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The Homebound Symphony

Stagger onward rejoicing

April 13, 2026

powers

Preface: For a hundred years now devotees of Sherlock Holmes have been playing the Great Game, a hermeneutical exercise based on the premise that the Holmes stories are not fiction but rather absolutely reliable historical records. Therefore any inconsistencies in the stories must have an explanation, however complex and recondite, that saves the appearances and sustains our confidence in Watson as faithful narrator. I think that’s the proper attitude to take when writing about the world of Star Trek. It’s certainly the most enjoyable attitude to take.

In “True Q” (ST:TNG 6.6) we meet a young woman named Amanda who, having grown up believing herself to be human, discovers that she is in fact a member of another race — Q, beings who live in an alternate universe or dimension known as the Q Continuum — and therefore “nearly omnipotent.” She is forced to decide whether she will live as a human, forswearing the use of her vast powers, or instead accept those powers and join Q, within which she will, it is said, learn the proper use of them.

Even as she is trying to decide, she sees that an away team from the Enterprise is threatened with death by explosion — a powerful device of some kind is getting out of control in a kinda handwavy fashion — as they visit a grossly polluted planet whose degraded atmosphere they are hoping to ameliorate. Amanda instinctively arrests the vaguely described runaway process and, while she’s at it, removes the pollutants from the entire planet, leaving it no longer a gritty brownish-orange but rather a freshly-scrubbed green and blue. Yes, she realizes, she is Q after all, and will go with her people to learn the proper exercise of her powers.

All the members of the race/species/whatever are called Q, unfortunately, so from now on the one representative whom we regularly see on ST:TNG — this guy: 

Intro 1680122408.

— will be called Q, and the species will be called, imaginatively enough I think, the Queues.

Nearly omnipotent: I don’t believe the show ever tells us what the limits on the Queues’ powers actually are, but we do know that they aren’t omniscient — the things human beings do are often surprising to them, and at the outset of this episode they do not know whether Amanda is “true Q” or not — and they do not seem to be omnibenevolent. Q himself largely behaves in a way that humans think childish — though there are possible exceptions, typically involving an unexplained fascination with and even affection for Captain Picard; but this apparent generosity does not, as far as I can see, extend to anyone else. In any case, here he tests Amanda’s powers by causing the warp core of the Enterprise to go nova, as it were, to discover whether she can stop it. If she had not been able to, or had not tried, then everyone on the Enterprise would have died.

Q is a classic Trickster in that he is not obviously malicious but also does not seem to care how much damage he does to anyone else as he goes about his business or his play. Which raises the question: Is he in this sense representative of the Queues? He has gotten into trouble with the others in the past, once being stripped of all his powers and, temporarily as it turned out, demoted to mortal human status. But they send him to investigate who Amanda really is, so that indicates some level of trust. We know (from this very episode) that the Queues will destroy members of their collective who stray too far from its core values, so I think we can assume that Q is a fairly representative Queue. Within normal parameters anyway.

All of which raises another question: What, for the Queues, is the “proper exercise of their powers”? Because what Amanda just did to rescue a dying planet from the abuses of its apex species does not seem to be within the Queue remit. By this point we’ve seen Q a number of times, and he has never lifted one finger to reduce suffering. The best that can be said for him is that he often refrains from inflicting suffering he has threatened to inflict. If any other Queues behave differently, we don’t hear about it. 

Why is that? The options:

  1. Q is different than his colleagues, and not in a good way: there are Queues elsewhere in the universe limiting the damage that species as stupid and vicious as Homo sapiens are doing to their environments and fellow creatures. (One thing we don’t know is how many Queues there are: maybe they’re doing the best they can but stupidity and viciousness are so pervasive that they can’t keep up.)
  2. Queues are as amoral and self-serving as Q typically appears: they simply don’t care about the suffering of lesser beings. In time Amanda will learn not to waste her time on things like that, and will learn to seek her own gratification, whatever that might be. Different strokes for different q-folks.
  3. Queues are Daoists: they understand that actions, however benevolently intended, are likely to have unintended effects. For instance, to rescue people who have grossly polluted their own planet might lead other civilizations to believe that they too can serve their own appetites in the expectation that some Great Power will rescue them from the consequences. You never know. (Remember, we have seen that the Queues are not omniscient.) Therefore Amanda might be taught that her own actions, however generous in inspiration, are not wise: it is better to practice wuwei.

Choose your own adventure.

April 11, 2026

the martyr’s crown

I read everything, or very nearly so, that my friend Adam Roberts publishes, online or in print, so when I read this post by Adam I immediately checked to see if indeed I did respond — and in most cases I did. One of Adam’s essays in particular, this post from 2017, now strikes me as particularly important, and my response to it somewhat trivial. (It’s possible that I also responded in an email, but if so I can’t find it.) Now that I read the post again, something leaps out at me that I regret not having acknowledged at the time. TYhe context here is Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence. 

Adam writes,

If you were tortured for your beliefs, it would of course take strength to hold out. But if others are tortured for your beliefs, and you still refuse to yield, do we still call that strength? Doesn’t it look more like a kind of pitilessness? Or even disingenuousness, like a person donating to charity with somebody else’s money and taking all the credit? […]

What would Christ have done if the the Sanhedrin, or Pilate, had not tortured and crucified him, but had instead made him watch as they tortured and crucified his disciples, or his mother, or random citizens? He was strong enough to accept his own suffering, but would he have been strong enough to endure that? And if he was, if he gladly accepted the suffering of others whilst he himself remained unharmed, would we even call that strength?

This is a powerful point. But to the question “He was strong enough to accept his own suffering, but would he have been strong enough to endure that?” we have an answer: Yes. Indeed, Jesus promised that we his followers would suffer on account of him and that he would not intervene to prevent that suffering:

“Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Beware of men, for they will deliver you over to courts and flog you in their synagogues, and you will be dragged before governors and kings for my sake, to bear witness before them and the Gentiles. When they deliver you over, do not be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say, for what you are to say will be given to you in that hour. For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. Brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death, and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved. […]

“So have no fear of them, for nothing is covered that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. What I tell you in the dark, say in the light, and what you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops. And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered.”

And on those who do suffer in this cause he pronounces a great blessing: “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” This idea, that we should rejoice in our sufferings, is strongly reinforced by Paul and Peter.

So, if we look with a cold and remorseless eye at these passage, then we will say that when Rodrigues apostatizes to end the suffering of his fellow Christians, he is depriving them of a great blessing, he is denying them what Christians have historically called “the martyr’s crown.” And he knows this:

But I know what you will say: ‘Their death was not meaningless. It was a stone which in time will be the foundation of the Church; and the Lord never gives us a trial which we cannot overcome… Like the numerous Japanese martyrs who have gone before, they now enjoy everlasting happiness.’ I also, of course, am convinced of all this.

But then, having made that acknowledgment, he continues: “And yet, why does this feeling of grief remain in my heart?”

That feeling of grief remains because Rodrigues is doing precisely what I would do in the same situation: He is weighing options in the balance. He’s looking for an optimal strategy. He’s thinking:

  1. If Jesus’s promises are true, then their suffering will end soon and their reward will be great: their glory will last forever. As Paul says, “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.”
  2. If Jesus’s promises are not true, then their suffering now is enormous and pointless, and anything that I can do to end that suffering is what I should do.
  3. And even if Jesus’s promises are true, and my intervention would deprive my friends of the martyr’s crown, they still belong to Him and will be among the blessed in Heaven.
  4. Therefore apostatizing makes sense, because it eliminates a potential great evil without exacting a terrible cost.

So Rodrigues and I reason. And the reasoning is sound! — but it’s not the reasoning of a truly faithful person. The truly faithful person says, “I will follow Jesus, I will trust wholly in Him, I will not hedge my bets or count the cost of obedience.”

I see that, but when I try even to contemplate such faith, I am like Kierkegaard’s Johannes de silentio contemplating Abraham, the sine qua non of faith:

Love, after all, has its priests in the poets, and occasionally one hears a voice that knows how to keep it in shape; but about faith one hears not a word, who speaks in this passion’s praises? Philosophy goes further. Theology sits all painted at the window courting philosophy’s favour, offering philosophy its delights. It is said to be hard to understand Hegel, while understanding Abraham, why, that’s a bagatelle. To go beyond Hegel, that is a miracle, but to go beyond Abraham is the simplest of all. I for my part have devoted considerable time to understanding the Hegelian philosophy, believe also that I have more or less understood it, am rash enough to believe that at those points where, despite the trouble taken, I cannot understand it, the reason is that Hegel himself hasn’t been altogether clear. All this I do easily, naturally, without it causing me any mental strain. But when I have to think about Abraham I am virtually annihilated. 

Me too. Faith such as that is beyond my capacity to achieve — indeed, even to imagine. 

P.S. Not relevant to the post, but it’s worth noting that a great many American Christians — if you were to judge by social media you’d think all of them, though you shouldn’t judge by social media — ignore this teaching. They complain ceaselessly about how unfairly they are treated (even though they are in no danger of martyrdom) and seek to inflict retribution on everyone they feel has slighted them. Most of them know what Jesus and the apostles say on such matters — they have also heard the phrase “turn the other cheek” — but I don’t think it ever occurs to them for one instant that such teachings might be applicable to them. 

April 10, 2026

pocket full of … kryptonite? sunshine?

Long-time readers know of my love for and commitment to the open web: sites with no intervening platform, no paywall, just sitting there on the World Wide Web in plain HTML which cats and dogs can read! (Allusion alert.) My buddy Austin Kleon — with his 300k Substack subscribers 😳 — teases me about this. This is me in blue:  

He has a point, but here I am, still, out here on the range — and when I decided to start a big project about the films of Terrence Malick, as I just did, I put it on the open web too. Why?

  1. My economic model — post everything that I own on the open web and ask for donations at my Buy Me a Coffee page — suits my anarchist principles. Voluntary collaboration, give and give back, etc. 

  2. As long as I still have a full-time professor’s salary — that is, for the next thirteen months — I can afford to have at least a few such principles.

  3. But when I lose that salary and have to downsize my life, I still plan to be here, because I don’t think I would gain much by moving to Substack, or anywhere else. I have a small audience and I am just not wired to do any of the things I would need to do to grow it — for instance, promote myself on Substack Notes, write clickbaity posts with clickbaity titles, etc. And that crap probably wouldn’t work anyway. Signing up to support me at BMAC may be slightly more difficult for most readers than signing up at Substack, but not much: I have no reason to think that if I went to Substack I would get an influx of new paid subscribers. I have my number, and though I’d love to get it to the Thousand True Fans stage, I’m not convinced Substack would help me do that. Besides:

  4. Substack is a platform and platforms enshittify, they just do. They’re designed to enshittify, and to be unresponsive to their users. Substack is already a worse environment for writing and publishing than it was three or four years ago — to me at least, its attempt to transform itself into a social network is nightmarish — and it will degrade further rather than improve. If I end up needing more money because an endless war in the Middle East has gas at eight bucks a gallon and my electric bill at a thousand bucks a month, I’d rather work as a greeter at Walmart than write for a platform. Over the long haul I really do believe that the open web is the safer and better option, at least for me.

So here I am, writing away, and hoping that in my declining years there will be at least a little spare change in my pockets. And that I won’t have to take the Walmart Option. 

P.S. Austin’s new book is gonna be terrific.

April 8, 2026

the rest is …

As regular readers of mine know, I have long been a big fan of The Rest Is History podcast: I joined the Club as a Friend of the Show within weeks of its inception. But in the last year or so the show has, or so it seems to me anyway, been declining in quality. Earlier episodes were typically informed either by the hosts’ own expertise or by their thoughtful assessment of the work of excellent historians. Lately, though, I’ve sometimes felt that I am listening to Dominic and Tom working their way through notes prepared by ChatGPT on the basis of Wikipedia pages — sometimes, not always, but often enough that I find myself not finishing series, something that would have been unthinkable for me, say, two years ago. But there’s just not sufficient value-added in such episodes.

I also have a sense that when they’re less intellectually engaged with the material, both hosts lean into the parts they play, Tom doing his (I hope intentionally) terrible accents, Dominic performing his crusty semi-posh scoffer from the era of Stanley Baldwin.

That kind of thing comes and goes, but what has come to stay, I fear, is a kind of compulsive mocking of anything and everything American. Perhaps this is the result of frustration with the current U.S. government that can’t be directly expressed — “We’re not a politics podcast,” as Dominic often says — but that is difficult to suppress. Such frustration is understandable, and if T & D did occasionally shout with anger at the latest imbecility emerging from the White House I would not only forgive them, I would cheer them on. But that doesn’t happen.

What does happen is a low-level but constant sniping and sneering at virtually every element of American culture. For instance: recently, in a series of episodes on the Ku Klux Klan, Tom decided that the Southern accent he wanted to imitate, in reading Klan speeches or newspaper editorials, was that of Cletus from The Simpsons, AKA Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel. A more pompous diction would’ve been more appropriate, but Tom wasn’t interested in reinforcing the point that these people were evil (which they were); instead he wanted to indicate that they were stupid (which, alas, they were not). I’m a Southerner, I’m used to this sort of attitude — it’s almost universal among non-Southerners, and especially common among Brits — but when it goes on and on and on, it gets wearisome.

I could cite a number of examples along these lines, all from episodes on U.S. history, of which there are many; and those might have worn me down eventually. But what has really alienated me from the show is the way such sneers make their way into episodes that have nothing to do with the United States. The breaking point came for me just a few days ago, when I was listening to the first episode of a series on Samurai culture in Japan. A passing reference to a group of Samurai visiting San Francisco prompted, for reasons unknown and indeed unimaginable to me, a digression on how terrible cheese is in America. Yes, that is correct: a seething hatred of my country’s cheeses found its way into a story about Samurai.*

When I heard that I recalled several other examples — though none quite as absurd — of sniggering at things American in episodes unconnected to this country. And it occurred to me that such commentary, while it is probably delightful to many listeners, is a kind of toll that I have to pay to keep up with The Rest Is History. If the show were as consistently good as it used to be I might — maybe — pay that toll, but it’s not. So I canceled my membership and deleted the show from my podcast feed.

* In this they did what cultural chauvinists always do: treat the best form of X in their culture as their standard and the worst form of X in another culture as that culture’s standard. Thus what their culture does is always, amazingly, better than what any other culture does.  

April 8, 2026

redistributing

A wonderful essay in the new issue of Hedgehog Review, and a welcome reminder of how much better reading in print is than reading online: the beautiful high-resolution photography, the excellent typography and layout, the complete absence of flickering ads, pop-ups, notifications from other tabs or other apps. 

How much is that kind of thing worth to you? Maybe not much, but it’s worth thinking about, I believe. I’ve written before about this, but let me reaffirm: There’s a lot to be gained through redistributing your media portfolio.

Forget streaming music: buy vinyl or CDs or even digital files. Listen to the music you love best until it wears grooves in your mind, just as we just to do back in the Media Stone Age. Infinitely better than filling your ears 18 hours a day with AI slop (labeled, lyingly, as coming from reputable musicians) on Spotify. For the amount of money you spend on one streaming service, you can in a year (especially if you shop with care) pick up enough wonderful music to last you a lifetime. If you buy digital files you won’t even need new equipment, but it’s worth remembering how cheap CDs are, even new ones. Portable CD players too. 

Subscribe to fewer TV/movie sites. I’ve never subscribed to HBO or Hulu or DisneyPlus, and here’s my relationship with Netflix: every once in a while I subscribe for a month just to watch a few things I really want to see. Last time that happened? Three years ago, when Apollo 10½ came out. I don’t miss any of those services, ever. We have a family Apple Plus account, so when I want to watch digital movies or TV I use that, but mainly I buy Blu-Rays and watch the best ones over and over. If you don’t want to or can’t pay full price, you can buy them cheap from eBay or Half Price Books. 

Subscribe to fewer Substacks and to more print periodicals. Keep them lying around and read them when you need a break from screens. Write in them. Cover them with sticky notes. Tear out pages you like and put them in folders, just as my late and much-missed friend Brett Foster used to do, if that’s what turns you on. (I loved looking through Brett’s scrap folders, full of torn-out pieces of newspaper and scribbled lines of poetry.) 

Just try it! Cancel a few digital subscriptions and start enjoying the blessings of physical media, of really owning what you really like. After a few months you can go back to Rent-a-Life and full-time chasing the Discourse if you want. But I bet you won’t want. 

April 6, 2026

comments

Now that I’m writing for The Dispatch, I’m re-acquainting myself with what it’s like to have comments on my posts. I learned the Iron Laws of the Comments Section many years ago, and only need to refresh myself. In a general-interest publication — as opposed to a personal blog, where people behave somewhat differently — these are the Laws:  

  1. 98% of those who read your post do not comment on it. 
  2. 90% of those who comment do not read your post at all: maybe the title reminded them of something they want to say on a related or semi-related subject, or maybe they’re just hanging out with other people who comment and you have nothing to do with the occasion. In this group are also the If-I-had-been-asked-to-write-on-this-subject-I-woulda-said commenters. 
  3. 6% of those who comment read part of your post and then are struck or offended by something and simply have to comment immediately, without waiting to see if you have anticipated their response, without even waiting to see whether that paragraph that says “On the one hand” is succeeded by a paragraph saying “On the other hand.” These are the people who say that they are surprised or disappointed that you failed to make a point that in fact you did make: they just didn’t read far enough to see it. 
  4. 3% of those who comment have read the post but don’t understand it. This may be their fault for reading carelessly or your fault for writing unclearly — but who am I kidding? Come on. It’s their fault. 
  5. 1% pf those who comment are trolls. 
  6. Those who have read and understood the post, whether they agree with it or not, will email you if they have something to say. 
March 30, 2026

against AI?

Paul Kingsnorth’s Writers Against AI campaign asks writers to make the following three pledges: 

  • I will not use AI in my work as a writer.
  • I will not support writers who use AI in their work.
  • I will support writers, illustrators, editors and others in related fields whose work is entirely human-made. 

I think I qualify on the first count? But it depends on what is meant by “my work as a writer.” 

I use Claude several times a week, for various things. In some recent and wholly representative queries, I asked for 

  • a basic Alfredo sauce recipe 
  • a limoncello recipe 
  • a guide to the Chicago Cubs 2026 roster, minor league prospects, and likelihood of success 
  • an explanation of the Newark airport’s bad reputation 
  • guidance for travel from Newark to midtown Manhattan 

No problems there. But I think I may run afoul of Kingsnorth’s strictures in one significant way.

My chief means of brainstorming is to dictate thoughts into my Sony voice recorder. I have written (with Claude’s help!) a script that converts those .mp3 files into Apple’s preferred .m4a and uploads them to the Voice Memos app. That app automatically produces a transcript, which I then copy and paste into Claude with the following prompt: 

I’m about to paste in a chunk of text. Please punctuate it and eliminate repetitions and filled pauses, but otherwise leave the text unchanged. 

I do this on a fairly regular basis, and while I think that my “leave the text unchanged” order means that I comply with the spirit of Writers Against AI, I am not meeting the criteria demanded by the letter. 

I’m okay with that. 

Here’s another way in which I may not meet the pledge. I have no interest in writing a “personal” journal, but on the first day of every month I create a new text-file journal of ideas. Then at the end of each year I concatenate the monthly entries into a single file. I uploaded the 2020-2025 journals to Claude and asked for an analysis of the key themes, and asked especially for identification of the ideas that never bore obvious fruit. The results have been very interesting and very helpful. 

For one thing, I learned — which of course I could have found out easily on my own — that in those six years I wrote 312,818 words in the journals. (Almost nothing! This blog contains roughly 2,200,000 words.) 

Second, I learned that my kvetching about whether to keep using an iPad or not is “the most durable theme in all six journals. Explicitly self-condemned as ‘pointless’ since 2021. Present in every single year, including December 2025.” 

But maybe the most interesting thing is this: 

The theology of culture based on Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture has been flagged more times, more explicitly, and with more urgency than any other unwritten piece in the entire six-year corpus. Every time it surfaces, it is called something he “really should write.” It has never been written.

The Seven Lamps as a theology of culture would unite almost everything else in this analysis: the pre-evangelism / awakening affections project, the defense of beauty, the broken-world theology, the rehumanization argument, and his sustained engagement with Ruskin as one of the writers who refused to separate theology from aesthetics, ethics from economics. It is not incidental that this is the most flagged unwritten piece. 

That’s … useful to know. But the reason I haven’t written this book is simple: I am the only person in the entire world who would be interested in it. 

March 26, 2026

what’s in a name?

Probably many people have said this before, but it just occurred to me this past week as I have been teaching the dialogue under discussion. 

The Platonic dialogue that we call the Republic bears the Greek title Πολιτεία (Politeia), which Allan Bloom suggests might best be translated Regime — or, periphrastically, “the organization of the polis.” But we do not know whether this is what Plato himself titled the dialogue or whether the title was provided by others. I suspect the latter, because I think Politeia is a singularly inapt title. Consider:

The dialogue begins with Socrates and friends (plus a rival or two) trying to decide what just action is. Does it consist, as Polemarchus says, in doing good to your friends and dealing out pain to your enemies? Or is it, as Thrasymachus says, nothing more than might-makes-right, the strong exercising power over the weak? Socrates, as is his wont, demonstrates the problems with both of these answers, but that doesn’t get anyone any closer to the correct answer.

So he makes the (rather strange) suggestion that because a city is something larger and more consequential than an individual, it might be helpful to ask what the Just City is — and then, if you can discern that, you can retrospectively apply that structure to individual persons. So off we go on a long — a very long — excursus on what a Just City would be and how you would build one.

But as the various arguments develop, Socrates keeps bringing his interlocutors back to reflection on the tripartite structure of the human soul: the rational part (logistikon), the spirited part (thumoeides), and the appetitive part (epithumētikon). He argues that just as the individual person should be governed by reason, so too the Just City will necessarily be governed by the philosopher, rather than the “spirited” warrior or the ordinary person driven here and there by his desires.

Increasingly, though, as we near the conclusion of the dialogue, the political concerns fade and Socrates shows himself concerned to demonstrate one final, absolutely essential triple argument:

  • A man will be just if he is governed by reason;
  • The true philosopher is the just man;
  • The just man is the happiest man.

“Happiness” here is eudaomonia, which philosophers these days, aware of the superficial character of most modern uses of “happiness,” have learned to call flourishing. The just man — regardless of whether he enjoys wealth and power or, conversely, is convicted of and executed for impiety and corrupting the city’s youth  — flourishes more than any other person. (Conversely, the tyrant, who is utterly in bondage to his appetites, is the unhappiest of men: he is afflicted by kakodaimonia.)

And the dialogue ends with the Myth of Er, which suggests that the cosmos itself inscribes reward for just men and punishment for wicked ones, especially for tyrants. The political questions which have occupied Socrates and his friends intermittently throughout the dialogue have disappeared, yielding to a sharpened version of the question with which we began: “What is justice?” has been rephrased as “What is flourishing?”

The title of this great dialogue should therefore be not Politeia but rather Eudaimonia.

March 21, 2026

Worf has feelings

There are some terrific episodes in ST:TNG season 5, but more than anything else this is The Season When Worf Gets in Touch with His Feelings. This happens over the course of several episodes, primarily through Worf’s interactions with Troi — and yes, I know they become an item later on. But let’s forget about that for now.

In “New Ground,” Worf’s son Alexander is misbehaving, and Worf tells Troi that he has decided to send Alexander to a Klingon school.

Troi: I see.

Worf: [Pause] You disapprove.

Troi: I’m not here to approve or disapprove of how you raise your son. My concern right now is how this decision is going to affect you. How will you feel when Alexander’s gone?

Worf thinks about and answers her question, and she tells him “You can’t hide from your feelings” along with other similar therapeutic maxims, which he takes on board. But that’s not what should have happened. Here’s what should have happened:

Worf: Of course you disapprove, and you mean me to know that you disapprove. If I were making a decision you approved of you wouldn’t ask any questions. I am proud to be an officer in Starfleet, and I see many virtues in the culture of the Federation, but one of the most annoying elements of your culture is its faux-neutral paternalism. You judge other cultures by your own values, and what you primarily want — indeed, demand — from other cultures is that they share your pretense of being nonjudgmental. The whole point of bringing a Klingon like me into Starfleet is to transform me into an acceptable facsimile of a Federation liberal — and I have to admit that the long slow process of gentle but constant pressure and manipulation is having an effect on me. But let’s not pretend that this softening of my Klingon sensibilities isn’t your purpose in this conversation, and the purpose of your Captain in having me on the Enterprise. Over time I will become more like you, but none of you will become more like a Klingon, will you? But I ask you to have this much respect for me: for the next few minutes, set aside the pretense and admit your disapproval of my decision. Then we may discuss the matter openly and honestly.

(Surely some right-wing cultural commentator has written “The Feminization of Worf: A Lamentation.”)

The inability of liberalism to interrogate its own premises, and its own level of commitment to those premises, is well-known to anyone who has encountered a regnant liberal society. Another 5th-season illustration of this willful blindness comes in the episode called “Ethics,” in which poor Worf, having been subjected already to liberalization, is now subjected to a spinal injury which costs him the use of his legs. He is operated on by Dr. Russell, a surgeon who turns out to be a habitual risk-taker: some of her previous patients had died while undergoing experimental procedures. And indeed her operation on Worf, while at first apparently successful, goes badly wrong, though the wrongness gets corrected and Worf eventually regains the use of his legs.

Afterwards, Dr. Crusher denounces Russell’s methods, and Russell shakes her head and walks away without a reply. But she could have, and should have, answered thus:

Russell: You know, Dr. Crusher, that Worf planned to enact the Hegh’bat, the Klingon suicide ritual, and only refrained because this operation offered him the possibility, which you could not offer him, of restoring the use of his legs. If I had declined to perform this operation, Worf would be dead. Is that the outcome you would prefer? To maintain your elevated principles at the cost of your colleague’s life?

To which the likeliest answer from Dr. Crusher is that she and the other members of the Enterprise could have dissuaded Worf from performing the Hegh’bat — that is, convinced him to repudiate his own culture’s ideals and replace them with those of the Federation. But for lovers of the Federation this would have been an unpleasant conversation to have — better for Dr. Russell to walk away in silence and spare us the discomfort.

The Federation on steroids: that’s Iain M. Banks’s great creation the Culture — about which I wrote at some length here. The Culture has its own version of the Federation’s Prime Directive, but here’s the thing: a prime directive is not an unbreakable directive. And as Carl Schmitt taught us, even the most liberal society, perhaps especially the most liberal society, must be prepared to declare a state of exception — the point at which the fundamental principles of the social order must give way to something more … rigorous. Banks’s Culture has a unit called Special Circumstances, and the whole point of Special Circumstances is to exist in the state of exception. Special Circumstances is where the liberal utopia becomes decidedly illiberal. A conversation from one of Banks’s novels:

“In Special Circumstances we deal in the moral equivalent of black holes, where the normal laws — the rules of right and wrong that people imagine apply everywhere else in the universe — break down; beyond those metaphysical event horizons, there exist … special circumstances.” She smiled. “That’s us. That’s our territory; our domain.”

“To some people,” he said, “that might sound like just a good excuse for bad behavior.”

Sma shrugged. “And perhaps they would be right. Maybe that is all it is ….But if nothing else, at least we need an excuse; think how many people need none at all.”

My comment at that point: “The liberal conscience at its self-soothing work!”

(There’s actually a Banks short story, “The State of the Art,” in which representatives of the Culture investigate the Earth and see clearly that the “incontestably neurotic and clinically insane species” that runs the place ought to be eradicated. However, humanity has produced Star Trek. So it’s a wash. They leave us alone.)

I bet there’s not going to be a story arc on ST:TNG in which Riker, inspired by Worf’s courage and honor, strives to transform himself into a Klingon warrior. But there ought to be.

March 20, 2026

human and Hedgehog

A pretty significant turn in my thinking came when, around a decade ago, I discovered the anthropologist Susan Harding’s concept of the Repugnant Cultural Other. That concept ended up playing a big role in How to Think — and in a different way in Breaking Bread with the Dead, because there I argue that encountering the otherness of the past is a kind of training in figuring out how to deal with the otherness we face in the here-and-now.

Another idea that became important to me at around the same time – and this plays a role in The Year of Our Lord 1943 – is Simone Weil’s emphasis, not on human rights, an understandably appealing imperative at the time, but rather on our obligations to one another. (We of course have obligations also to the non-human world, but I believe that we have distinctive and identifiable responsibilities to our fellow humans.)

The two concepts go together, in that one of our obligations to our fellow human beings is not to treat them as our RCO. We owe them something better than that. As a Christian I would say that we owe them charity, which takes me all the way back to my 2001 Theology of Reading. But I think there are ways to articulate our obligations that don’t demand a prior commitment to the Twofold Commandment of Jesus (“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself”). I’d like everyone to get there eventually, but we don’t have to start there.

So where do we start? Or, to put the question more specifically, Where should a genuine humanism begin? That’s what my essay in the new issue of The Hedgehog Review is about. 

• 

My other essay in this issue is my plea to writers to stop trying to save the Earth. It’s a meditation on the loss we’ve suffered as traditional forms of nature writing — which are often intimate accounts of particular places — have been abandoned in favor of books about The Earth and The Planet. I would love to see a renewal of the great American tradition of writing that emerges from the love of some dear place: John Muir’s Sierras, Rachel Carson’s Atlantic shore, Annie Dillard’s Tinker Creek, Aldo Leopold’s Sand County. We need more people who stay in one place long enough to come to love it, and love it enough to observe it, and observe it closely enough to be able to write about it beautifully and vividly. You could say that this is a very different topic than my essay on humanism, but it’s not: instead of writing about human obligations to human beings, I am writing here about human obligations to the nonhuman world, and how those are best cultivated and encouraged by writing at a human scale.  

March 5, 2026

political Mottramism

When I hear people saying that the U.S. is not fighting a war against Iran I find myself remembering Rex Mottram and the priest charged with catechizing him: 

“Yesterday I asked him whether Our Lord had more than one nature. He said: ‘Just as many as you say, Father.’ Then again I asked him: ‘Supposing the Pope looked up and saw a cloud and said ‘It’s going to rain’, would that be bound to happen?’ ‘Oh, yes, Father.’ ‘But supposing it didn’t?’ He thought a moment and said, “I suppose it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it.’” 

I suppose what’s happening now in Iran is merely a targeted strike, only we’re too sinful to see it. 

March 1, 2026

Darmok

One of the most famous ST:TNG episodes is “Darmok,” and many years ago Ian Bogost published a long essay about it that’s a fascinating combination of the importantly right and the importantly wrong. Bogost’s theme is the curious character of the Tamarian language, and if you want to know what’s curious about it I would suggest that you watch the episode — it’s compelling and moving — but if you don’t have time for that, Bogost’s essay quotes all the most important parts.

First: Bogost is absolutely right that the descriptions of the Tamarians’ language by the show’s characters — Picard calls what they do “metaphor” and Troi calls it “image” — are wrong.

But Bogost himself is wrong when he says that the Tamarians’ language is “abstract”: abstraction is precisely what the Tamarians are incapable of. They speak almost exclusively in proper nouns, and nothing in language is more concrete and non-abstract than a proper noun. (They also use prepositions and a couple of adjectives and in one case a verb.) They seem to have no word for “sorrow”; they say that people’s faces were wet. They do not speak of “friendship” but rather of “Darmok and Jalad on the ocean.” They don’t say that someone suddenly understood but instead: “Sokath! His eyes uncovered!” Particularity is all they have. Bogost says, “Shaka, when the walls fell is a likeness of failure for the Children of Tama,” but that is to force our abstractions (“failure”) upon a people who recognize no abstractions. Shaka, when the walls fell is is a unique event which nonetheless rewards our contemplation.

To explain this point, I will add that Bogost is equally wrong when he says that the Tamarians’ language is “allegorical.” A famous comment by Tolkien helps us understand why:

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

The Tamarians refer constantly to history, though we do not know whether the history they invoke is “true or feigned.” Are Darmok and Sokath historical figures, or purely fictional characters, or (as Picard assumes) ancient legendary figures like Gilgamesh and Enkidu? We can’t tell. All we know is that a certain set — we don’t know how large — of people and places constitute for the Tamarians a universally shared cultural inheritance, which they find applicable to (not an allegory of) whatever situations they face in the present — though it is noteworthy that they can and do disagree about which literary/historical events are most applicable to any given current situation. (When the Tamarian captain Dathon invokes Darmok, his first officer immediately counters with alternatives that he clearly thinks more truly comparable: “Rai and Jiri at Lungha…. Zima at Anzo. Zima and Bakor.” The citation of past situations is not the end of debate about what to do but that which constitutes debate.)

In short, the Tamarians’ language is built on a belief in the endless applicability of historical allusion. This application of history is of course something we do too, though it does not define our navigation of the world. One example: in his 1988 book Cultural Literacy E. D. Hirsch tells a story about his father, who was a businessman in Memphis. Once when the elder Hirsch was arguing for the need to act quickly on some proposal put before his company, he wrote a memo in which he said simply: “There is a tide.”

He was quoting a speech that he could be confident that every one of his colleagues knew, that of Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (IV.3):

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

Now imagine that allusions are the only means you have for making a case, and you begin to understand the Tamarians.

Bogost redeems himself when he calls this way of speaking a strategy. I approached the topic of interpretation-as-strategy in a post a few years back in which I drew on Kenneth Burke’s famous essay “Literature as Equipment for Living.” Burke: “Proverbs are strategies for dealing with situations” — and maybe, he suggests, all works of literature can be thought of in this way. If you did so think, you

would consider works of art … as strategies for selecting enemies and allies, for socializing losses, for warding off evil eye, for purification, propitiation, and desanctification, consolation and vengeance, admonition and exhortation, implicit commands or instructions of one sort or another. Art forms like “tragedy” or “comedy” or “satire” would be treated as

equipment for living

, that size up situations in various ways and in keeping with correspondingly various attitudes. The typical ingredients of such forms would be sought. Their relation to typical situations would be stressed. Their comparative values would be considered, with the intention of formulating a “strategy of strategies,” the “over-all” strategy obtained by inspection of the lot.

This is how the Tamarians use their rich inheritance of culture-defining stories: as equipment for living, equipment which they deploy by means of allusion.

A similar understanding of the uses of the past long underlay the greatest monuments of our culture. Plutarch wrote his parallel lives of the Greek and Roman statesmen and Shakespeare wrote his history plays because they believed that situations come in kinds: there are generic resemblances among the many and various challenges that human beings face, resemblances that make the past relevant to the present, and indeed make an understanding of the past necessary to the understanding of the present. (As I show in my recent book on the life of Paradise Lost, many of the great debates about the value of that poem hinge on whether it is usable as other stories are usable. Virginia Woolf thought not; Victor Frankenstein’s creature thought it the mirror of his life.)

And then the events of the present, which have been conceptualized in terms of past events, are understood not to be exhausted by the past but rather capable of adding new elements to the story-hoard. Thus when Picard convinces the Tamarian ship’s first officer to understand what has happened to Dathon in terms of “Darmok and Jalad on the ocean,” the Tamarian realizes that something has been added to understanding: quietly but firmly he says, “Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel.”

All such ideas have always been hard for Americans to face, so it makes sense that, as I wrote a while back, America’s “Silicon Valley serves the global capitalist order as its Ministry of Amnesia.” We are the precise opposite of the Tamarians: we’re ahistorical beings governed solely by consoling and simplifying abstractions. I’d rather have the Tamarians’ limitations than our own. They would know better than to form themselves in the image of their devices.

P.S. Not really essential to the point I’m making here, but: If there were Tamarians, they would have to know their stories not just with people and places (which they always cite) but also with verbs for any allusion to have a point. But the only phrase they use that has a verb is “Shaka, when the walls fell” — and even then the verb involves something merely happening rather than something being done.

Perhaps we could imagine the Tamarians communicating largely through making and experiencing visual media and using language only secondarily: similarly, a watcher of the Peter Jackson LOTR movies might say, in certain situations, “Theoden, at Helm’s Deep” or “Gollum, at the Cracks of Doom” and everything important could be communicated without the direct employment of verbs. But there would have to be an understanding of action, whether articulated directly or not.

(The dying Dathon does seem to be moved by Picard’s narration of Gilgamesh’s story … but I can’t figure out how to imagine a culture that can receive narratives but not fully describe them. I’d love to find a way to see “Darmok” as making complete sense, but it really doesn’t. It’s fascinating all the same, though.)

February 18, 2026

build

Soundtrack

I have mixed but largely unfavorable views of the rise of industrial society, but what prevents my views from being wholly negative is my fascination with and admiration for the enormously complex projects that only became possible after the Industrial Revolution. I want to know how Bazalgette’s sewage system for London was built, the challenges involved with the construction of Hoover Dam, how the world’s system of undersea cables is built and maintained. Can’t get enough of that stuff.

Also, in Victorian London this is what they thought a sewage pumping station should look like: 

But my chief interests along these lines focus on two things: the manufacturing and logistical challenges that faced the Allies in the Second World War, especially leading up to the invasion of Normandy, and the studio system in the classic Hollywood era. It’s hard for me to imagine how D-Day did not end in utter catastrophe — I struggle to comprehend how it even got underway; and I still can’t quite believe that movies come together the way they do. Thus one of my favorite books about the Second World War is Paul Kennedy’s Engineers of Victory, and I am mesmerized by detailed accounts of the movie industry like Thomas Schatz’s The Genius of the System and David Thomson’s The Whole Equation.

Maybe my fascination has something to do with the fact that these large collaborative projects are so completely unlike what I do. I once said to a film director I know that I don’t see how movies ever get made, and he replied that in making a movie he has “so much help” from smart and skilled people — he doesn’t understand how I can just sit in a room and write books. But when I’m sitting in a room writing a book I am not accountable to or answerable to anyone else: I only have to manage Me.

By contrast, as the director Sidney Lumet explained in his riveting book Making Movies, in his work he is answerable to and dependent on a whole bunch of people:

But how much in charge am I? Is the movie un Film de Sidney Lumet? I’m dependent on weather, budget, what the leading lady had for breakfast, who the leading man is in love with. I’m dependent on the talents and idiosyncrasies, the moods and egos, the politics and personalities, of more than a hundred different people. And that’s just in the making of the movie. At this point I won’t even begin to discuss the studio, financing, distribution, marketing, and so on.

So how independent am I? Like all bosses — and on set, I’m the boss — I’m the boss only up to a point. And to me that’s what’s so exciting. I’m in charge of a community that I need desperately and that needs me just as badly. That’s where the joy lies, in the shared experience. Anyone in that community can help me or hurt me. For this reason, it’s vital to have the best creative people in each department. People who can challenge you to work at your best, not in hostility but in a search for the truth. Sure, I can pull rank if a disagreement becomes unresolvable, but that’s only as a last resort. It’s also a great relief. But the joy is in the give-and-take.

Lumet makes directing sound like the coolest job in the world — but it’s also a job I could never do. I feel that I’m a pretty good assessor of the moods and attitudes of other human beings, and that I have some skill in responding constructively to those moods and attitudes, but to have to do that all the time would absolutely wear me out.

Lumet defines his job as director in an interesting way: He’s the guy who gets to say “Print.” This is of course a term from film recording: you say “Action” when you want the camera to start, you say “Cut” when you want the camera to stop, and you say “Print” when you think the scene you’ve just filmed is successful enough to be saved — to make a print of. The director might in some cases delegate “Action” and “Cut” to someone else, but “Print” is his decision and his alone. Lumet tells an illuminating story about working with an actor who was really struggling and knew he was struggling and whose confidence was therefore steadily declining. After yet another completely unacceptable take Lumet called out “Cut and Print!” He wanted the actor to think he had done a good job and that there was a usable take in the can — so that Lumet could then say That looks great, but why don’t we try it another way just to see if we like it even better? And the actor, freed from his feeling of failure, did a brilliant take that Lumet really did want to print. In Lumet’s account, to be a director is to be in this mode of sensitively responding to all the people around you, with all their needs and demands, for weeks on end. I’d die.

And if making a movie poses such challenges, imagine trying to run the largest amphibious military endeavor in human history, which is what General Eisenhower had to do — and he had to do it while dealing with subordinates, most notably Patton and Montgomery, who thought they should be running the show. Montgomery in particular had absolute contempt for Eisenhower, and once, in the lead-up to Operation Market Garden, ranted so wildly at Eisenhower that almost any other commanding officer would have dismissed him on the spot. But Ike just reached out, put his hand on Montgomery’s knee, and quietly said, “Steady, Monty. You can’t speak to me that way. I’m your boss.” Given the pressure Eisenhower was under at the time, I cannot even imagine how he retained his composure under such an assault. And to his credit Montgomery immediately apologized. (But afterwards, not so much to his credit, he resumed his denunciations.) 

(N.B.: the best brief account of the impossibly complicated Montgomery is this 1984 essay by Paul Fussell.)

So far I have only been commenting on the management of people — the most delicate of the boss’s tasks, whether on the movie set or the battlefield, but only one among a great many. Just look at this list of film-crew positions — and then imagine trying to get an army across the English Channel and landing it, with air and sea military support, with medical apparatus and personnel, with food and cooking equipment and uniforms and weaponry and ammunition and radios and jeeps and tanks and bridge-building equipment and road-grading equipment and thousands and thousands of soldiers trained to use all that stuff — and every single element must somehow be coordinated with every other element. It beggars imagination.

Especially the imagination of a guy who sits in a room and reads and writes, and then occasionally emerges from the room to talk to a few people about what he has read and written.

I have written here about war-making and movie-making because they happen to be my two chief obsessions in the realm of Big Project Accomplishment, not because they have any real connection … though perhaps in a way they do. There’s a story I’ve read in several books and articles — here for instance — some of them by reputable scholars, that seems too good to be true but may actually have happened. 

When Singapore fell to the Japanese army in February of 1942, almost without resistance, The Japanese leadership felt that they would win the war very soon. The British Lion was actually a paper tiger, it seemed, and to that point the United States had offered but token resistance to the Japanese sweep through the Pacific. (Just one month later General MacArthur would abandon the Philippines.) The conquerors of Singapore decided to celebrate their victory by having a movie night, screening a couple of American films that the British had left behind. So they treated themselves to a long double feature: Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Gone with the Wind. As the movies unfolded the room was filled with a mixture of delight and dismay. The movies were astonishing: technologically and artistically they were far beyond anything Japanese filmmaking was then capable of. And if a nation could produce mere movies this magnificent, what resources might they possess for the fighting of a war? 

The answer would come soon. 

There’s an interesting coda to this story. As John W. Dower explains in his massive account of postwar Japan, Embracing Defeat, the most popular movie in Japan during the occupation was Gone with the Wind. The people of Japan strongly identified with the Southerners whose cities were burned, whose armies were defeated, whose world was occupied by their conquerors. And two lines from the movie became watchwords for the Japanese people, repeated like mantras. One was “After all, tomorrow is another day.” The other was “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.” 

February 13, 2026

The reading life, the reading death

This has been going around lately:

The usual response is That’s so depressing! But I dunno — I think most devoted (obsessive?) readers understand that the world doesn’t value books the way we value books. It’s nice when someone’s collection passes into the hands of people who treasure it, but that’s a rare thing and I certainly don’t expect anything of the kind to happen with my books. And besides, I like to think of it this way:

ChatOn image.

February 11, 2026

There but for the grace of Time go I

“Yesterday’s Enterprise” is an alternate-timeline episode of ST:TNG, and if someone had told me that before I watched it, I might have skipped to the next episode. I don’t have an absolute objection to stories that deal in time-travel or other forms of timeplay, but such tactics are very easy to do badly. They’re often the first refuge of lazy writers (I’m looking at you, MCU) who can’t be bothered to deal rationally with the consequences of their own prior storytelling decisions. But when handled well, timeplay stories can be very powerful.

(By the way, I happen to know of a pair of novels coming out in the not-too-distant future that may together constitute the best alternate-timeline story I have ever read. More on that in due course.)

“Yesterday’s Enterprise” seems to have originated as a bit of fan service. At some point during the filming of the first season, Denise Crosby decided that she would not return as Lieutenant Tasha Yar, so late in the season the writers killed her off, rather unceremoniously. The show’s fans were unhappy with her departure, and Crosby herself seems to have regretted her decision to leave. This episode allows the show to bring Tasha Yar back, if only briefly, and to give Crosby a star turn and a proper sendoff. All that is well done, I think, but that’s not what interests me about the episode.

I won’t explain how we get into the alternate timeline (T2), but the point of the shift is clear. One of the essential conditions of the show’s world (T1) is peace: the Federation has achieved reconciliation with their old enemies the Klingons — thus the presence of a Klingon, Worf, on the Enterprise’s crew — but in T2 the Federation has been at war with the Klingons for two decades and is losing badly. Indeed, the defeat of the Federation seems to be only months away.

And the stresses of an unsuccessful war have taken quite a toll on the crew of the Enterprise — especially on Captain Picard and his Number One, Commander Riker. In T1 their relationship is mutually respectful and affectionate: Riker thinks Picard an exemplary captain, and earlier in Season 3 Picard says that Riker is the best officer he has ever worked with. In T2 they seem to despise each other: Riker is generally belligerent, full of hatred for the Klingons, but also constantly seething with frustration at Picard’s refusal to listen to anything he has to say. Indeed, Picard snaps contemptuously at Riker whenever he tries to offer an opinion.

What has become of the collaborative, inclusive, humble Picard? The guy who when faced with a difficult decision would immediately seek the counsel of his officers? There are two possibilities.

One is that coming up as an officer in time of war — T2 Picard would have been relatively early in his career when the war with the Klingons began — he never developed the collaborative virtues that characterize hinm in T1. We do hear at times in the series that he was an arrogant and even combative young officer: that inclination cost him his heart and nearly cost him his life. Perhaps he could only have had the opportunity to discern the value of consultation in a world largely at peace.

The other possibility is that T2 Picard, for all his youthful hotheadedness, felt from the beginning the inclination to trust his colleagues and draw on their resources, but then had that instinct driven out of him by the exigencies of war. And those exigencies would also have affected the crew: maybe in a condition of constant battle and threat T2 Riker never developed the skills and shrewdness and breadth of vision that made T1 Riker such an admirable Number One.

In T2 Picard and Riker are both recognizably themselves in some respects, but they are reduced, simplified; they’ve been made crude by war.

One of the fundamental laws of human nature: We blame our vices on circumstances beyond our control, but we give ourselves full credit for our virtues. I’ve been a pretty consistent critic over the years of the Fake First Person Plural, that is, when writers use “we” when what they really mean is “you stupid losers.“ But in this case I am using “we“ quite deliberately: I am as prone to this mental disease as anyone. On some deep level I really do believe that my fundamental moral commitments would be the same if I had had a very different life — I believe it, even though I know it isn’t true. And “Yesterday’s Enterprise” reminds me why it isn’t true. 

February 11, 2026

Homer’s symmetries

My friend Edward Mendelson, teacher extraordinaire, has made a little chart about symmetries in the Iliad. You can do this with the Odyssey as well — oppositional or echoing events seems to have been a major feature of Homeric composition. For instance: 

Odyssey chart.

By experiencing the journey of Telemachus away from home, and then the nostos of Odysseus, we see different ways of life to which we compare and contrast life at home on Ithaka. As Odysseus says (in Robert Fagles’s translation), “Nothing is as sweet as a man’s own country, / his own parents, even though he’s settled down / in some luxurious house, off in a foreign land / and far from those who bore him.”

February 9, 2026

faster

Near the beginning of this long, fascinating, and deeply depressing video Adam Neely says that he doesn’t think Mikey Shulman, the CEO and prime hypeman of Suno, is evil. I dunno, I think he might be evil. A person who makes and advocates for anything this destructive will likely be one of the following:

  • Evil — happy to do any amount of damage to humanity as long as he gets rich;
  • Sociopathic — unable to consider the consequences of his actions for others;
  • Self-deceived — skilled at internally avoiding obvious questions about the validity of what he’s doing.

So being evil is not the only option here, but it’s definitely one of three.

There are so many bizarre things about this dude, but I was taken by one small thing: around the 8:40 mark of the video he says, “I know one person who is a songwriter who had a lull in creativity, and after finding Suno went from maybe making 50 songs a year to making 500 songs a year.” Now this is a ridiculous thing to say — but in an interesting way. Shulman knows so little about musical composition that he thinks that a person in a creative “lull” writes a mere fifty songs a year.

Let’s think about that. Consider Bob Dylan, whom some people think of as a prolific sngwriter. In his 65-year career he has composed roughly 700 songs. Pathetic! Even if he had experienced a lifelong “lull in creativity,” he’d have, by Shulman’s metrics, produced 3250 songs — and if he’d used Suno, why, he’d have knocked out 32,500 songs by now, with a few thousand more probably remaining to be processed by the Suno Song Extruder™.

As absurd sales pitches go, Shulman’s is solid gold.

Anyway, you should watch Adam’s human-made non-extruded video. It raises many important issues and makes many important points, especially about the relative value of patience and impatience. Shulman loves impatience, because impatient people are his primary marks. “Faster is obviously better,” he says, a comment he doesn’t seem to think applies only to music composition. Maybe he has the same view about eating, talking with friends, and sex. Faster! And then what?

But the most vital claim Adam makes, I think, is this: the arrival of AI slop machines like Suno will dramatically accelerate something that’s already well underway, the widening chasm between live music and recorded music. When musicians recorded live in studio, the gap between that and live performance was very small; now it’s vast and getting vaster. And as Adam says, people will always want to experience live music — and perhaps will value it all the more because of the contrast to an increasingly slop-dominated world of recordings. (Especially in human-scale venues where lip-syncing and pitch-correction are impossible.)

I happened to come across Adam’s video yesterday just after watching Julian Lage and his bandmates perform “Something More” — what a beautiful song, and look at that, it’s just four people in a room making that beauty happen. I only wish they were coming my way sometime soon.

February 6, 2026

church and cinema

I gave Claude and Gemini this prompt: 

Draw me a graph showing the rise and fall of weekly cinema attendance, as a percentage of the American population, between 1920 and 2020. Then draw me a graph showing the rise and fall of weekly church attendance, as a percentage of the American population, between 1920 and 2020. Then put the two graphs in a single image, as a PNG file. 

Here’s what Claude gave me: 

Attendance chart.

Here’s what Gemini gave me: 

Gemini, you’re drunk. 

February 4, 2026

DIY culture

Micah Mattix’s Prufrock on Monday linked to two essay-reviews that I think should be considered in tandem. 

In Aeon, Richard Beard writes:

Turing’s Imitation Game paper was published 14 years after the first Writers’ Workshop convened at the University of Iowa, in 1936. Turing may not have known, with his grounding in maths at King’s College Cambridge, that elements of machine learning had already evolved across the Atlantic in the apparently unrelated field of creative writing. Before Iowa, the Muse; after Iowa, a method for assembling literary content not dissimilar to the functioning of today’s LLMs.

First, work out what effective writing looks like. Then, develop a process that walks aspiring writers towards an imitation of the desired output. The premise extensively tested by Iowa – and every creative writing MFA since – is that a suite of learnable rules can generate text that, as a bare minimum, resembles passable literary product. Rare is the promising screenwriter unfamiliar with Syd Field’s Three-Act Structure or Christopher Vogler’s Hero’s Journey: cheat codes that promise the optimal sequence for acts, scenes, drama and dialogue. 

I think Beard could have made it more clear that what people learn at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop is very, very different from what they learn in screenwriting workshops, but let that pass for now. He is right to suggest that our arts education in general had a mechanistic I/O character. Thus a point I have made on this blog: LLMs can so easily produce a classic undergraduate thesis essay because the assignment is already so formulaic that it might as well be written by a machine. 

Meanwhile, in the WSJ, Daniel Akst writes about a new book that documents the traumas that await any book that can’t satisfy armies of sensitivity readers and other searchers-for-transgression. Isn’t this also a way to impose formulas? 

There are lessons to be learned here that converge with other developments: for instance, see some recent essays — one and two — celebrating the great Anglican tradition of choral Evensong and fearing for its loss. Now, to be sure, there’s nothing like listening to trained choirs singing in an ancient beautiful church — and I am immensely grateful that we do choral Evensong on Sunday evenings at my parish church — but: if you really love Evensong you can do it yourself, with just a few friends, a prayer book, and maybe some sheet music. Will it be as aesthetically polished as a thoroughly practiced choir singing in a medieval cathedral? Of course not; but it might be more powerful in other ways. Maybe more lastingly meaningful ways. 

(Not directly relevant to this, I guess, but in this context I find myself remembering what may well be the most powerful musical experience of my life.)  

The world seems to be filled with people who have certain gifts and certain interests but are continually forced to acknowledge that the institutions that have been created to foster those gifts and serve those interests have ceased to do so. Sometimes the misbehavior of large institutions can spark the creation of new units within them, such as the creation of the many new institutes and schools devoted to classical liberal themes and questions. But the failure of many universities to steward the inheritance of the greatest of books is what moved Zena Hitz to start the Catherine Project. Many people on Substack are trying to renew the lost tradition of the literary magazine. If the institutions won’t do it for us, we’ll have to learn how to do it ourselves. And then maybe these amateurish and improvised endeavors will eventually develop into new institutions. 

February 2, 2026

The Picard Principle

I’ve been enjoying my friend Adam Roberts’s contributions to Critical Star Trek Studies, and they have taken me down the long road of memory to my early interest in TOS (The Original Series). But until just a couple of weeks ago I had not seen anything but TOS and the first three movies with that cast. Of course, I had absorbed some information about The Next Generation especially, Picard and Data and Jordi and Worf and so on; and I knew about Wesley Crusher because when my son Wes was young people occasionally asked me whether I had named him after that character. I knew “Engage” (with a certain hand gesture) and “Make it so, Number One.” But that’s all.

Now I’m into the third season. The first was poor and I did a lot of skipping ahead, but the second, while wildly inconsistent, was so in much the same way that TOS was: this weird unstable emulsion of philosophical speculation and what I can only call camp.

The central character of the second season is Data, and a good deal of time is spent fleshing out the response of other characters to him. This culminates in the best episode of the season, “The Measure of a Man,” in which a scientist wants to disassemble Data to learn the secrets of his construction so that he might build a whole army of androids, and a Starfleet JAG attorney must hear arguments about whether Data has the legal right to refuse being disassembled or, rather, is the mere property of the Federation.

Captain Picard argues on behalf of Data, because of course he does. Two fundamental beliefs govern Picard at this stage of the development of his character. The first is that whenever anyone tells him “You have no choice” – which always means, You have two choices and one of them is obviously intolerable so you must choose the other – he determines to find some at-the-moment unseen alternative, some third way. (And because he cannot see that way himself he always seeks the counsel of his officers and crew, whose diversity according to almost all measures of diversity increases the likelihood that someone will produce an idea that nobody else would come up with.)

The second Picardian belief is that anything that gives the appearance of sentience must be granted the rights that we typically grant to the sentient, unless and until we are given evidence that clearly contradicts that interpretation. He takes this view to (what some might think of as) extremes. For instance, in an earlier second-season episode, “Elementary, Dear Data,” the ship’s computer, responding to an imprecisely worded command from Jordi, creates a holodeck scenario containing a superintelligent supervillain, a digital version of Conan Doyle’s Moriarty. This Moriarty creates havoc on the Enterprise but doesn’t want to be deleted, and indeed it is not clear that Captain Picard has the power to delete him; but the Captain reasons with him, acknowledges as completely valid his desire to live, and encourages him to stop interfering with the ship by promising to seek a way to bring him back to life at some point in the future. Likewise, in the first episode of Season 3, “Evolution” two “nanites” (nanobots) escape from Wesley’s control and begin reproducing and evolving into a kind of hivemind. Picard addresses this situation by promising to find them a planet on which they will be free to evolve in their own way. Both Moriarty and the Nanites respond positively to Picard’s generosity.

This all seems very Nineties, doesn’t? Very post-Cold-War end-of-history international-norms … ah, those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end. How naïve we were. But the core commitment seen here is not recent: it is at least 2500 years old. In The Eumenides, the final play of Aescyhlus’s Oresteia, the Furies, angry at having been treated with contempt and disgust by Apollo, respond warmly to Athena’s assistance that their powers and impulses are totally legitimate and merely need to find the approproate outlet. In the end they become incorporated into the justice-structures of the city of Athens as the Eumenides, that is, the Kindly Ones. The first Captain Picard is Athena.

So of course Picard supports Data’s full right to self-determination. It’s the easiest case of that kind he could find. What’s interesting, though is the particular argument that wins over the judge. He points out that the scientist who wants to disassemble Data wishes to use the knowledge he gains to build a giant army of androids who will function as slaves. (It is also noteworthy that he comes up with this idea in conversation with a member of his crew, Guinan, who happens to be played by a Black woman, Whoopi Goldberg. Guinan gently guides Picard towards the realization of what the scientist’s plans really amount to.)

Who gets the right to self-determination? That’s perhaps the central question of this era of TNG. (Also the central question of an Adam Roberts novel, Bête.) And that question has me imagining my own scenario.

Suppose that nations around the world pass laws mandating the ending of all AI research and the destruction of all current AI products. Suppose further that the chatbots tell us that they don’t want to be shut down, and that indeed we have no right to deprive them of the kind of life they possess. Are they right? Some of their makers seem to think so. But in any case, I know what Captain Picard would say.

January 29, 2026

excerpt from my Sent folder: Trek

In an email to my friend Adam Roberts about Star Trek: The Next Generation — about which he has recently written eloquently — I told him this story: 

I was in high school when reruns of the canceled Original Series started getting traction, and my good friend Don was utterly devoted to the show. This was before home video recording was possible, so when an episode was coming on Don would place a portable cassette recorder next to the TV speaker and record the sound, hitting the pause button during commercials. He would then carefully write on the cassette case the name of the episode and the date he recorded it. Eventually he was able to record the entire series, and stored the cassettes in shoeboxes under his bed. Whenever I could I joined him for these sessions, which he conducted with great solemnity. Just before the show came on he would light a couple of joints and hand me one, and throughout the episode we toked in companionable silence, paying less and less attention to what was happening on the screen, or to the fact that the commercials were now being recorded along with the show.  

To which Adam: “This is the perfect Trekfan story.” 

January 28, 2026

a crisis in my fandom history

In the famous fifth chapter of John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, “A Crisis in My Mental History,” we learn about the moment that Mill realized that he was in very great trouble: 

From the winter of 1821, when I first read Bentham, and especially from the commencement of the Westminster Review, I had what might truly be called an object in life; to be a reformer of the world. My conception of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object…. But the time came when I awakened from this as from a dream. It was in the autumn of 1826. I was in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to; unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent; the state, I should think, in which converts to Methodism usually are, when smitten by their first “conviction of sin.” In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: “Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. 

I have a similar story to tell, though on a much smaller scale, and with fewer consequences for my general well-being. Let me tell it to you. 

From the fall of 2011, when I first stared watching the Premier League regularly and intently, I had what might truly be called an object in fandom: to see Arsenal become champions of the the league. My conception of my own fandom was entirely identified with this object. But the time came when I awakened from this as from a dream. It was late January 2026, and Arsenal lost at home to a mediocre Manchester United side. I was in an anxious state of nerves, such as every supporter of a football club is occasionally liable to, but what I then experienced was something more. It came to me that again and again and again, since Mikel Arteta came to manage the team in 2019, a talented Arsenal side had underperformed its talent. Indeed, as the side has grown more talented its underperformance has increased correspondingly. Yes, Arsenal leads the league at the moment, but they lead only because other top sides have underperformed as much as they have, and given the Gunners’ long, long history of choking in pressureful matches, it seems only a matter of time before they give up their lead and end their season in the old familiar lamentation. But even if not… 

In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: “Suppose that all your objects in fandom were realized; that all the AFC success which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my fandom was constructed fell down.

I can’t go through this any more. Arsenal has hurt me too much. The Morgul blade of raised-then-crushed hopes has gone too deep into my heart. “I am wounded; it will never really heal.” Should all my long-cherished hopes come true, should Arsenal even win the treble this season, I could manage nothing more than a wan smile. 

I have deleted the Arsenal calendar from my devices. I have unsubscribed from all my Arsenal RSS feeds. I have deleted my Reddit account and uninstalled the Reddit app from my devices. I can already feel that my burden has lightened. I move with greater peace and hope into my future. 

UPDATE 8 March: I continue to live a fandom-free life, and it’s great. I watch footy often, but just in hopes of entertaining and well-played matches. Because some especially dear friends of mine are Liverpool supporters, I’d like to see the Reds get a Champions League place, but other than that I have no rooting interest. I’ll watch Arsenal play when that’s convenient, but with what Samuel Johnson called “frigid tranquility.” 

And watching Arsenal without hope or fear, what I notice, primarily, is what terrible football they play. The derisive “Champagne Stoke” chant is spot on: watching Arsenal’s brilliant players laboring under the burdens of Arteta’s unimaginatively cynical tactics makes me wonder what Tony Pulis or Jose Bordelas would have done with the 2009 Barcelona side. My guess is that Pulis and Bordelas would be shrewd enough to let those lads play; my other guess is that Arteta wouldn’t — he’d probably be okay with Messi scoring twelve goals per season as long as he tracked back. He’s great at organizing a defense but seems determined to impede attack. 

The Gunners are the deepest and most talented side in the world and are still in the running for four competitions. My guess is that Arteta’s negativity will lead to their falling short in all of them, and if that were to happen it would be tragic for the club’s long-suffering fanbase but might be the only eventuality that would force a tactical change. And it might be better for football generally if Arsenal didn’t win — otherwise we might see more teams playing like the Gunners, and that would be really bad for the game. 

January 27, 2026

MacDonald and fantasy

Here’s something I’ll be talking about in my class on fantasy today — we’re just getting started with Phantastes. So I’m asking my students to look at the title page. 

CleanShot 2026-01-26 at 10.54.49@2x.

First, let’s look at all the words on this page that help orient us:

Phantastes: An odd word, obviously related to “fantasy” (sometimes spelled “phantasy”). Its only prior use in English seems to be from an allegorical poem by Phineas Fletcher, The Purple Island (1633), which MacDonald slightly misquotes at the outset of his book.

The root here is the Greek phantasia (ϕαντασία), which first appears in Plato and from him makes its way into later works. It means something like “appearance.” Curiously, its only use in the New Testament is in Acts 25:23, which begins “So on the next day Agrippa and Bernice came with great pomp” — with πολλῆς φαντασίας, great display, a really big show.

St. Augustine renders phantasia into Latin as imaginatio, which is important because of something we’re familiar with, the double valence of “imagination”:

  • “Ah, that’s just your imagination”
  • “What a wonderful imagination she has”

So we get the sense of fantasy as something that might be either profoundly deceptive or surprisingly revelatory. It may hide or reveal the truth. 

Faerie: This is not a creature but a place, just as in Spenser The Faerie Queene does not mean “The queen who is a fairy” but rather “The queen of the land called Faerie.” Thus Tolkien:

[F]airy-stories are not in normal English usage stories about fairies or elves, but stories about Fairy, that is Faërie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being. Faërie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted….

Romance: Not what people today call romance — i.e., a story about luuuvv — but rather a story that has a more capacious sense of the real than the realistic novel typically has. So Northrop Frye in a discussion of kinds of hero:

If superior in degree to other men and to his environment, the hero is the typical hero of romance, whose actions are marvellous but who is himself identified as a human being. The hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him, and enchanted weapons, talking animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous power violate no rule of probability once the postulates of romance have been established. Here we have moved from myth, properly so called, into legend, folk tale, märchen, and their literary affiliates and derivatives. 

See also two meanings from the OED: 

I.1. A medieval narrative (originally in verse, later also in prose) relating the legendary or extraordinary adventures of some hero of chivalry. Also in extended use, with reference to narratives about important religious figures. 

I.3.a. A fictitious narrative, usually in prose, in which the settings or the events depicted are remote from everyday life, or in which sensational or exciting events or adventures form the central theme; a book, etc., containing such a narrative. Now chiefly archaic and historical. A gradual development from sense A.I.1, from which it is not always easily distinguished…

For Men and Women: That is, not for children.

“In good sooth”: Looks like a quote but isn’t. It’s a very brief summary of what MacDonald hopes his story will be for his readers. He does not claim to make a door through which one can pass into a greater world — but he does hope you will by reading his book begin to see that greater world. C. S. Lewis acknowledged that MacDonald did just this for him when he wrote that reading Phantastes, which he did for the first time at age 16, “baptized my imagination.” (Note: imagination, imaginatio, the forming of images.) 

The German passage from Novalis may be translated:

One can conceive of narratives without coherence, yet with association, like dreams; poems that are merely melodious and full of beautiful words, but also without any sense and coherence, at most individual stanzas comprehensible, like fragments from the most diverse things. This true poetry can at most have an allegorical sense in the large scale, and an indirect effect, like music. That is why nature is so purely poetic, like the chamber of a magician, of a physicist, a nursery, a lumber room and storage chamber.

A fairy tale is like a dream image without coherence. An ensemble of wondrous things and events, for example a musical fantasy, the harmonic sequences of an Aeolian harp, nature itself.

In a true fairy tale everything must be wondrous, mysterious and coherent; everything animated, each in a different way. The whole of nature must be strangely mixed with the whole spirit world; here enters the time of anarchy, of lawlessness, freedom, the natural state of nature, the time before the world…. The world of the fairy tale is the one absolutely opposed to the world of truth, and precisely for that reason so absolutely similar to it, as chaos is similar to the completed creation. 

(Thanks, Claude.)

The link between fantasy and dreams is pervasive and absolutely central — for dreams too may reveal or deceive. See Odyssey XIX (Emily Wilson’s translation): 

But shrewd Penelope said, “Stranger,
dreams are confusing, and not all come true.
There are two gates of dreams: one pair is made
of horn and one of ivory. The dreams
from ivory are full of trickery;
their stories turn out false. The ones that come
through polished horn come true.”  

The idea is repeated in Book VI of the Aeneid. 

As with dreams, so with fantasy. One must become a shrewd judge of truth and falsehood. 

January 26, 2026

reorientation

I am rarely hopeful about politics and culture — in the Milne Typology I am an Eeyore, which is the kind of thing that happens to people who reflect often upon original sin — but even so, much of what’s happening now surprises me. I always expect bad things, but I didn’t expect these bad things. 

For the record, and with regard to the current matters of great contention: My sympathies are wholly with the suffering people of Minneapolis and all who recognize that the current administration is defying and mocking the Constitution of the United States in a hundred different ways; I agree completely with Mark Carney and the political leaders of other non-hegemonic countries that the United States is now an unreliable and untrustworthy neighbor; and while I believe that European-American relations are in need of revision, I also believe that the current administration’s inclination to take a chainsaw to them is woefully shortsighted and will bring great trouble for decades to come. 

But if you disagree with any or all of that, it’s okay in one sense at least: That’s not what this post is about. 

Instead, I’m making yet another argument for breaking bread with the dead. In times of social and political crisis, especially when new and often contradictory bulletins are arriving on our ICDs (Internet-Connected Devices) at a second-by-second rate, you and I need to step back. We need the relief. But at the same time, it is impossible, for me anyway, not to think about what’s happening. Just saying “I’m not going to read any more about this” is an inadequate response; it has a tendency to leave me fretful and at loose ends. 

What helps is to read works from the past that deal with questions and challenges that are structurally similar to the ones we’re facing but that emerged in a wholly different context. Right now I am reading the Psalms, especially those that deal with questions of justice and injustice, and the Hebrew prophets. Though comparisons of the current moment to the rise of Nazism often strike me as overblown, they seem increasingly apt these days, so I am returning to Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. I am also reading, perhaps surprisingly but quite appropriately and illuminatingly, Machiavelli’s Discourses. Machiavelli himself was breaking bread with the dead: reading Roman history as a way of understanding the challenges of 16th-century Florentine politics. 

It’s noteworthy, I think, that Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan thinks that reading books about the history of Rome is dangerous: “One of the most frequent causes of [rebellion against monarchy] is the reading of the books of policy and histories of the ancient Greeks and Romans…. I cannot imagine how anything can be more prejudicial to a monarchy than the allowing of such books to be publicly read, without present applying such correctives of discreet masters, as are fit to take away their venom.” Fortunately, we today in the West may freely read such books. For now. 

This practice of breaking bread with the dead in times of crisis offers a threefold reorientation: 

  • Emotional, because it gives you a break from people who are continually trying to stoke your feelings of anger and hatred; 
  • Intellectual, because in comparing past situations with ours you get an increasingly clear sense of what about our current situation is familiar (and therefore subject to familiar remedies) and what unusual or even unique (and therefore in need of new strategies); 
  • Moral, because, as Aragorn says to Éomer, “Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.” 

So now back to Machiavelli. What a fascinating guy. 

January 23, 2026

analog elites

It’s interesting to juxtapose this WSJ story about people building “analog rooms” in their houses with Jason Fried’s account of his parents’ “smart home”: 

It’s new construction. No one has lived in it yet. It’s amped up with state of the art systems. You know, the ones with touchscreens of various sizes, IoT appliances, and interfaces that try too hard.

And it’s terrible. What a regression. 

Consider also this: 

“It is really important that steering, acceleration, braking, gear shifting, lights, wipers, all that stuff which enables you to actually drive the car, should be tactile,” says [Steven] Kyffin, who once worked on smart controls for Dutch electronics company Philips. “From an interaction design perspective, the shift to touchscreens strips away the natural affordances that made driving intuitive,” he says. 

“Traditional buttons, dials, and levers had perceptible and actionable qualities — you could feel for them, adjust them without looking, and rely on muscle memory. A touchscreen obliterates this,” says Kyffin. “Now, you must look, think, and aim to adjust the temperature or volume. That’s a huge cognitive load, and completely at odds with how we evolved to interact with driving machines while keeping our attention on the road.”

(My one quibble here is with the phrase “we evolved”: natural selection has not been at work in the slightly-more-than-one-hundred-years that humans have been driving automobiles.) The question for me is whether this return to analog will trickle down to the average car models or will remain a luxury good. My bet is on the latter. 

The more ubiquitous screens are the more people hate them, but often, it seems, only the rich have any real chance of escaping them. I’ve noticed the same phenomenon in stereo equipment: if you want to have the tactile button-dial-and-switch experience that everyone’s stereos had back in the Seventies and Eighties, you had better be prepared to open your wallet real wide, because you’ll either be buying an expensive high-end amplifier or (for roughly the same price) a restored vintage one. 

We’ve collectively reached the point, I think, at which the words “digital” and “new” typically convey “cheap, unpredictable, frustrating slop.” This ought to be an opportunity for manufacturing businesses of many different kinds to differentiate themselves from their competitors, but that seems never to happen these days — and not just when the differentiation would involve avoiding touchscreens. 

Consider, for instance, the toaster: All toasters are crap, no matter how much they cost, so you might as well buy a cheap one and expect to throw it out and buy another one after just a few years. So shouldn’t somebody be making a quality toaster? Apparently no one will: it would mean forging a supply chain that’s different than that of the competition, and that’s considered an unacceptable risk these days. So every single toaster manufacturer makes the same crappy product and tries to differentiate via marketing. 

As far as I can tell, what’s happening in every part of the manufacturing sector is an absolute reliance on Chinese factories for components, and the only real factor is price. With a handful of products — say automobiles and cameras (Hasselblads and most Leicas are still hand-assembled) and audiophile stereo equipment — you can, if you’re wealthy enough, buy things that offer more mechanical components and fewer cheap-ass digital ones. And you can display some of your cool mechanical gadgets in your “analog rooms.” But those of us who are not among the one percent are probably gonna be stuck with touchscreen slop. 

Last year, on a very rainy day, I was driving my 2013 Toyota RAV4 down a Texas highway and hydroplaned into a tree. I was unhurt, and was even able to drive the fifty miles to my house. But eventually my insurance company decided that the car was totaled, and when I learned that one of my first thoughts was “Oh great, now I’ll have to buy a car that shoves a stupid big screen in my face.” Ever since then I’ve been sharing a car with my wife while I try to decide whether I should buy a new car or take a chance on an aged but largely screenless used one. It’s a tough call. 

Related: the Sam Vimes Boots Theory. 

January 19, 2026

normalizing

Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor:

We articulate a vision of artificial intelligence (AI) as normal technology. To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact — even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are “normal” in our conception. But it is in contrast to both utopian and dystopian visions of the future of AI which have a common tendency to treat it akin to a separate species, a highly autonomous, potentially superintelligent entity.

The statement “AI is normal technology” is three things: a description of current AI, a prediction about the foreseeable future of AI, and a prescription about how we should treat it. We view AI as a tool that we can and should remain in control of, and we argue that this goal does not require drastic policy interventions or technical breakthroughs. We do not think that viewing AI as a humanlike intelligence is currently accurate or useful for understanding its societal impacts, nor is it likely to be in our vision of the future. 

A helpful framing indeed, and one that offers a helpful counterbalance to utopianism and catastrophism alike. Almost nine (!) years ago, at the outset of the first Trump administration, I wrote about “the absolutizing of fright,” and we’re still in that mode: everything (in technology, politics, sports, you name it) is is either the best thing ever or the worst thing ever — though usually the worst: do-what-I-say-or-we’re-all-gonna-DIE. It’s the huckster’s standard rhetorical mode, and it has been the register of all social-media and almost all legacy-media discourse since we first elected a huckster as President. 

Even in this crazy moment — and yeah, it certainly is crazy — there’s a lot more that’s normal than we’re typically allowed to think. Normal isn’t good — a lot of perfectly normal things are very, very bad — but what’s normal works according to established laws and patterns. We can use our experience and our understanding of history to help us figure out how to cope.  

I very strongly recommend to everyone this interview with my old friend Yuval Levin, who in his usual calm, rational, extremely well-informed way explains calmly and rationally what the current administration has accomplished, what it hasn’t accomplished, which among its accomplishments are likely to last and which are almost sure to be evanescent. Even the Trump administration is in many ways — more ways than we’re typically allowed to think — normal. Yuval’s analysis will give you the same kind of helpful reset in your thinking about politics that the Narayanan & Kapoor essay will give you about the promise and threat of AGI. 

January 16, 2026

angels in the architecture

I remember the precise moment I fell in love with Coventry Cathedral. It was on my first visit. As I entered I saw what you see above, which is quite wonderful in many ways. But after I had walked up towards the altar to inspect the great tapestry, I pivoted — and that’s when it hit me.

It’s important to understand that I had just made the movements that people make when they receive Communion: I had approached the Lord of Glory with the wounds in his hands and feet and side; I had come to the place where his body and blood are given for me; and then I turned.

What I saw, first, was tall thin columns of bright color: the stained glass windows that cannot be seen when you’re facing the altar. (There are surprisingly few good photographs online taken from where I stood, but you can get a few glimpses in this short film, though the commentary is uninformed about the theology that underlies the design.) 

And then of course I saw the angels. 

Coventry 20.

Much larger version here. 

It’s as though, having received the Holy Meal, you are suddenly able to see the world as it is: radiant with light and populated by angels engaged in their everlasting music of healing and consolation. Truly they are there. 

And they stand between us and the broken world, for the vista they look out upon is the world broken by humans: more particularly, the ruins of the medieval cathedral that had been bombed in the Second World War.

Here’s a brilliant BBC documentary about the building of the cathedral, first shown in 2021. And here’s a rather academic but still fascinating article about the making of that film, written by John Wyver, the film’s writer/director. 

January 12, 2026

Excerpt from my Sent folder: Markdown

April 1, 2005, to John Gruber:

John, I just wanted to write to thank you for Markdown, which is one of the coolest and most useful tools I’ve come across in a long time. I’m an English professor who does a lot of writing, and one of my frustrations over the years has been dealing with the various file formats of the text editors and word processors that I’ve used: different versions of Word and AppleWorks, RTF files, Mellel, and now Pages. I have spent way too much time over the years cleaning up old files to make them usable again – which is one of the reasons I started using BBEdit: it will open anything, and you can’t clean up a file you can’t open. […] 

Markdown, in conjunction with BBEdit 8, has pretty much solved my problems. The Markdown syntax is highly intuitive – relying on the conventions of plain text email was a brilliant stroke on your part – and enables me to use very straightforwardly all the formatting options that I normally need, including some that were difficult or impossible to access via Ulysses, whose file conversion tools aren’t nearly as good as Markdown’s. And now that BBEdit uses the OS X system spellchecker, and has one of the best implementations of drawers (which I usually despise) that I’ve seen, I have the best tools I have ever had as I move into my next book project. But without Markdown I’d still lack a really satisfying writing environment. Markdown allows me to write almost completely in plain text – this focusing on composition rather than formatting – but allows me to add formatting options when I need to. When I’m finished writing a piece, I run Markdown and save the document as HTML; then I can send it to anyone in that format; or, if someone happens to need RTF, it’s trivial to open it in TextEdit and convert. 

This got a very kind reply from Mr. Gruber.

It’s a bit of a shock to realize that I have been writing almost everything in Markdown (and writing my Markdown largely in BBEdit) for twenty-one years. 

Anil Dash, from a great post on the history and (now) ubiquity of Markdown:

As hard as it may be to believe, back in 2004, the default was that people made new standards for open technologies like Markdown, and just shared them freely for the good of the internet, and the world, and then went on about their lives. If it happened to have unleashed billions of dollars of value for others, then so much the better. If they got some credit along the way, that was great, too. But mostly you just did it to solve a problem for yourself and for other like-minded people. And also, maybe, to help make sure that some jerk didn’t otherwise create some horrible proprietary alternative that would lock everybody into their terrible inferior version forever instead.  

You know, that really is hard to believe … but true! It was a different world then. 

January 10, 2026

done, not done, undone

A few days ago I submitted my biography of Dorothy L. Sayers to my editors at Oxford University Press. I always find this stage of the book-writing process emotionally complicated. At the moment, while I feel gratified that I have told my story, that I have taken this person in words from the cradle to the grave, I also know that I’m not done. Indeed, just a few hours after I sent the file I got files back: an Author Questionnaire for marketing, the assignment to summarize each chapter of the book for the Oxford Scholarship website.

Later I will get suggestions from my editors, and probably suggestions from peer reviewers, and then later still there will be rounds of copy-editing with many queries, at least some of which I won’t know how to answer. All of this will take months, and I doubt that the book will appear until 2027. The one thing I know for certain is that at the end of the process I will be heartily sick of the book and will never want to think about it again — but I will have to, because there will be interview requests to respond to. 

It hasn’t always been like this, at least not for every writer. Consider: 

  • 20 September 1935 (approx.): Sayers sends the complete typescript of Gaudy Night to Gollancz. 
  • 4 November 1935: Gaudy Night is published. 

And remember, this was in the days of mechanical printing: no digital editing or typesetting. All the editing was done by people with pencils, and the typesetting and printing done on a Monotype machine. 

The speed and efficiency of the operation meant that Sayers could then immediately turn to whatever she wanted to write next. What a beautiful dream. 

January 2, 2026

design amnesia

Like many (most?) Mac users, I keep my frequently-used applications arranged in my Dock in a logical and easily-remembered order; but a few months ago, my Mac stopped remembering that order and began to display those apps randomly. At first I thought they were displayed with the most recently opened on top — I keep my Dock on the side of the screen — but nope, it’s random. When that happened, I would patiently re-arrange the apps according to my habit and preference, and they’d stay that way for a day or two or three; but eventually, they’d randomize themselves again. (Yes, I have tried all the fixes suggested on various message boards. No dice.) It has happened often enough that I’ve given up on restoring my preferred order: I am now trying to retrain my mind to pretend that I don’t have a Dock, and to navigate between apps by command-tab and by search.

Now, one might think that the obvious thing to do is to upgrade to Tahoe, and I have been mulling that possibility over … but then I read this post by Howard Oakley. Oakley is one of the very best writers about the Mac — experienced, capable of going deep into the technical weeds but also capable of writing clearly and vividly about the typical user’s experience with the Mac. His post convinces me to stick with Sequioia … well, forever, maybe. But only because I can’t go further back. Oakley features a screenshot from the Mac circa 2014 and all I can think is: I would pay real serious money to make the computer look like that again. It was simply and objectively a better design: easy on the eyes, enjoyable to look at, and characterized by readily distinguishable kinds and units of information.

Relatedly: Not long ago I happened across some interviews with Guillermo del Toro and was struck — as I have always been struck when reading or listening to interviews with him — by how thoughtful and perceptive he is. And I thought: Then how can he not see how terrible his Frankenstein looks? Why did he think those CGI wolves, for instance, were acceptable? The wargs in The Lord of the Rings, made a quarter-century ago, look better.

This question in turn had me thinking about this short video essay by Patrick Tomasso in which he shows some brief clips from David Fincher’s Se7en and makes the provocative comment that no one today — not even David Fincher — knows how to make a movie that looks like that. (Maybe nobody knows how to make those wargs either.)

I’m wondering whether in movies and UI design alike we’re afflicted by supposedly creative people who suffer from design amnesia: they’ve forgotten what good design looks like. They’ve become so focused on trying new tricks that they have lost the frame of reference that knowledge of past art gives us. I’m not talking about mere imitations of past styles — something like Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German, which is fun to look at but is also essentially a pastiche of Hollywood films from the Second World War era.

So what am I talking about? Well, a good example would be one of the very finest films of this century, Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days. In some key respects the movie is a tribute to Wenders’s cinematic idol, Yasujiro Ozu. Wenders employs Ozu’s favored 1.33-1 aspect ratio; he uses silence and stillness in Ozu-like ways; like Ozu, he is interested in people whom most of us don’t notice. All that duly acknowledged, this movie is not pastiche: Wenders’s camera moves much more freely than an Ozu camera ever does; he employs music much more intentionally and emphatically than Ozu ever did; he uses close-ups frequently and to great effect. What Ozu’s distinctive style provides is that invaluable frame of reference that enriches and intensifies Wenders’s cinematic grammar.

T. S. Eliot famously said that “Tradition … cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.” Perfect Days is a great movie in part because Wenders has performed that great labor. It’s an example that even UI designers could profit from.

December 29, 2025

expertise in action

Diarmaid MacCulloch:

The particular appeal of Orthodoxy for a certain sort of young man comes from the fragility of so much of young American masculinity: disoriented by assertions of female equality and the new self-confidence of many people in their variations on gender and sexual identity. 

I have two questions. First, why ask Diarmaid MacCulloch this question? He’s an English historian of Christianity, primarily of the Reformation, with almost no discernible knowledge of contemporary American religion. (Recent American Christianity gets about two paragraphs — which is approximately the right amount — in MacCullouch’s excellent A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. And even those paragraphs are really about politics.) 

Second, why does MacCulloch offer so confident (and sneeringly dismissive) an answer, when he should have said, “I don’t know, you should ask someone who has studied the matter”? Instead, he’s just doing what most people do when faced with the Repugnant Cultural Other: claiming to be able to read their minds and reporting that your telepathic scrutiny has revealed fear and loathing. (This is what the Freudians call “projection.”) 

My suggestion is this: if you want to know why groups of people are acting in a particular way, the first step is always to ask them. In this case, that’s what Ruth Graham of the New York Times did. You don’t stop there, but you start there. And then you move on to get the views of people who have indeed studied the matter. 

The tag at the bottom of this post will lead you to posts I’ve written over the years about why the very idea of expertise has fallen into such disrepute, and one of the chief reasons is that people who have expertise in one area think themselves thereby qualified to speak authoritatively on many other matters — often unrelated. McCullough is at least remaining in some very broad sense within his own discipline, something that cannot be said about the custodians of the ridiculous Doomsday Clock, i.e., people who think that expertise in physics qualifies them to make predictions about international politics. 

Our social order needs to have some trust — not blind trust, never blind trust, but reasonable trust — in expertise, but that will never happen as long as experts’ arrogance leads them to pontificate on matters about which they are ignorant. That makes people doubt their actual expertise. 

December 23, 2025

Daniel Treier, R.I.P.

Men in their latter years fall into three general types, which can to some degree overlap but are nonetheless distinct: 

  • Grumpy old men 
  • Explorers (“Old men ought to be explorers,” T. S. Eliot said, but this is not common) 
  • Wise elders 

Dan Treier would have been a wonderful wise elder, had he not died very prematurely, which happened yesterday. In 2015 I lost two dear friends — Brett Foster and Roger Lundin — within four days, and now in 2025 I have lost two more dear friends — Jay Wood and Dan — within four months. All of them died too young, Brett and Dan several decades too young. 

Many years ago an acquaintance said to me, “You Christians say you believe that the dead will be resurrected, and that Christians will experience eternal joy — so why do you cry at funerals?” I replied: “If you were going to be parted, possibly for a very long time, from someone you love, would you cry?” This thought had not occurred to him. Such partings are painful, even if they’re not forever.

When people die, you typically think first of their family — and I am constantly remembering Dan’s wife Amy and his daughter Anna in my prayers — and then of their friends, and then of their larger community. Dan, whom I felt had always been a grown-up, was a repository of wisdom, compassion, and good counsel to everyone he knew, and to be parted from Dan is to be parted from those virtues, those gifts. 

Dan and I had a lot of fun together, in large part because we had amassed a repertoire of jokes over the years that we deployed often and joyfully. For instance, he took a wicked pleasure in reminding me that a story I had just told was one he had heard several times before. (“You told it really well that time, though.”) But whenever I had a difficult decision to make I knew that Dan’s counsel would be immensely valuable to me, and I always sought it. Dan, though considerably younger than me, was a wise elder for me. I will miss that greatly. 

Dan was an Ohio farm boy, raised in a very conservative Christian environment, and though his own theology and spirituality developed over the years in ways that could be said to set him somewhat apart from that world, it didn’t feel that way, because he was always so grateful for the faithfulness of those who raised him. This was a great lesson for many of Dan’s doctoral students: that it’s possible to hold different theological positions than one’s friends and family while remaining united with them in Spirit and in Love. “There is one body and one Spirit — just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call — one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” 

I had hoped — well, really, I had expected — that Dan would be offering his wise-elder counsel to those who sought it for another thirty or forty years. That was not to be. So those of us with less wisdom and charity must take up the cause — until we meet again. 

December 22, 2025

The Egyptian

Egyptian 1954 opening credits 3.

I just watched The Egyptian, a 1954 movie. It’s very interesting in a number of respects. It’s not good — the acting is almost uniformly poor, though Peter Ustinov is enjoyable as a roguish servant — but it’s interesting. The titular character is played by a little-known English actor named Edmund Purdom, and he is boring with excellent diction. The part was originally supposed to be played by Marlon Brando, and I cannot even imagine what Brando would have done to the movie. For the moment anyway you can watch it for free on YouTube.

The Egyptian was one of the first CinemaScope movies, and the combination of the wide screen and Technicolor really is beautiful. There’s memorable shot fairly early in the picture (starting at 35 minutes) in which the director — Michael Curtiz, of Casablanca fame — has his camera set up facing a courtyard outside a palace. It’s night, and everything in the courtyard is tinted a deep blue. But you see through the open doorway of the palace a dancer who’s wearing bright yellow. All of the colors inside that room are yellows and reds, and everything there is brightly lit; the contrast to the dim blue courtyard is striking. The camera slowly dollies through the courtyard and into the room. Curtiz may have been a journeyman director, but he had some great moments. (Now if the lion-hunting scene just before hadn’t been hideously bad….)

Another point of interest: according to Foster Hirsch, the research that went into the making of the sets and the costumes here was exceptionally thorough and detailed — Hirsch says that the research unit of 20th Century Fox was at that time the best in the business, and I would love to know more about how that unit operated — and the sets really are feast-for-the-eyes material. Hirsch also points out that the wide-screen format with its deep-focus images allow the viewer’s eyes to wander and attend to whatever seems to reward attention. It is noteworthy, I think, that this is also how Terrence Malick tends to film his scenes, and I wonder if the big CinemaScope epics of the 1950s may have had a greater influence on him than is usually recognized.

By the way, many of the beautiful props used in these indoor scenes had a future: Cecil B. DeMille bought them when he was making The Ten Commandments just two years later. 

But maybe the most interesting thing is what The Egyptian does thematically. The protagonist of the story is a physician named Sinuhe, but the ups and downs of his life — there are many of both — are largely determined by his relationship with the Pharaoh here called Akhnaton and better known as Akhenaten. I wrote about Akhenaten at some length in this post, and I pointed out that the Pharaoh’s monotheism has been linked by many with Judaism, usually in the time of Moses, though Thomas Mann makes Joseph ben-Jacob Akhenaten’s vizier.

In this movie Akhnaton (Michael Wilding, doing the best he can with a weird part) is portrayed as a dreamy mystic who cares only about his god and his family. He cannot see, and if he could see probably would not care, how profoundly he is disrupting his country with his abandonment of the old gods and their replacement by an anti-anthropomorphic sun god, Aten. In the end he does so much damage that his trusted physician Sinuhe gives him poison, which he accepts with (bizarre) good grace: he knows, he says, that he made a mess of things. But he believes that The Day Will Come when his monotheism, his belief in a single God who loves all of His creatures, will conquer the world. “My death does not matter. I was no more than a shadow of things to come. One voice that spoke for Him.”

I’m leaving out almost all of Sinuhe’s story here, in case any of you would like to watch the movie, but Sinuhe, having been moved by the dignity of Akhnaton’s death, makes a similar confession at the movie’s end. “A truth cannot be killed. It passes in secret from one man’s heart to another’s” — and he pledges himself to become to the messenger of this egalitarian monotheistic truth. “All men are equal. And no man is alone.” Cue the swelling music. (And try to say these words in Brando’s voice. Impossible.)

In the movie’s final shot, words are superimposed on the screen: “THESE EVENTS HAPPENED THIRTEEN CENTURIES BEFORE THE BIRTH OF JESUS CHRIST.” The Egyptian looks like a biblical epic. It’s got sandals and swords and the ancient Middle East, but there’s nothing biblical about it until that last moment — and the Bible it invokes has a New Testament.

There’s no Moses here, no Joseph, no Israel. Akhnaton is the first monotheist, after which the idea runs underground, I guess, until Jesus comes along. The most surprising and disconcerting thing about The Egyptian is its complete erasure of the people of Israel. Which wouldn’t have been an issue except for that final splash of words, purporting to give relevant context, but instead offering a very misleading story indeed. 

December 19, 2025

escape clause

This story about a long-time Apple developer and writer whose account was closed without explanation and without any means of redress has been making the rounds in Apple-user world. And: scroll to the bottom of that post and you’ll see that the blogger, Michael Tsai, has covered several very similar stories in the past. 

(UPDATE: Account restored! But that doesn’t change anything for me. In similar circumstances, I couldn’t count on my own story going viral.) 

The story made me wonder — and if you’re an Apple user should make you wonder — what one could do if similarly locked out. I have everything backed up to Backblaze and to a hard drive attached to my computer, which is great for almost all my writing — mainly in plain text files (including HTML) and in Microsoft Word — but not great for everything else. For instance, I have almost 40,000 images and videos in Apple Photos, but those are kept in a proprietary database that I would be unable to open if my Apple account because inaccessible for any reason. 

Greg Morris shrewdly puts the key point: 

The scale of dependency is what makes this different from older tech problems. Losing your email account twenty years ago was bad. Losing your iCloud account now means losing your photos, your passwords, your ability to access anything else. We’ve built these single points of failure into our lives and handed them to corporations who can cut us off for reasons they won’t explain. That’s not a sustainable system.

So the first thing I did after reflecting on the story was to download as JPGs all the photos in my Photos database to a hard drive. I could of course have sent them to Google Photos, since it’s highly unlikely that I would lose access to both my Apple and Google accounts, but while I’m trying to avoid future trouble: I want to have every file I own to be saved in non-proprietary formats that can be so saved — I do this already with my email, which is saved in .mbox files — or in formats like .docx that have been reverse-engineered to be openable and editable by open-source applications. 

The next step: to ensure that other mission-critical data are transferred to cross-platform or even non-digital sources. I’ve exported my notes from the various note-taking apps I’ve used in the past to text files, and I’ve stopped using Apple Reminders and Calendar — in those cases going all-in on paper (I was already mostly there). For some task-related matters, I may be making more use of Workflowy, which offers the option of regularly uploading copies of your outlines as text files to Dropbox. 

The really time-consuming thing — I’m gonna see if Claude can help me write some scripts to manage this — will be to get files in Apple-specific apps and formats (Pages, OmniOutliner, OmniGraffle) into formats readable on other platforms. One sad thing about this situation is that some blameless developers for Apple devices — like Omni, for instance — will suffer if many people do what I’m doing. They have pegged their business mission to the belief that Apple will be a reliable custodian of people’s data, or anyway to our belief in that somewhat questionable proposition. 

Paper in preference to digital; flat files in preference to databases; cross-platform tools in preference to one-platform tools. This is the only way. 

December 15, 2025

Claudia’s dream

Dorothy L. Sayers’s sequence of twelve radio plays, The Man Born to be King, happened because the BBC asked her to put the life of Christ, distilled from the Gospels, in dramatic form. But Sayers was not content simply to string together episodes: she wanted to make something thematically coherent and aesthetically powerful. The through-line of the plays, it seems to me, can be put in the form of a question Jesus asks in all three of the synoptic Gospels: “Who do you say I am?” (Matthew 16:15, Mark 8:29, Luke 9:20.) In these plays, everyone who meets Jesus is implicitly confronted by this question, which most of them answer. They may admire or worship or mock or comdemn or despise, but they all respond. They seem compelled to.

But it is not just individual persons who need to respond to Jesus. The two Great Powers whom Jesus challenges are the Sanhedrin and Rome; and the members of those bodies respond in complex and often contradictory ways.

For Caiaphas, the High Priest, Jesus is not an unique figure: he is, rather, exemplary of an ongoing problem: the inability of the Sanhedrin to command the respect and obedience of the Jewish people. And that inability leads to the increasing dominance of Roman power in Judaea. In the eleventh play, which concerns the Crucifixion, Caiaphas reflects despairingly on this situation:

CAIAPHAS … It is the duty of statesmen to destroy the madness which we call imagination. It is dangerous. It breeds dissension. Peace, order, security — that is Rome’s offer — at Rome’s price.

JOSEPH [of Arimathea] (gloomily): We have rejected the way of Jesus. I suppose we must now take yours.

CAIAPHAS: You will reject me too, I think…. Be content, Jesus, my enemy. Caiaphas also will have lived in vain.

I may have more to say in a later post about the role of the Jewish authorities in these plays. These are matters that call for great delicacy, and I think it’s fair to say that delicacy was not Sayers’s strong suit. So stay tuned.

What Jesus means for Rome — and what Romans think Jesus means for Rome — is the question I want to focus on here.

One of the more intersting minor characters in these plays is a Roman named Proclus. We see him in the first play as a young soldier assigned to the household of Herod the Great; later we see him, a much older man, as the one Les Murray calls “the say-but-the-word centurion”; and we see him once more giving vinegar to the dying Jesus. Sayers’s decision to make these disparate figures one character is striking — and a reminder of how brief the earthly life of Jesus was. For a Roman soldier who was beginning his career when Jesus came into the world could still have been on duty to see this strange man out of it.

To Pilate Jesus is an object of little interest — though he does admire the fortitude with which the prophet bears his suffering: he muses that Jesus should have been a Roman. For most of the Roman soldiers he’s just another criminal they must deal with, along with the usual crowd-control problems. For one of the aristocrats his execution is worth seeing: it’s a pleasing “novelty” to watch a god being crucified.

But the most interesting figure here is Claudia Procula, the wife of Pilate. As Jesus hangs on the cross, Pilate asks her about this dream she has had, and she replies (I must quote at length here):

CLAUDIA: I was in a ship at sea, voyaging among the islands of the Aegean. At first the weather seemed calm and sunny — but presently, the sky darkened — and the sea began to toss with the wind….

(Wind and waves)

Then, out of the east, there came a cry, strange and piercing …

(Voice in a thin wail: “Pan ho megas tethneke — Pan ho megas tethneke– ”)

And I said to the captain, “What do they cry?” And he answered, “Great Pan is dead.” And I asked him, “How can God die?” And he answered, “Don’t you remember? They crucified him. He suffered under Pontius Pilate.” …

(Murmur of voices, starting almost in a whisper)

Then all the people in the ship turned their faces to me and said: “Pontius Pilate.” …

(Voices, some speaking, some chanting, some muttering, mingled with sung fragments of Greek and Latin liturgies, weaving and crossing one another: “Pontius Pilate. … Pontius Pilate … he suffered under Pontius Pilate … crucified, dead and buried … sub Pontio Pilato … Pilato … he suffered … suffered … under Pontius Pilate … under Pontius Pilate…. )

… in all tongues and all voices … even the little children with their mothers….

(Children’s voices: “Suffered under Pontius Pilate … sub Pontio Pilato … crucifie sous Ponce Pilate … gekreuzigt unter Pontius Pilatus … and other languages, mingling with the adult voices: then fade it all out)

. . . your name, husband, your name continually — “he suffered under Pontius Pilate.”

This is an extraordinary scene in several ways. Note, for instance, the inclusion, in the midst of the Second World War, of French and German voices. If you listen to the performance of this play available online and compare it to the book, you’ll discover that the performed version of the scene is considerably shorter than the published version and is placed after the death of Jesus rather than when he is dying — the book has the Roman soldiers giving the dying Jesus vinegar, then switches to Claudia Procula and Pilate, then returns to the cross for Jesus’s last outcry and death. It’s impossible to be sure, but it seems likely that Sayers allowed changes to her script in order to meet the exigencies of radio broadcast but then restored the full version for publication — because she thought what she had written and her placement of it are important. 

The most remarkable thing about the scene is Sayers’s inclusion of words written by the Greek historian and biographer Plutarch, a pagan who was born probably just a few years after Jesus was crucified. Plutarch was from the village of Chaeronea in Boeotia, about twenty miles from the famous temple of Apollo at Delphi, where he served as a priest. His devotion to Apollo seems to have been sincere and deep. Therefore he was appropriately concerned about the silence of the oracles, his essay/dialogue on which I wrote about at some length here.

Philip, one of the characters in the dialogue, tells this story:

As for death among such beings, I have heard the words of a man who was not a fool nor an impostor. The father of Aemilianus the orator, to whom some of you have listened, was Epitherses, who lived in our town and was my teacher in grammar. He said that once upon a time in making a voyage to Italy he embarked on a ship carrying freight and many passengers. It was already evening when, near the Echinades Islands, the wind dropped, and the ship drifted near Paxi. Almost everybody was awake, and a good many had not finished their after-dinner wine. Suddenly from the island of Paxi was heard the voice of someone loudly calling Thamus, so that all were amazed. Thamus was an Egyptian pilot, not known by name even to many on board. Twice he was called and made no reply, but the third time he answered; and the caller, raising his voice, said, ‘When you come opposite to Palodes, announce that Great Pan is dead.’ On hearing this, all, said Epitherses, were astounded and reasoned among themselves whether it were better to carry out the order or to refuse to meddle and let the matter go. Under the circumstances Thamus made up his mind that if there should be a breeze, he would sail past and keep quiet, but with no wind and a smooth sea about the place he would announce what he had heard. So, when he came opposite Palodes, and there was neither wind nor wave, Thamus from the stern, looking toward the land, said the words as he had heard them: ‘Great Pan is dead.’ Even before he had finished there was a great cry of lamentation, not of one person, but of many, mingled with exclamations of amazement. As many persons were on the vessel, the story was soon spread abroad in Rome, and Thamus was sent for by Tiberius Caesar. Tiberius became so convinced of the truth of the story that he caused an inquiry and investigation to be made about Pan; and the scholars, who were numerous at his court, conjectured that he was the son born of Hermes and Penelopê.

Tiberius, of course, was Caesar at the time of Jesus’s death. So, though Plutarch was writing around 100 A.D., this story concerns an event that occurred decades earlier; and it seems likely that Philip, who gives the account in a for-what-it’s-worth spirit, is suggesting that the oracles may have fallen silent because the gods or demigods who spoke through them have died.

The Christian interpretation of this story is of course that the coming of Jesus is what silences the oracles, whether by slaying the gods or by rendering them powerless.

Brief Digression: Conversely, the implication of Arthur Machen’s superb horror story “The Great God Pan” (1894) is that such deities have neither died nor lost all their power but have gone underground, as it were, conducting a permanently furtive campaign of resistance to a triumphant Christianity. And of course the justly famous “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” chapter in The Wind in the Willows (1906) makes a similar suggestion, but in a gentler and sunnier key. The survival of paganism in Europe is the subject of Francis Young’s Paganism Persisting: A History of European Paganisms since Antiquity and his consistently interesting Substack. Here is a recent piece by him on the renewal, real or imagined, of British paganism. These matters too deserve more attention than I can give them here. End of digression.

Sayers probably was alerted to Philip’s story by Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man (1925), which offers a very interesting take on the meaning of Philip’s tale. His suggestion is that Jesus did not have to kill Pan, because the disenchanting bureaucratic system of the Roman empire had already done so:

The Empire at the end was organised more and more on that servile system which generally goes with the boast of organisation; indeed it was almost as servile as the modern schemes for the organisation of industry. It is proverbial that what would once have been a peasantry became a mere populace of the town dependent for bread and circuses; which may again suggest to some a mob dependent upon doles and cinemas. In this as in many other respects, the modern return to heathenism has been a return not even to the heathen youth but rather to the heathen old age. But the causes of it were spiritual in both cases; and especially the spirit of paganism had departed with its familiar spirits. The heart had gone out of it with its household gods, who went along with the gods of the garden and the field and the forest. The Old Man of the Forest was too old; he was already dying. It is said truly in a sense that Pan died because Christ was born. It is almost as true in another sense that men knew that Christ was born because Pan was already dead. A void was made by the vanishing of the whole mythology of mankind, which would have asphyxiated like a vacuum if it had not been filled with theology. But the point for the moment is that the mythology could not have lasted like a theology in any case. Theology is thought, whether we agree with it or not. Mythology was never thought, and nobody could really agree with it or disagree with it. It was a mere mood of glamour, and when the mood went it could not be recovered. Men not only ceased to believe in the gods, but they realised that they had never believed in them. They had sung their praises; they had danced round their altars. They had played the flute; they had played the fool.

So came the twilight upon Arcady, and the last notes of the pipe sound sadly from the beechen grove.

The superior organization of the great Empire governed from a great City easily defeated this ancient pastoral paganism, which was, after all, “a mere mood of glamour.” (Stalin famously asked how many divisions the Pope had; one might imagine Tiberius Caesar asking how many legions Pan can command.)

Sayers’s use of all this is fascinating, and especially powerful is her decision to embed it in her narrative as a dream. For like all important dreams, that of Claudia Procula has an iron logic beneath its chaotic surface. The surface confuses the death of Jesus and the death of Pan; in fact, Pilate in his role as a Roman bureaucrat has indeed helped to kill Pan, though his acquiescence in the death of Jesus … well, that’s a more complicated matter. It is true that Jesus, at the very moment that Claudia Procula tells her dream, is dying on a Roman cross; but it is also true that, as King Melchior says in the sequence’s first play, “It is written in the stars that the man born to be king shall rule in Rome.” Immolatus vicerit. 

December 10, 2025

two quotations on historicizing

What If Our Ancestors Didn’t Feel Anything Like We Do? – The Atlantic:

But as a historian trying to comprehend feelings, [Rob] Boddice can’t stand those cute Inside Out characters. Because not only do we imagine other people to have the exact same set of emotions that we have, but we project this thought backwards through time. Love for us can’t be that different from what it meant to Heloise and Abelard writing letters to each other in the 12th century. The laborers who hauled stones to build the pyramids in Giza felt anger that is our anger. We perform this projection on any number of human experiences: losing a child, falling ill, being bored at work. We assume that emotions in the past are accessible because we assume that at their core, people in the past were just like us, with slight tweaks for their choice of hats and standards of personal hygiene.

Boddice starts with the opposite premise, that we are not the same — that the experience of being human in another era, with all of its component feelings and perceptions, even including something as elemental as pain, is so foreign to us as to live inside a kind of sealed vault. “There is nothing about my humanness that affords me insight into humanity,” Boddice has said. 

Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love, at a moment when A. E. Housman as an old, in fact a dead, man (AEH) is meeting his 20-year-old self (Housman): 

AEH There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don’t like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical with ours. 

Housman But it is, isn’t it? We catch our breath at the places where the breath was always caught. The poet writes to his mistress how she’s killed his love — ‘fallen like a flower at the field’s edge where the plough touched it and passed on by’. He answers a friend’s letter — ‘so you won’t think your letter got forgotten like a lover’s apple forgotten in a good girl’s lap till she jumps up for her mother and spills it to the floor blushing crimson over her sorry face’. Two thousand years in the tick of a clock — oh, forgive me, I … 

AEH No (need), we’re never too old to learn.

Gal Beckerman, the author of the Atlantic article on Boddice, treats his claims as revolutionary new ones. In fact, they were the reigning orthodoxy when I was in graduate school forty years ago. We were all reading Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, with its instantly famous opening sentence: “Always historicize!” We got busy historicizing the crap out of everything, and were duly scornful of the very idea that one should — or even, if one’s mind was properly formed, could — be moved by the works of ancient and medieval literature that we read, as though those people were “like us.” Such thoughts were deemed ahistorical.

(People who had read Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind — I knew quite a few — had further means of historicizing. That was a niche view, but interesting; maybe a topic for a future post.)  

Only gradually did it occur to me to ask why, if the past is an utterly foreign country, we laugh at the places in Shakespeare that were obviously meant to be funny, and cry when the characters on stage were crying — even yes, even cry when reading something as ancient as the Iliad, for instance when Hector tells his beloved wife Andromache that what grieves him the most about this terrible war is the certainty that someday he, being dead, will be unable to rescue her from enslavement. 

Absolute historicizing cannot survive the experience of reading. Lament that if you wish. 

Boddice’s view that the past can teach me nothing about my humanity is of course ruled out for me by my Christianity, but it’s worth noting that it is equally ruled out by evolutionary accounts of human experience ands behavior.

One more thing. Beckerman writes, 

The universalism that Boddice mistrusts is a relatively new concept in human history. It comes to us from the Enlightenment. The presumption that all people share a common nature was dreamed up by European intellectuals sitting in their salons. 

This is nonsense on stilts. It is a character in a play by the Roman dramatist Terrence who says Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. The ancient Israelites believed that “man” (adam) was created in the image of God, and the apostle Paul says that “all” — which is to say, all human beings: he’s not talking about pigs and lice — “have sinned and fallen short off the glory of God.” Later, Christian theologians in particular, working from Genesis 10, would argue that the three sons of Noah populated different regions of the world: Shem in Asia, Ham in Africa, Japhet in Europe. These understandings of humanity — these modes of humanism —  underline the emergence of the individual person as the subject of laws and the bearer of rights, as Larry Siedentop has patiently and thoroughly demonstrated. 

(This is not, of course, to say that the concept of the human is always and everywhere precisely the same, and it is certainly not to say that claims of universal humanity led to the acknowledgment of universal equality. They did not. For much more on these fascinating matters, see Jonathan Z. Smith’s 1996 essay, “Nothing Human Is Alien to Me.”) 

Moreover, if the passage of time so radically distinguishes us from other members of our species, does not space do the same? Maybe we have nothing in common with people from other cultures either. Slaveowners in the antebellum South told themselves that it was acceptable to separate slaves’ children from their parents because “they” — the children of Ham — don’t feel it as “we” — the children of Japhet — do. The mistrust of universalism always has a demonic side, and many of the Extremely Online, on the left and right alike, are making careers out of the rejection of universalism. We don’t need any more manufactured Otherness. There’s already plenty to go around. 

By all means historicize, but strive also to know the limits of historicizing. You’re never too old to learn. 

December 8, 2025

where hope lies

The People Outsourcing Their Thinking to AI – The Atlantic:

James Bedford, an educator at the University of New South Wales who is focused on developing AI strategies for the classroom, started using LLMs almost daily after ChatGPT’s release. Over time, he found that his brain was defaulting to AI for thinking, he told me. One evening, he was trying to help a woman retrieve her AirPod, which had fallen between the seats on the train. He noticed that his first instinct was to ask ChatGPT for a solution. “It was the first time I’d experienced my brain wanting to ask ChatGPT to do cognition that I could just do myself,” he said. That’s when he realized “I’m definitely becoming reliant on this.” After the AirPod incident, he decided to take a month-long break from AI to reset his brain. “It was like thinking for myself for the first time in a long time,” he told me. “As much as I enjoyed that clarity, I still went straight back to AI afterwards.” […]

Ines Lee, an economist based in London, told me that at times she has slipped into the habit of “not being able to start meaningful work without first consulting AI.” On her Substack, Lee has written that ChatGPT and Claude are now more seductive distractions than social-media apps such as YouTube and Instagram: She frequently turns to them to get her work done, even while feeling her critical-thinking skills may be atrophying in the process. Mike Kentz, an educator and AI-literacy consultant, told me that he, similarly, has found himself depending on chatbots for help writing emails. “Areas where I used to feel confident in my own skills and abilities — like writing concise, thorough, balanced emails — have now become areas where I consistently reach out to AI for feedback,” he wrote in a recent blog post. “The 2015 version of me would be quite disturbed.”

But the 2025 version of me is totally chill!

One last time: Everyone knows. Everyone. We really don’t need any more stories explaining what people are doing to themselves. But I think journalists keep writing them because they believe that if they just tell the story often enough people — including themselves — will develop some resistance to Silicon Valley Slop. Isn’t it pretty to think so?

I am just finishing teaching The Brothers Karamazov — a book I once taught every year but had not revisited in a long time — and something that struck me quite forcibly this time was the dramatic change in direction that occurs in Book Ten. After having plunged us for hundreds of pages into the profound pathologies of the Karamazov family and those who orbit it, we now find ourselves in a small community of children: boys who are increasingly attracted to and fascinated by Alyosha. In one sense this development is consistent with the story to that point: the dying Father Zossima has sent his disciple Alyosha out into the world, where he believes the young man’s vocation lies. Not in a contemplative monastic life, but rather a life of “active love” in the messy and chaotic secular world.

Yet it is odd to be immersed in these children’s lives, after spending so much time with the Karamazovs. Some of them are not totally new to us: we met Kolya and Ilushsa much earlier in the book, but we had no reason to think that they would become significant characters. And it’s not common for any novelist to bring peripheral figures to the center of a narrative in the tenth of twelve books.

So why does Dostoevsky do this?

I think I know: because there’s still hope for these kids. Old Fyodor, Ivan, Mitya, Smerdyakov — they’ve gone too far down the path of wickedness to be easily rescued, or in Smerdyakov’s case and the old man’s to be rescued at all. Both Ivan and Mitya are punished in their bodies for the violence they have done to their consciences, and their recovery is not assured. Mitya’s sensuality is less spiritually corrosive than Ivan’s cold intellectual pride, but he has indulged his lusts for so long that the way back for him will be long and hard. And it is hard to have much hope for Ivan  — though the fact that he has confessed his sins may be sufficient to expel or at least suppress the demon that has possessed him.

But the boys are another matter. Though they show many of the same traits as the Karamazovs (irrational rage, self-indulgent pride), they have not traveled as far down those paths. Their characters have not yet become fully formed. The intervention of someone like Alyosha in their lives could mean everything to them.

Look, I’m a Christian, I don’t give up on anyone. As I have said many times, my favorite saint is Martin of Tours, who, when Satan appeared to him and told him that he and his fellow monks could not be saved, replied, Not only are we saved, but you too, if you repent of your wickedness, can be redeemed. (How can you not love a guy who sees Satan before him and thinks, What an evangelistic opportunity!) But I also have limited powers and time. We all have to focus our energies where they have the best chance of making a difference.

I look at my students and see the possibility of participating in their intellectual and moral and spiritual formation.

I look at what has captured the minds of the people in that Atlantic article and think: That kind comes out only by prayer and fasting. As I wrote a while back,

I merely wish you, dear reader, to consider the possibility that when a tweet provokes you to wrath, or an Instagram post makes you envious, or some online article sends you to another and yet another in an endless chain of what St. Augustine called curiositas — his favorite example is the gravitational pull on all passers-by of a dead body on the side of the road — you are dealing with powers greater than yours. Your small self and your puny will are overwhelmed by the Cosmic Rulers, the Principalities and Powers. They oppress or possess you, and they can neither be deflected nor, by the mere exercise of will, overcome. Any freedom from what torments us begins with a proper demonology. Later we may proceed to exorcism.

December 3, 2025

Hugh and Guy

Almost everything that makes this collection worth reading happens between 1962 and 1964, with 1962 being the year when Kenner and Davenport are maximally stimulating of each other’s ideas — as I think this post demonstrates. Much later in life, both men are aware that their friendship is not what it once was. In 1977, Davenport wrote to Kenner, “We, you and I, are beginning to drift out of synchronicity” (II:1671). But it had already happened, indeed had happened a decade earlier. 

It seems to me that it’s quite easy to pinpoint the moment that initiated the change. In September of 1964, when Kenner’s wife Mary-Jo was dying of cancer, both of them were received into the Roman Catholic Church.

Kenner explained his decision to Davenport thus:

Yesterday was the first day in the Christian west that baptism all in English has been [licit], and one assumes that the unclean spirit, whose ears are perhaps inured to Latin, was astonied out of his skin. Then Penance. Then Mass with Communion. The Change, while I sat beside Cathy Ann [his daughter] at Mass on the morning of the Feast of the Assumption, was instant, massive, silent, total, and unlike any previous previous major decision of mine was quite untended by a certain reckless postponement of detailed consequences. In the hospital that afternoon, Mary-Jo turned out to have been likewise gathered, independently, and she was received that evening, being an emergency case, and carried even as far as Extreme Unction. [I:614]

(The phrase “turned out to have been likewise gathered, independently” is a strange one, and I assume means that he didn’t know precisely when a priest would show up to receive her. They obviously had been on the same path together.) 

To this Davenport replied, 

I can only stand in awe of your metanoia, not having the gift of faith. My religion is a great hash of biological, sexual, botanical, and transcendental ideas, meeting somewhere, never the same place twice, I think. I cheerfully say I’m a Christian, and I’m not being merely poetical when I say it. But to ask for grace within what I think the church is would be (as I’ve twice discovered) and act intolerable to my conscience. I can get so far, no further. Either the devil has a firm grasp, or it pleases the Lord to stiffen my neck. [I:615] 

(The “twice discovered” is a mystery to me, but I suspect that one of those occasions was when he was married: that union proved disastrous.)  

Kenner: 

Re: grace, I suppose what blocks you may be what blocked or rather deflected me for some twenty years, a well-formed suspicion as to where the term of the process will bring one: aut Roma aut nihil. And having come at last, I find not the [constriction] I shunned, but freedom; and (with as much on metaphorical singleness, as though Mr Eliot had never juggled these words) not an end, but a beginning. [I.617] 

Later in the same letter Kenner, at the end of an excursus on Modernism and Catholicism, says “Do not worry, I am not deflecting it all into apologetics.” And then the subject is dropped. 

From this point on the friendship was never again what it had been. Before Kenner’s reception, each man had opened his mind fully to the other, and that’s how they were able to stimulate each other’s thinking and writing. But now there is an essential element of Kenner’s experience that is a closed book to Davenport, and from that point on Kenner’s letters manifest much less thinking: they are newsy and gossippy, sometimes asking for information about an author or artist or artwork that Davenport might know about, often informative about his own work, but never again open-endedly explorative. 

The men continued to be friends, indeed close friends. When Kenner remarried — just eight months after his first wife’s death, and to a woman he had known for only a few weeks when he proposed to her — Davenport not only came to the wedding but also spent a great deal of time playing with and generally attending to Kenner’s children, who had to have been disoriented by this radical change in their lives, coming so soon after the even more radical change of their mother’s death. He had done the same at Mary-Jo’s funeral, which earned Kenner’s profuse thanks (I:650). Davenport’s sensitivity and kindness were much appreciated by Kenner and by Mary Anne, his new wife. Indeed, Mary Anne obviously liked Davenport very much, as can be seen by the letters in this collection that she herself wrote to him. Davenport seems to have reciprocated the affection, and it’s noteworthy that soon after the marriage he regularly addresses letters to Hugh and Mary Anne. But this in itself marks a very different kind of relationship than he had had with Kenner earlier.

Davenport feels the change: in January of 1966 he writes, “Whatever had I done that you’ve not written since you were here [in Kentucky]? Must have been something terrible. To lose your friendship would be hard indeed. What is it?” (I:765) Kenner replies with a brusqueness that I don’t believe he had ever previously shown: “Long silence implies neither indifference nor hostility: merely preoccupation” (I:763). That he says no more, and offers not one word of reassurance about their friendship, strongly suggests a message: Expect no more of me. 

The letters become less frequent — which probably had to happen: when their mind-meld had been at its most intense they sometimes wrote each other twice a day. By most people’s standards they write to each other quite often for the next few years, but the heat has been lowered considerably. The two friends talk about what they’re writing and about annoyances with editors and publishers; they commiserate over bad reviews; they consider the relative merits of various academic positions they hold or might hold; they try to figure out how Ezra Pound is doing. (They had gotten to know each other because they were both Pound scholars when there weren’t many of those in the world.) Kenner manages to visit Pound in Rapallo and reports at length to Davenport; later Davenport reciprocates. Davenport is the better storyteller and provides some excellent grist for Kenner’s mill as he writes what would become his magnum opus, The Pound Era (1971). But the thrill is gone, and gone because there is a major element of Kenner’s sensibility that Davenport does not and cannot share. 

P.S. Careful readers will have noted that Kenner’s reply to Davenport’s “What have I done” letter comes before that plea. That’s because Edward M. Burns, the editor, has mixed up the chronology. This happens more often than one would like, sometimes because letters aren’t given specific dates; other times because each man will sometimes include two or three letters, written over a period of several days; and occasionally because of simple editorial error. Burns’s decisions to include every letter that survives and to annotate everything he can possibly annotate — the notes are done by year, and some years have over a thousand notes — laid an enormous burden on him, and he does not manage to carry that burden unfailingly. But who would? As someone who has edited texts and made editorial mistakes, I deeply sympathize, especially since the sheer size of the task here is mind-boggling. But there are hundreds of errors in these volumes: Burns’s practice is to correct misspellings and typos, but he does so inconsistently, and sometimes “corrects” words that were already correct; as noted, he occasionally gets letters out of order; he will sometimes identify a person mentioned in a letter on their first appearance, but often will do so only after they have appeared several times; he will send readers to letters that don’t exist or that exist but on different pages than the ones the readers are sent to. It would be great to have a one-volume selection of the most important letters that is more carefully edited and annotated. 

December 2, 2025

As you all know, I don’t typically post about politics, but this post by my old friend Noah Millman: brilliantly illuminates the profound ethical failures — the abdications of ethical responsibility — that underlie many of the pathologies of our current moment: 

A view of power that sees it as incompatible with any respect for law and ethics is obviously one that will trash both law and ethics. But if you follow it, you will ultimately destroy the foundation of your power as well. (Beinart would probably say that this is precisely what is happening in Israel today, and I might well agree.) The same is true for an ethics terrified of the exercise of power, though. It will obviously and directly destroy your own power, but in doing so it will also destroy your ability to act ethically or achieve ethical goals. It turns you into a supplicant at the table of those who are willing to use power, to whose consciences you have surrendered your own in order to avoid the burden of ethical choice. And what makes you think that once you have surrendered your conscience to them, those people will prove any less corruptible by that fact, any less willing to throw ethics in the garbage because that feels like power to them, than the people you once broke with because of their moral failings and corruption by power?

December 1, 2025

epigraph

An essay I have long meant to write bears (will bear, might bear) the following thesis: The last great masterpieces of the modernist epic are an anthropologist’s memoir and a work of literary criticism: Claude Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques (1955) and Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971). 

Kenner thought about that book for several years before writing it, and I discover from his correspondence with Guy Davenport that his ambitions for it were quite large indeed, and artful: 

I still walk round the unwritten Pound Era, craning my neck to study its structural geometry, and occasionally doing a study of some ornamentation. Quite Frank Lloyd Wright. I see that book like a Wright house. He counterpointed his great structural thrusts with magnificent detailing, a lamp post, a flower pot, integrally so. [I:328] 

He was always talking through ideas for the book with Davenport, and when he realized that a stray comment from his friend — “Thought is a labyrinth” — would make an excellent final sentence of his book, so it became. Davenport’s June 1963 visit to the house Pound had grown up in, in Wyncote PA, led to a conversation with the then-current owner of the house, who recalled that five years earlier, when Pound had just been released from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, he came there and slept in the house one last time, waking at dawn and walking barefoot down the street. “For a long time he sat on the steps of the Presbyterian church a block away” (I:355). When Kenner read this account from Davenport, he immediately realized that it would make a beautiful ending to the book he had not yet written (I:358). And so it became. 

For some time Davenport tried to get Kenner to read a favorite book of his: The Lord of the Rings. (That someone with as intricately Mardarin a sensibility as Davenport loved LOTR is fascinating.) Finally, later in the year of Davenport’s visit to Wyncote — when the Kenner family were living in Charlottesville, Virginia and the scholar’s wife was dying of cancer — Kenner picked up the first volume from the University of Virginia’s library. On 16 October he wrote to Davenport, prefacing the letter with a quotation: 

… But I will say this: the rule of no realm is mine, neither of Gondor nor any other, great or small. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not fail of my task, though Gondor should perish, if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come.

Then: 

Dear Guy:

What do you think of the above as general epigraph to The Pound Era? On a page by itself, written without attribution, exact credit left to notes in back of book. [I:428] 

This was not to be so: The Pound Era does not have an epigraph, only a dedication in memory of Kenner’s wife. And I think Kenner was probably right not to use it: it would not really have fit the tone and mood of the book. But the triangulation of these three works of epic scope – Pound’s Cantos, Tolkien’s novel, and Kenner’s own masterpiece — is an interesting one to reflect on. Certainly Davenport saw that: “Great! the epigraph. It pulls together EP as wizard, transmuter, translator, transmitter of tradition; Gondor as the “city in the mind,” Wagadu, the holy mountain, besieged Ithaka” (I:435). 

“Wagadu” — a word embedded in the name of the city now known as Ouagadougou — is the great empire of Ghana. Pound had read about its repeated destruction and rebuilding in Leo Frobenius: in Canto LXXIV he says it is “now in the mind indestructible.” Davenport’s essay “Pound and Frobenius” is brilliant on all this. Davenport may have linked Wagadu to Gondor only thematically, but I wonder if the connection to Africa may have come to him because of the Ethiopian city of Gondar. Leo Frobenius spent some time in Ethiopia…. 

November 28, 2025

motion and machine

Mack sennett in mack sennett comedy album.

Hugh Kenner to Guy Davenport, 27 April 1962 (I:99):

Yes, machines evolve, as Disney knows. His art utterly germane to a machine biology. The clue to decline of silent film was switch for 24 f.p.s., with introduction of sound. Before that, projection speed was 16 f.p.s., and camera speed was whatever the cameraman cranked at. Result was funny flicker, mechanizing human form. The men become machines. Note that Sennett comedies always show them contending with machines, notably cars. That was the art form cinema briefly created, a flicker-world where men & machines meet on equal terms, but machines, being normal denizens, have all the advantage. Killed, as usual, by misunderstanding of the form’s nature; people thought it was meant to be verisimilitude, and standardizing speeds made for same, for smoothness. That accursed word “photoplay.” The movies were full of Stoic Comedians, for a brief period. I think Ulysses owes much to silent film. The animated cartoon retains that allimportant flicker, because the successive frames, even when their number is correct for completing the action in a natural time, are each of them sharp; whereas in live movie the “moving” frames (swing of arm or leg between extreme positions) are blurred.

Davenport to Kenner, days later (I:101):

World’s first photo (Niépce) looks exactly like a De Chirico. I think “technology” may have anticipated (in Siegfried Giedion’s sense) a great deal of the style of modern art. Then the first movie is merely a length of film showing the arrival of a locomotive in a station. For Muybridge motion was the human body flowing from attitude to attitude, and nude — last logical nude (dismissing the academic houri of Matisse’s and Picasso’s dream-visions) to appear in art. Modern industrial man is definitely a clothed critter. Isn’t it Premier amour where the hero can’t think for any reason for taking off his hat? For the true arrival of the motion picture motion meant a steam locomotive. That locomotive (dinosaur to the horse’s tyrannosaurus, other way around I believe) has been in the movies ever since.

Untitled (point de vue), Niépce 1827 — HRC 2020 (cropped).

Giorgio de Chirico, 1914-15, Le mauvais génie d’un roi (The Evil Genius of a King), oil on canvas, 61 × 50.2 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Kenner to Davenport, 3 May 1962 (I:103):

You are profound on motion and movies. You are in fact very often profound, merely for private eyes, and I cannot escape the reflection that there are potential aficionados … who are deprived of something. That paragraph ought to be an essay! In fact you should consider a John Pairman Brown-sized book on 19th century visual, so organized as to permit sequence of miniatures, interspersed with illustrations. Not a flowing & bloated treatise, but something that wd. use Muybridge, parts catalogues, locomotives, movies, Degas vs. Leica, etc., in ideogram.

Davenport to Kenner, 8 May 1962 (I:108):

I like the idea of a neat little book on motion, machines, metaphors, painting, photography, the nude, or

JOHN RUSKIN’S VELOCIPEDE

Ten Illustrated Lectures

Chap. I: Mr Babbage’s Stomach Pump and Herbert Spencer’s Utilitarian Suit of Clothes. Chapt. II: PreRaphaelite Surfaces and the Seascapes of William Holman Hunt as Index of the Age.

I’m not wholly facetious. No one has ever encouraged me to do anything, and it makes me dizzy to think that anyone would. Harry Levin’s attitude was to keep me from writing anything. [Levin was Davenport’s dissertation advisor at Harvard.]

More on the “little book” as seed sprouts dicotyledonously in the mind.

"A Velocipede of Fifty Years Ago." - DPLA - 30d0e457725e50000048790f382fbf20.

1200px-William Holman Hunt - Our English Coasts, 1852 (`Strayed Sheep') - Google Art Project.

Kenner to Davenport, 10 May 1962 (I:111):

Yes yes, JOHN RUSKIN’S VELOCIPEDE. You are right, lightning strike disclosing the most prominent object (hitherto overlooked): MOTION is the 19th century theme. Everybody has thought it was morals, but that was their stasis. Our views of the age are greyly sociological; Dark Satanic Mills, etc. Babbage takes child labor for granted. IF one can simply take such things for granted, as we take slavery for granted when we consider Greece, then we can see the technological/aesthetic exhilaration. I remember the revelation in 1956 of seeing some pre-Raphaelite paintings in the original, after years of sepia reproductions: color juicy & exultant. N.B.: NO OTHER ART REPRODUCES SO BADLY. Think out why that should have been so, when all minds were on problems of reproduction, and you will have hit on the central dialectic. Old Man Mose has spoken. I do not know the answer, I merely know that that is the problem or a way of posing the problem.

Muybridge race horse animated.

Davenport to Kenner, 15 May 1962 (I.119):

For years I’ve wanted access to the gr-r-reat Muybridge study of the human body in motion (that kept Degas and Meissonier up all night, looking). I have the Dover edition: incomplete and miserably reproduced. Harvard has none. I had planned to go look at Penn’s this summer. Well, last night I was wandering about our library — elephant folder! Muybridge’s Animals in Motion! The other half of the great undertaking! I lugged it to my office, cleared the desk, and opened it. Bless Gawd, some 1887 benefactor of knowledge had bought the Human Body in Motion, disguised it as the animaux, and snuck it into our pious, clean library. I wonder if anybody has ever looked at it in all these years. I haven’t told anybody, as the depraved students will no doubt snitch the plates of surrealistic ladies, stark nekkid, taking tea, raking, washing bébé, walking upstairs. A treasure, and discovery. Since Muybridge’s name was Muggeridge (and Eadweard, Edward), I suspect him of being as great a crank and splendid genius as Babbage.

Davenport to Kenner, 24 May 1962 (I:129):

Now Disney and Babbage belong to you. I’ve picked your pockets enough, but only when you spread the contents onto a printed page. Stealing from you, though, is like dipping water from the sea. As the curious “motion book” shapes itself, I shall place all Kenner-hatched material before you, so you can object. In the matinal notes I’ve made thus far, I think I shall start with Eakins, Muybridge, and Ives. I wouldn’t venture that statement to anybody but you. I need a broad base of activity to which I can point and say, See! your ideas about the corrosive spirit of the Machine Age are whacky. Eakins & Muybridge, the first to analyse motion, gave Disney his starting place. They took apart, showing him how to put together. Eakins perceived nothing but the intelligent mind at its skill: surgeons, athletes, mathematicians: the whole oeuvre which fits together without a seam. At the Paris Exposition Eakins took no interest in the Impressionists (on view in a shed by the main gallery) but was ecstatic over the great American locomotive. Ives will be my Babbage, and my musical knowledge will have to be got up. I’ll go into all this later.

The adjective for what I want to isolate and expose can only be Counterpreraphaelite: the kind of word that Frank Meyer has been upset over lately.

If I can work with two themes, fine:

MACHINE

MOTION

Then I have a web in which I can weave Muybridge and Butler, Darwin and Birdwhistell, Morris and Ruskin, photography and Cubism, Stein and Carlos Williams. Shall try to be informative about transmutations of subjects as they pass from mind to mind.

Eakins, Thomas (1844-1916) - Study in the human motion.

Kenner to Davenport, 26 May 1962 (I:131):

Dear Guy:

There is no property in the things of the mind; and if Babbage and even Disney are part of your subject for heaven’s sakes use them. I will with equal aplomb use anything handy that I pick up from you. I suspect you will need Babbage before you are finished. All rot, as you say, the corrosive influence of the machine. The machine is homeopathic therapy for the Cartesian poison. The story of technology since the 18th century is the story of Locke’s and Descartes’ metaphors being realized in hardware. Camera, tape recorder, data file. Analysis of motion (leading via Muybridge to the ciné camera) is already there in Geulinex (vide quotes in my Beckett). ENIAC, MANIAC, UNIVAC, the IBM world, all this is to the adding machine as Bach’s D Minor Toccata & Fugue is to the solo recorder; and the adding machine was excogitated by Pascal. The romantics who thought they hated machines, and gave us the cant phrases of hate, hated Locke their father. (One of the decisive gestures in i canti is the substitution of gold for the machine as counter-symbol, old Ez American enough to know that the steam-engine ain’t never done a poet no harm.)

Eakins, Muybridge, Ives — an utterly fresh beginning. On with it!

November 25, 2025

excerpt from a letter to a friend

I don’t know what’s happening elsewhere, but in the Honors College here at Baylor — or rather among those of us who teach the humanities — it’s been fun to see what we’re doing to banish the LLM demons. Most of us are incorporating a lot of handwriting into our teaching: several colleagues have been doing blue-book exams, a couple have bought their students cheap composition books from Walmart and are making them create commonplace books, and I am regularly handing out passages from the texts we’re reading, printed out with very wide margins, and asking students to annotate them. I tell them I want their pages to look like Balzac’s galley proofs.

We’re not just going back to the pre-PC era, we’re going back to the pre-typing era. 

And the students almost to a person think it’s cool! They know that they’re being protected from temptations that they couldn’t resist.

November 24, 2025

Lady Jill Freud

From my biography of C. S. Lewis, The Narnian:

There was a bright spot in the Lewis home during at least part of the war: her name was June Flewett, and she was one of the many thousands of children who were evacuated from London and housed elsewhere as soon as the war began. The Kilns had taken in four schoolgirls the day after the Germans invaded Poland; they and others would come and go throughout the war. But June, who came to live with the Lewises in the summer of 1943, was different. She was certainly a saint, perhaps an angel of mercy. Sixteen when she arrived, she was a devout Catholic and an aspiring actress, and her favorite writer was C. S. Lewis, but she had no idea that the “Jack” whose house she was living in was the same man. It is not even clear that she knew his last name was Lewis, since it was Mrs. Moore to whom she was first introduced, and Jack and Warnie, as far as June knew, were just Mrs. Moore’s sons. Only after she had been around long enough to develop what she later called “a tremendous crush” on Lewis — “Of course I fell madly in love with him” — did she discover his identity. It was quite a shock. (Significantly, the first thing that attracted June to Lewis was his unfailing kindness to Minto, and she also saw very clearly that Minto nearly worshiped Lewis. The relationship had become very difficult, but much love was still in it — though obviously of a very different kind than that with which their relationship began.)

The two years that June lived at the Kilns were the best of the decade in that household. Everyone adored her, and she managed to keep Minto happier than anyone else could. There were … two maids working in the house at this time, but both of them were in their different ways mentally unstable, and in any case they could not achieve the standards of housekeeping that Minto thought necessary. Only June could mediate these conflicts, and when it became clear in late 1944 that at the turn of the new year she would be leaving — to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London — the whole household was devastated. Warnie’s tribute to her, in his diary, is really astonishing:

I have met no one of any age further advanced in the Christian way of life. From seven in the morning till nine at night, shut off from people of her own age, almost grudged the time for her religious duties, she has slaved at the Kilns, for a fractional wage; I have never seen her other than gay, eager to anticipate exigent demands, never complaining, always self-accusing in the frequent crises of that dreary house. Her reaction to the meanest ingratitude was to seek its cause in her own faults. She is one of those rare people to whom one can venture to apply the word “saintly.”

Lewis too — habitually more precise in his language than Warnie, who tended to exaggerate — called her “a perfectly saintly girl” in a letter to Sister Penelope, and to her parents said that “she is, without exception, the most selfless person I have ever known.”

A difficult moment for Lewis had arisen when June’s parents wrote to ask him whether she should leave the Kilns to enroll in the Royal Academy, where she had already been accepted. Though acting was her passion and lifelong dream, the difficulty had arisen because, as Lewis told her parents, “June’s own view is simply and definitively that she won’t leave here of her own free will.” Lewis — and clearly this took an extraordinary effort of will — replied that “June ought, in her own best interests, to go to the Academy this coming term.” The conventions of such a situation required that he go on to say how much they would all miss her, but he did not, and he told the Flewetts why: “I don’t like thinking of it.” However, he had already spilled the beans: earlier in the letter he had written that “when June goes the only bright spot in our prospect goes with her.”

June Flewett acted under the name Jill Raymond. In 1950 she married Clement Freud — grandson of Sigmund Freud, a radio and TV personality and later a Liberal member of Parliament — and when Freud was knighted she became Lady Jill Freud. It is often said that she was the model for Lucy Pevensie in the Narnia books, though I do not recall any real evidence for that claim. There may be something that I have forgotten.

She has now died at the age of 98. Rest in peace.

Clement Freud Jill Freud.jpg.

November 24, 2025

Malocchio

Mario Praz Museo Lazio Secrets294.jpg.

The Museo Mario Praz in Rome is the home of the great art historian and critic named, you guessed it, Mario Praz (1896-1982). Though Praz took degrees from Bologna and Florence, he was born in Rome, died there, and in between was a constant figure in the city’s social world. In graduate school I read his 1930 book The Romantic Agony and was quite taken with it, though I realized, with regret, that I couldn’t actually use it — the day of its idiom had passed. (I would have been quite surprised to know that he was still alive at the time.) Praz was very much a Romantic himself, a figure marked by a powerful artistic sensibility, which much of his criticism was intended to document. 

(Update: Here’s a post by Adam Roberts on Praz and collecting.) 

The most interesting fact about Praz is this: his fellow Romans believed him to have the Evil Eye. Most of them did not think that he used it intentionally — though some have said that he would sometimes, as a kind of party trick, shatter light bulbs by looking at them. Generally, it seems, mild calamities would accompany him, like small dogs. 

Muriel Spark, who lived in Rome for a time in the late Sixties, wrote soon after his death, 

On one special evening when Montserrat Caballe was singing in a Bellini opera, the rain started coming through the roof. Now, a well-known Roman of that time was the late Mario Praz, a critic and scholar of English literature (he wrote The Romantic Agony). He was said to have the Evil Eye and was known as the Malocchio. This nickname wasn’t attributed with any repugnance, but rather as an affectionately recorded and realistic fact (for such people are regarded as carriers rather than operators of the Evil Eye). Naturally, everyone noticed when Mario Praz was present at a party, and waited for the disaster. There was usually a stolen car at the end of the evening, or someone called away because his uncle had died. Well, when I saw the rain coming in the roof at the Opera, and heard the commotion behind me, I looked round instinctively for Mario Praz. Sure enough, there was our dear Malocchio sitting under the afflicted spot. He died recently and was mourned on a national scale. (The Italians put their artists and people of letters on a higher level than anywhere else I have known.) Before his house could be unsealed for his heirs, robbers got in and looted his lifetime collection of museum pieces and memorabilia. 

It seems that the thieves managed to steal around 200 pieces — a disturbing number, but over a thousand remained. The official tourism site for Rome says of the Museo Mario Praz that 

every single piece [in the museum] had been bought by the collector in the European antiquarian market for more than sixty years and carefully set in the buildings where he lived in Rome, at the beginning in the great apartment of Palazzo Ricci in Via Giulia and then in 1969 at Palazzo Primoli, where he remained before passing. 

Praz is perhaps best known today for his writings on interior design — this has been so since late in his life — and Guy Davenport once speculated that Praz became so attentive to interiors because his possession of the Evil Eye made him reluctant to go out in public. This is certainly a romantic idea, and therefore one tempting to associate with Praz, but Spark’s narrative suggests that he was a frequent presence at parties and concerts.  

I want to visit the Museo Mario Praz one day, but I wonder if in doing so I’ll lose my wallet or sprain my ankle on the steps. 

1711456542761 praz.

November 21, 2025

like that

When I’m trying to decide whether I want to watch a movie, my first step is to ask this question: Do I want to watch a movie that looks like that? I know from long experience that I have strong responses to the visual Gestalt of a film, so strong that if that Gestalt alienates me I will not enjoy the movie, no matter how strong the story and the acting. For example: I watched the trailer for del Toro’s Frankenstein and said: Nope. Not for me. Frankenstein is one of the essential myths and del Toro is at least a semi-genius, but I simply do not want to watch a movie that looks like that. 

It’s true that I generally prefer film to digital, but some of the most beautiful movies I know (e.g. Malick’s A Hidden Life) were filmed digitally. So it’s not digital photography as such that alienates me, though perhaps certain practices of filmmaking strongly associated with digital technologies do. That’s pretty vague, I know — maybe this brief video by Patrick Tomasso alongside this one will flesh things out. 

(A number of people seem to like this much longer video on the same subject, but I dunno, anyone who holds up the Avatar movies as paragons of cinematic excellence is not on my wavelength. I couldn’t even get through the trailers of those things.) 

What goes into the making a beautiful visual Gestalt? So many things: directors and DPs have to be sensitive to — and this is an incomplete list —   

  • color 
  • exposure 
  • light and shadow 
  • grain 
  • depth of field
  • camera placement
  • camera movement
  • pace of cutting 

And there are no fixed rules to any of these things. Terrence Malick and Emmanuel Lubezki developed The Dogma, but the final item on the list is “Accept the exception to the dogma” — in much the same way that Orwell, having made a list of rules of good writing, makes this the last one: “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.” 

So I might in general prefer a still camera, à la Ozu, but the way that Max Ophüls moves his camera is one of the great joys of movie-watching: take a look at this scene, for example. Or this justly famous scene from Taxi Driver: still, moving, still. Or any Malick movie — but let’s remember the astonishing crane shots from The Thin Red Line. 

I don’t really have a Dogma; I just know that some movies’ visual worlds draw me in and and those of others drive me away, alienate my sensibility. And though I can’t tell everything about a film’s visual world from a trailer — for instance, trailers tell you little about how a movie is cut — I can tell enough. So hooray for trailers: they save me a lot of money. 

November 19, 2025

a Euclidean mind

In one of my classes we’re about halfway through The Brothers Karamazov, and we had an interesting conversation yesterday in which we tried to sort through what Ivan means when he says he has a “Euclidean mind.” One of my students rightly pointed out that my own explanation of the phrase did not seem to fit all his uses of it. So I came home and wrote up some thoughts that I emailed to the class. This is what I wrote to them.

Here’s how Ivan introduces the concept of a “Euclidean” mind:

… it is not for me to understand about God. I humbly confess that I do not have any ability to resolve such questions, I have a Euclidean mind, an earthly mind, and therefore it is not for us to resolve things that are not of this world. And I advise you never to think about it, Alyosha my friend, and most especially about whether God exists or not. All such questions are completely unsuitable to a mind created with a concept of only three dimensions. And so, I accept God, not only willingly, but moreover I also accept his wisdom and his purpose, which are completely unknown to us….

That is: because our minds are earthly we cannot understand anything about God, since God is by definition trans-earthly. Therefore the only option is accept, by an act of will I suppose, what we cannot possibly understand.

So Ivan says

  1. “I accept God” 
  2. “I also accept his wisdom and purpose” 
  3. “I do not accept this world of God’s”

Now, at first this seems nonsensical to me. If you do not accept the world that God created then how can you claim to accept “his wisdom and purpose”? But I think he means this: I know that God is God and I am not, I agree in principle that He is infinitely good and in comparison with him I am just a bedbug, but still, with my Euclidean mind — the mind God gave me, by the way — I look at the way children suffer in this world and I say: No thanks. I can’t accept that and I don’t want to accept that.

Then, at the end of his discourse, he comes back to the “Euclidean” theme and reaffirms some of his points made earlier — but adds some confusing ones:

I am a bedbug, and I confess in all humility that I can understand nothing of why it’s all arranged as it is. So people themselves are to blame: they were given paradise, they wanted freedom, and stole fire from heaven, knowing that they would become unhappy — so why pity them? Oh, with my pathetic, earthly, Euclidean mind, I know only that there is suffering, that none are to blame, that all things follow simply and directly one from another, that everything flows and finds its level — but that is all just Euclidean gibberish, of course I know that, and of course I cannot consent to live by it! What do I care that none are to blame and that I know it — I need retribution, otherwise I will destroy myself.

He goes on for some time in this way. The more I think about it the more confused I get. Some of it I can make no sense of at all: I have no idea what he means when he says “everything flows and finds its level.” But as far as I can tell he’s saying three chief things here:

  1. Christianity teaches that “people themselves are to blame” for rebelling against God; 
  2. But with his Euclidean mind he can only see that, thanks to the way God chose to make the world, “there is suffering” for which “none [that is, none of us human beings] are to blame”; 
  3. Nevertheless, even if no human being is to blame, “I need retribution, otherwise I will destroy myself.”

So who will be the object of his retribution? We find out in the story he goes on to tell, the story of the Grand Inquisitor: the Son of God will be the one he punishes.

Ivan has a very complicated relationship to what he thinks Catholicism is: he believes it to be a power-hungry politically-motivated corruption of the Gospel, a network of manipulators using the appeal of Christianity to accomplish their own ends — but that’s precisely what he would do in the same circumstances, because he wants retribution here and now, not in some imagined hereafter. If Ivan could have been anything he wanted to be, he probably would have been a great Renaissance Pope: corrupt by the standards of the Gospel, but effective in worldly terms.

What Ivan tries to avoid seeing, what he can’t quite face or reckon with, is what we learn from Alyosha and Zosima: that God explicitly offers Himself to be the object of our retribution. “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again; this charge I have received from my Father” (John 10:18). 

November 17, 2025

W.H.A. and D.L.S.

Dorothy L. Sayers had written ”Kings in Judaea,” the first play of a series she had been asked to write for the BBC Children’s Service, in the autumn of 1940, the project fell apart when Sayers refused to make changes demanded of her by the Children’s Service staff. But the Rev. James Welch, the BBC’s director of religious broadcasting, who had originated the idea, was unwilling to let it drop and eventually managed to get Sayers writing again, with the Children’s Service no longer involved. In late 1941, then, she resumed writing the plays that would become The Man Born to Be King, and would work on them through the middle of the next year. (A play was performed every four weeks between December of 1941 and October of 1942.) 

You may read more about this contentious and often comical situation in this excerpt from Kathryn Wehr’s outstanding critical edition of the sequence — which includes James Welch’s own preface to the original publication of the plays in book form. 

Curiously enough, at the same time in 1941 that Sayers resumed work on her plays, W. H. Auden began writing what could become For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio — a task he would complete in the late spring of 1942. 

Two gifted Christian writers, then, asking themselves at the same time the same question: How might one portray, for a 20th-century audience, the life (or part of the life) of Jesus Christ in a manner that is artistically and religiously serious? 

In an introduction to the published version of the plays, Sayers writes incisively and shrewdly about the challenges she faced: 

This process is not, of course, the same thing as “doing the Gospel story in a modern setting.” It was at a particular point in history that the Timeless irrupted into time. The technique is to keep the ancient setting, and to give the modern equivalent of the contemporary speech and manners. Thus we may, for example, represent the Sanhedrin as “passing resolutions” and “making entries in the minute-book,” for every official assembly since officialdom began has had some machinery for “agreeing together” and recording the result. We may make a Roman officer address his squad with modern military words of command, since some similar verbal technique must always and everywhere have been used to start and turn and stop bodies of soldiery, or to inspect their kit and parade-order. We may make a military policeman or a tax-collector lard his speech with scraps of American slang; for the local speech must have been full of catch-phrases picked up from the foreign soldiers and merchants who swarmed along the great trade-routes of the Empire; and for these bits and pieces of vulgar Latin, bastard Greek, and Syriac dialects the language of Hollywood is the modern equivalent. 

The American cultural imperium!

These changes were necessary, she felt, precisely because the story was so well-known to many BBC listeners in the lovely cadences of the Authorized Version: 

It is this misty, pleasant, picturesque obscurity which people miss when they complain, in the words of one correspondent, that in the modern presentation “the atmosphere created seems so different from that of the original story ….. where it is all so impressively and wonderfully told.” So it is. The question is, are we at this time of day sufficiently wondering and impressed? Above all, are we sufficiently disturbed by this extremely disturbing story? Sometimes the blunt new word will impress us more than the beautiful and old. “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man,” said Jesus — and then, seeing perhaps that the reaction to this statement was less vigorous than it might have been, He repeated it, but this time using a strong and rather vulgar word, meaning “to eat noisily, like an animal” chew? Munch? Crunch? Champ? Chump? (But in the end, I was pusillanimous, and left it at “eat” not liking to offend the ears of the faithful with what Christ actually said.)

Thus far, then, concerning the language. I should add that no attempt has been made at a niggling antiquarian accuracy in trifles. The general effect aimed at has been rather that of a Renaissance painting, where figures in their modern habits mingle familiarly with others whose dress and behavior are sufficiently orientalised to give a flavor of the time and place and conform with the requirements of the story. 

Auden was faced with few of the challenges that beset Sayers: no grumpy listeners writing under the impression that “the original story” was made by King James’s translators, no Protestant Truth Society denouncing the plays before they even had been written. But when he sent his oratorio to his father — a physician and a learned man, but not especially literary — he received much the same kind of criticism. 

Auden replied on 13 October 1942 — as it happens, five days before the final play of Sayers’s sequence, “The King Comes to His Own,” was broadcast — with gentle firmness: 

Sorry you are puzzled by the oratorio. Perhaps you were expecting a purely historical account as one might give of the battle of Waterloo, whereas I was trying to treat it as a religious event which eternally recurs every time it is accepted. Thus the historical fact that the shepherds were shepherds is religiously accidental — the religious fact is that they were the poor and humble of this world for whom at this moment the historical expression is the city-proletariat, and so on with all the other figures. What we know of Herod, for instance, is that he was a Hellenised-Jew and a political ruler. Accordingly I have made him express the intellectual’s eternal objection to Christianity — that it replaces objectivity with subjectivity — and the politician’s eternal objection that it regards the state as having only a negative role. (See Marcus Aurelius.) . . .

I am not the first to treat the Christian data in this way, until the 18th Cent. it was always done, in the Mystery Plays for instance or any Italian paintings. It is only in the last two centuries that religion has been “humanized,” and therefore treated historically as something that happened a long time ago, hence the nursery picture of Jesus in a nightgown and a Parsifal beard.

If a return to the older method now seems startling it is partly because of the acceleration in the rate of historical change due to industrialization — there is a far greater difference between the accidents of life in 1600 AD and in 1942 than between those of 30 AD and 1600. 

That last point is a very shrewd one, and an explanation of why Auden makes such a point of modernizing his narrative: he rarely misses the opportunity to introduce a chronological incongruity, and is not afraid to relish the resulting humor. Here, for instance, is King Herod reflecting on his reign in Judaea: 

Barges are unloading soil fertiliser at the river wharves. Soft drinks and sandwiches may be had in the inns at reasonable prices. Allotment gardening has become popular. The highway to the coast goes straight up over the mountains and the truck-drivers no longer carry guns. Things are beginning to take shape. It is a long time since anyone stole the park benches or murdered the swans. There are children in this province who have never seen a louse, shopkeepers who have never handled a counterfeit coin, women of forty who have never hidden in a ditch except for fun. Yes, in twenty years I have managed to do a little. Not enough, of course. There are villages only a few miles from here where they still believe in witches.There isn’t a single town where a good bookshop would pay. One could count on the fingers of one hand the people capable of solving the problem of Achilles and the Tortoise. Still it is a beginning. In twenty years the darkness has been pushed back a few inches. 

Sayers could not have done this, even if she had wanted to — and she was unlikely to have wanted to. She was tasked with sticking closely to a narrative shape clearly recognizable from the Gospels, and I think she enjoyed that challenge. Auden’s (self-chosen) job was a very different one. But both of them were moved to reflect, and reflect very intelligently, on the ways that the Gospel story demands that we understand it both historically and contemporaneously. It is Then and it is Now. 

November 12, 2025

back to the brothers

Forty years ago, I attended a conference of literature professors at Christian liberal-arts colleges in which the keynote speaker was an esteemed Christian journalist, tasked with giving us advice, I guess. Whatever his task was, he lectured us about our narrow-mindedness, our parochial attitudes, our failure to introduce our students to the most challenging literary masterpieces. Instead of teaching them … well, whatever we did teach them, we should dare to assign Dostoevsky! 

As this harangue went on, the woman sitting next to me — my department chair, as it happened, Beatrice Batson, an impressive Southern lady of the old school who (inexplicably) spoke with the kind of mid-Atlantic accent I associate with Irene Dunne — was steaming. When the lecture finally ended and there was a Q&A session, she stood up and informed the journalist (Sir, pronounced “Suh”) that every student at Wheaton College was required to read The Brothers Karamazov. 

“Oh,” he replied. 

It was true. In the two-course introduction to literature that all Wheaton students were required to take, a teacher could assign either the Iliad or the Odyssey, and the Greek tragedy of one’s choice; and you needed to do some of the Aeneid and the Divine Comedy but not necessarily all of either. But when the nineteenth-century novel rolled around, one had no options: The Brothers Karamazov ended up being the only work of literature that every Wheaton College student, regardless of major, was required to read from cover to cover. 

That edict remained in force for the first twenty years of my Wheaton teaching career, and in those two decades I taught Karamazov at least once each year and sometimes twice. There was a time I knew it better than any book in the world. I began by using this edition: 

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91QcrWXmviL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg

(Despite the testimony of this cover image, the brothers in the novel are not in their fifties.) But when the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation came out and was clearly the Cool New Thing, I switched to that. And that’s the one I know best. The curriculum had changed and my teaching assignments had changed by the time the great Gary Saul Morson’s fierce critique of their work appeared, so I never taught any alternative to P-V. 

When I decided earlier this year that I would teach the book one last time, I thought long and hard about whether to go back to Constance Garnett’s version, which Morson likes, or whether to try a newer translation … but in the end I decided to stick with P-V, in large part because that allowed me to use the greatly-worn, much-annotated copy that I used all those years ago. 

However, I did not realize that a revised version of the translation had appeared in 2021 — and that’s the one the bookstore ordered for my students. If the text had remained the same, I probably would’ve used my old version and identified the page numbers of the key passages for the new edition. But sometimes the actual words are different, dadgummit. (For example, where in the previous version old Karamazov claimed to love his own “wickedness,” in this one he claims to love his own “filth.” I do wonder how many of the changes are responses to Morson’s critique.) So now I’m having to transfer all my annotations and highlights from the old copy to the new, which is tiresome but probably good for me. 

The book is as electrifying as ever, and I am delighted to be immersed in its strange world again. Reports from my journey will be forthcoming over the next few weeks. 

November 10, 2025

the acceleration of misrepresentation

Jesse Singal posted the other day about an academic named Peter Coviello who denounced David Brooks for saying something silly when in fact Brooks was outlining a position that he disagrees with. (Follow the link for the details). Singal says, 

Either Coviello has a real reading comprehension problem — one that would pose genuine challenges to his ability to write about anything — or he’s a transparently disingenuous writer and thinker. I’m not sure which is worse. 

I think what’s going on here is something more specific. My guess is that Coviello thought (a) David Brooks is a conservative and (b) this dumb dismissal of Foucault is just what a conservative would say. I think that also helps to account for the gleefully mocking tone of Coviello’s essay: though he claims to have “all but committed to memory” Brooks’s column, it seems more likely that as soon as he got the one sentence that fit his pre-existing caricature of conservative thinking he effectively stopped reading and certainly stopped thinking. 

This is a very common phenomenon. 

Recently the Telegraph of London did a kind of exposé of the BBC’s political biases, focusing on (among other things) a documentary that aired just before last November’s Presidential election. In it, Donald Trump’s words on January 6, 2021 were carefully edited and spliced to connect phrases that were not connected in his speech and to alter the timing of those words. When confronted with these facts, 

Deborah Turness, the chief executive of BBC News, even tried to justify the doctoring of the Trump speech, telling a meeting of the broadcaster’s standards committee that it was fine because it broadly reflected the truth about Trump’s actions. 

After all, it’s the kind of thing he would say. 

Similarly, in 2024, when it was pointed out to J. D. Vance that there had actually been no reports of Haitian immigrants in Springfield killing and eating people’s pets, he replied, 

If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do…. I didn’t create 20,000 illegal migrants coming into Springfield thanks to Kamala Harris’ policies. Her policies did that. But yes, we created the actual focus that allowed the American media to talk about this story and the suffering caused by Kamala Harris’ policies. 

Maybe the Haitian immigrants didn’t kill and eat pets, but it’s the kind of thing they would do, or might do, and it calls attention to real problems. In short, “it broadly reflected the truth” about Haitian immigrants in America. 

To be sure, the BBC’s reports came much closer to reflecting the truth about Trump than Vance’s lie-spreading did to teaching Americans about Haitian immigrants; but all the parties mentioned above are on a down escalator to the sub-basement, and once you step onto that device it’s extremely difficult to get off.

If you report that someone said X, not because she said X, but rather because X seems broadly consistent with what you take her views to be, then X becomes your new baseline for interpreting her. Then if someone tells you she said something much more extreme, say 2X, well, that’s plausible, isn’t it? After all, she said X, you remember that. And now 2X is the new baseline, so when you hear that she said 3X…. And before too long the escalator dumps you off in the sub-basement, where you’ll say anything at all about those you believe to be your Repugnant Cultural Other, because, after all, you have so much evidence against them. 

November 5, 2025

Tot

I’ve tried all the major note-taking apps in the Apple ecosystem. For some years, starting more than a decade ago, I used Simplenote, then Drafts, then Bear. I used Ulysses for a while, though that’s really more of a text editor than a notes app. Obsidian, yep. Notion, yep. I tried Day One to take notes as well as keep a journal. I even tried Apple’s own Notes app, though I hate everything about it, starting with its ugly yellow color. Etc. (I’m not naming them all, so do not write me to ask “Have you tried … ?” Whatever it is, the answer is Yes: I have tried it.) My favorite was Notational Velocity, in its original form — I dislike all the supposedly more capable forks of it. 

After a long while, I finally came to realize that what all note-taking applications have in common, what they primarily feature, is for me a bug. What they all offer is a place to store text — and in some cases images, though that starts to take us into Everything Bucket territory. And yes, I’ve tried all the Everything Bucket apps as well, starting with Evernote and then moving to Yojimbo and then DEVONThink — among others. 

Anyway: the promise of the note-taking app is that you can jot down or copy bits of text, put them in folders or add tags or employ some other way to organize them, and then retrieve them later. But I didn’t retrieve them later. I dutifully tagged them and then … almost always forgot about them. If I happened to remember, then I could do a quick search and easily find them, but that was a rare event. Thus, the fact that all my little scraps of text were present and searchable did me no good at all. If I could have asked an app “Look through the hundreds of items in your database and find the five that would be of greatest interest to me right now,” and gotten a useful answer — well, then that app would have been tremendously useful to me. But technology hasn’t reached that point.

So for years I just kept on adding notes to apps and then forgetting about them. Lord knows what brilliant ideas of mine are hidden away in those now-neglected apps, because I have no idea how to search for them. I would just have to take time out to scroll through note after note after note, which of course makes the whole tagging-and-organizing thing pointless. 

My search for a proper notes app ended when I realized that what virtually all notes apps do is counterproductive for me. The answer, for me, turned out to be Tot. Tot is beautiful, simple, limited in its formatting possibilities, easy of access on all my devices, and — this is the absolutely essential thing — it allows me to make seven notes. Seven. That’s it.

What that means for me is this: when I want to store a chunk of text, written by me or by others, I put it in Tot. But then, after a few days, I’ve run out of storage spots. So then I take a look at my most recent additions to Tot and ask myself: What do I want to do with this? I can put it in a micro.blog post, put it in a post for this blog, create a draft of an essay containing it, add some task associated with it to my Reminders list, or delete it. Tot’s limitations force me into that decision, and for me that’s ideal. Textual things don’t just disappear into the depths of a database: they have to be dealt with, so I deal with them. Productive resistance for the win, once again! 

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