Mindful: Attentive, Aware, Conscious, Thoughtful, Alert.
Miscellany: A collection of various items, parts, or ingredients, especially one composed of diverse literary works.
Welcome to A Mindful Miscellany, a newsletter dedicated to finding Signal in the Turbulent Twenties.
Signal in LOTR
I got COVID a couple weeks ago. I spent a few days in the basement, before the rest of my family got it and I could emerge from my vampiric lair. One day, I (re)watched all three of the Lord of the Rings movies. I think it was around eleven hours of content, all told. You can see the influence of Tolkien’s time as a soldier in WWI and watching his sons fight WWII (Tolkien himself has denied this, but there’s too much that resonates in terms of characters, situations, technology/magic). This was a particularly good (post-tragic) bit:
Writing Updates
As mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ve been deep in the agent querying trenches, in addition to ideating and outlining the next novel. I now have a literary agent.1 Bob Diforio and D4EO Literary Agency will be taking The Infernal Tower and looking for a good home at a publishing house. From here, I have no idea how long the process will take. Could be months, years, or never. We shall see.
Metacrisis
Lots of jousting back and forth between various actors about how to name this current age of tumult— the Davos set prefers Polycrisis, Ventakesh Rao favors Permacrisis, etc. I took a swing at describing the Metacrisis and Metamodernism in an essay last year here. In this talk given at The Stoa, Josh Williams does a great job of summarizing many of the challenges facing humanity and why Metacrisis is the best descriptor. And he does it without getting all Chicken Little about it. Here is the slide deck if you want to check it out.
In the Air Tonight on MNF
Great to see it re-imagined for Monday Night Football. Purists may not like it, but I enjoy all the different takes/covers to the song over the years. And who doesn’t like a good country/rap crossover? Nonlinear combinations, people! This is as close to bipartisan as we’re gonna get, in our shared national religion, the NFL.
Substack Recommendation: It’s the (Re)Orientation, Stupid
Mark McGrath just over here crushing it, talking John Boyd and helping folks flourish in a chaotic world.
Have a great week everyone!
I know I should be more excited about getting an agent. It’s a major milestone for a writer. I’m still in shock, like Ricky Bobby in this clip:
There’s a fantastic book about Tolkien and his influences from the Great War, conveniently enough called “Tolkien and the Great War,” by John Garth. Can’t recommend it highly enough
Your term "metacrisis" may work even better when realizing that MET is the acronym for "major evolutionary transition," a concept that has been around for a while in theorizing about biological and cultural evolution. Which might mean spelling it as "METacrisis," which might not go over well. But METs are interesting anyway, and that's what we're heading into, Adam.