READING LIST: So some random kid writes in to The Corner asking for reading material on a number of fronts: history, art, music, architecture, biography, natural history, and conservatism. For some of these things, I straight up have no clue. (Architecture? Um, Chesterton’s “Architect of Spears”? The collected works of Antonin Gaudi? Help me out here, people….) But for the ones where I think I have something to say, here’s my take:

History: Paul Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern. I’ve only read volumes one and three, but they were fantastic, especially volume one. Rahe really knows how to swing from anecdote to generalization; he leaves you with a challenging and philosophically complex portrait of the world he presents, whether it’s the ancient Greek republics or the American founding.

R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages. As far as I can tell, everyone respects this slim, fun, easy intro volume; which speaks incredibly well for it. Please read this if you have any desire at all to see beyond the “Dark Ages” stereotype we were fed in high school.

Art: I like stuff that looks like stuff. I’m a big fan of representational art. To my mind, representational art–which includes, and is probably modeled on, literature–is the perfect medium between the two extremes of delusion of reference (where people with mental disorders think everything they see refers, specifically, to themselves and their mental wanderings) and meaninglessness (the viewpoint of the honorable, grim lieutenant in Graham Greene’s Power and the Glory, who wishes to bequeath to the youth of Mexico the sweet knowledge that they are trapped on a desolate and cooling planet lost in indifferent skies). In representational art, things in this world matter–it’s a vividly incarnational sensibility–but they don’t matter because they refer to me. They refer in and of themselves. They would refer if I never existed. They would, if I had never been born, still point beyond themselves to the higher and distilled meaning shown to us by art.

So what I’m basically saying here is, I love photography. It seems to me to be the perfect art form (along with sculpture), the closest the visual arts have to literature. (Yes, I know that’s an unfair standard, but ’tis mine own.) For photography, you can’t go wrong with The Lives of Lee Miller (samples of her photos here) and Weegee’s World.

Conservatism: Nothing beats Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. Seriously. It’s like a reverse-o-world of conservatism. Also, as everyone by now knows, I highly recommend Maggie Gallagher’s work, wherein she redefines social conservatism as the reclamation of eros in our time. That kicks a#@.