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The Homebound Symphony

Stagger onward rejoicing

May 10, 2024

Christian Spirituality: categories

The Great Texts program here at Baylor, where I teach about half my classes, begins its course of study with a series of periods: Ancient, Medieval, Early Modern, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Twentieth Century. Then it diverges into genres, themes, and topics. I’ve just concluded teaching Great Texts in Christian Spirituality — for the third time — and while that’s a very interesting and enjoyable course for me to teach, it’s quite a challenge to design. There are so many texts to choose from that (I tell my class) I could probably teach it five times with five completely different sets of texts and do equal justice to the theme. 

And, of course, it’s very difficult simply to define the topic. What is Christian spirituality, for heaven’s sake? I always start with this: Christian spirituality is the application of Christian theology to the challenge of living — and then we work through various other definitions as the term goes on. But the boundaries between spirituality and theology never can become precise, and indeed, some key Christian thinkers would deny the distinction. As Jaroslav Pelikan has noted,

It was in the aftermath of the Council of Chalcedon that Maximus Confessor attained his historic importance, both for the history of spirituality and for the history of dogma (a distinction that he would not have accepted since, as every one of these treatises makes abundantly clear, there was for him no spirituality apart from dogma, and no dogma apart from spirituality).

Anyway: when I’m choosing texts, I’m careful to (a) cover the historical ground as best I can and (b) draw upon the three major streams of Christian writing on spirituality: Roman, Orthodox, Protestant. But over my three times teaching the course, I’ve come to think that certain other distinctions are important to acknowledge as well. I think especially of three axes: 

  • apophatic ↔ kataphatic 
  • individual ↔ communal 
  • encounter ↔ obedience 

That is, any given Christian writer might emphasize the apophatic — what cannot be said about God and the experience of God — or the kataphatic — what can and must be said; might emphasize the individual or the communal and ecclesial aspects of the Christian life; might see the Christian life primarily in terms of an encounter with God or obedience to God. And you can sort Christian writers or texts accordingly. For instance: 

  • Julian of Norwich: apophatic/individual/encounter
  • The Imitation of Christ: kataphatic/individual/obedience 
  • Eliot’s Four Quartets: apophatic/individual/encounter 
  • C. S. Lewis’s sermons and talks: kataphatic/communal/encounter 

These classifications are arguable, of course! Also of course: they can’t be strictly distinguished from one another, for example, one’s obedience to God may have a great impact on one’s ability to have a genuine encounter with God. But as indicators of tendencies, as guides to emphasis, I think the categories are useful. 

Some figures are difficult to classify: Maximus tends to cover all the possibilities, which is perhaps key to his uniquely powerful place in the whole tradition. (His Centuries are very much about communal life and obedience within that life, but he also wants to demonstrate the ways that an obedient life can lead to an encounter with the Divine that cannot easily be put into words.) But trying to place writers or books in this scheme has, in my experience, been a great way to generate conversation about them. Maybe some of you will find it useful. 

May 9, 2024

intrinsic values

Adam Kirsch:

In his poem “Little Gidding,” written during World War II, T. S. Eliot wrote that the Cavaliers and Puritans who fought in England’s Civil War, in the 17th century, now “are folded in a single party.” The same already seems true of Vendler and Perloff. Today college students are fleeing humanities majors, and English departments are desperately trying to lure them back by promoting the ephemera of pop culture as worthy subjects of study. (Vendler’s own Harvard English department has been getting a great deal of attention for offering a class on Taylor Swift.) Both Vendler and Perloff, by contrast, rejected the idea that poetry had to earn its place in the curriculum, or in the culture at large, by being “relevant.” Nor did it have to be defended on the grounds that it makes us more virtuous citizens or more employable technicians of reading and writing.

Rather, they believed that studying poetry was valuable in and of itself.

I like this essay, but I’m mentioning it here because Kirsch makes use of a common phrase that has always puzzled me: “valuable in and of itself.” Variants: “intrinsically valuable” and “valuable for its own sake.” I have never known what that means — or even could mean. Because: if you ask people to say more about valuing something for its own sake, they end up saying that it gives them pleasure or delights them or fascinates them. But to pursue something because it delights or fascinates you is not pursuing it for its own sake — it’s pursuing it for the sake of the delight or fascination.

When people say that something is “valuable in and of itself,” I think what they mean is simply that it has no economic or social value — note Kirsch’s contrast between intrinsic value and something valued because it “makes us more virtuous citizens or more employable technicians of reading and writing.” Someone might say that when we say some artifact or experience is intrinsically valuable we’re saying that it does not have any instrumental value — but isn’t a song that delights me instrumental to that delight? And isn’t that okay? 

So I think that when we describe something as having intrinsic value, what we really mean is that the value it provides is higher than or nobler than any furthering of crassly economic or social ambitions. We’re indirectly and somewhat sloppily appealing to a hierarchy of goods. And maybe — especially in the context of debates about liberal education, which is at least partly the context of Kirsch’s essay — we should be more explicit about that, and conscious of what our hierarchy is and why we affirm it. 

May 8, 2024

Dan Kois:

Most alarmingly, kids in third and fourth grade are beginning to stop reading for fun. It’s called the “Decline by 9,” and it’s reaching a crisis point for publishers and educators. According to research by the children’s publishers Scholastic, at age 8, 57 percent of kids say they read books for fun most days; at age 9, only 35 percent do. This trend started before the pandemic, experts say, but the pandemic accelerated things. “I don’t think it’s possible to overstate how disruptive the pandemic was on middle grade readers,” one industry analyst told Publishers Weekly. And everyone I talked to agreed that the sudden drop-off in reading for fun is happening at a crucial age—the very age when, according to publishing lore, lifetime readers are made. “If you can keep them interested in books at that age, it will foster an interest in books the rest of their life,” said Brenna Connor, an industry analyst at Circana, the market research company that runs Bookscan. “If you don’t, they don’t want to read books as an adult.” 

Obviously this is bad news, but let’s remember the context: Do kids do anything for fun these days? They’re not allowed to play, only to have “supervised leisure activities.” Everything is grinding and striving and measured performance. Are they even given enough time alone to make reading possible? If kids go from school to music lessons to the sport of the season, or to various after-school programs, and they’re given phones to occupy their every free instant, of course they won’t read. But then, in such cases not-reading isn’t the worst of their problems. 

May 8, 2024

back to the brows

After reading various writings about the brows — including, first of all, this unsent letter by Virginia Woolf and this 1949 essay by Russell Lyne, I find myself impatient and wanting to cut to the chase. I’ll come back to these matters later when I’ve had more time to think them over, but in the meantime, some Theses:

  1. A work of art can largely confirm the expectations of those who encounter it, largely thwart those expectations, or touch any point between those extremes. This is true of all the arts, but for present purposes I will speak only of fiction.
  2. These expectations can be of many kinds, but the most commonly invoked expectation involves difficulty: How hard-to-track, hard-to-comprehend do we expect and want a book to be?
  3. The reader who demands that all of his or her expectations be met is often called a lowbrow reader; the writer whose work habitually meets such readers’ expectations is often called a lowbrow writer.
  4. The reader who craves surprise, excess, extremity, who is impatient with work that confirms typical expectations, is often called a highbrow reader; the writer whose work consistently violates norms and transgresses standards is often called a highbrow writer. 
  5. N.B.: Higher-browed readers often want to have their aesthetic expectations challenged, but not their moral ones. Almost no one wants that. (But they get it sometimes, from some writers. George Eliot and Vladimir Nabokov are good examples — I’ll write about them, in this regard, one day.) 
  6. “Highbrow,” “middlebrow,” and “lowbrow” are all characteristically pejorative terms, meant to insult, though in some cases (e.g. the piece by Woolf above) a writer will claim and even treasure the insult. See for comparison the history of such words as “Quaker” and “Methodist.” If Virginia Woolf does not think that your novel sufficiently resists your readers’ expectations, she will call you and your readers middlebrows; Graves and Hodges in the same circumstance will call you and your readers lowbrows. (They don’t mention C. P. Snow in their book, but if they had they’d probably have called him a lowbrow writer, but something like The Search is clearly meant for the educated reader.) 
  7. The three brow-terms are most commonly used by people who are or believe themselves to be highbrows, though they may dislike that language and (implicitly or explicitly) put ironic scare-quotes around it.  
  8. Even the most challenging writer will not always want to read works that constantly challenge or repudiate his or her expectations. Auden used to say that great masterpieces demand so much of their readers that you simply can’t take one on every day, not without either trivializing the experience or exhausting yourself. 
  9. It is characteristic of highbrows’ use of these distinctions — see the Woolf letter quoted above and T. S. Eliot’s encomium to the music-hall entertainer Marie Lloyd, which employs the related socio-economic terms “aristocrat,” “middle-class,” and “worker” — that they articulate some alliance of themselves and the lowbrows against the middlebrow.
  10. Lowbrow readers do not know, and if they knew would not care, about this supposed alliance.
  11. Middlebrow readers and writers alike are often aware of the disdain of them felt by highbrows, and may respond either by defensiveness or mockery. (Think of Liberace’s famous response to his critics’ scorn for his music: “I cried all the way to the bank.” Funny to think of that line having a known origin, but it does.) 
  12. For a long time now there has been no genuine lowbrow reading. Those who insist on all their expectations being fulfilled can get that hit much more efficiently through movies, TV, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
  13. The brow-discourse is conceptually distinct from, but overlaps considerably with, genre-discourse. For instance, detective novels that adhere strictly to the conventions of the genre — the Ellery Queen stories, for instance — will often be called lowbrow, while those that frequently deviate from the conventions — the later novels of P. D. James, for instance, or Sayers’s Gaudy Night — may get called “highbrow” or, more likely, “literary fiction.”
  14. The tripartite brow-discourse is much less useful than a more nuanced and more detailed account of readerly expectations, one which is sensitive to the ways different genres can generate different sets of expectations, and respond to those expectations in diverse ways.
May 6, 2024

elegance personified (really)

Last night Teri and I watched Swing Time, and afterwards played a little game: We went back to the dance scenes and tried to pause at instants when Astaire and Rogers didn’t look elegant. Couldn’t do it. At every moment they are balanced and poised, they’re perfect images of grace.

002 ginger rogers theredlist.

May 6, 2024

the integrity of science

I haven’t forgotten about middlebrow matters, but right now my mind is on something else. Something related, though. 

Readers of Gaudy Night (1935) will recall — stop reading if you haven’t read Gaudy Night and don’t want any spoilers — that the plot hinges on an event that occurred some years before the book’s present-day: a (male) historian fudged some evidence and a (female) historian caught him at it and reported the malfeasance, which led to his losing his job. Late in the book, but before the full relevance of this event to the plot has been revealed, there’s a conversation about scholarly integrity, which I will now drop into the middle of: 

“So long,” said Wimsey, “as it doesn’t falsify the facts. But it might be a different kind of thing. To take a concrete instance — somebody wrote a novel called The Search — “

“C. P. Snow,” said Miss Burrows. “It’s funny you should mention that. It was the book that the — ”

“I know,” said Peter. “That’s possibly why it was in my mind.” 

A person has been vandalizing Shrewsbury College and a copy of that novel, with certain pages torn out, has been found. The novel, by the way, appeared in 1934, around the time that Sayers began writing Gaudy Night. It would be interesting to know whether it was the direct inspiration for her story, or whether she read it after some elements were already in place. I hope to find out more about that.

And by the way, I am going to be spoiling that novel far more thoroughly than I will spoil Gaudy Night — but it’s not one that many people read, these days. 

 

“I never read the book,” said the Warden.

“Oh, I did,” said the Dean. “It’s about a man who starts out to be a scientist and gets on very well till, just as he’s going to be appointed to an important executive post, he finds he’s made a careless error in a scientific paper. He didn’t check his assistant’s results, or something. Somebody finds out, and he doesn’t get the job. So he decides he doesn’t really care about science after all.”  

“Obviously not,” said Miss Edwards. “He only cared about the post.”

Neither the Dean, who has read the book, nor Miss Edwards, who hasn’t, is quite accurate. The scholar, whose name is Arthur Miles, probably would have gotten the post even without the paper; but it’s perfectly possible that he rushed the paper, failed to be appropriately self-critical, because he knew that the vote for the Director of a new scientific institute would be coming soon. Miles doesn’t know; he can’t be sure; maybe he would’ve made the mistake anyway. But in any case, as soon as he is told that there’s a problem with his paper, he runs the numbers again, sees the error, and immediately admits that he was wrong. 

Let me pause for two digressions: 

  1. Sayers specifies what pages were torn from the book — but I don’t have access to the edition that Sayers had read, which I assume was the first hardcover edition, so I don’t know what exactly was excised, but I suspect that it was the part where Miles admits his mistake. (The whole business is a flaw in Sayers’s plot, because it’s impossible to imagine the Responsible Party having read Snow’s book and known which pages to tear out; but DLS clearly was determined to get a discussion of The Search into her own novel, so she found a way.)   
  2. As it happens, this is Snow’s most autobiographical novel: what happened to Miles also happened to him. He began his career as a chemist, and wrote a paper (published in Nature) which was then discovered to contain an embarrassing mistake — upon which he abandoned his work as a scientist and became a novelist and bureaucrat.    

Now, back to Gaudy Night: 

“The point about it,” said Wimsey, “is what an elderly scientist says to him. He tells him: ‘The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit.’ Words to that effect. I may not be quoting quite correctly.“

Wimsey’s summary is a good one. This is indeed what the “elderly scientist,” a man named Hulme, says to him. And Miles does not disagree. What’s more on his mind, though, is the picture of his future laid out for him by another senior scientist: 

“You’ve got to work absolutely steadily, without another suspicion of a mistake. You’ve got to let yourself be patronised and regretted over. You’ve got to get out of the limelight. Then in three or four years, you’ll be back where you were; though it will be held up against you, one way and another, for longer than that. It will delay your getting into the Royal [Society], of course. That can’t be helped. You’ll have a lean time for a while; but you’re young enough to get over it.” 

Faced with this prospect, Miles realizes that he could only manage all this (“Watching the dullards gloat. Working under Tremlin. Having every day a reminder of the old dreams”) if he had a genuine devotion to science. But: “It occurred to me I had no devotion to science.”

N.B.: the point is not that the event has taken away his devotion to science, but rather, “I am not devoted to science, I thought. And I have not been for years, and I have kept it from myself till now.” The revelation of his error leads to a revelation of what had been true about him all along: “There were so many signs going back so far, if I had let myself see, if it had been convenient to see.” Indeed, it now becomes clear to him that his desire to become the director of a scientific institute — an administrative position, not one that would involve him directly in research — precisely because on some unconscious level he didn’t want to be a scientist any more: “I had thrown myself into human beings — to escape the chill when my scientific devotion ended.” 

It should be clear, then, that “he decides he doesn’t really care about science after all” is not an adequate explanation of what happens. 

But there’s also a twist in the tail of this story, which in Gaudy Night Sayers calls attention to: 

“In the same novel,” said the Dean, “somebody deliberately falsifies a result — later on, I mean — in order to get a job. And the man who made the original mistake finds it out. But he says nothing, because the other man is very badly off and has a wife and family to keep.”

”These wives and families!“ said Peter.

”Does the author approve?“ inquired the Warden.

”Well,“ said the Dean, ”the book ends there, so I suppose he does.” 

Or does he? And is that an accurate description of the case? Several facts here are relevant:

  • The man who has falsified the data, Sheriff, is one of Miles’s oldest friends.  
  • Miles got Sheriff his current job and has been guiding his research, trying to keep him on the straight and narrow — he’s a feckless fellow, and a habitual liar, but Miles had hoped that he was ready to reform.   
  • Sheriff had promised Miles, and also his own wife, that he was working on a safe project when he was in fact working on a high-risk, high-reward one — one he thought likely to lead to a prestigious position that, now that the paper has been published, he is indeed about to be offered.   
  • Miles has a sense of responsibility for Sheriff because he had hoped to hire him for a position at the aforementioned Institute, but gave up on the idea when he realized that his own position was compromised. He thinks perhaps he should have pushed harder for Sheriff anyway. 
  • Early in his career Miles had had the opportunity to consciously fudge data himself, and seriously considered it — he thought that he might eventually be found out, but only after achieving a brilliant career from which summit he could just say “Whoops, I made a mistake” — but instead abandoned the research project. He thought, though, that in the future he would have compassion for any scientist who succumbed to a similar temptation.  
  • And most important of all, Sheriff is married to Audrey, Miles’s former lover, for whom, though he himself is now happily married, he cherishes a strong and lasting tendresse — despite the fact that Sheriff basically stole her affections while Miles was abroad.  

The Search is not a great novel, but this is perhaps its best element: the faithful portrayal of Miles’s complex and ever-shifting and deeply human responses to Sheriff’s lying. (It reminds me a bit of the greatest scene of this kind I know, the moment in Middlemarch when Lydgate has to decide how to vote for the chaplaincy of a new hospital. I wrote about that thirty years ago [!!] near the end of this essay.)

On the one hand, he knows exactly what Sheriff did and why:  

I had no doubts at all. It was a deliberate mistake. He had committed the major scientific crime (I could still hear Hulme’s voice trickling gently, firmly on).

Sheriff had given some false facts, suppressed some true ones. When I realised it, I was not particularly surprised. I could imagine his quick, ingenious, harassed mind thinking it over. For various reasons, he had chosen this problem; it would not take so much work, it would be more exciting, it might secure his niche straight away. … But I must not know, half because he was a little ashamed, half because I might interfere. So [his research assistant] and Audrey must, for safety’s sake, also be deceived.

All this he would do quite cheerfully. The problem began well. … Then he came to that stage where every result seemed to contradict the last, where there was no clear road ahead, where there seemed no road ahead at all. There he must have hesitated. On the one hand he had lost months, there would be no position for years, he would have to come to me and confess; on the other his mind flitted round the chance of a fraud.

There was a risk, but he might secure all the success still. I scarcely think the ethics of scientific deceit troubled him; but the risk must have done. For if he were found out, he was ruined. He might keep on as a minor lecturer, but there would be nothing ahead. 

Miles does not excuse Sheriff at any point; he knows that the man’s dishonesty is habitual, perhaps pathological. But he also knows that Sheriff and Audrey have reached a certain accommodation in their marriage, that Audrey understands who her husband is but loves him and needs him anyway. Miles writes a letter that would expose and run Sheriff, and then, realizing that it would also ruin Audrey, … 

I shall not send the letter, I was thinking. Let him win his gamble. Let him cheat his way to the respectable success he wants. He will delight in it, and become a figure in the scientific world; and give broadcast talks and views on immortality; all of which he will love. And Audrey will be there, amused but rather proud. Oh, let him have it.

For me, if I do not send the letter, what then? There was only one answer; I was breaking irrevocably from science. This was the end, for me. Ever since I left professionally, I had been keeping a retreat open in my mind; supervising Sheriff had meant to myself that I could go back at any time. If I did not write I should be depriving myself of the loophole. I should have proved, once for all, how little science mattered to me.

There were no ways between. I could have held my hand until he was elected, and then threatened that either he must correct the mistake, or I would; but that was a compromise in action and not in mind. No, he should have his triumph to the full. Audrey should not know, she had seen so many disillusions, I would spare her this.

The human wins out over the scientific. Maybe, Arthur thinks, it always does. But Gaudy Night shows that sometimes the scientific — in the sense of a strict commitment to the sacredness of honest research — can sometimes have its own victories. And Gaudy Night also suggests that the choices might not be as stark as Snow’s story suggests. More on that in another post. 

May 3, 2024

P.S.A.

A number of people have asked me for my thoughts about the current university campus protests. I have very few. As the novelist John Barth said when asked why he hadn’t been involved in the anti-war protests of the Sixties, “the fact that the situation is desperate doesn’t make it any more interesting.” People who aren’t interested in learning (or in politics either, in any meaningful way) have thrown a monkey wrench into the works of universities that don’t care about teaching them. Not my bag. 

I think this Ross Douthat column is good, though. I’m grateful that Ross writes about things like this so I can write about very different things. 

May 3, 2024

refuge

Bryan Garsten: 

Liberal societies, I want to suggest, are those that offer refuge from the very people they empower. The reach of this formulation will become evident when we allow ourselves to use “refuge” in both a literal and a metaphorical sense, so that institutions and practices can offer refuge from a powerful person as much as a fortress can. […] 

Because liberal societies offer within them different sorts of refuge, they should not produce many refugees fleeing elsewhere. The United States does not generally produce large refugee flows, but those it has at times produced — as when enslaved Americans fled to Canada before the American Civil War — have offered good indices of weaknesses in its liberal credentials. Liberal societies themselves should by their nature appreciate the plight of foreign refugees and err on the side of welcoming them, but the facts do not allow us to say that liberal societies are always more welcoming than nonliberal societies. The crucial indicator of liberalism is whether a society produces refugees. A society becomes more liberal when it reduces the reasons that people have to flee — not by converting all people to one outlook or identity, but by offering them the chance to find refuge internally. Liberal societies aim to generate no exodus. 

It is in this sense that many of the recent developments I have regularly decried on this blog — surveillance capitalism, panoptic governance, coercive administrative practices (especially in academia) — are straightforwardly anti-liberal, sometimes consciously, sometimes blindly. I like the framing of refuge. From Florida’s “Stop WOKE” law to the anti-bias “teams” and “task forces” that populate American campuses, the common theme is: You have no refuge from us. Resistance is futile.

Garsten’s essay is trying to do a lot of things, and I think he gets tangled up at times, in interesting ways. For instance, on page 143 he moves seamlessly from celebrating the founding of cities to celebrating the spread of markets, in a way that suggests that he thinks that the reason we have cities is to spread markets. There are other views on that point. But the major themes involve certain claims about healthy societies. Such societies 

  • do not generate many refugees 
  • are hospitable to refugees from elsewhere 
  • provide means of exit from their internal systems and structures 
  • provide means of exit from the society altogether 

Thus the conclusion: 

Some critics worry that if we are given the choice to flee evils in the many ways a liberalism of refuge protects, our mobility will turn us into “rootless” beings. This concern has been given too much weight since Heidegger and Arendt. We are not trees who flourish when deeply rooted in the soil. We are human beings with legs, meant to explore. What we need to flourish is not roots so much as refuges from which we can venture forth and to which we can retreat. Often, we end up returning to where we started with new insight or appreciation, like Odysseus gratefully coming home. Sometimes we do not, or cannot, return home, and so we begin again and find, in those beginnings, a distinctively liberal adventure — the noble work of building a new society that refugees know so well. 

I have reservations. For one thing, whether “building a new society” is “noble work” depends on the kind of society you’re building. (See: the Taliban.) More important: Is “exploring” the main thing that legs are for? Again, it depends on why you’re exploring. If Garsten had said that legs are for exploring to find food for your family and community, and to bring that food back to those who hunger, I’d have been happier. And in general, I think it’s more important for our minds to explore than our legs, even if when doesn’t create new markets. 

In general, Garsten’s vision is a libertarian one, whereas I prefer anarchist models. In my view the primarily difference between libertarianism and anarchism is that the former wants to expand the scope of individual freedom while the latter wants to expand the scope of collaboration and cooperation. What if we were to re-frame “refuge” and “exit” in anarchist, or at least communitarian, terms? 

An interesting book in this regard is Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, and especially the character of McPhee. McPhee is basically Lewis’s old tutor, William Kirkpatrick, AKA Kirk or the Great Knock, and I have always found it touching that Lewis sought to find some way to offer that dour atheist the blessings of Christian community, but without as it were forcing him into a false conversion. 

The community of St. Anne’s — an attempt by Lewis to embody the themes of his great essay “Membership” — is not quite anarchic, and I say that not because it has a Director but rather because no one else but Mr. Fisher-King could be the Director. Still, it is a collaborative and cooperative endeavor, and no one is coerced into participation, nor is anyone who wishes to belong excluded — though they may not choose their own roles: the community strives to make charitable but honest assessments of what its members are capable of, and especially what risks they can be expected to take. 

No community is perfect, of course. When the people of St. Anne’s become aware of the gifts of Jane Studdock, one of them goes to far as to say “You have to join us” — but that is immediately recognized not only as counterproductive (Jane flees at the first hint of coercion) but also contrary to the character of the community. One must enter freely or not at all, and the damage done by that moment of impulsiveness is almost irreversible. 

St. Anne’s is of course an intentionally Christian community or “body” through and through, which leads to the question: Why is McPhee there? He is no Christian, and for all his respect for the Director, he believes the man prone to nonsensical words and thoughts. 

The answer is that McPhee is there because he wants to be. Eccentric though he is, the community gives him refuge — indeed, it would violate its character as much by exclusion as by coercion. He is given tasks appropriate to his abilities, though he cannot participate directly in the spiritual warfare which, in this story, comes to be the chief business of St. Anne’s. As one who does not believe and therefore does not pray, he lacks the protection he needs against supernatural Powers. He cannot — as the Apostle, or John Bunyan, might say — “put on the armor of God.” If McPhee resents this, he doesn’t say much about it; after all, he has found a place where he is respected and loved, and where his service is welcomed with gratitude. And what better refuge can any of us hope for? 

May 2, 2024

attention please

Nathan Heller:

“Attention as a category isn’t that salient for younger folks,” Jac Mullen, a writer and a high-school teacher in New Haven, told me recently. “It takes a lot to show that how you pay attention affects the outcome — that if you focus your attention on one thing, rather than dispersing it across many things, the one thing you think is hard will become easier — but that’s a level of instruction I often find myself giving.” It’s not the students’ fault, he thinks; multitasking and its euphemism, “time management,” have become goals across the pedagogic field. The SAT was redesigned this spring to be forty-five minutes shorter, with many reading-comprehension passages trimmed to two or three sentences. Some Ivy League professors report being counselled to switch up what they’re doing every ten minutes or so to avoid falling behind their students’ churn. What appears at first to be a crisis of attention may be a narrowing of the way we interpret its value: an emergency about where — and with what goal — we look.

This is really badly written, and I had to spend a good deal of my own attention trying to figure out what it’s saying. The quotation from Jac Mullen is hard to parse — I think he’s saying, “I have to try to teach my students that multitasking doesn’t really work, but it’s hard to get them to accept that point.” And if I understand that point correctly, then doesn’t the next sentence contradict it? If “multitasking and its euphemism, ‘time management,’ have become goals across the pedagogic field,” then aren’t teachers trying to teach something (multitasking) that Mullen has just (and rightly) said is impossible? Maybe that’s the point, though. Maybe Heller needs to say that Mullen has problems convincing his students because all the other teachers are promoting multitasking. Also: since when is “time management a euphemism — “euphemism”? What does Heller think that word means? — for “multitasking”? I’ve never thought those words were synonymous. And then the following sentence, about the redesign of the SAT, has nothing to do with either multitasking or time management, so I believe some kind of transition was needed there. The most unclear sentence of all is the last one — I have no idea what it means. I don’t know what he means by “narrowing” or what the phrase “emergency about where we look” could possible denote.

What a mess!

What’s going on here? How did Heller, a professional writer, and his editors let a passage this inept make its way into print? My guess: They don’t want to say that our society is gripped by a “crisis of attention” because that’s the kind of thing that Moms and Dads and Boomers and Luddites and … well, conservatives say, so they disavow that language and try to replace it with something else, anything else. But if you look at the whole paragraph, the only conclusion you could reasonably draw is: Holy shit, we’re in the midst of a crisis of attention!

May 1, 2024

Sayers the middlebrow writer

Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, in The Lost Week-End (1940), their generally fascinating and informative social history of Great Britain between the world wars, make a great many Olympian pronouncements. They say, for instance, that Auden “perhaps never wrote an original line,” a claim that, to the person who has read even a handful of Auden poems, is instantly revealed as one of the most dim-witted statements in the history of literary criticism. (“Who stands, the crux left of the watershed” — oh goodness, that hoary old chestnut?) And they declare that by the 1930s “low-brow reading was now dominated by the detective novel.”

Well … if the detective novel is “low-brow reading,” then how to describe magazines devoted to movie stars or Mills & Boon romances? “Such things,” we can imagine Graves and Hodge saying in the plummiest of tones, “scarcely deserve the name of ‘reading.’” But people who read such books really are reading, and contra G&H, detective novels, in their literary ambitions and expectations, are an ideal example of middlebrow literature.

I tend to think of middlebrow writing as the kind of thing that highbrows would never write but still enjoy. Auden, for instance, whether an original poet or not, loved detective stories, as did T. S. Eliot (among many others).

Dorothy L. Sayers — my current biographical subject — strikes me as a paradigmatic middlebrow writer, possessing the intellectual equipment of the highbrow but believing implicitly in the capabilities of what Virginia Woolf condescendingly called “the common reader.” Woolf was highly aware of the deficiencies of the common reader:

The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole — a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing. He never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real object to allow of affection, laughter, and argument. Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture without caring where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure, his deficiencies as a critic are too obvious to be pointed out; but if he has, as Dr. Johnson maintained, some say in the final distribution of poetical honours, then, perhaps, it may be worth while to write down a few of the ideas and opinions which, insignificant in themselves, yet contribute to so mighty a result.

Not well educated, not generously gifted, instinctively (not consciously) moved to create a whole but capable of constructing only the “rickety and ramshackle,” the common reader can only form “insignificant” ideas and opinions. Lovely.

Sayers would agree with some of this. But she did not think the ideas and opinions of the common reader insignificant; indeed, she thought them typically superior to the opinions of highbrows. More important: while Woolf takes the shortcomings of “the common reader” as givens, almost as natural phenomena like mushrooms or cloudy days, Sayers, by contrast, sees any such deficiencies as remediable — and sees such remediation as part of her responsibility as an intellectual.

Let me just make a few pronouncements of my own:

  1. Woolf is a truly great writer; Sayers is not.
  2. Woolf is a highbrow; Sayers is not, and indeed frequently makes highbrows the butt of her satire.
  3. Sayers in her fiction regularly shows an interest in a wide range of social classes, with their accompanying habits, inclinations, and modes of speech; Woolf is interested in none of these things: all of her characters are of the same social class.
  4. Sayers is far better-educated than Woolf, more learned, and has a wider intellectual capacity: Woolf could not have managed cryptograms in a novel, or forced herself to learn the biochemistry of poisons, or translated Dante and and Song of Roland … but of course Sayers couldn’t have written Mrs. Dalloway either.

(Digression: I might add, in relation to that last point, that while Sayers was only eleven years younger than Woolf, a major transformation in the possibilities of education for women in England accelerated between Woolf’s adolescence and Sayers’s. Virginia Stephen was largely educated at home, though she did get to attend classes at King’s College London for a time; Sayers took a first-class degree at Somerville College, Oxford: when she completed her studies in 1915, women could not yet receive Oxford degrees, but she was awarded hers retroactively in 1920. The whole business of women’s education was immensely complicated in this era, with different universities changing their policies at different rates. For instance, Flora Hamilton, later to be Flora Lewis and the mother of C. S. Lewis, took a first-class degree in logic and a second in mathematics at Queen’s University Belfast in 1885. But by the time Sayers took that belated degree openness to both sexes was nearly universal, though of course informal bigotry would continue.)

I would further suggest that Sayers’s translations of Dante, and her sequence of radio plays The Man Born to be King, are classic middlebrow endeavors: attempts to render old, difficult texts and ideas comprehensible to a general audience. (A project in remediation.) I will also argue in my biography, though probably not in detail here on my blog, that her detective novels do some of the same work, as she tried in them to do what Wilkie Collins had done in the previous century: marry the story of detection with the social novel.

But wait: I haven’t defined my brows, have I? What do I mean — what should one mean — by highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow? As it happens, that was a central question of mid-twentieth-century intellectual life — and it gave us some categories that we still use today. So I’ll be exploring that in future posts.

April 30, 2024

St. Mark’s Place

The Five Spot

The Five Spot, on St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan, hosted most of the great jazz musicians of the middle part of the twentieth century — Charles Mingus, for instance:

It was also a block-and-a-half from 77 St. Mark’s Place, which is where for a long time Auden lived for about half of each year. (Leon Trotsky also lived there for a time, and a section of the street provided the image for the cover of Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti.) I often find myself wondering how often Auden passed Miles Davis or John Coltrane on the street, or sat next to them at a local bar.

Photograph of AUDEN on St. Mark's Place by Richard Avedon

April 28, 2024

more rational choices

My recent posts on how I choose what fiction to read and what’s going on with the publishing industry share a theme: perverse incentives. (Indeed, it seems that a lot of my writing is about perverse incentives, but more about that another time.) The intellectual/political monoculture of the modern university leads to an intellectual/political monoculture in the major media companies, and when you combine that with the many ways the internet has disrupted the economic models of all the arts, you get a general environment in which interesting, imaginative work is not just resisted, it’s virtually prohibited. All the incentives of everyone involved are aligned against it.

Thus the thesis of this essay by James Poniewozik: “We have entered the golden age of Mid TV”: 

Above all, Mid is easy. It’s not dumb easy — it shows evidence that its writers have read books. But the story beats are familiar. Plot points and themes are repeated. You don’t have to immerse yourself single-mindedly the way you might have with, say, “The Wire.” It is prestige TV that you can fold laundry to. 

Or you could listen to a Sally Rooney novel on Audible while chopping the veggies. Same, basically. This is what I think about almost everything from current big-studio Hollywood movies to new literary fiction to music by Taylor Swift or Beyoncé: it’s … okay. It doesn’t offend.

But wouldn’t it be nice to have something better? Wouldn’t it be cool to be surprised? Crevecoeur famously described early America as a land characterized by “a pleasing uniformity of decent competence.” But after a while the competence isn’t all that pleasing. As Wittgenstein famously wrote in the Philosophical Investigations: “We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!” I wrote an essay about this.

Of course I think about this stuff all the time. 

The good news is that these production-line periods tend to produce a reaction: Romantic poetry was one such; punk rock another; the Nouvelle Vague in French movies yet another. Indeed, so was Wittgenstein’s philosophy. But the bad news is that today our manorial technocracy makes the project of finding cracks in the walls more difficult than it has ever been. So I’ll be watching the rough ground to see who turns up there, but in the meantime, here’s how I make my decisions about watching movies: 

  • If someone I love wants me to go to a movie with them, I do. 
  • Otherwise, I don’t watch movies produced and/or distributed by the big studios. (I had been leaning in this direction for a while, but I didn’t make it a guideline until three or four years ago.) I just don’t, for the same reason that I don’t read novels by people who live in Brooklyn: it’s not a good bet. The chance of encountering something excellent, or even interestingly flawed, is too remote. Not impossible — I really enjoyed Dune, for instance, and Oppenheimer, both of which I watched with my son — but remote. 
  • I don’t subscribe to Netflix, or HBO, or Amazon Prime. (I do have Apple TV as part of my Apple subscription, but I primarily use it to rent movies. I did try watching For All Mankind and Masters of the Air, but both of them were too … Mid for me.) The only service I subscribe to is the Criterion Channel, because it allows me to watch (a) classic movies, (b) independent movies, and (c) foreign movies. All of which are much better bets than anything the current big studios make. 
  • I never hesitate to watch a favorite movie again when that’s where my whim takes me. In fact, I watch movies from my Blu-Ray/DVD collection more often than I stream anything. 
April 26, 2024

advancing

Elle Griffin seems to have carved out a niche for herself telling hard truths to would-be writers – which is an unpleasant but useful service, I think. But there’s one troublesome point I think she actually understresses — though it will take me a few minutes to get to that point.

Griffin cites this chart from Penguin USA:

Category 1: Lead titles with a sales goal of 75,000 units and up
Advance: $500,000 and up

Category 2: Titles with a sales goal of 25,000–75,000 units
Advance: $150,000-$500,000

Category 3: Titles with a sales goal of 10,000–25,000 units
Advance: $50,000- $150,000

Category 4: Titles with a sales goal of 5,000 to 10,000 units
Advance: $50,000 or less

Four times in my career I have received Category 3 advances; in two of those cases (The Narnian and How To Think) I ended up with Category 1 sales, thus significantly overperforming my advance. In one case (Breaking Bread with the Dead) I have achieved sales to match the “sales goal,” though not (yet?) enough to earn back my advance; in the fourth case (Original Sin) I underperformed the sales goal.

All this assuming that the above information is correct, which, I dunno.

Anyway, this track record should make it possible for me to get another Category 3 advance, should I want one, and if I can come up with the right proposal. I’m not a sure-fire winner, but I’m a decent bet when I do get a big-house contract. (My academic books don’t figure into this discussion, because while they sell well for academic books, even taken together they don’t make enough money annually to pay my property taxes.)

And if the numbers Griffin cites are correct, the sales of my more successful books put them, to my surprise and puzzlement and discomfort, in the top 5% of published books. It’s true that How to Think has sold more copies than books from the same period by Billie Eilish and Justin Timberlake, which should tell you something – mainly that fans of Billie Eilish and Justin Timberlake don’t read books. I should also add that How to Think really took off for a little while because Fareed Zakaria loved it and hyped it on CNN. Funny old world, ain’t it. But still … the “top 5%” thing just feels wrong. 

Anyway, let’s imagine that I receive a $100,000 advance for a future book. Not impossible by any means. The thing is, and this is the point I think Griffin should lean on more heavily: “advance” is a misleading term. Advances don’t come all at once, they come in stages, either three or four of them, for instance:

  • $25,000 at contract signing;
  • $25,000 at submission of an acceptable (but still to be edited) manuscript;
  • $25,000 at publication of the hardcover;
  • $25,000 at publication of the paperback, or, if the publisher chooses not to make a paperback, one year after the publication of the hardcover.

(Sometimes the unit payments vary: for instance, for Breaking Bread with the Dead my agent negotiated bigger payouts for the first and third stages, smaller ones for the other two.) In a typical situation, after you sign the contract you might need two years to write the book. Supposing that your manuscript is pretty good and just needs editing, that process can take several months, and then getting the book ready for publication can take several more months. And the final payout will come a year after that initial publication. So while a $100,000 advance sounds like a lot of money, it often ends up being $25,000 a year; not nearly enough to live on. 

The moral: Writing books can be a nice supplement to your day job, but it is virtually impossible for it to replace your day job, even if you’re in the top 5% percent of sales. That I, several of whose books appear to be in that category, couldn’t make a decent living if I sold three times as many of those books as I do, should suggest … not, as Griffin keeps saying, that no one buys books, but that the whole industry is smaller than most people think and a money machine for only a handful of writers. You probably have to get into the top 1% of published-by-publishers writers to make a living solely by writing. Probably only a few hundred, or at most a few thousand, people in the entire world manage that. (Griffin seems to think Substack offers a better chance for success, but I bet the percentages there are roughly the same.) 

 

P.S. I’m probably not going to get another significant advance, because I doubt I will ask for one. I can’t at the moment imagine wanting to write a book that a Big Five publisher would want to pay for. That could change, of course, but I don’t expect it will. I decided to write my Sayers biography for a university press rather than a trade house primarily to write the book I wanted to write — not the book I needed to write to earn back an advance.  

P.P.S. I see Freddie has weighed in also. Some good thoughts there, but I’m not sure about the title: “Publishing is Designed to Make Most Authors Feel Like Losers Even While the Industry Makes Money.” Maybe that’s right. It’s certainly that advances used to be smaller for the biggest sellers and larger for the mid-list writers, which made it possible for mid-list writers to make a modest but firmly middle-class living — especially when they could supplement their book income with writing for periodicals that, in inflation-adjusted dollars, paid much more than they do now. (Why could so many magazines back in the day pay so much more? Because they got much higher ad revenue in periods when ad money didn’t have nearly as many places to go.) The publishing industry has clearly borrowed the Silicon Valley venture capitalists’ practice of hoping for one or two hits in a thousand investments, but I don’t understand how that affects their decisions about how to distribute the money they have available for advances. I wish I did. 

April 25, 2024

influence and citation

I have an essay coming out in the July issue of Harper’s which I titled “The Mythical Method” but which will probably end up with the title “Yesterday’s Men: The Death of the Mythical Method.” It concerns the rise and fall of myth as a central, or perhaps at times the central, concept of humanistic study; and therefore it has some things to say about Northrop Frye’s former influence over the humanities and especially over literary criticism. 

Perhaps the most prominent scholar of Northrop Frye’s work is Robert D. Denham, who has repeatedly written — see for instance this 2009 essay — that the rumors of Frye’s repetitional demise are greatly exaggerated, and that “if Frye is no longer at “the center of critical activity,” as he was in the mid-1960s, he still remains very much a containing presence at the circumference.” Denham continues, 

In 1963 Mary Curtis Tucker wrote the first doctoral dissertation on Frye. The period between 1964 and 2003 saw another 192 doctoral dissertations devoted in whole or part to Frye, “in part” meaning that “Frye” is indexed as a subject in Dissertation Abstracts International. The number of dissertations for each of the decades falls out as follows: 1960s = 5; 1970s = 28; 1980s = 63; 1990s = 68; and in the first four years of the present decade, 29.3. These data obviously indicate that during the twenty-year period following the height of the post-structural moment, interest in Frye as a topic of graduate research substantially increased. 

I mention all this because this is an interesting case of how statistics can mislead when context is eliminated. In citing these numbers Denham omits some important information: 

  • The rise of literary theory as a subset of literary studies. When Mary Curtis Tucker wrote that first dissertation on Northrop Frye, people in English studies simply didn’t write dissertations on other academic literary critics. The rise of theory as a sub-discipline changed that. 
  • The overproduction, especially in the humanities, of PhDs — something that has been worried over since I was in grad school. 

If in 2009, when Denham published that essay, we saw (a) far more PhDs in English being produced than had been the case in in 1963 — a trend that, inexplicably and indefensibly, continued for several more years — and (b) a far larger percentage of dissertations focusing on contemporary literary criticism and theory than had been the case in 1963, then it becomes clear that citations of Frye could rise in absolute numbers during the same period when Frye’s influence was significantly decreasing proportionate to the whole discourse. 

In a recent book, Denham goes beyond his 2009 argument to say that there has been an “exponential progression” to Frye’s influence. But here he is relying on dissertations from places like the University of Peking and even the University of Inner Mongolia in Hoh-Hot (now known as Inner Mongolia University). But how many dissertations on any topic in English literature or literary theory and criticism would have been produced in those universities forty or forty years ago? Denham is making comparative judgments without a fixed or appropriate baseline of comparison. “People say that the Sega Genesis console is obsolete, but far more people use them today than used them in 1987!” 

(In so doing — I say this only in passing — Denham is missing what could be a really fascinating point: I’d be willing to bet that Chinese students of Western literary criticism and theory will, generally speaking, find Northrop Frye more interesting and useful than, say, Judith Butler. That would be a topic worth exploring.)  

There is another issue also: “citation” is a word that captures a wide range of possibilities. In the 1960s and 1970s, Frye’s work could be cited to clinch a point — if you could get Northrop Frye on your side you could win an argument. But since then Frye has typically been cited in North America and Great Britain as a representative of a Eurocentric false universalism, a residual Christian imperialism, a putatively apolitical totalizing discourse of patriarchy — that kind of thing: citing him not because he’s on the winning side but because his side isn’t winning any more, thank God. 

But of course, as Oscar Wilde said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. 

April 24, 2024

more on costs and choices

Isaiah Berlin, “The Originality of Machiavelli”:

The ideals of Christianity are charity, mercy, sacrifice, love of God, forgiveness of enemies, contempt for the goods of this world, faith in the life hereafter, belief in the salvation of the individual soul as being of incomparable value – higher than, indeed wholly incommensurable with, any social or political or other terrestrial goal, any economic or military or aesthetic consideration. Machiavelli lays it down that out of men who believe in such ideals, and practise them, no satisfactory human community, in his Roman sense, can in principle be constructed. It is not simply a question of the unattainability of an ideal because of human imperfection, original sin, or bad luck, or ignorance, or insufficiency of material means. It is not, in other words, the inability in practice on the part of ordinary human beings to rise to a sufficiently high level of Christian virtue (which may, indeed, be the inescapable lot of sinful men on earth) that makes it, for him, impracticable to establish, even to seek after, the good Christian State. It is the very opposite: Machiavelli is convinced that what are commonly thought of as the central Christian virtues, whatever their intrinsic value, are insuperable obstacles to the building of the kind of society that he wishes to see; a society which, moreover, he assumes that it is natural for all normal men to want – the kind of community that, in his view, satisfies men’s permanent desires and interests. […]

It is important to realise that Machiavelli does not wish to deny that what Christians call good is, in fact, good, that what they call virtue and vice are in fact virtue and vice. Unlike Hobbes or Spinoza (or eighteenth-century philosophes or, for that matter, the first Stoics), who try to define (or redefine) moral notions in such a way as to fit in with the kind of community that, in their view, rational men must, if they are consistent, wish to build, Machiavelli does not fly in the face of common notions — the traditional, accepted moral vocabulary of mankind. He does not say or imply (as various radical philosophical reformers have done) that humility, kindness, unworldliness, faith in God, sanctity, Christian love, unwavering truthfulness, compassion are bad or unimportant attributes; or that cruelty, bad faith, power politics, sacrifice of innocent men to social needs, and so on are good ones.

But if history, and the insights of wise statesmen, especially in the ancient world, verified as they have been in practice (verità effettuale), are to guide us, it will be seen that it is in fact impossible to combine Christian virtues, for example meekness or the search for spiritual salvation, with a satisfactory, stable, vigorous, strong society on earth. Consequently a man must choose. To choose to lead a Christian life is to condemn oneself to political impotence: to being used and crushed by powerful, ambitious, clever, unscrupulous men; if one wishes to build a glorious community like those of Athens or Rome at their best, then one must abandon Christian education and substitute one better suited to the purpose. 

I think Berlin is right about Machiavelli, and I think Machiavelli is right about Christianity too. The whole argument illustrates Berlin’s one great theme: the incompatibility of certain “Great Goods” with one another. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the inability to grasp this point is one of the greatest causes of personal unhappiness and social unrest. Millions of American Christians don’t see how it might be impossible to reconcile (a) being a disciple of Jesus Christ with (b) ruling over their fellow citizens and seeking retribution against them. Many students at Columbia University would be furious if you told them that they can’t simultaneously (a) participate in what they call protest and (b) fulfill the obligations they’ve taken on as students. They want both! They demand both! 

Everybody wants everything, that’s all. They’re willing to settle for everything. 

See my recent post on costs and the “plurality” tag at the bottom of this post. 

April 24, 2024

Matt Crawford, on Substack:

Probing his riding companions, Robert [Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance] comes to understand that John and Sylvia’s attitude of non-involvement with “technology” is emblematic of a wider phenomenon that was then emerging, a countercultural sensibility that seeks escape from the Man and all his works: “the whole organized bit,” “the system,” as they put it. The solution, or rather evasion, that John and Sylvia hit on for managing their revulsion at technology is to “Have it somewhere else. Don’t have it here.” The irony is that they ride their motorcycle out into the countryside to escape this “death force” that is trying to turn them into “mass people,” and it is precisely in these moments that they find themselves most intimately entangled with The Machine – the one they sit on. This dependence is an affront to their own sense of themselves as cultural dissidents. The problem, then, cuts rather deep. They are living a contradiction. It’s a bit like using Substack to write critiques of technology.

April 23, 2024

rational choices

The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but that is the way to bet. 

— Hugh E. Keogh 

There’s too much to read, right? Especially contemporary fiction. Too many choices. You have to develop a strategy of selection, a method of triage. I will always read more old books than new ones, as I think everyone should. But I don’t neglect what my contemporaries are doing. This summer, for instance, I plan to read Jon Fosse’s Septology and Zito Madu’s memoir The Minotaur at Calle Lanza. (Memoir is not fiction, of course, but it uses some of the same techniques and, for me, scratches some of the same itches.) 

My own strategy for deciding what to read arises from these facts: Literary fiction in America has become a monoculture in which the writers and the editors are overwhelmingly products of the same few top-ranked universities and the same few top-ranked MFA programs — we’re still in The Program Era — and work in a moment that prizes above all else ideological uniformity. Such people tend also to live in the same tiny handful of places. And it is virtually impossible for anything really interesting, surprising, or provocative to emerge from an intellectual monoculture. 

With these facts in mind I have developed a three-strike system to help me decide whether to read contemporary fiction, with the following features: 

  • The book is set in Brooklyn: Three strikes, you’re out. 
  • The author lives in Brooklyn: Three strikes, you’re out. 
  • The book is set anywhere else in New York City: Two strikes. 
  • The book is set in San Francisco: Two strikes. 
  • The book’s protagonist is a writer or artist or would-be writer or would-be artist: Two strikes. 
  • The author attended an Ivy League or Ivy-adjacent university or college: Two strikes. 
  • The book is set in Los Angeles: One strike. 
  • The author lives in San Francisco: One strike. 
  • The author has an MFA: One strike. 
  • The book is set in the present day: One strike. 

I am not saying that any book that racks up three strikes cannot be good. I am saying that the odds against said book being good are enormous. It is vanishingly unlikely that a book that gets three strikes in my system will be worth reading, because any such book is overwhelmingly likely to reaffirm the views of its monoculture — to be a kind of comfort food for its readers. Even books as horrific as Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life — a novel I wish I had never read, and one of the key books that made me settle on this system — is comforting in the sense that we always know precisely whom we are to sympathize with and whom to hate. Daniel Mendelsohn is correct: “Yanagihara’s book sometimes feels less like a novel than like a seven-hundred-page-long pamphlet.” I would delete “sometimes.” 

(Author graduated from Smith College, lives somewhere in New York City, book is set in New York City in more-or-less the present day: at least five strikes. I shoulda known.) 

My system does not cover every eventuality. Among other things, it only applies to American writers, though the monoculture I have described extends overseas: for instance, Sally Rooney doesn’t live in Brooklyn, but she might as well; and her books aren’t set in Brooklyn, though they might as well be. I need to extend my system to account for this kind of thing. But I can continue to work on that. 

I have a similar system for deciding whether to watch a movie; maybe I’ll write about that in another post. 

April 22, 2024

Gilead revisited

The way we speak and think of the Puritans seems to me a serviceable model for important aspects of the phenomenon we call Puritanism. Very simply, it is a great example of our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved. And it demonstrates how effectively such consensus can close off a subject from inquiry. I know from experience that if one says the Puritans were a more impressive and ingratiating culture than they are assumed to have been, one will be heard to say that one finds repressiveness and intolerance ingratiating. Unauthorized views are in effect punished by incomprehension, not intentionally and not to anyone’s benefit, but simply as a consequence of a hypertrophic instinct for consensus. This instinct is so powerful that I would suspect it had survival value, if history or current events gave me the least encouragement to believe we are equipped to survive.

– Marilynne Robinson, “Puritans and Prigs” (1996)

I’m re-reading Gilead now, in preparation for teaching it, and I am struck all over again by what an extraordinary book it is, what a gift it has been to so many readers — millions of them, maybe. (Promotional material for the book has long shouted A MILLION COPIES SOLD, but the count might be two million by now, and of course many thousands of people have read used and library copies.) Really, it’s some kind of miracle. The novels that have followed it are excellent novels indeed, but they aren’t miraculous. Gilead certainly is. 

But today, twenty years later, would Gilead even be published by a big trade house? As long as the author could say that she teaches at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, probably. Would it be widely read and celebrated? Almost certainly not. The self-appointed cultural gatekeepers would denounce it as a project of white cis-het imperialism, and trepidatious reviewers would either ignore it or offer, at best, muted praise. And if it were a first novel, it might not get published at all — though perhaps an outfit like Belt Publishing would take it on.

As I read Gilead today it still feels like a great gift, but also an artifact of a lost era. 

April 22, 2024

costs

A brief follow-up to this post from last week: In our current climate of political assholery, no self-described “activist” can answer what I think of as an essential question: If you get what you want, what will be the costs? Every choice — every choice ever made by every human being — carries costs. Some of the costs are easily borne; some, though, are unmanageable, or even catastrophic. Especially if you’re a political activist, you have a responsibility to anticipate the costs of your preferred policy and develop a plan for dealing with them. But if you ask people who call themselves activists the question above, you’ll only get two responses: dumfounded blankness or sheer rage.

CDN media

April 20, 2024

Peace, Peace

N.B. This post is spoilerful. 

A few years ago I read a fascinating post by my colleague Philip Jenkins about Gene Wolfe’s 1975 novel Peace. I had read Peace many years ago but didn’t remember anything about it, and Philip’s post reminded me that there’s a complicated discourse surrounding the book. I decided that I wanted to re-read the book without looking at the interpretations … and only now have I gotten around to it. Here are some things that struck me:

It seemed obvious to me that our narrator, Alden Dennis Weer, is dead and is revisiting his life. (Wolfe has cheerfully confirmed that Weer is a ghost.) He clearly lives, or “lives,” in a rambling memory palace of his own making, each room of which is related to some season of his life. But the palace is not complete, and he can temporarily or permanently lose access to some of its rooms.

Severian, the protagonist and narrator of Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun tetralogy — which Wolfe began almost immediately after writing Peace — claims to have a perfect memory, and perhaps he does, but he does not tell us everything he remembers. When he remains silent about some episode in his life, the reader has to sift the evidence to figure out what really happened, or wait for later evidence. The same is true of Weer’s narration in Peace. Often he leaves stories unfinished — and by “stories” I mean both his direct narration of his life’s events and the book’s many tales (some of them fairy tales, some of them anecdotes told to him by others). It’s possible that he has forgotten how some stories end, but in many of the cases he simply does not want to say what happened, and we are left to draw inferences. He does not narrate the death of his Aunt Olivia, but we can piece together an account of her death. He explicitly says that he will not tell us what happened when he and the librarian Lois Arbuthnot visited a farm outside of town to search for an old document, but later it becomes pretty clear what happened: Weer killed her. (And she may not be the only person he murders.)

When declining to tell that story, Weer writes,

You must excuse me. I can write nothing more now about the trip Lois and I made to Gold’s, or our search for the buried treasure. Everything we do is unimportant, I know; but some things are, if not more important, at least more immediate than others, and so I must tell you (writing alone in this empty room, my pen scratching on the paper like a mouse in a wall) that I am very ill. Sicker, I think, than I have ever been before — sicker, even, than I was this winter, before Eleanor Bold’s tree fell.

The falling of that tree — called Eleanor Bold’s because she planted it, but the key point is that she planted it over Weer’s grave — is what awakens his spirit (Wolfe confirmed this in an interview) and inaugurates his assessment of his life. Trees can live a long time, and there’s a hint early in the book that Weer knows himself to be a ghost, and a ghost haunting the place where he had lived long, long before:

And as if by magic — and it may have been magic, for I believe America is the land of magic, and that we, we now past Americans, were once the magical people of it, waiting now to stand to some unguessable generation of the future as the nameless pre-Mycenaean tribes did to the Greeks, ready, at a word, each of us now, to flit piping through groves ungrown, our women ready to haunt as lamioe the rose-red ruins of Chicago and Indianapolis when they are little more than earthen mounds, when the heads of the trees are higher than the hundred-and-twenty-fifth floor — it seemed to me that I found myself in bed again, the old house swaying in silence as though it were moored to the universe by only the thread of smoke from the stove.

This narration, then, may take place hundreds of years in the future.

What is the term of Weer’s haunting? Will he forever be a ghost? Or is he, perhaps, like Hamlet’s father, “Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night … Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away”? I am inclined to believe the latter. That is, I think that Weer will wander through the rooms of his memory until he remembers, and faces, it all. His old house is a purgatorial mansion. (That word makes me wonder whether there is a thematic connection between Peace and an even weirder book by Wolfe’s fellow Roman Catholic SF writer, R. A. Lafferty: Fourth Mansions.)

Those who know Alden Dennis Weer best call him Den, which is interesting because that’s the second half of his first name and the first half of his second name. Den/Den. I take this to indicate that he is a doubled self — like Dr. Jekyll, and like the Major Weir (!) Philip discusses in his post — and may be liberated from his complicated prison only when he has confronted and acknowledged all that he currently denies or evades. Then and only then will he have peace. The title of the novel thus points to what’s missing from it.

The various interpolated tales in Peace comment in various ways on the events that Weer narrates and the people that he knew. For instance, one story about a princess and her suitors clearly mirrors Aunt Olivia and her suitors. And late in the novel the bookseller and forger Mr. Gold reads a tale to Weer that I think is meant to describe to Weer his own situation. The tale comes, Gold says, from a book called The Book That Binds the Dead, though he comments that “It may not be as easy to hold the dead down as we think.” Be that as it may, in the passage Gold reads a man describes how he and a friend tried to summon the spirit of a dead man. They stand over his grave, and eventually he rises before them:

The flesh of his head was as the dust, and there remained only his hair, which hung to his shoulders as in life, but had lost its luster and had in it certain of those small animals which the sun engenders in that which no longer has life. His eyes were no more; their sockets seemed dark pits, save that there flickered behind them a point of light that moved from one to the other and often was gone from both, and appeared just such a spark as is seen at night when the wind blows a fire that is almost gone, and perhaps a single spark, burning red, flies hither and thither in the black air. From what the spirit, that mighty one, had whispered to me, I knew this spark for the soul of the dead man, seeking now in all the chambers under the vault of the skull its old resting places.

Then, gathering all my courage, and recollecting what the spirit had divulged to me — that the dead man was not like to harm me save I set my foot upon his grave, or cast aside one of the stones that had sheltered him from the jackals — I spoke to him, saying, “O you who have returned where none return. You waked from the death that men say never dies; speak to us the knowledge of the place from which you have come.”

Then he said to us, “O shades of the unborn years, depart from me, and trouble not the day that is mine.”

What does he mean by “the day that is mine”? It is, I think, the day of his purgation. We should remember Pope Adrian V in Dante’s Purgatorio, who speaks briefly the pilgrim but then asks him to go away: “Your presence here distracts me from the tears that make me ready.” The spirit the men in this tale have raised is a true image of Alden Dennis Weer.

I have tried in the above to outline what I think is fundamentally going on in Peace — but what I say has relatively little overlap with the vast online literature about the novel, which, now that I’ve looked it over in the aftermath of my reading, seems mainly concerned to trace the staggeringly dense and complex web of reference that Wolfe weaves into this novel, as he does into most of his stories. To mention just one tiny example that I noticed as I read: Weer early on mentions his childhood fascination with Andrew Lang’s Green Fairy Book, which (I reminded myself by checking Wikipedia) contains a version of the old French fairy tale “The Blue Bird,” in which a man is transformed into a bird. And then one of the characters in Peace narrates his encounter with a man who is gradually being transformed into stone — a man whom he meets in The Bluebird Cafe. This led me to notice the number of characters in the novel who are compared to birds; and I also started thinking of the characters’ various metamorphoses. Aunt Olivia, for instance, once described as being “all bird bones and petticoats,” eventually becomes a corpulent woman whom Weer sees naked in her bath. Plus, “The Blue Bird” also concerns magic eggs, and a major event in Peace involves the quest for a rare and beautiful painted egg.

There is no end to this kind of thing in Wolfe’s fiction: he knits and purls, always stitching stitching stitching, ever complicating the weave, to a degree that seems to me compulsive and often, frankly, counterproductive. The (largely online) discourse about his books is obsessed with these fancy stitchings, and you can read thousands and thousands of words about this connection and that, this allusion and that, without ever finding anyone who asks what a given book is about, why it exists.

I’m reading a lot of mysteries these days, in preparation for a biography of Dorothy L. Sayers, and readers of mysteries may be divided into two camps, those who want to find a good puzzle to solve and those who want to read an interesting story. You can also, generally speaking, divide the writers of mysteries into two camps: those who want to please the puzzle solvers and those who want to please the story lovers.

Gene Wolfe is likewise a maker of puzzles and a teller of tales, and I often find myself wondering which he cared about more. If you look at the online commentary on Wolfe’s novels, you might think that the puzzles are the only things that matter, and certainly Wolfe gives us a superabundance of teasing clues. I call that superabundance “counterproductive” because I like stories more than puzzles — which is also why I’d rather read Dorothy L. Sayers than John Dickson Carr. When reading Wolfe’s fiction I am often frustrated, because I find that the complications of the weave obscure the design of the story. In my reflections above I have tried to set aside many of the puzzles in order to focus on the matters I find essential. But maybe occluding the distinction between the essential and inessential is just what Wolfe wants to do.

April 19, 2024

adult children

I think there’s a strong causal relationship between (a) the overly structured lives of children today and (b) the silly political stunts of protestors and “activists.”

As has often been noted, American children today rarely play: they engage in planned, supervised activities completely dictated by adults. Those of us who were raised in less fearful times spent a lot of time, especially during school vacations, figuring out what to do: what games to play, what sorts of things to build, etc. To do all this, we had to learn strategies of negotiation and persuasion and give-and-take. I might agree to play the game Jerry wants to play today on the condition that we play the game I want to play tomorrow. You could of course refuse to negotiate, but then people would just stop playing with you. Over time, therefore, kids sorted these matters out: maybe one became the regular leader, maybe they took turns, maybe some kids opted out and spent more time by themselves. Some were happy about how things worked out, some less happy; there were occasionally hurt feelings and fights; some kids became the butt of jokes.

I was one of those last because I was always younger and smaller than the others. (Story of my childhood in one sentence.) That’s why I often decided to stay home and read or play with Lego. But eventually I would come back, and when I did I was, more or less, welcomed. We worked it out. It wasn’t painless, but it wasn’t The Lord of the Flies either. We came to an understanding; we negotiated our way to a functional little society of neighborhood children.

But in today’s anti-ludic world of “planned activities,” kids don’t learn those skills. In their tightly managed environments, they basically have two options: acquiescence and “acting out.” And thus when they become politically aware young adults and find themselves in situations they can’t in conscience acquiesce to, acting out is basically the only tool in their toolbox. So they bring a microphone and speaker to a dinner at someone’s house and demand that everyone listen to their speech on their pet issue. Or they blockade a bridge, thereby annoying people who probably agree with their political news and giving decision-makers good reason to condemn them. Or they dress up in American flags and storm the U. S. Capitol building. And they act out because they can’t think of anything else to do when political decisions don’t go their way. After all, they’ve been doing it all their lives.

When kids do this kind of thing, we’re not surprised; we say, hey, kids will be kids. When adults do it, we call them assholes. We raise our children in such a way – this is my thesis – that we almost guarantee that they’ll grow up to be assholes. Congratulations to us! We’ve created a world in which, pretty soon, the Politics of Assholery will be the only kind of politics there is.

P.S. This is why I’m interested in anarchism! As I have said several times, the difference between libertarianism and anarchism is simply this: the goal of libertarianism is to expand the realm of individual freedom, while the goal of anarchism is to expand the realm of collaboration and cooperation. We need more anarchic childhoods today to have a more mature and constructive politics tomorrow.

April 18, 2024

The Internet’s New Favorite Philosopher | The New Yorker:

Maret is part of a growing coterie of readers who have embraced [Byung-Chul] Han as a kind of sage of the Internet era. Elizabeth Nakamura, a twentysomething art-gallery associate in San Francisco, had a similar conversion experience, during the early days of pandemic lockdown, after someone in a Discord chat suggested that she check out Han’s work. She downloaded “The Agony of Eros” from Libgen, a Web site that is known for pirated e-books. (She possesses Han’s books only in PDF form, like digital samizdat.) The monograph argues that the overexposure and self-aggrandizement encouraged by social media have killed the possibility of truly erotic experience, which requires an encounter with an other. “I’m like queening out reading this,” she told me, using Gen Z slang for effusive enjoyment—fangirling. “It’s a meme but not in the funny way — in the way that it’s sort of concise and easily disseminated. I can send this to my friends who aren’t as into reading to help them think about something,” she said. 

“This guy’s thinking has changed my life but of course that doesn’t mean I’m willing to pay for his books.” 

April 17, 2024

Wystan and Erika

Erika Mann WH Auden.

The couple above are W. H. Auden and Erika Mann. The photo was taken by a student at The Downs School, where Auden was then teaching. Erika, the daughter of the novelist Thomas Mann and an ardent opponent of Nazism, had been living in England but was in imminent danger of being repatriated to Germany. To prevent that from happening, Auden agreed to marry her. (Both were gay and not otherwise interested in matrimony.) On June 15, 1935 they were married in Ledbury, a town near the school. This photo was taken around that time, perhaps even on their wedding day.

Thomas and Katia Mann were very worried about Erika’s safety: had she been repatriated, a lengthy prison term was the best that she could have hoped for, especially since on her mother’s side she was of Jewish descent. Thomas and Katia were themselves safely on their way to New York City, traveling by ocean liner, when, on June 16, they received a terse and to-the-point telegram:

ALL LOVE FROM MRS AUDEN

Eventually the Mann family would be reunited in America, and Erika and Klaus would write a book about their deliverance from Nazism.

Mann erika klaus escape to life.

In January of 1939, Auden and his friend Christopher Isherwood arrived in New York City and were greeted at the pier by Erika and Klaus. They all drove down to Princeton to meet Papa and Mama Mann, and Life magazine sent a photographer to capture a family photo:

Carl mydans christopher isherwood and w.h. auden with thomas mann and his family at mann home, princeton, nj.

A happy reunion!

Wystan and Erika never divorced, so for decades Auden got to enjoy making jokes about “my father-in-law.” When Erika died in 1969 some of the obituaries noted that she was survived by her husband, the poet W. H. Auden — a piece of information that came as rather a shock to some of her friends, and his.

All that said, after their marriage Auden was very eager for his parents to meet Erika and insisted that she travel to Birmingham with him so they could receive the parental blessing. (“My husband is a tyrant,” Erika sighed in a letter to a friend, not thinking Birmingham a sufficiently interesting or beautiful city to make a visit worthwhile.) They remained friends always, and Isherwood thought that later there was even “a touch of eroticism” to their relationship. So to call it a “marriage of convenience” is perhaps not to tell the whole truth.

April 16, 2024

rewilding

The essay by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon on “Rewilding the Internet” is absolutely essential — and you might know that I would think so if you read my essay from a few years back on “Tending the Digital Commons.” (See also my reflections on “manorial technocracy” and the tag, visible at the bottom of this post, “open web.”) Our metaphors are slightly different but our theme is the same. 

It’s noteworthy, I think, that those of us who care about the internet and love the best versions of it tend to think ecologically. 

Farrell and Berjon: 

Ecologists have re-oriented their field as a “crisis discipline,” a field of study that’s not just about learning things but about saving them. We technologists need to do the same. Rewilding the internet connects and grows what people are doing across regulation, standards-setting and new ways of organizing and building infrastructure, to tell a shared story of where we want to go. It’s a shared vision with many strategies. The instruments we need to shift away from extractive technological monocultures are at hand or ready to be built. 

Just as a diverse “pocket forest” is the surest way to regenerate urban vegetation, a global network with multiple different ways “to internet” is the best insurance policy for future innovation and resilience. We need to rewild the internet for the future, for our freedom to build tools and spaces, and to share knowledge, ideas and stories that haven’t been anticipated by the internet’s current overlords and cannot be contained. 

This is precisely why this blog is on the open web rather than on Substack or any of the other walled gardens. To be sure, I can afford to do it this way, with the occasional contribution from my Buy Me a Coffee page — I have a day job and don’t depend on blogging to feed my family and pay my mortgage. If I were utterly dependent on this blog I might do things differently — but only after I had tried every way possible to make it work on the open web. 

I really do think that the internet, in its original open form, is an amazing thing and a genuine contributor to human flourishing — but the occlusion of the open web by the big social media companies has been a disaster for our common life and for the life of the mind. My plan, and my hope, is to keep going here long after I have lost the ability to publish anywhere else. This is my home on the web and also the place where I can most fully be myself as a writer. And that’s worth a lot. 

April 12, 2024

Narayan’s Malgudi

In his newsletter today, my buddy Austin Kleon mentions in passing the Hindu concept of the ashramas or stages of life, which is funny because I’ve just been thinking about a novel based on those stages: The Guide, by R. K. Narayan. 

Narayan was a great, great genius, and maybe the best comic novelist since P. G. Wodehouse. His comedy is different than Wodehouse’s — it’s pretty quiet and gently ironic. But he’s very funny! Narayan’s novels and short stories — he’s a masterful writer of short stories — are set in the fictional town of Malgudi in southern India. See the map above, from my old copy of his short-story collection Malgudi Days, which is bad because it’s just an iPhone photo. (I need to buy a flatbed scanner.) 

Here’s one example of Narayan’s humor, from one of my favorites among his novels, The Painter of Signs (1976). Rajan, the sign-painter of the title, is a man with strong views about his profession — he knows precisely the kind of lettering appropriate for every commission — and considers himself a “rationalist”: “I want a rational explanation for everything. Otherwise my mind refuses to accept any statement.” (He’s always arguing with his aunt, who insists that his actions should be governed by the mandates of astrology.) 

But his rationalism starts to fray when he agrees to paint a sign for the local Family Planning Centre, because said Centre is run by a highly progressive and single-minded young woman who rejoices in the improbable name of Daisy. Raman goes weak in the knees at his first sight of her. 

Having written signboards for so many years, it was rather strange that he should be presented with a female customer now, and that it should prove so troublesome. He was going to shield himself against this temptation. Mahatma Gandhi had advised one of his followers in a similar situation, ‘Walk with your eyes fixed on your toes during the day, and on the stars at night.’ He was going to do the same thing with this woman. He would not look at her eyes when he met her, nor involve himself in any conversation beyond the strictest business.

Unfortunately, he almost immediately runs into Daisy when he has no time to prepare himself. On impulse, just before entering the Family Planning Centre to discuss his commission, he buys a cheap pair of sunglasses, recommended to him by the vendor as made in Hong Kong. When he enters her office he’s wearing the sunglasses:

He had been talking to her with his eyes looking away, but now he lifted his eyes in her direction, looked through his glasses. He noticed that she seemed heavy-jowled and somewhat ridiculous, with her forehead slightly tapering. The Hong Kong optician has excelled in his art, he thought. She looks terrible. This is even better than Gandhi’s plan to keep one’s mind pure. She seemed to grin, and looked like a demoness! 

I’ll leave it to you to find out what happens next. 

Another great Malgudi novel is Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961), which concerns a printer named Nataraj who makes the catastrophic mistake of renting space in his attic to Vasu, a taxidermist (that “nefarious trade,” thinks Nataraj) who, it turns out, is very well-connected among Malgudi’s professional dancing-girls. 

But perhaps my favorite is the aforementioned The Guide (1958), which concerns an utterly corrupt tourist guide named Raju who, after being released from prison, finds himself wandering in search of a new home and a new life. He camps out in an abandoned temple, at which point some of the local villagers take him for a holy man. And why should he disabuse them of that notion? 

Ladies and gentlemen, take my advice: Pay a visit to Malgudi. You won’t regret it. 

April 10, 2024

everyone knows

Reading this Jessica Grose piece — so similar to ten thousand other reports made in recent years — on the miseries induced or exacerbated by digital technologies in the classroom, I think: Everyone knows all this.

Everyone knows that living on screens is making children miserable in a dozen different ways, contributing to ever-increasing rates of mental illness and inhibiting or disabling children’s mental faculties.

Everyone knows that engaging creatively with the material world is better for children — is better for all of us. 

Everyone knows that Meta and TikTok are predatory and parasitical, and that they impoverish the lives of the people addicted to them. 

Everyone knows that social media breed bad actors: each platform does this in its own way, but they all do it, and the more often people engage on such platforms the more messed-up and unhappy they become. 

Everyone knows that the big Silicon Valley companies do not care how much damage they do to society or the environment; they care only about what Mark Zuckerberg likes to call DOMINATION. The occupational psychosis of Silicon Valley is sociopathy. The rise of LLMs is simply the next big step in this sociopathic program. 

Everyone knows all this. Some people, for their own reasons, choose to deny it, but even they know it — indeed, probably no one knows all that I’ve been saying better than Mark Zuckerberg and Shou Zi Chew and Sam Altman do. 

So our problem is not a lack of knowledge; it’s a deficiency of will and a malformation of desire. St. Augustine explained it all to us 1600 years ago: My actions are determined by my will, and my will is driven by what I love. We do badly by our children because we do not love them sufficiently or properly; we do badly by our neighbors for the same reason; we do badly by ourselves for the same reason, because narcissists — and one of the things everyone knows is that all the forces named above breed narcissists — do not rightly love themselves. 

Those of us who care about the future of our children, our neighbors, and ourselves don’t need to repeat what everyone already knows. We need to devote our full attention to one question and one question only: How do we love rightly and teach others to love rightly? If that’s not our constant meditation, we’re wasting our time. If we cannot redirect our desires towards better things than Silicon Valley, AKA Vanity Fair, sells, then nothing, literally nothing, will get better. 

P.S. Why didn’t I remember Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” when I wrote this post? Austin Kleon reminded me. This is what in footy is called “missing a sitter.” 

April 8, 2024

to be a pilgrim

I’ve been teaching The Pilgrim’s Progress, something that always gives me great joy. I find it simply wonderful that so utterly bonkers a book was so omnipresent in English-language culture (and well beyond) for so long. You couldn’t avoid it, whether you loved it — as George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver did, and lamented the sale of the family’s copy: “I thought we should never part with that while we lived” — or found it puzzling, as Huck Finn did when he recalled the books he read as a child: “One was ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’, about a man that left his family it didn’t say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.” 

One of the “tough” things about the “statements” is the way they veer from hard-coded allegory to plain realism, sometimes within a given sentence. One minute Moses is the canonical author of the Pentateuch, the next he’s a guy who keeps knocking Hopeful down. But the book is always psychologically realistic, to an extreme degree. No one knew anxiety and terror better than Bunyan did, and when Christian is passing through the Valley of the Shadow of Death and hears voices whispering blasphemies in his ears, the true horror of the moment is that he thinks he himself is uttering the blasphemies. (The calls are coming from inside the house.) 

It seems likely that the last major cultural figure to acknowledge the power of Bunyan’s book is Terrence Malick, who begins his movie Knight of Cups with a voice declaiming the full title of the book: “The pilgrim’s progress from this world to that which is to come, delivered under the similitude of a dream; wherein is discovered the manner of his setting out, his dangerous journey, and safe arrival at the desired country.” 

Those words are uttered by John Gielgud, because they are taken from a 1990 performance of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The Pilgrim’s Progress: A Bunyan Sequence, which is a work that Vaughan Williams wanted to compose for his whole life, but only got to near his life’s end: it is his final operatic composition. And it’s wonderful. 

The Pilgrim’s Progress is almost always illustrated, and prominent among those illustrations are maps. Here’s a post about those maps. From that post I learned that Garrett Taylor — an artist and animator who has worked for Pixar and on The Wingfeather Saga TV series — has mapped The Pilgrim’s Progress is four prints that you can buy here. I bought them and had them framed and they now adorn a wall of our house. I stop to look at them three or four times a day. 

It would be wrong for me to post the full-resolution images here, but I think I can risk one portion of one image: 

Now, if Mr. Taylor can just convince Pixar to film the whole book…. 

April 5, 2024

bounce

J. R. Ackerley, author of that remarkable book My Dog Tulip, worked for the BBC for many years and in that capacity oversaw the production of The Scoop (1931), a detective story written by six authors, each of whom read his or her contribution on-air. Dorothy L. Sayers coordinated the project; she was probably the only person who could have gotten the shy and retiring Agatha Christie to participate. But she and Ackerley continually butted heads, as he wished to provide editorial oversight that Sayers flatly rejected.

Some years later Ackerley wrote in a BBC memo, 

So far as I recall Agatha Christie, she was surprisingly good-looking and extremely tiresome. She was always late sending in her stuff, very difficult to pin down to any engagements and invariably late for them. I record these memories with pain, for she is my favourite detective story writer.

Her success as a broadcaster has made less impression upon me. I believe she was quite adequate but nothing more; a little on the feeble side, if I recollect aright, but then anyone in that series would have seemed feeble against the terrific vitality, bullying and bounce of that dreadful woman Dorothy L. Sayers. 

Whether Sayers was indeed “bullying,” or simply a woman who refused to be dictated to by men who were accustomed to dictating to women, is a matter of dispute. Later, when she was writing the plays that would become The Man Born to be King, she responded to an interfering producer thus: “Oh no you don’t, my poppet!” That producer was removed from the project — and replaced by one of the greatest theatrical producers of the twentieth century, Val Gielgud (brother of the actor John). However “difficult” she might have been, she couldn’t be dispensed with; in the end, it was almost always her critics who had to give way. 

But “vitality, bullying and bounce” is a great phrase, and many people found DLS similarly intimidating, and too energetic for comfort. But not everyone disliked the bounciness. On her death, C. S. Lewis wrote, “I liked her, originally, because she liked me; later, for the extraordinary zest and edge of her conversation — as I like a high wind.” And in a memoir Val Gielgud wrote, “Miss Sayers is professional of the professionals. She can tolerate anything but the shoddy or the slapdash. Of all the authors I have known she has the clearest, and the most justifiable, view of the proper respective spheres of author and producer, and of their respective limitations. She is authoritative, brisk, and positive.” 

Vitality, bounce, zest, edge, authoritative, brisk — a high wind indeed. No wonder responses to her were so mixed. She’s gonna be so much fun to write about.  

April 4, 2024

The Gardener

I am very pleased that my colleague Philip Jenkins has written about Rudyard Kipling’s “The Gardener,” one of the finest short stories in the world. His care not to spoil the story is exemplary, but it’s virtually impossible to say anything meaningful about the story except in light of its conclusion. 

So you should read the story as soon as you can. 

There’s one element of the story that’s hotly debated, and I want to weigh in on that, but I also want to avoid spoilers, so I am posting my thoughts on another page: this one. 

April 2, 2024

a letter from Karl Barth

On 7 September 1939, a week after the Wehrmacht invaded Poland and thus began the Second World War, the great theologian Karl Barth wrote, in German, from his home in Switzerland to a woman in England. “You too must be shocked by the events of our day,” he wrote. “But I am happy that this time England did not want to let another ‘Munich’ happen, and I hope also for the poor German people that now the end of its worst time (which I have witnessed intimately) has at least begun.” Tragically, war had returned to Europe — but the hapless policy of of appeasement was over, and now the end of Hitler, and of Nazism, could, however dimly, be foreseen. 

But to acknowledge the war was not the purpose of Barth’s letter. Rather, he wanted to ask this woman for permission to translate two of her theological writings, and also to seek answers to a few questions about the texts. Barth did not make a habit of translating non-German texts — in fact, the only translation he had published was of a sermon by John Calvin — but in these contemporary writings he had found something that he thought his audience would particularly benefit from reading. Moreover, this woman’s fiction had helped him to learn English better; perhaps even more to the point, he had read her novels “with particular interest and admiration.” 

The author to whom Barth wrote was Dorothy L. Sayers. Twenty years later he remarked that, in 1939, she had been “familiar to me as the author of a whole series of detective novels — at once thrilling, cultured, and thoughtful. The fascinating thing about these books for me was the visible connection in them between a humanism of the best Oxford tradition and a pronounced mastery in the technique which is essential to literary engagement in this genre.” But at that time he had no idea that she was a Christian, and when a Scottish friend suggested that he read some of her theological essays, he was surprised to learn of their existence — and even more surprised to find them stating most clearly and forcefully certain points about the beauty, power, and sheer drama of Christian doctrine that were dear to his own heart. (However, he did discern, and even in that introductory letter told her that he discerned, a strain of “semi-Pelagianism” in her theology, a comment that she found amusing and inaccurate.) 

The works he sought to translate had originally appeared in 1938 in the Times of London: “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged” and “The Triumph of Easter,” later published together in a short book. Barth, having had his questions answered by Sayers, duly produced his translation, but in the chaos that inevitably accompanies wartime set it aside and did not return to it until 1959, two years after Sayers’s death. At that time he wrote, 

The special gift of the author, which is evident in her earlier work, certainly remained with her in this later phase of her writing as well — something to which the present little book bears witness. In the following pages, she has spiritedly and successfully come out against dogma’s reputation for “tediousness”; in her manner of taking it up and discussing it, its effect is certainly anything but tedious! … For having vigorously made the message of the gospel her own in breathless astonishment over its central content, and for having recounted it in a way that is open to the world, yet undaunted, quick-witted, and without any hint of apology — but above all, in a way that is joyful and that causes joy in turn — for all of this, regardless of how one might relate to the ins and outs of her thinking at particular points, one must be grateful to her. 

“In a way that is joyful and that causes joy in turn” — what a lovely tribute. The source of that joy may be found described in that essay on Easter. Here’s an excerpt:

“Then Judas, which had betrayed Him, when he saw that He was condemned,… cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself.” And thereby Judas committed the final, the fatal, the most pitiful error of all; for he despaired of God and himself and never waited to see the Resurrection. Had he done so, there would have been an encounter, and an opportunity, to leave invention bankrupt; but unhappily for himself, he did not. In this world, at any rate, he never saw the triumph of Christ fulfilled upon him, and through him, and despite of him. He saw the dreadful payment made, and never knew what victory had been purchased with the price.

All of us, perhaps, are too ready, when our behaviour turns out to have appalling consequences, to rush out and hang ourselves. Sometimes we do worse, and show an inclination to go and hang other people. Judas, at least, seems to have blamed nobody but himself, and St. Peter, who had a minor betrayal of his own to weep for, made his act of contrition and waited to see what came next. What came next for St. Peter and the other disciples was the sudden assurance of what God was, and with it the answer to all the riddles.

If Christ could take evil and suffering and do that sort of thing with them, then of course it was all worth while, and the triumph of Easter linked up with that strange, triumphant prayer in the Upper Room, which the events of Good Friday had seemed to make so puzzling. As for their own parts in the drama, nothing could now alter the fact that they had been stupid, cowardly, faithless, and in many ways singularly unhelpful; but they did not allow any morbid and egotistical remorse to inhibit their joyful activities in the future.

Now, indeed, they could go out and “do something” about the problem of sin and suffering. They had seen the strong hands of God twist the crown of thorns into a crown of glory, and in hands as strong as that they knew themselves safe. They had misunderstood practically everything Christ had ever said to them, but no matter: the thing made sense at last, and the meaning was far beyond anything they had dreamed. They had expected a walk-over, and they beheld a victory; they had expected an earthly Messiah, and they beheld the Soul of Eternity.

It had been said to them of old time, “No man shall look upon My face and live”; but for them a means had been found. They had seen the face of the living God turned upon them; and it was the face of a suffering and rejoicing Man. 

The refusal to “allow any morbid and egotistical remorse to inhibit their joyful activities in the future” is a key point for Sayers, and something essential for understanding certain elements of her own life — but that’s a story for me to tell in my biography of her. 

The story of this correspondence is well-told in an article by my former colleague David McNutt. In this post I have used David’s translation of Barth’s reflections on Sayers. 

April 1, 2024

against the factory of unreason

Dear readers, I have returned! — and I say unto you, it might be interesting to read my reflections on my students’ reading ability in conjunction with Emma Green’s report on classical Christian education.

The report is a curious one. She clearly strives to be fair, and acknowledges that the supporters of classical education are more diverse — racially, culturally, and politically — than the typical New Yorker reader is likely to expect. That said, there is an unintentionally comical moment when she confronts classical Christian homeschoolers with their failure to teach Hebrew — this, in a society which every year graduates hundreds of thousands of students from high school who can’t read or write basic English, and in which three-fourths of the population are completely monolingual. (You call yourself a school and you don’t teach Hebrew? Gotcha!) And Green’s conclusion is disappointingly hand-wavy, as though to say that while Those People may not be all we thought they were, still, we ought somehow to be worried about them.

Now, Green isn’t writing about American education in general, rather about one specific movement. But I think we should pull back a bit from that movement to see the larger picture, which is this: A surprisingly large and rapidly growing body of Americans have looked at what the educational establishment is offering and have said, No thank you. From kindergarten through university, that establishment has decided that its job is not to teach any particular skills or bodies of knowledge, but rather to perform certain quite specific political attitudes; to strike poses and teach students to strike the same poses. (It’s a purely performative leftism — it has nothing to do with implementing any policies preferred by the left, you know, as they existed back in the day when the left and right actually had preferred policies instead of contenting themselves with tribal hostilities. This is especially true of elite institutions, which are, after all, hedge funds with attached universities. DEI and similar endeavors are merely ways to camouflage the actual principles that govern such institutions. And the rhetoric trickles down to the non-elite schools, which reflexively copy those whose status they aspire to.)

However, it seems that many parents would prefer their children to learn something substantial. And this enrages the educational establishment and its enablers in the political sphere, who will brook no criticism, even when what their favored groups choose to perform is plain racial hatred, especially of Jews. A “factory of unreason” is what they’ve built, and they’ll do anything they can to prevent people from opting out of labor in that factory.

I am a fan of almost anything that disrupts the hegemony of this fatuously self-righteous and profoundly anti-intellectual educational establishment, which exists not to lift up the marginalized and excluded but rather to soothe the consciences of the ruling class. May the forces of disruption flourish.

February 7, 2024

Class Notes: Two Renewals

In my Christian Renaissance of the Twentieth Century class, we’re reading, back-to-back, passages from Jacques Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism (1920) and Karl Barth’s 1922 lecture “The Word of God and the Task of Theology” (reprinted in this excellent collection of writings by Barth, edited by Keith Johnson). It’s interesting to compare these two vital figures, because their tasks are in some ways quite different but in other ways very similar. 

It is noteworthy, first of all, that Maritain and Barth, born just four years apart, grew up in a generally liberal Protestant world, a mild environment in which pietism and evangelicalism were either embarrassing or totally unknown, and Catholicism known but alien and unthinkable. 

Barth’s lecture was given in response to critics of his great commentary on Romans, and is basically a defense of his “dialectical” method against the gentle anthropological pieties of liberal Protestantism. He wants German Protestants to realize that their project is doomed: it is neither fish nor foul, neither fully Christian nor fully secular; it is mealy-mouthed, tepid, timorous. Nietzsche had made the same point several decades earlier in his evisceration of David Strauss, but Nietzsche wanted the pastors and theologians to cast aside the last vestiges of supernaturalism and move forward boldly into a world freed from the “slave morality” of Christianity. (This move forward is also a move backward in the sense that Nietzsche wants to draw on the energies of a long-marginalized paganism, a paganism ripe for renewal and a final victory over Jewish and Jewish-inspired thought.) 

Barth also wants theology to move both forward and backward: forward fearlessly into a modernity which has no time for warmed-over moralism, and backward to reclaim the radical and essential insights of Luther and Calvin. We have to be as fearless as Luther and Calvin, he thought, if we are to speak convincingly to the watered-down world liberal Protestantism had (largely inadvertently) created. 

Maritain’s challenge to his readers is similar in that he believes that figures from the Christian past, especially Thomas Aquinas, speak to modernity more powerfully and effectually than any self-proclaimed “modernist” theologian or priest possibly could. But in another sense he has a very different problem than Barth — and the problem arises largely because Maritain is interested in the renewal of art. 

Once he became a Catholic, Maritain entered a church that for the previous century had not been following the liberal Protestant line of cultural accommodation — reconciling itself to its cultured despisers — but rather had been doing something like the opposite: insulating itself, protecting itself, from modernity. Thus the famous last item in Pio Nono’s Syllabus of Errors: “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.” (Pio Nono: Nope.) 

For Maritain this is in one essential sense vitally correct, indeed necessary to the survival of Catholicism. But Maritain knows that however necessary such self-protection may be, it can lead to a generalized prejudice against the new and different. So in this little book he takes pains to insist that even by the standards we acquire through the study of medieval Scholastic thought, Stravinsky and Satie are outstanding composers whose music is worth our most serious attention. (He struggles a bit with certain visual artists, and I may do a post on that.) 

So, in short: Barth wants to lead liberal Protestantism away from an accommodationist tendency that had become sheer cultural capitulation, while Maritain wants to lead orthodox Catholicism away from its tendency to mere reaction against the new, to reflexive revulsion. But both of them think that the cure for the intellectual diseases of their ecclesial communities is: Ad fontes! Back to the sources! 

February 6, 2024

Terry Teachout and the Last of the Conservative Critics | The Nation:

But Teachout, whose natural inclination was toward equanimity and collegiality, perhaps never fully confronted the politics of his conservative peers. Unlike Didion and Wills, Teachout never stopped writing for National Review. His review of a biography of Graham Greene ran in the magazine last year — a magazine that is no longer that of the Goldwater or Reagan right but one that that seems to have settled on a position of being anti-anti-Trump. Not only that, but Teachout eschewed a larger reckoning with the question of how Trump took over the GOP so quickly. It would have been a major contribution for a writer of Teachout’s caliber to make an inquiry into how the right had gone haywire, but he never made the effort. 

Why should Teachout have made that effort? He “eschewed” political controversy so he could write about the things he most cared about: the arts. Seems a reasonable decision to me, and one I wish more writers made. There aren’t enough writers who are conservative in Teachout’s mode. 

(Teachout was a terrific writer in so many ways, but I must pause to note that the one great outlier in his body of work was his absurdly unfair, tendentious, and just plain hostile biography of Duke Ellington. I’ve never understood his attitude towards the Duke. Ethan Iverson’s detailed critique of the biography, mentioned in the Nation essay, is very good, and is usefully supplemented by an equally detailed response by the Duke’s nephew.) 

February 5, 2024

Ceci N’est Pas une Current-Events Post

No no no, this is not at all about a current controversy. Hang in there, you’ll see what I mean. 

Recently some people — including grifters, but also a few people who want to have a reputation for responsible thinking and writing — have been promoting a re-interpretation of the death of George Floyd, an alternative account in which Derek Chauvin is not guilty of murder. So Radley Balko looked into the matter, and … well, as far as I can tell, after Radley has done his thing there’s not much left of the revisionist case. 

Let me correct that: there’s nothing left of the revisionist case. 

But I’m not writing here to refute that case, or rejoice in its refutation. I’m writing because if you read Balko’s piece you’ll see what it takes to do something like this the right way. It requires persistence, patience, extreme attentiveness, and the willingness to turn over every stone. Read that piece and you’ll see that Balko has studied the materials that the revisionists have never bothered to look at: he’s read police-procedure manuals — not just current ones, but also older ones, and has noted the changes from one to another; he’s watched police training videos; he’s surveyed court documents, and shared illustrations that were provided in court testimony, as well as the associated verbal testimony; he’s looked into the history of Minneapolis police actions against black members of the community; he’s watched with minute scrutiny the documentary that has made the revisionist claim popular, and has found the hidden seams in the presentation. Basically, he has done it all. 

It’s hard to find journalists as thorough as Balko has been here — and in many other writings over the years — because journalists know that almost no one cares. Well more than 99% of readers/viewers/listeners have one question about a work of journalism: Does it or does it not confirm the views I already have about this case? That is all they know on earth, and all they (think they) need know. But if you’re one of the <1% who care about the truth, a journalist like Radley Balko is an invaluable resource. 

And not just because he’ll help you find out what really happened — no, there’s another benefit to reading pieces like this one. It’ll will help you to a better understanding of where, when, and how other journalists (or “journalists”) cut corners. You’ll see the very particular consequences of motivated reasoning: selective attention, question-begging, concealment of evidence, faulty logic of every variety. And that’s an education in itself, whether you care about the particular case at hand or not. 

February 3, 2024

Robinson Meyer:

This sincere interest in geoengineering and climate modification represents a broader shift in climate science from observation to intervention. It also represents a huge change for a field that used to regard any interference with the climate system — short of cutting greenhouse gas emissions — as verboten. “There is a growing realization that [solar radiation management] is not a taboo anymore,” Dan Visioni, a Cornell climate professor, told me. “There was a growing interest from NASA, NOAA, the national labs, that wasn’t there a year ago.”

At the highest level, this acceptance of geoengineering shows that scientists have seriously begun to imagine what will happen if humanity blows its goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions. 

I think this development is wholly welcome, and overdue. 

February 2, 2024

timing

People often talk about comic timing, but what does that mean, exactly? Well, here’s an example, from one of the best comedy routines ever: Elaine May as Bell Telephone (in several personae) and Mike Nichols as a self-confessed “broken man.” Watch it just for fun, because it carries a lot of fun. 

Then watch it again and note pace: note that sometimes they rush, sometimes they pause, sometimes they talk over each other. It’s so musical — they’re like two jazz musicians who’ve been playing together forever and have mastered each other’s natural rhythms. 

And then: not on the matter of timing, but rather delivery, you see the genius of Elaine May in three lines, one by each of the characters she plays: 

  • At 2:10: “Information cannot argue with a closed mind.”  
  • At 4:10: “Bell Telephone didn’t steal your dime. Bell Telephone doesn’t need your dime.” 
  • At 6:30, when Miss Jones is told that “one of your operators inadvertently collected my last dime”: “Oh my God.” 

Absolute genius, I tell you. 

February 2, 2024

Class Notes: Enchiridion

Second in a series of reflections on what I’m teaching. 

Late in his life, Augustine wrote his Enchiridion in response to a request from someone named Laurentius. What Laurentius wanted was a handy summary of Christian teaching that he could “always keep beside” him, to have ready when questions arose. He also wanted the handbook — for that is what enchiridion means — to contain refutations of other philosophies and theologies, but Augustine tells him that that kind of thing wouldn’t fit in a handbook, but rather would require several bookshelves full of books; and in any case, if one wishes to refute falsehoods, what one needs most of all is “to have a great zeal kindled in one’s heart.” 

Augustine doesn’t say this, but in his day the best-known and most influential Enchiridion was that of Epictetus — which was, to be precise, a selection from Epictetus’s writings made and organized by a disciple of his named Arrian. It’s clear (if unstated) that Augustine thinks that Epictetus got it all wrong by starting from inadequate initial principles. Epictetus says that we need to begin by learning what is within our power and what isn’t. Augustine, by contrast, says that we have to begin by understanding that “the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom.” Nothing is within our power; everything comes from the Lord, and returns to him. (Exitus et reditus.) To fear the Lord is to worship him, and the “graces” by which we worship him are faith, hope, and love. Therefore a proper Enchiridion must be a guide to faith, hope, and love. Q.E.D. 

And of course “the greatest of these is love.” For Augustine, human flourishing is never about assessing the scope of our power and adjusting our expectations accordingly. It’s about altering the direction and force of our loves, about turning away from self-love — ceasing to be incurvatus in se, uncoiling our self-constricted mode of being — and turning outwards, towards an ever-expanding love of God and neighbor. 

February 1, 2024

Class notes: Anarchy, Law, Pain

I’m thinking that this term, when I’m teaching a number of things I haven’t taught before, or haven’t taught in a long time, I might use this blog to lay out some of the things I’m thinking about — not in a systematic or final way, but in what I hope will be a generative way (for myself, my students, and maybe even my readers). This will be the first such installment. 

I would very much like to say that the anarchists in Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday aren’t really anarchists. I am, after all, at least anarchism-adjacent myself, and value the movement because of its peaceful and patient resistance to centralizing and domineering powers, especially, in our moment, the Power that’s sometimes called Technopoly. But, as Maya Jasanoff has pointed out, in 1881 the International Anarchist Congress officially adopted a strategy of “propaganda by deed” — i.e., terrorism. 

Still, there is a distinction to make, and a learned constable, early in Thursday, makes it. When Gabriel Syme asks him “What is this anarchy?” He replies: 

“Do not confuse it,” replied the constable, “with those chance dynamite outbreaks from Russia or from Ireland, which are really the outbreaks of oppressed, if mistaken, men. This is a vast philosophic movement, consisting of an outer and an inner ring. You might even call the outer ring the laity and the inner ring the priesthood. I prefer to call the outer ring the innocent section, the inner ring the supremely guilty section. The outer ring — the main mass of their supporters — are merely anarchists; that is, men who believe that rules and formulas have destroyed human happiness. They believe that all the evil results of human crime are the results of the system that has called it crime. They do not believe that the crime creates the punishment. They believe that the punishment has created the crime. They believe that if a man seduced seven women he would naturally walk away as blameless as the flowers of spring. They believe that if a man picked a pocket he would naturally feel exquisitely good. These I call the innocent section.”

“Oh!” said Syme.

“Naturally, therefore, these people talk about ‘a happy time coming’; ‘the paradise of the future’; ‘mankind freed from the bondage of vice and the bondage of virtue,’ and so on. And so also the men of the inner circle speak — the sacred priesthood. They also speak to applauding crowds of the happiness of the future, and of mankind freed at last. But in their mouths” — and the policeman lowered his voice — “in their mouths these happy phrases have a horrible meaning. They are under no illusions; they are too intellectual to think that man upon this earth can ever be quite free of original sin and the struggle. And they mean death. When they say that mankind shall be free at last, they mean that mankind shall commit suicide. When they talk of a paradise without right or wrong, they mean the grave.

“They have but two objects, to destroy first humanity and then themselves. That is why they throw bombs instead of firing pistols. The innocent rank and file are disappointed because the bomb has not killed the king; but the high-priesthood are happy because it has killed somebody.” 

I think the constable is making an essential distinction, though I do not believe that either of his groups is actually anarchistic. Rather than two “rings” of anarchism, what the constable has described is the difference between libertines and nihilists. 

That’s my view, anyway. What GKC wants to show in Thursday is that while people fear the “anarchists” who assassinate, even the assassins share with ordinary folks the belief that the world is in many ways bad and ought to be better — it is in that sense that they are “innocent.” We should be more concerned about those who randomly kill, randomly throw bombs, because at heart they reject the whole of Creation — they think that the world itself is not worth the candle, every law (natural law, moral law, whatever) is inevitably an insupportable tyranny, that nothingness itself is less bad than a world governed by law. Under law people suffer; and to end them, and ultimately end the world, is at least to end suffering.

Thus at the end of Thursday the “real anarchist” cries out, 

I know what you are all of you, from first to last — you are the people in power! You are the police — the great fat, smiling men in blue and buttons! You are the Law, and you have never been broken. But is there a free soul alive that does not long to break you, only because you have never been broken? We in revolt talk all kind of nonsense doubtless about this crime or that crime of the Government. It is all folly! The only crime of the Government is that it governs. The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme. 

Therefore, he says, “I am a destroyer. I would destroy the world if I could.” 

Now, GKC rejects all of this. For one thing, as he says in Orthodoxy — the book he wrote immediately after writing Thursday — people wrongly think of Law as a cold dead hand imposing itself on Life: 

All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness. The very speed and ecstacy of his life would have the stillness of death. The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. 

That’s one of my favorite passages in Chesterton, a vital re-conceiving of the meaning of repetition. But it’s not the point he chooses to emphasize in Thursday. What turns out to be the whole point of that novel is the re-conceiving of the relationship between law and suffering. The policemen, i.e. the upholders of the Law, are said by the Accuser to be safe, to be free from fear and pain. But precisely the opposite is true. As Syme says to that Accuser, “We have been broken on the wheel.” It is a hard calling to become strong enough to exult in monotony — and, while doing so, to restrain the destructive impulses of those who believe that repetition is an infringement on their freedom, an imposed pain. 

January 31, 2024

Noah Millman:

You can’t just hate the present and long for the past, any more than you can make the future better by demanding of some nonexistent authority that they make it so. To make the future, you have to actually learn about the past, its glories and its follies alike, its conflicts and its contradictions. If we want to be like our forebears who successfully made it new, we have to, you know, be like them. We have to mine the incredibly rich resource of our past, and use that resource in whatever way we need to create new forms of art and politics, forms that are relevant to us. And then we have to hope that the future will treat us the same way, because then it will be alive. 

Noah is absolutely right about this, because, you know, when is Noah not right? But I will just add that if you suggest that there is anything, anything at all, that we can learn from the past, a vast loud chorus will show up to shout: NOSTALGIA! 

January 30, 2024

Effectual Art

David Brooks: “Does consuming art, music, literature and the rest of what we call culture make you a better person?” Answer:

  1. No. Consuming art can’t make anyone better.
  2. But experiencing art certainly can make you a better person.
  3. So can experiencing anything else. It depends on you. 

But, okay, there’s more to say. Anything we experience may, depending on the circumstances, help to make us better people, but we have to be disposed to change, willing to change for the better. And maybe one thing art can do is to shape our dispositions, put us in a frame of mind or heart to live differently. (That’s what happened to Maggie Tulliver when she read The Imitation of Christ, which is not a work of art exactly but is a book artfully shaped.) 

I still think one of the most useful approaches to this whole set of questions is Nick Wolterstorff’s early book Art in Action. Here’s a quote: 

What then is art for? What purpose underlies this human universal?

One of my fundamental theses is that this question, so often posed, must be rejected rather than answered. The question assumes that there is such a thing as the purpose of art. That assumption is false. There is no purpose which art serves, nor any which it is intended to serve. Art plays and is meant to play an enormous diversity of roles in human life. Works of art are instruments by which we perform such diverse actions as praising our great men and expressing our grief, evoking emotion and communicating knowledge. Works of art are objects of such actions as contemplation for the sake of delight. Works of art are accompaniments for such actions as hoeing cotton and rocking infants. Works of art are background for such actions as eating meals and walking through airports.

Works of art equip us for action. And the range of actions for which they equip us is very nearly as broad as the range of human action itself. The purposes of art are the purposes of life. 

I think these statements provide a great entry into the conversation about what art does and is, because they make the notion of “becoming a better person” less abstract. A mother whose lullaby soothes her baby and also calms herself is, perhaps, making herself a better person in that context, at that moment. 

January 29, 2024

As a kind of pendant to my previous post, I comment to you this by Adam Roberts, which I thought of as I was writing:

When I was a kid I memorised — don’t laugh — the Bene Gesserit ‘Litany Against Fear’, and used to repeat it quietly to myself when I was in a place of terror. I was eleven or twelve, and my family had moved to Canterbury in Kent, from London SE23. Where we lived was about a mile’s walk into town, and the only way was down the narrow pavement alongside the Dover Road, on which enormous lorries and trucks would hurtle at incredible, terrifying speeds, on their ways to and from the port at Dover and London town — nowadays the city has built a ring-road to relieve its city centre of this burden of traffic, but that postdates me. Walking along this road as these T.I.R’s roared and howled inches from me was scary. Repeating the litany helped me cope with that fear. 

I mean, sure: by all means laugh at me if you like … I was a massive SF nerd, not skilled at making friends, quite inward and withdrawn. I can see this little story has its ridiculous side. Then again, if I’m honest, when I look back at my younger self I find something touching and even, in its miniscule way, heroic about it, actually. I made it into town. I went to the Albion bookshop and spent my pocket-money on yet another pulp SF book. I got home again without being swallowed or consumed by my fear, although the fear, which perhaps looks trivial to you, was, inside me, vast and pressing and lupine, and was given prodigious materiality by the howling hundred-ton trucks speeding inches past me and whipping their trailing winds about me. I wasn’t really scared of the lorries; the lorries only gave temporary physical shape to something more pervasively in me and my relationship to life. I was a much and deeply frightened kid, as, in many ways, I still am, as an adult. Stories for kids should be beautiful and moving, but they should also furnish kids with the psychological wherewithal to understand and navigate the world and their own feelings about it.

January 29, 2024

Maggie and her Books

There’s a really extraordinary moment in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, a moment that says something profound about what we might call the ecology of reading in the age of print.

First, some background: Mr. Tulliver – the father of Tom and Maggie Tulliver, the two central characters in this novel – embarks upon a rash lawsuit which fails, and its failure sends him into bankruptcy. His family lose almost everything. As they are trying to adjust to their economic and social fall, Tom Tulliver receives a visit from his childhood friend Bob Jakin. Bob is a packman, a kind of traveling salesman who goes about on foot bearing a pack full of random goods which he sells mainly to the working poor. Bob is little better than working poor himself, even if through diligence and shrewd bargaining he is rising in the world: certainly he is constantly aware of his social inferiority to the Tullivers, despite their distressed circumstances; he always refers to Tom as “Master Tom.” Bob visits to try to give the Tullivers some money which Tom’s pride will not allow him to receive (probably he wouldn’t receive it from anybody, but he certainly won’t receive it from Bob). During their visit Tom’s younger sister Maggie comes in to the parlor and discovers that in the recent auction of their goods her books had been sold. Her eyes fill with tears; she is especially grieved over the loss of the family copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress: “I thought we should never part with that while we lived.”

Maggie is a devoted reader, much more so than her brother, and earlier in the book, when Maggie visits Tom at the pastor’s house where he is a paying pupil, we see that her intellectual interests are far stronger than his own and her capabilities far greater. But this was not an era in which young women of such gifts were reliably provided with an education adequate to them, so Maggie must remain largely self-educated. Thus she treasures so greatly the handful of books she owns and is so grieved at their disappearance.

Bob, who adores Maggie, though as a creature far above him in the Great Chain of Being, notices her distress and some weeks later pays her another visit. He has brought with him some books that he has scavenged in the course of his labors. Some of them are illustrated books – Bob himself thinks the illustrations quite fine and likely to interest Maggie – but he’s also aware that Maggie likes books with words in them and so makes sure to bring her a parcel of those: “I thought you might like a bit more print as well as the picturs, an’ I got these for a sayso, – they’re cram-full o’ print, an’ I thought they’d do no harm comin’ along wi’ these bettermost books.” (Bob, being illiterate, can’t tell you anything about the content of the books, he can only judge quantity of print.) Maggie receives these gifts gratefully but sets them aside; she has much on her mind and it’s not until later that she thinks to take up one of the volumes.

She does so at a time of great personal and familial distress. She has been forced to leave school — where she had been learning at least a few rudimentary skills that a young woman might need — in order to tend to her father, who has collapsed in the aftermath of his financial defeat and its consequent shame. All her life now is caring for her father’s needs, but she is a teenage girl of high intellect and great passion, and the consumption of her whole being in the dreary round of daily service is of course a struggle to her. Among the books in Bob’s parcel, the one that catches her eye is an old translation of Thomas a Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. She feels that she has heard the name but knows nothing about the book; she picks it up and begins to read.

And here is where something extraordinary happens.

She took up the little, old, clumsy book with some curiosity; it had the corners turned down in many places, and some hand, now forever quiet, had made at certain passages strong pen-and-ink marks, long since browned by time. Maggie turned from leaf to leaf, and read where the quiet hand pointed: “Know that the love of thyself doth hurt thee more than anything in the world…. If thou seekest this or that, and wouldst be here or there to enjoy thy own will and pleasure, thou shalt never be quiet nor free from care; for in everything somewhat will be wanting, and in every place there will be some that will cross thee…. Both above and below, which way soever thou dost turn thee, everywhere thou shalt find the Cross; and everywhere of necessity thou must have patience, if thou wilt have inward peace, and enjoy an everlasting crown…. If thou desirest to mount unto this height, thou must set out courageously, and lay the axe to the root, that thou mayest pluck up and destroy that hidden inordinate inclination to thyself, and unto all private and earthly good. On this sin, that a man inordinately loveth himself, almost all dependeth, whatsoever is thoroughly to be overcome; which evil being once overcome and subdued, there will presently ensue great peace and tranquillity…. It is but little thou sufferest in comparison of them that have suffered so much, were so strongly tempted, so grievously afflicted, so many ways tried and exercised. Thou oughtest therefore to call to mind the more heavy sufferings of others, that thou mayest the easier bear thy little adversities. And if they seem not little unto thee, beware lest thy impatience be the cause thereof…. Blessed are those ears that receive the whispers of the divine voice, and listen not to the whisperings of the world. Blessed are those ears which hearken not unto the voice which soundeth outwardly, but unto the Truth, which teacheth inwardly.”

The quiet hand – Eliot repeats the phrase: “She went on from one brown mark to another, where the quiet hand seemed to point, hardly conscious that she was reading, seeming rather to listen.” Her reading of this book becomes a kind of three-way conversation: this miserable adolescent girl in Lincolnshire, the old monk, and the long-dead reader whom Maggie thinks of as her “invisible teacher.”

Maggie has been deprived of visible teachers, at least ones who would teach her the things that she most cares about, but here she finds one – in the margins of an old book picked up in some dingy provincial shop by an illiterate packman – who is able to guide her in her time of greatest distress. I find myself remembering here the motto of the Everyman’s Library editions, words that in the medieval morality play Everyman are spoken by Knowledge:

Everyman,
I will go with thee,
and be thy guide,
In thy most need
to go by thy side.

So the publisher, by gathering these great books together and making them both presentable and affordable, can become itself an “invisible teacher.” 

By the time she wrote The Mill on the Floss, Eliot had (to my regret) left behind the evangelical piety that dominated her own teenage years; but that does not reduce her admiration of The Imitation of Christ:

I suppose that is the reason why the small old-fashioned book, for which you need only pay sixpence at a book-stall, works miracles to this day, turning bitter waters into sweetness; while expensive sermons and treatises, newly issued, leave all things as they were before. It was written down by a hand that waited for the heart’s prompting; it is the chronicle of a solitary, hidden anguish, struggle, trust, and triumph, not written on velvet cushions to teach endurance to those who are treading with bleeding feet on the stones. And so it remains to all time a lasting record of human needs and human consolations; the voice of a brother who, ages ago, felt and suffered and renounced, – in the cloister, perhaps, with serge gown and tonsured head, with much chanting and long fasts, and with a fashion of speech different from ours, – but under the same silent far-off heavens, and with the same passionate desires, the same strivings, the same failures, the same weariness.

That heartfelt and heart-prompted book was once found by a reader whose own heart responded to it; and he (or she) recorded that response with a pen; and that record, many years later, gave direction and comfort to a friendless and miserable girl in a small English town.

This idea of books and their readers as friends and teachers, as a silent fellowship extending across time and space, is a very dear one to me. Like Francis Spufford, I was a child that books built; in a childhood with its own deep unhappiness, books were my best companions and almost my only real teachers. And at a moment when our educational system is in such disarray, when it so often does ill rather than good to its students, it’s important to remember that these resources are available – and available in radically more extensive forms than Maggie Tulliver could have dreamed possible. The world of print, publication, and distribution holds together an ecology of reading, a vast circulatory system by which mind speaks to distant mind, and heart to distant heart.  

That old copy of The Imitation of Christ and the invisible teacher within it guide Maggie through a great crisis in her life. Through them she learns the discipline of self-renunciation, and while she later comes to question – is forced by a man who loves her to question – whether self-renunciation is indeed her call, there is no question that what she learned from that book truly saves her in that crisis. And she never wholly forgets what she learned in that season of life, through the book’s text and through the patient directions of the quiet hand.

The lessons of the old monk and the invisible teacher might have been valuable to her much later in life, had she been granted a long life. But that is a longer and a darker story, one that I will take up elsewhere.

January 28, 2024

a small parable

Occasionally I find myself in groups populated by business people, technologists, consultants, people who work in nonprofits, practitioners of various kinds — and academics. Such groups gather to figure out how to respond to certain major social problems. Because the participants come from various professional worlds, it can sometimes be difficult to discover a common language, but one theme is always quickly settled on: It’s totally fine to talk about how useless academics are — especially academics in the humanities.

I’ve experienced this so many times over the years that I have to make a point of reminding myself of how curious it is. I mean, why invite people to a gathering only to tell them that they have no contribution to make? But I never respond to the dismissal and mockery; I just sit there and smile. I am only tempted to reply in one situation: When people say that academics “have their heads in the clouds.” Or that we humanists are always taking “the view from 50,000 feet.” That’s when I want to say: No. We’re not taking the view from 50,000 feet, we’re taking the view from ten feet underground, and from long long ago.

Once there was a man named Jack who owned a nice house. One day, though, Jack noticed that one end of the house was a little lower than it had been. You could place a ball on the floor and it would slowly roll towards that end. Jack was a practical man, so he called Neil, another practical man he knew, who worked in construction. Neil said that he could jack up that end of the house and make everything level again. Jack agreed, and Neil got to work.

Jack had a neighbor named Hugh. Hugh was interested in many things, and watched closely as Neil jacked up the low end of the house. With Jack’s permission, he looked around the basement of the house. All this made him more curious, so he walked down to the town’s Records Office and got some information about Jack’s house: when it had been built, who had built it, and what the land had been used for before. Hugh also learned a few things about the soil composition in their neighborhood and its geological character.

Hugh paid Jack a visit so he could tell Jack about all he had learned. He stood at Jack’s door with his hands full of documents and photographs, and rang the bell. But when Jack answered he told Hugh that he didn’t have time to look at documents and photographs. He had a very immediate problem: that end of his house was sinking again. In such circumstances Jack certainly couldn’t attend to Hugh’s ragbag of information and discourses about ancient history. After all, Jack was a practical man.

January 25, 2024

a note on plagiarism

The Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal — or, depending on your point of view, “plagiarism” scandal — has me thinking about How We Write Today. John McWhorter has recently written that there really is a meaningful distinction between plagiarism and “duplicative language,” and I suppose there often is, but it’s all because of technology, innit? 

That distinction arises because of what people do when they read as well as write on a computer. “Duplicative language” arises when scholars (presumably in something of a hurry) see something in a digital book or article that they want to use, copy the relevant text, and then paste it into Word with the intention of editing it later to in some sense make it their own. (Part of McWhorter’s argument is that maybe we don’t need to do that, or do it as often. I don’t think I agree, but I’ll waive the point for now.) 

At least some of these issues arise from a general sense that one’s work should not contain too many long quotations, an idea that Adam Roberts has explored and questioned here. (I might disagree with Adam also, but I’ll waive that point as well as McWhorter’s.) The tendency to overquote becomes a problem when professors don’t have a lot to add to an existing scholarly conversation but need publications for tenure or promotion. In such circumstances, the bulk of any given article will likely be the collecting of other scholars’ work, and if you quote too much, it might become obvious that there’s not a lot of you in your article. So you need to rework the quotations to make the extent of your debts less obvious. 

But note that all of this is a result of the pressure to publish, a pressure that people might feel especially strongly if their stronger interests are in teaching or administrating. That Claudine Gay has never written a book, and has produced only eleven journal articles in twenty years, one of those co-authored, and moreover moved quite early in her career into administration, all suggests that we’re dealing here with a person whose primary calling is not the production of scholarship. And that’s totally fine! By all accounts Gay has been an effective administrator, and Lord knows academia needs more of those. Heck, maybe Gay even has some scholarly humility, something I have heard of, occasionally. 

So if you’re a person who is publishing under pressure, and not really extending the scholarly conversation in dramatic ways, and perhaps not even very excited about writing, then you’ll probably be more prone to (a) copy and paste that digital text and (b) forget later to make the necessary changes. 

I don’t think I do this? I hesitate to assert too strongly, because I may be deficient in self-knowledge. But I will say this: whenever I copy and paste from some existing text, primary source or secondary, I paste it as a quotation. I never ever paste it into the body of my work. When I’m drafting an essay or article or book chapter I just don’t worry about whether I have too many quotations or whether the quotations are too long. That’s something I assess in revision. 

Which makes me wonder whether some of the plagiarism (or “duplicative language”) we’re now seeing so much of is a result of one small habit common to digital writing: pasting wrongly. Pasting as body text and not as quotation. Maybe this should be part of what we teach our student writers: If you think you can just drop a quotation into the body of your text and and then go back to fix it later, you’re may well be fooling yourself.  

January 23, 2024

placing bets

The last four of Ted Gioia’s seven hypotheses about meaningful progress:

4. The discourse on progress is controlled by technocrats, politicians and economists. But in the current moment, they are the wrong people to decide which metrics drive quality of life and human flourishing.

5. Real wisdom on human flourishing is now more likely to come from the humanities, philosophy, and the spiritual realms than technocrats and politicians. By destroying these disciplines, we actually reduce our chances at genuine advancement.

6. Things like music, books, art, family, friends, the inner life, etc. will increasingly play a larger role in quality of life (and hence progress) than gadgets and devices.

7. Over the next decade, the epicenter for meaningful progress will be the private lives of individuals and small communities. It will be driven by their wisdom, their core values, and the courage of their convictions — none of which will be supplied via virtual reality headsets or apps on their smartphones. 

The ongoing existence of this here blog is based on almost exactly these assumptions. It’s a bet that people want what’s best about the world. 

January 22, 2024

FWIW

I’ve written before about how my own history as a fabulist makes me reflexively skeptical about certain kinds of stories that people tell. But it’s not my history as a fabulist, it’s rather my belief in original sin that makes me skeptical of one particular kind of story: the “Doing this hurts me but darn it I simply must stand up for my principles” story — which is the tale that a number of former Substackers are telling these days. “Substack is great for me but I simply can’t be on the same platform with all these Nazis” — though as many people have pointed out, Substack has maybe half a dozen Nazis among its zillions of users, and none of the platforms these people are decamping for are Nazi-free either. 

Here’s what I believe: This has absolutely nothing to do with Nazis. The purpose of the campaign is not to expel Nazis from Substack but to create a precedent. If Substack said “Okay, the Nazis are gone, the response would not be “Thanks!” It would be, “Cool, now let’s talk about Rod Dreher.” And then Bari Weiss, and then Jesse Singal, and then Freddie DeBoer, etc. etc. The goal is not to eliminate Nazis; the goal is to reconstitute the ideological monoculture that Substack, for all its flaws — it’s not a service I would ever use —, has effectively disrupted. 

January 22, 2024

head start

CleanShot 2024-01-15 at 20.58.51@2x.

The Vikings was the first movie I ever saw — not in a standard movie theater, but some years after its release, at a drive-in. I remember being at once bemused and excited by the rituals of finding a parking place, hanging the speaker over the car door .. and the movie itself? I adored it. What four-year-old wouldn’t? 

I also remember quite clearly the first movie I saw in a proper movie theater, not too long after I saw The Vikings. It was this: 

So what I’m saying is that I had a good start on my movie-watching career. 

Things got even better a few years later when my ne’er-do-well uncle — a ladies’ man, a snappy dresser, a driver (and occasional seller) of exotic automobiles —  decided to take his 12-year-old nephew to the movies, in fact to a double feature. And what were those movies? Why, Dirty Harry and The Wild Bunch, of course. Food for the spirit of a growing boy. 

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