Oxford don. At The Critic, Armand D’Angour reviews C.S. Lewis’s Oxford by Simon Horobin. Are there yet more stones of his personal and professional life to overturn and examine? It seems there are:
[Lewis] initially rejected the offer of the Cambridge professorship owing to a reluctance to leave his home in Oxford, … saying that he was precluded from moving by his “peculiar domestic setup”…. The domestic setup was indeed peculiar since, in addition to [his brother Warnie’s heavy drinking], the house was home to Mrs Jane Moore and her daughter Maureen, whose welfare Lewis had undertaken to oversee after Jane’s son, Paddy Moore, had been killed in action in 1918…. The nature of his relationship with Mrs Moore has been a subject of speculation….
Lewis was by his own admission less successful as an administrator than as a scholar. His year as vice-president of Magdalen in 1941 involved sitting on “all college committees”…. Lewis did not enjoy dealing with such minutiae…. He was required to write an official account of his term, and did so as a five-act drama in blank verse entitled “The Tragi-Comicall Briefe Reigne of Lewis the Bald”. It survives in the college archives, as does a large corpus of his letters and book drafts written in his neatly slanted handwriting (the illustrations in this book are a pleasure to peruse).
“Friendship was key to Lewis’s life,” writes Horobin. “His ideal evening was staying up late in a friend’s college room, ‘talking nonsense, poetry, theology, metaphysics over beer, tea, and pipes’.”
(2) The Death of the Magazine
This account by Ted Gioia on why magazines, as a business, “almost always get smaller, not bigger” is an insightful look at the depressing economic trends and why even beloved periodicals are in a downward death spiral.
In the year 2024, the traditional magazine is rarely the best platform for serious journalism—and that’s true for both print and digital media. The legacy outlets are all chasing short form ‘content’ (ugh!) now, and have lost confidence in good writing.
But here’s the strange thing. Readers are hungry for the longer, smarter writing that these periodicals refuse to publish. As a result, readers increasingly bypass the magazine and deal directly with writers [such as via Substack and other platforms].
That’s the new reality in media. Readers are now more loyal to writers than they are to periodicals. They seek them out. They trust them more. The magazine as an aggregating concept is increasingly irrelevant….
So if you see a newsstand filled with magazines, go and enjoy it now. Because in the future, you will only see something like that in a museum of defunct media.
I’ll mourn their passing. But those who work in journalism can’t waste too many tears on these dinosaurs—these disappearing magazines of the past. That’s because we all need to get to work building something solid to take their place.
Other Things
Thursday nights: Adam Pelser’s Thursday night course returns this fall, likely starting the second week of September. The book we’re studying is TBD, probably something on virtue ethics. Stay tuned.
Biblical archaeology roundup: Giant Second Temple period quarry uncovered | Long lost church altar rediscovered, casually leaning against a wall | 3,300-year-old ship, the oldest ever found in deep seas, discovered off Israeli coast
Re-enchantment: Apparently, record numbers of pilgrims are journeying to see holy sites around the world. Our little project here to document and visit Colorado’s holy places made some modest gains this summer. We hiked Notch Mountain to see Holy Cross in late June, and I added Christ of the Mines in Silverton, CO to the list.
Hope to see you Friday.