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The Homebound Symphony

Stagger onward rejoicing

Tag: housekeeping (page 1 of 2)

May 3, 2024

P.S.A.

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

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

January 15, 2024

looking ahead

Lately I’ve been posting in How to Think mode — HTT as the tag here calls it: I’ve been writing about various common-all-too-common errors in reasoning and how they might be avoided. But I’m about to change direction for a while. 

When I was a young faculty member at Wheaton College, a college that prides itself on “the integration of faith and learning,” I quickly realized that there was a fundamental mismatch between my knowledge of my academic discipline, which was fairly sophisticated, and my understanding of the Christian faith, which was woefully underdeveloped. I was only 25 years old when I began teaching at Wheaton; I had not grown up in a Christian home and indeed had only been a Christian for around five years; I had a lot to learn. But at least I grasped that point. 

And I was richly blessed in my neighbors, for I worked in the same building with Mark Noll, Roger Lundin, Bob Webber, and Arthur Holmes, among others. I relentlessly peppered them with questions, and especially sought recommendations for books I could read to give me an adequate understanding of the full range of Christian thought. I did not understand that I was asking for something that I couldn’t achieve in a lifetime. Gradually it dawned on me that Christian thinking about the arts and humanities was richer and deeper and more extensive than I could have imagined; and then, also gradually, my scholarship and non-scholarly writing too became more and more informed by and rooted in that great and complex tradition. 

My experience was somewhat like that of the Methodist theologian Thomas Oden, who when invited to teach and write about pastoral care could but draw on what little he knew about then-contemporary models of psychological counseling. It was only when he asked himself whether Christians, who had been doing pastoral care for 2000 years, might know a little bit about the subject that he began the great series of books on pastoral theology for which he is best remembered. Like me, Oden discovered that the Christian tradition in his chosen field was more extensive and powerful than he had anticipated, and he drank deeply from the well of that tradition for the rest of his life. 

Well, for me one thing led to another, and I now have one of the longest job titles in the American academy: the Jim and Sharon Harrod Endowed Chair of Christian Thought and Distinguished Professor of the Humanities in the Honors Program. The second half of that title I’ve had for a decade now; the first half is new. I am pleased and honored and excited by the prospect of becoming an official advocate for the great Christian tradition that I have been talking about in this post. 

Partly because of this new role, and partly by accident, I am this semester — for the first time, in a teaching career that now exceeds forty years — teaching only Christian writers. (I have had many semesters in which I didn’t teach any Christian writers at all, though usually there’s been a mix.) I am teaching, for Baylor’s Great Texts program, a course called Great Texts in Christian Spirituality; and I am teaching a new course, one I designed to express my chief interests as the new Harrod Chair: The Christian Renaissance of the Twentieth Century. 

The new course is devoted to exploring the extraordinary outburst of distinctively Christian creativity — in all the arts and humanities — that occurred especially in the first half of the twentieth century, but has continued in certain forms ever since. It is a ridiculously ambitious and indefensibly wide-ranging course, since we will look (sometimes briefly, sometimes in detail) at painting, architecture, music, literature, philosophy, philosophy, and filmmaking. Basically we’ll go from G. K. Chesterton and Jacques Maritain to Marilynne Robinson, Arvo Pärt, and Terrence Malick. (Though as it happens, on Day One we’ll discuss Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil.) It’s gonna be utterly insane, and also, I think, a lot of fun. I hope to learn much in this first iteration that I can apply when I teach the course again — and I hope to teach it every year, student interest permitting. 

Between that course and the Christian Spirituality one — which will go from the Didache and Maximus Confessor to Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm — I will have on my mind, for the next few months, an vast agglomeration of works in Christian theology, philosophy, and all the arts. There will be a lot to process, and this here blog is where I do much of my processing, so — if you like that kind of thing, then this will be the kind of thing you like. If not … well, sorry about that. 

December 31, 2023

Who’s Counting?

I’m not doing an end-of-year roundup of what I’ve written this year, or what I’ve read, or what I’ve watched, or what I’ve listened to, or where I’ve traveled, or the museums I’ve visited, or the concerts I’ve attended – that last one because I didn’t attend any concerts in 2023, not even Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. But I’m not writing up any of that other stuff because I don’t know: don’t know how many books I’ve read, movies I’ve seen, etc. etc. I couldn’t tell you what the most-read posts on this blog are because I don’t have analytics enabled. I don’t know what my Top Ten Books of the Year are because I just don’t think that way.

I used to; when I was a teenager I kept a list of the Ten Best Books I’ve Ever Read and every time I read a book I felt obliged to sit down and think about whether it broke the top ten – and if so, where did it belong? (Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End reigned unchallenged at the top for quite some time – and then I read Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed.) But then after a few years I realized that some of the books that meant the most to me were, unaccountably, not on the list; while some books that I had put on the list … I squirmed just seeing the titles. And the whole business was so much work. I now think of the day I crumpled up the sheet and threw it in the trash as my first real step towards maturity as a reader.

But it took me a lot longer to rid myself of that year-end feeling of accountability, of the calendar-turning responsibility to make a report. Now that I’ve put all that behind me, it seems odd that I ever felt the pressure to report.

Micro.blog has a great feature called Bookshelves, which I often – though not altogether consistently – use to note what I’m reading, less for myself than for those who ask. You can note what you want to read – which I never do, because I read at whim – what you’re currently reading, and what you’ve finished reading. But there are (blessedly) no dates on that page I just linked to, only book covers. I could figure out how many of those books I read in a given year, but I never have and never will. And in any case those three categories are insufficient: something important is missing.

I am inspired by my buddy Austin Kleon’s list of the books he didn’t read this year, the idea for which, he says, he got from John Warner. Inspired not to do that, exactly, but some year – not this year, mind you – to make a list of Books I Abandoned This Year.

I think one of the most interesting things you can do as a reader is to sit down and think about why you abandon a book, when that happens to you. Many, many pages in my notebooks discuss just this question. Over the years I gradually came to an awareness: the kinds of book I am most likely to abandon are history and theology; the kinds I am least likely to abandon are novels and biographies. It turns out that while I am deeply interested in both history and theology, my mind needs a human story to hook itself to. (Thus the great narrative historians, like Gibbon and C. V. Wedgwood, command my attention in precisely the same way that novels and biographies do.) Novels and biographies raise certain questions for me that I pursue by mining works of history and theology for information and insight, which means that I read quite a bit of history and theology; I just don’t read those books from beginning to end. I don’t read them the way I read narratives.

If you ask yourself why you’re abandoning a book you can learn a lot about your own intellectual habits, preferences, needs. The books you don’t finish can be even more important to you than the ones you do, if you learn to inquire into your own responses. And that’s one reason why I don’t make these year-end lists: they tell a misleading story.

And I’ve only noted one of the ways they mislead: What about short stories and poems and essays and even blog posts? In any given year, those short-form genres may shape your thoughts and feelings, may contribute to your flourishing, more than any work that happens to be book-length. One of Pascal’s pensées or one Psalm may matter more than a dozen books.

A few years ago, I started the practice of taking one hour each week to reflect on what I read and wrote in the previous seven days; and one morning each month to reflect on what I read and wrote in the previous month. I think that has been infinitely better for my intellectual and spiritual orientation than any year-end list could be. Something to consider, maybe?

A blessed new year to you, to me, and to this poor wounded world. 

UPDATE 2024–12–31: In the year since I’ve posted this, I’ve found myself thinking of another reason to avoid year-end lists. As I have often said, some of the most important reading experiences of my life have been re-readings — coming back to a book for a second or third or fourth time. Ditto with movies and records. But if you’re making a list and checking it twice obsessively, then you just might not need the impulse to re-read, re-watch, re-listen. To return to something that means a lot to you is to forego the chance to add a new item to your list, and if you’re a list-maker, that’s a tough call to make. But if you’re not counting, then you can obey the call to revisit — which, IMO, is often an important call to heed. 

December 4, 2023

Future Mann

I don’t know how many people read my recent series of posts on Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers — but then, I don’t know how many people read any of my posts, because I don’t have analytics enabled on this site. I always write under the assumption that I have somewhere between 40 and 50 readers. Anyway, I have been reading much more by and about Thomas Mann, focusing especially on the decade he lived in America — the 1940s, more or less — and have been fascinated by the ways that that period of Mann’s life, and what he wrote and spoke in those years, connects with the major themes of my own writing. So I will be returning to Herr Mann.

But not immediately. I have classes to finish, and then between now and the end of January I’ll be trying to finish a draft of my “biography” of Paradise Lost. So I’ll be setting aside my work on Mann in the interests of Getting Things Done, and in the coming weeks blogging will be inconsistent and desultory, though there will be, as always, a drizzle of links and images at my micro.blog page.

July 14, 2023

my new title

I ain’t going nowhere. I’m still here at Baylor’s Honors College, and I’ll continue, mostly, to do what I’ve been doing. But I have a new job title, and I want to explain what that means for me.

My new title, which is sorta bolted on to the old one, is – and I’m gonna need to take a deep breath here – the Jim and Sharon Harrod Chair of Christian Thought and Distinguished Professor of the Humanities in the Honors Program of Baylor University. That, friends, is a mouthful and no mistake.

When I was invited to apply for this newly-created position, I hesitated. I hesitated simply because I love the humanities – all the disciplines of humanistic learning, and all the ways they interact with one another – and I love the idea of professing a body of learning, a way of thinking, that is so often neglected, despised, and, by many of its soi-disant adherents, betrayed. I liked my old job title; through it I could stand for something I want to stand for. I didn’t want to give it up. (As it turns out, I get to keep it! – but I didn’t at the outset know how Baylor would handle the whole business.)

That said, I have also spent much of my career trying to demonstrate to readers the enduring power and relevance of the 2000-year history of Christian thought. My first book was largely about W. H. Auden’s discovery of the richness of that complicated and sometimes contradictory tradition; my second monograph tried to imagine how the challenges of literary reading and interpretation could be navigated with the aid of Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana (297–426 AD). And I have gone on in this vein ever since, as best I’ve been able. I hope to continue as long as I can.

I’ll be giving an inaugural lecture at some point in the coming year, and I’ll probably post it here.

Also, I’ve been talking with my bosses, Doug Henry and Elizabeth Corey, about a signature course for the chair – or at least a course that suits the ways I can exemplify the character and the purpose of the chair, and honor the generosity of the Harrods. (Some later holder of the chair, from some discipline other than mine, will surely do something totally different.) To conclude this post, here’s my initial sketch:

The Christian Renaissance of the 20th Century

By the end of the 19th century, close observers of elite culture were confident that Christianity was soon to be dead – at least among the artists and intellectuals of the Western world. Those observers were wrong. The twentieth century witnessed a great intellectual and artistic flourishing among Christians, a flourishing that altered the entire cultural landscape of the Western world. In this class we will explore this signal development. Figures studied may include:

  • Writers of fiction: J. R. R. Tolkien, Flannery O’Connor, Shūsaku Endō
  • Poets: T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Geoffrey Hill
  • Composers: Olivier Messiaen, Arvo Pärt, John Tavener
  • Philosophers: Jacques Maritain, G. M. Anscombe, Alvin Plantinga
  • Theologians: Karl Barth, Simone Weil, C. S. Lewis
  • Visual artists: Georges Rouault, Arcabas, Mako Fujimura
  • Filmmakers: Robert Bresson, Terrence Malick, Martin Scorsese

The goal here is not to give a comprehensive survey — that would be too vast a challenge for one course — but rather to understand how Christian thinkers and artists changed, and are still changing, our cultural world.

(Obviously I could replace all of those figures with others and still make the thing work; the multitude of choices just shows how vast in scope this renaissance has been.)

April 2, 2023

adjustments

As many of my readers will know, I am continually fiddling around with my online presence, to such a degree that I try my own patience. The one element that’s fixed is my newsletter, which (IMHO) has a clear identity and purpose. I always know when something I’ve come across will be a fit for the newsletter. 

Deciding how to use my micro.blog page has been a bit more of a challenge, but in recent months I have settled on what strikes me as a good approach: It’s a kind of journal, with photos and links to what I’m reading and listening to. And that’s all. 

Everything else goes here — but what should that “everything else” be? As I’ve been mulling this over, I’ve come to two conclusions: 

  1. I share too much nasty stuff. I’ve become like those Geico raccoons: “This is terrible, you gotta try it.” No more of that. You can find plenty to alarm and disgust you elsewhere. I need to remember my own tagline for this blog. That doesn’t mean that I won’t write about unpleasant topics, but … 
  2. Whether pleasant or unpleasant, the stuff I share — if it’s worth sharing at all — needs more commentary than I typically give it. So I’m going to try to post less often but in more detail. Maybe only a couple of posts per week, but I want them to be more like essays that offhand comments. 

Let’s see how well I keep my resolutions! 

UPDATE: A reader has rightly questioned my comment about “nasty stuff.” Not the best phrase for what I mean, which is “current events that call for critique or denunciation.” So many people are already in the critique-and-denunciation game, I don’t need to add to their number. (That said, my next major post will be, um, a critique and denunciation. Oh well.) 

March 20, 2023

slight return

I’m back! — well, partially. Posting will be light for a while. But I certainly learned that for me micro.blog works best as a place to post images and sounds (and to make note of books I’m reading).  

March 10, 2023

hiatus

Heads up, friends: I’ll be taking a break from this blog in order to work on several projects — some essay-length, one (or maybe two) book-length — that my daily commentary here has been distracting me from.

But while I’m away from here, I’ll be more active than usual at my micro.blog page, because links and images that I would ordinarily post here I’ll be posting there. The plus for you, dear readers, of my relocating to micro.blog is that there you can subscribe to a weekly digest of my posts.

And of course my weekly newsletter will continue. 

January 17, 2023

trouble

IMG 1267

I’ve got a few posts queued up, but I am expecting serious disruption in service next week — like, a Southwest-Airlines-over-the-holidays level of disruption — thanks to the creature pictured above. His name is Angus. My one quiet time of the day, in the early morning with my coffee and my RSS feed, is quiet no longer. It will take us all a while to adjust. 

I’m just stating, not complaining. He is pretty darn adorable. 

IMG 9246

December 30, 2022

removals: a few year-endish thoughts

One: I don’t do year-end lists, and I typically don’t read those of others. (Those of you who write them: Please forgive me!) I make note of books I’ve read, music I’ve listened to, and movies I’ve watched, but I do it in my paper planner. I like seeing my aesthetic experiences in their Lebenswelt: I watched The Awful Truth after making steak frites for my family; I read Trickster Makes This World while our floors were being refinished. To take those experiences out of those contexts seems, to me, to transform them into mere calculations. (I also record some of these experiences on my micro.blog page, but I’m not super-disciplined about it.) 

This means that I also never have any idea how many books I’ve read or movies I’ve watched in any given period of time; and of course if I’m not keeping track of that, I can’t have any “reading goals.” And I don’t want any reading goals: it’s a matter of, again, the And Then What? problem. Some books should be savored — read slowly, meditated on, returned to — but if I’ve made it my goal to read X number of books or watch Z number of movies, then I won’t give such works the time they ask of me. I’ll rush through them so I can mark them off my list and move on to The Next Thing. 

Two: There’s some good stuff in the Guardian, but there’s also a lot of incurious leftist reflexiveness, and, moreover, a pervasive (almost obsessive) anti-Americanism. I don’t mean critiques of American politics and American culture — Lord knows we deserve all of that we get, and more — but a kind of newspaper-wide tic, an inability to resist mocking and sneering at anyone and anything American, even when America and Americans have nothing to do with the subject at hand. (There’s a lot of that in the paper’s sports section.) At some point this year I got sick of it and simply removed every Guardian feed from my RSS reader. And you know what? I didn’t miss it. Not for one second.  

This got me thinking about what I read and listen to by mere habit, even though I am frustrated by it. I decided to do a reverse Marie Kondo and ask, “Does this spark annoyance?” I went through my RSS feeds and deleted many more sites; I started realizing how many podcasts I subscribe to through an obscure feeling of duty but don’t really want to listen to. So let’s say I listen to one of them: and then what? Listen to some more just to cross them off my list? Why? I deleted a bunch of those subscriptions too. 

Three: I made it through another year, my third in a row, without getting on an airplane. My wife, who has to fly several times a year, has commented that not only have passengers stopped wearing masks, they now don’t even cover their mouths when they cough — they’ve descended into a kind of barbarism. On her last trip she didn’t contract Covid, but she did pick up RSV and had a cough for a month. Passengers behaving badly, airline staff undertrained and impatient, delays and cancellations rampant, security theater now in its third decade of mindlessness … Why would I ever voluntarily subject myself to this kind of crap? 

I do hope to travel overseas again, someday, and when I do I’ll gladly get on a plane. But I’m now seriously wondering if I can simply not fly within the U.S. any more, and drive whenever I need to get somewhere. The problem with this, of course, is that I live deep in the heart of Texas, and it is one hell of a long way to anywhere else. On the other hand, it’s a two-day drive from most places in this country I’d ever have a need to visit. (It’s almost exactly the same distance from Waco to Washington D.C. and to Los Angeles.)

I’ve twice made the drive to and from Charlottesville, VA, and while it’s no fun having to stop in a hotel overnight, I do enjoy the scenery, the thinking time, even the occasional audiobook (typically not my thing, but enjoyable on a long drive). And it’s nice simply to throw whatever I think I might need into the car, not worrying about having to go through security and getting sneezed on by strangers. Maybe it’s time for me to read Matt Crawford’s book on driving and embrace “the philosophy of the open road.” 

So, you’ll note, 2022 was at least partly a year of removals, of excisions. I didn’t mean to, I didn’t plan to, but I eliminated a lot of noise, and therefore a lot of frustration. It has felt good, and I want to do more of the same in 2023. 

October 28, 2022

this blog’s mission statement

Auden, from “The Garrison”:

Whoever rules, our duty to the City
is loyal opposition, never greening
for the big money, never neighing after
a public image.
 
Let us leave rebellions to the choleric
who enjoy them: to serve as a paradigm
now of what a plausible Future might be
is what we’re here for.

September 25, 2022

name change

I decided to change the name of this blog, for reasons that should be clear from recent and future posts. But ICYMI, the namesake post of the blog is here. 

The newsletter will continue to be called Snakes & Ladders. I like the idea of the two endeavors having different names. 

August 23, 2022

heads up

Might be kinda quiet around here for a few days — I (finally) have Covid, and feel like a dim bulb. A stuffy, achy, coughy dim bulb. Though if it gets no worse than this I will think I got off fairly easy. 

I hope the posts earlier today about Oliver Sacks and (especially) Fred Buechner are reasonably clear, though I might not be the best judge of that. 

One more thing: I can’t be absolutely precise about the timing because I don’t have access to a 1982 University of Virginia academic calendar, but: I taught my first class forty years ago this week. Which is an anniversary to remember. 

Okay, TTFN. 

August 12, 2022

heads up

I’ve got a number of brief quote-posts queued up for the next week, and a couple of slightly longer ones, but I won’t be around. I’m off Monday for a brief writing retreat, to see if I can finish a complete draft of my “biography” of Paradise Lost … which has been fun to write but also immensely challenging. It occurred to me the other day that if I had to rewrite the book using nothing I have used so far — none of the facts about Milton’s life, none of the quotations from Paradise Lost, none of the references to later readers and writers — I could easily do it. That’s how much material there is to draw on. And I have to keep the whole thing to 50,000 words! 

July 1, 2022

annoyance

I like Independent Publisher, the WordPress theme you’re looking at, but I’m not crazy about it. I prefer Davis, the theme I was using before — but Davis just underwent an update that undid the custom CSS I was using to tweak it. Davis does something that many themes do, something indefensible and unforgivable: it renders all block quotes in italics. This is stupid, because sometimes such quotations contain italics of their own, which are wiped out by the CSS. Typically, it’s possible to use the Custom CSS feature in WordPress to fix things like that, and in the past I did that — but this new update has made the theme impervious to such changes. No matter what CSS I add, the theme ignores it. So I am back to Independent Publisher, which is … okay. Fine, I guess.

The whole situation is yet another reminder of how frustrating life in the indie web world can be if you don’t possess the tools you need to Do It Yourself. I really really don’t have the time to learn how to write my own WordPress theme … but that’s probably what I should do. Sigh.

Of course, another alternative would be to leave WordPress altogether for an alternative platform, but I suspect that will have to wait until I retire. Because that is a big job.

May 24, 2022

brief hiatus

This seems like a good time to go silent for a few days — to pray in silence. I’ll be back, probably next week. 

May 3, 2022

the glazing of eyes

The older I get, the more common this experience becomes: finding that I am simply unable to read essays and articles on certain topics. I may, out of a sense of duty, begin to read something on these topics, but almost immediately my eyes begin to wander, or to glaze over. I strive to refocus; I re-read the same few sentences; but before long my mind has wandered elsewhere. Eventually I give up.

I used to be able to read about some of these things, but the way The Discourse asymptotically approaches the point of absolute stupidity — a stupidity than which no stupider can be conceived — has now rendered my brain dysfunctional w/r/t the following:

  • Critical race theory
  • Trans issues
  • Productivity
  • Burnout
  • The New Right
  • Denominational break-ups and church splits
  • Elon Musk
  • And, now of course, abortion (The Discourse around which has always been brain-dead, but was usually avoidable)

That is of course only a partial list, but it seems to cover about 90% of what I’m seeing in news periodicals these days.

One nice feature of Feedbin is the ability to create actions based on filters. So, for instance, I have just created an action to set any new article that contains the word “abortion” as read; that way it won’t show up in my “unread” feed, which is the only feed I look at. A couple of weeks ago I created a similar action for the term “Elon Musk”; I had already targeted posts that have “Burnout” or “Productivity” in their titles — if the Bad Words are not in the actual title then maybe their use in the text is innocuous. We’ll see how it goes; I’ll adjust as necessary. Keeping my sanity requires constant vigilance — unless I want to go offline altogether, which, believe me, I often consider.

On the other side, things I find that I want to read more about these days:

  • China, present and past, especially religion in China
  • Daoism
  • Anarchism
  • Infrastructure
  • Materials science
  • Scientific innovation, especially regarding climate-change mitigation
  • Water, and places where it is (a) scarce or (b) overabundant
  • Late antiquity in the West
  • … and one more topic I’ll talk about in a future post.

Mainly, though, I want to read more novels.

[I thought I had this post scheduled to go out tomorrow, but obviously I messed up. Consider this, then, a proleptic disclosure of the eschaton.]

April 25, 2022

this and that

I am working on some things that will (I hope) be significant additions to my Invitation & Repair project, but those are taking a while to develop. It’s getting near the end of the semester and such times are always busy and stressful, so opportunity for reflection is currently a bit scarce. 

Whenever I see something online that I think I want to read, I put it in Instapaper — and then I try to leave it for a while. Often when I visit Instapaper the chief thing I do is delete the pieces I only had thought I needed to read. So for me it’s not just a read-later service, it’s a don’t-read-later service. But that only works if I don’t go there too often. I try to catch up with my Instapaper queue once a week at most. 

One of the most essential tips for researchers and writers: revisit and review. It’s not enough to make notes — however you prefer to make them — you have to set aside time to review what you’ve written and find the most important stuff. Some items might be recycled through several review sessions before finding a place in your writing. All serious thinking is iterative. My first task, once the current school term ends, is to revisit some of the key tags on this blog to see what connections I’ve missed, what ideas bear further development. 

Late to this, but my friend Richard Gibson has a smart and provocative piece at the Hog Blog on maps, territories, and Ukraine. 

“We cannot be His ambassadors reconciling the world to God, if we have not ourselves been willing to be reconciled to one another.” — Lesslie Newbigin.  

I am alarmed by how dramatically the quality of writing in the New York Review of Books has declined since Robert Silvers’s death. Essay after essay seems structurally disordered or filled with confusing sentences or simply lacking in clear purpose. People always said that Silvers was an editorial genius and I’m ever more inclined to believe the praise. 

The best punditry strategy: Claiming that the people you hate are scheming to destroy your audience. If they do what you predict, you rejoice in your status as prophet; if they don’t, you claim credit for having sounded the warning that averted the catastrophe. 

“A leading television commentator lectured me that I presumed to judge the experience of the world from the viewpoint of my own limited Soviet and prison-camp experience. Indeed, how true! Life and death, imprisonment and hunger, the cultivation of the soul despite the captivity of the body: how very limited that is compared to the bright world of political parties, yesterday’s numbers on the stock exchange, amusements without end, and exotic foreign travel!” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as quoted in a brilliant essay by Gary Saul Morson. (His excellence hasn’t been lessened by Silvers’s departure from the scene.) 

April 8, 2022

scatterings

A few brief notes:

You’re seeing more posts about movies these days because I have a couple of long-term projects in mind that concern cinematic art, especially things made in the middle third of the 20th century. I am having a lot of fun watching!  

Related: Remember to explore this blog using the tags, like this one: #movies. Also, a couple of years ago I wrote a summary of this blog’s chief themes with links to the most important tags: see that here. 

I use micro.blog almost exclusively for two things: photos and a record of the books I’m reading. (I love micro.blog and would post there exclusively except that I have fifteen years of tagged posts here.) If you’re interested in those little things, you can subscribe to a weekly digest of my posts here — though you should know that while I am an enthusiastic photographer I am not a skilled one. The digest goes out every Friday afternoon. 

It still feels very weird to me to offer the opportunity to support this blog financially via Buy Me a Coffee (see the link above). But I’m doing it, because I really like writing here and feel that I can genuinely explore ideas in ways not easily done in other media, and I need to make my writing here financially defensible if I possibly can. Recently I added the possibility of monthly or annual memberships — which feels even weirder, but … I am so grateful for any and all support.  

My Laity Lodge retreat with Sara Hendren filled up in 24 hours! My regrets to those who wanted to but could not register — maybe there will be a second edition at some point in the future. 

Adam Roberts’s translation of the Lord of the Rings rhyme into Latin is fun. I think the line “In terra Mordoris tenebrosissima” is especially melodious. I’m going around the house chanting it under my breath. 

I think my three recent posts on neighborliness — one and two and three — add up to something, though I’m not wholly sure just what. 

I had cause today to remember that of all the essays I have published — more than a hundred now, I guess — the one that best encapsulates what I believe and what I care about is this one: “Filth Therapy.” 

March 3, 2022

Screen Shot 2022 03 03 at 7 37 41 AM

Took me this long to get it in two. Will I ever get it in one? Doubtful. 

January 4, 2022

why?

Let me just say a bit more about why I’m doing this Buy Me a Dragon thing. My thinking can be condensed into three simple points.

First: I’ve never been able to get published the things I am most interested in writing. I do not blame editors for this – they are professionally required to think of what won’t lose money, or what fits with their periodical’s mission and purpose, or what the people above them in the hierarchy will tolerate. And look, I’m a pro at this game – I have rarely even asked editors to publish my less marketable thoughts. I have trimmed my sails appropriately in advance. (Though I remember with great delight the rare exceptions – for instance, when John Wilson warmly agreed to let me write a 30th-anniversary essay on Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos. That was a red-letter day for me.) But…

Second: I have been thinking a lot about this from the English novelist M. John Harrison: “The idea you have when you’re young, to reach the edge of what can be done with your abilities and find out what might happen if you went past it? You promise yourself you’ll try but then wake up fifty years later to discover that you were in fact always too sensible to push things until they fell over, in case people thought less of you. In your seventies, though, it doesn’t seem to matter any more what other people think. That’s probably the first phase of your life in which you can actually do what you want. And certainly the last.” I’m still several years from my seventies … but I’m ready to be in that frame of mind now. And this blog may be the only venue where such exploration — as Eliot said, “Old men ought to be explorers” — is possible for me. 

Third: I have been genuinely moved by the messages I received from people when I suspended this blog last month, and by what they have written on my Buy Me a Coffee page. I had no idea that this blog meant anything to more than a dozen people. This recent encouragement has given me heart to resume my writing here – after a period in which I felt it was a completely pointless activity.

So that, in sum, is why I’m here. Buy Me a Coffee allows me to continue this work that’s meaningful to me without feeling that I’m losing money. It allows me to get paid — some, anyway — for what I really really want (and on some level need) to write. And that’s a wonderful feeling. So massive thanks to all who have supported me in this endeavor. 

January 1, 2022

Buy Me a Dragon

If you look to the top of this page, you’ll see something new: a Buy Me a Dragon link. Now, before we go any further, let me just say that I do not actually plan to buy a dragon, unless, of course, you are more likely to support my writing if you think I am going to buy a dragon, in which case, yes, I will definitely buy a dragon or two, or three … once I have enough coin. (Then perhaps I can poll my supporters on which city to destroy first.)

Anyway, let me explain: The self-suspension of my blog last month had two major results. First, it showed me how much blogging helps me to think – to order my ideas, to see them in relation to my earlier writings and the writings of others. Second, I got so many lovely responses from people who like the blog that I was encouraged to think that my work here has some value to people other than me.

But, you know, I don’t get paid for this. And that does affect my decisions about what and where to write, largely because – I need to be vague about this – certain members of my family need my support. Writing essays for publication rather than blogging would at least give me the chance to earn some money, but at the cost of depriving me of this little Thought Lab. (This is something I will say more about in a later post.)

So I have decided to turn to you, my readers. The Buy Me a Coffee service allows you to contribute to this curious online project, and, ideally, make it permanently sustainable. I could of course start a Substack, but that’s not a good fit for the kind of writing I plan to do. (If you want to know more about why I say that, read this.) And Patreon doesn’t seem like the right fit either, for someone who’s not doing a job full-time – if I were a musician or a painter or even a freelance journalist, then maybe; but I’m none of those things.

Buy Me a Coffee allows you to support this blog whenever you feel like it, in smaller or larger amounts. It feels low-pressure, for you and for me. But of course, the more support I get through that conduit the easier it will be for me to focus on the kind of writing I do here, which I enjoy so much. I am especially eager to resume work on my Invitation and Repair project.

Please help me out if you can, and if you can’t or choose not to, thank you for reading. This will continue to be on the open web for all to see.

Oh, and I will keep writing books, and my Snakes & Ladders newsletter too.

December 28, 2021

here I am again

Well, my abandonment of this blog lasted less than a month. Here’s why, in a word: tags. When I decided to move quotes and links, as well as photos, to my micro.blog page, I forgot that I have been tagging my posts here for a long time, and that anything I post to micro.blog, where that tagging system doesn’t exist, will certainly be forgotten and will probably become effectively irretrievable. And anything worth posting is worth finding. So I am going to be posting quotes and links here where I can read and use them later. I’ll continue to use micro.blog for photos. 

I still plan to take an extended break from blogging as such, that is, from using this site to develop my own thoughts. But I now think that someday I will return to real blogging here. That’s largely because of all the kind messages I got after I announced my hiatus. It turns out that people read what I write here and profit from it. Who knew? (Certainly not me! I estimate that 95% of the messages I have received about the site over the years have been significantly or harshly critical. I really didn’t think that more than a dozen people read this site and liked it.) 

December 28, 2021

reviews and essays, hidden

I have reposted here on this site a number of my essays and reviews, originally published elsewhere, that I’d like to preserve:

I’ll update this post whenever I add more essays, which I expect to do from time to time.

December 4, 2021

heads up

I’ve been re-thinking my approach to blogging, and here’s my decision: 

  1. Blogging has been rather parasitic on my essay-writing, so for the rest of this year and all of 2022 I am putting this blog on hiatus. We’ll see if that will help me to write more essays. Right now I’m working on one about anarchism. 
  2. I will continue to issue my weekly newsletter. 
  3. I will use my micro.blog, which for some time I have devoted only to photos, as a kind of online scrapbook, with links to interesting articles — including ones written by me — and brief commentary thereon. (I also my use it to record at least some of the books I read because micro.blog has a nice Bookshelf feature.)  

See y’all at micro.blog! — and, I hope, elsewhere. 

October 22, 2021

hiatus

This will be my last post on this blog in 2021: I’m shutting down for the rest of the year. I’ll revisit things in January to see if I want to resume. 

In the meantime, I’ll still be doing my weekly newsletter and my utterly-boring-to-everyone-except-me photo blog. 

August 23, 2021

bookmarking

Since 2009, I’ve been keeping my bookmarks online in service called Pinboard. It’s a service that displays your bookmarks — with tags and text excerpts, both very important for me — in a simple and readable form. Obviously I wouldn’t have used it for so long if I didn’t like it, but two things have consistently bothered me. One is that it has never had a responsive design: though some gestures in that direction have been made recently, if you want to look at your bookmarks in a mobile device your best option is to manually add the letter “m” and a period before the URL. The other says more about me than about Pinboard: I bookmark too many pages. Way too many pages. The result has been that I forget almost everything that I have there, including the things that I really want to remember. Yes, search is available, but when faced with a wilderness of bookmarks it can be difficult, for me anyway, even to understand what to search for.

Nevertheless, when, a few months ago, the owner of Pinboard asked longtime users to make a contribution to the ongoing maintenance of the site, I agreed to do so. After all, I had paid once, twelve years ago, and had been using the site ever since. It seemed a reasonable request. But then, very soon afterward, I started having problems with the site and wrote to ask for assistance. Those emails have not been answered. I have to say, it’s just a little bit annoying to have tech support fall silent right after you give the company money, but this is the world we live in. Still, despite my stoic resignation, it struck me that this was an opportunity for me to rethink my bookmarking practices. After all, as Manton Reece reminds us, “The only web site that you can trust to last and have your interests at heart is the web site with your name on it.” Pinboard is on the open web but it could still disappear today and I would have no recourse.

So here’s my plan: I will bookmark-with-excerpts less often, but when it happens it’ll happen here on blog.ayjay.org, where I already have a tagging system in place. After all, I am equally interested in what I say and what others say on any given topic; and comparing my thoughts with theirs is a useful exercise.

A new semester starts today, so I won’t be doing as much blogging blogging as I did over the summer. But this site may be even more active, just in a quotey sort of way. Caveat lector.

Finally: I’ll still be doing my weekly newsletter — a new issue went out this morning.

May 24, 2021

linkage

“Now there’s this fame business. I know it’s going to go away. It has to. This so-called mass fame comes from people who get caught up in a thing for a while and buy the records. Then they stop. And when they stop, I won’t be famous anymore.”

— Bob Dylan, age 23

One of the highlights of my career: Long ago, I published an essay on bobdylan.com. Bob may even have read it — the guy who ran the website said he “usually” read what was posted there. Also awesome: I didn’t get paid in money but in music. I was told that they’d send me as many Columbia/Sony CDs as I wanted. I agonized over the question of how much would be too much to ask, and eventually settled on 20 CDs. A week later, they all showed up in my mailbox. 

My friend and former colleague Jason Long and his colleague Jeremy Cook have written a sobering essay on the long-term social and economic effects of the Tulsa Race Massacre, which happened 100 years ago. 

Arnold Kling’s proposal for making Twitter less rude assumes that there are people on Twitter who want to be less rude. I’m sure that there are plenty of Twitter users who would like to constrain other people — but certainly not themselves. 

William Deresiewicz’s essay at Harper’s on what the pandemic has done and is doing to artistic careers is powerful: 

The pandemic will likely extinguish thousands of artistic careers. And the devastation will extend to the businesses and institutions that connect artists to audiences. The big players with deep pockets — Live Nation, the mammoth concert, ticketing, and artist-management company, or Gagosian, which operates galleries in seven countries — will survive. The entities that founder will be the smaller ones — mid-tier galleries, independent music venues — the kind that are crucial for helping emerging artists gain exposure, for sustaining serious creators and performers who won’t or can’t sell out to the commercial mainstream, and for keeping alive the spirit and soul of the arts. […] 

But the most frightening prospect is precisely the degree to which this crisis has entrenched and extended the power of the platforms: Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook; YouTube, which is part of Google; and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. Because it is that power that is ultimately behind what has been happening to artists. Art hasn’t really been demonetized. For the companies reaping the clicks and streams, free content is a bonanza. Along with Spotify and a few other players, the tech giants are diverting tens of billions of dollars a year away from creators and toward themselves. They have been able to do so only because of their size, which has given them leverage over labels, studios, publishers, publications, and above all, independent artists, and because of the influence it has given them in Congress. 

Finally, I wrote a post over at the Hog Blog about how workers reluctant to return to their morning commutes resemble English peasants after the Black Death. 

May 17, 2021

next steps

Work on the Invitation & Repair project has basically come to a halt, and there are three major reasons for that.

First of all, I really need to buckle down and get some work done on my project of editing Auden’s book The Shield of Achilles. I agreed to produce this edition a year or so ago, but thanks to Covid I’ve been unable to get into the archives of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, which is where the key manuscripts are located. The Ransom Center is still closed to the public, but I expect that it will be opening pretty soon and so it’s time for me to get started on this project.

Second, I’ve lined up the project that will follow that one. Years ago I had a wonderful time writing about the Book of Common Prayer for the Princeton University Press series Lives of Great Religious Books, and I’m delighted that I have the opportunity to write another volume in that series. This time my subject will be Milton’s Paradise Lost. More about that in due course.

The third reason for putting Invitation & Repair on hold is that it has recently become clear to me that while I have done a good bit of thinking about the techno element of technopoly, I haven’t thought enough about the poly element, that is to say the political and economic structures and practices that make it possible for digital technologies to dominate so much of our lives. I’ve come to realize that I really need to educate myself in political economy, with a particular eye towards understanding what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” — with a special emphasis on what capitalism actually was, is, and might become — and also to try to figure out what plausible alternatives there are to that way of being in the world. I made a first stab at that when I wrote this essay on certain recent technological developments as a kind of distributism for creatives — and also, I guess, in the small things I’ve written about anarchism. But those are baby steps. So over the next couple of years, in my spare time, if I have any, I’m going to be trying to get a better understanding of the political economy of our moment. Because my imagination is reliably activated by fiction, one of the first things I’m going to do is read John Lanchester’s novel Capital.

Anyway, the Invitation & Repair idea continues to be important to me, but it’s going to be moving slowly for quite some time. You’re never too old to learn, but learning takes time. Which also means that there may not be much blogging here for a while, though I will still, I think, be posting photos to my micro.blog. 

May 12, 2021

bits and pieces

I am just back from a visit to my son in Chicago and the rest of my family in Alabama, and am still frazzled — I’m definitely out of traveling shape. Moving around the country was simultaneously delightful, exhausting, and (sometimes) disconcerting. One of the disconcerting elements was the almost complete absence of masks in Alabama, the least-vaccinated state in the USA. I’m now back in Waco, which seems by comparison to offer a model of responsible masking. As a native of Alabama, I want to say to my people back there: Just get vaccinated, and then ditch the masks. 

Anyway, here are a few things I might write about at greater length if I were a little more coherent and energetic. 

My friend the Rev. Jessica Martin has begun her Bampton Lectures at Oxford, and all signs point to a brilliant set of discourses. I am looking forward to listening to them all and talking copious notes. 

Re: this thoughtful post by another dear friend, Adam Roberts, if I were to write an essay for the Journal of Controversial Ideas I would make the argument that “gender” is a word that is meaningful only in the context of grammar.

Yet another dear friend — I have so many smart friends! They are amazing! — Rick Gibson, writes in the Hedgehog Review about “the newest inhabitants of ‘liquid modernity.’” I’ll definitely comment further on this one. 

Ted Gioia: “We have nurtured two sharply contrasting musical cultures over thousands of years. One celebrates conciliation and the settled life of the rural world, while the other revels in the nomadic triumphs of the fierce and passionate human predator.” Country music is for herders and their animals; drum-driven rock is for predators. 

Every summer needs a song, and pretty obviously this is the one for 2021. One note: it’s significant that Lake Street Dive has been around for about a decade and is very much an indie band. How can you tell? Because the song begins with a slow intro before kicking into that irresistible groove. A song calculated to maximize streaming-service revenue would never do that: because Spotify only pays artists for listens of 30 seconds or more, studios are forcing their songwriters to frontload their songs’ choruses. “Hypotheticals” as a composition is a relic of the past; we’ll get fewer and fewer songs structured that way. Another reason — along with that sweet groove and Rachael Price’s amazing voice — to appreciate a terrific pop-R&B throwback number. 

April 20, 2021

updates on this and that

In the wake of the jury’s determination that Derek Chauvin is guilty of the murder of George Floyd, I’ll just say that I stand firmly by what I wrote last August. 

I wish to align myself wholly with what Tish Harrison Warren says here about the “whole life movement.” Preach it, sister, I’m here for it all. 

In the wake of what appears to be the imminent collapse of the European Stupid League, I will just say that the most accurate and concise summary comes from Manchester City defender Aymeric Laporte: 


And in other positive news, I have added to my repertoire of media ecology essays with this entry at the Hog Blog on Substack (and other new platforms) as Distributism for writers and artists. 

February 5, 2021

qi

On the one hand, it’s good to stretch yourself intellectually; on the other hand, when you do so you might pull a muscle. In my recent essay on Cosmotechnics, I got in over my head — delightfully so, for me, but it led to at least one embarrassing error.

In my first footnote I talk about Yuk Hui’s use of the word qi and I get it wrong. I received a very kind email from a Sinologist named Nils Wieland explaining my mistake:

qi 氣 is the Qi non-Chinese speakers have heard of as some sort of energy or spirit, which Yuk Hui romanizes as Ch’i.

qi 器 doesn’t have the same popularity, it’s a standard Chinese word meaning container, vessel or instrument, and it’s the Qi from Yuk Hui’s Dao-Qi-duality.

(Both qi’s sound exactly the same, so I guess differentiating them by romanization is a good approach; what’s odd is that he chose the nowadays standard Pinyin spelling for the less famous qi – throwing people off 😉 )

Dammit! I knew something like this had to be the case; you wouldn’t believe how long and fruitlessly I googled the question. Again, this is what happens when your reach exceeds your grasp — and (trying to be meaningfully self-reflective here) I think on some level I was afraid that if I contacted a Sinologist I’d get the information but would also be told that my whole essay was nonsense. And I really wanted to write that essay.

I also have received a very kind message from Tongdong Bai, whom I quote in my essay, pointing to other work of his on the political implications (or lack thereof) of Daoism. Nils Wieland suggested some further reading too. So while I am embarrassed at my rookie error I have some interesting next steps to take in this project.

December 31, 2020

a reflection

Þere parfit treuthe and pouere herte is and pacience of tonge, Þere is charitee.

— Piers Plowman

“Patience” is the title of the essay about Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life that I published earlier this year, just as everything was beginning to go all lopsided.

Patience (patientia) is related to passion (passio). Both connote suffering and the endurance of suffering; the acceptance with dignity of what cannot, and sometimes should not, be avoided; the willingness to wait until this present darkness passes. Jesus bore his passion with patience; those who endure to the end, who are likewise patient in their suffering, will be saved.

I try to cultivate patience because I am commanded to do so. “Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer” (Romans 12:12), says St. Paul, who also begs me “to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:1–2). And does not the book of Proverbs (15:18) teach me that “Those who are hot-tempered stir up strife, but those who are slow to anger calm contention”?

I try to cultivate patience because I am by nature — as my family will quickly and perhaps eagerly tell you — extremely impatient. In public life I am easily frustrated by what I believe to be intellectual error, especially if I think that error stems from a lack of charity. Uncharity makes us all stupid, and my tendency to be uncharitable to the uncharitable is one of my worst faults. Reflecting on that sober fact led me, some years ago, to make a case for the canonization of Jonathan Swift.

I try to cultivate patience especially along three intersecting axes: the ecclesial, the political, and the technological. I am especially interested in the ways that our dominant communications technologies mediate both political life and religious life, and entangle those with each other. (Anyone who has lived through the Trump Era will not need me to explain what I mean.) Especially our social media tend to make us madly impatient with disagreement and difference and to try to quash dissent through words and actions alike. We might demand that everyone be with us wholly or against us wholly; we might long for a King who will rout our enemies and bring about perfect unity.

But anyone pursuing such practices has succumbed to the temptation to immanentize the eschaton. And the only remedy for that particular temptation is to practice patience. And you will only do that if you understand the real import — which is political as well as spiritual — of the parable of the wheat and the weeds, about which I wrote, some years ago, here. In the end, we are told, “every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,” but to live now, to live in “the time being,” is to live, with as much patience as we can manage, in the plural world. That is why I have written a good deal recently about plurality:

But any attempt to live patiently in plurality meets with profound resistance from the gods of our age, who want us to live wholly and reactively in the present, who teach us fear and loathing of the past, what I call palaiphobia. We can begin to overcome that, begin to escape the direhose, first by understanding that our current social hatreds are driven by fundamentally religious impulses.

And then, equipped with that understanding, we can practice listening to the voices of the past; attending to the apparently irrelevant; cultivating handmind; learning to be idiots. And on basis of all that, we can then, perhaps, make a bet on mutuality.

A last word: For the past couple of years I have become more and more convinced that there are vital resources for those of us who want to cultivate patience, who want to be peaceable towards others, who are drawn towards technologies that help us to be more peaceable and patient, in the philosophical tradition of Daoism. (As opposed to Daoism as a religion, in which I am not interested. I follow Jesus.) That’s why I published this essay, the writing of which, as I recently said to a friend, felt like “opening a door for myself — but I still don’t know what lies on the other side of that door.”

Because I want to pursue this new direction, I expect 2021 to be a quieter year for me. I want to write as much as ever, but I think patience now requires me to consider and reflect more while posting and publishing less. Of course, there’s a part of me that hopes that a time of silence will in the long run yield essays and books. But one of my goals for the next year is to make that part of me less vocal, less dominant.

December 10, 2020

clarification

I normally don’t respond to reviews, either positive or negative, but because I’m getting a good deal of email about this:

— I’ll make three brief comments.

  1. My book isn’t a defense of great books, at all; it’s an argument for encountering the past. Only one chapter (Chapter 4) deals with reading the classics as such. Elsewhere in the book I refer to texts that are usually designated as classics or great books, but that designation isn’t relevant to my use of them: what matters to me is that they are old.
  2. Callard speculates on who my audience might be, but there’s no need for speculation: I say in the Introduction that it’s readers who are in need of a more tranquil mind.
  3. In her review Callard asks, “Could it be that those of us whose connection with the past is supposed to be rock solid, who are supposed to profess the deepest and most abiding love of great books, are struggling with our own attention problems?” And she suggests I write about that. But I already did, a decade ago. And then again a few years later.

UPDATE: So now, thanks to this review, I am getting emails from people about my “defense of the classics,” my “advocacy for great books,” and my “defense of the literary canon” — none of which are in any way the subject of my book. (I don’t even mention “the literary canon.”) None of these people have read my book, of course; they’re just assuming that a review in the Wall Street Journal couldn’t possibly have misdescribed the content of the book. I think this must be what Rod Dreher feels like when people who have not read a single word of The Benedict Option opine confidently about their agreement or disagreement with its argument, because of some review or (more likely) some tweet they read. I’m now realizing how blessed I have been over the years that most of the negative reviews of my books have responded to what I actually wrote. 

August 16, 2020

summary, with tags

I’ve spent some time recently sorting through my online writings, and it’s not easy, given my susceptibility to logorrhea. But I’m thinking it would be useful to summarize a few things.

First, I have links to all of my recent essays and the various sites at which I have written over the years on my home page, so please check that out if you’re interested. And I have reposted some older essays of mine that I want to preserve.

Second, I want to talk about this here site. My posts here are organized by tag, or mostly they are — I have never been as disciplined or consistent about tagging as I should be. But I’ve done some work lately to clean things up, which has been useful in part because there are some topics that I had been thinking of writing about that, it turns out, I have already written about. Quelle surprise.

Anyway, I’m thinking it could be useful for me to summarize the key themes of this blog by listing some of the most frequently used tags — though first, I should note that my chief general imperative at this stage of my career is rejecting the smooth things and heading for the rough ground.

  • My major project these days is one I call Invitation & Repair.
  • Another theme that’s on the back burner now but will come to the front one day is Mid-Century Modernity.
  • Here I write on themes associated with my book How to Think — largely cognitive errors of various kinds.
  • Here I write about whether there is such a thing as a “Christian intellectual” and, if there is, what sort of person that might be.
  • It seems that I have written a good bit on that vexed term evangelical.
  • I have posts on the Christian life and posts specifically on theology — though I’m not sure I do a good job of distinguishing those.
  • I’ve written about Left Purity Culture (LPC) and race and racism.
  • I’ve written too much about politics here, but let this one post stand for what I most deeply and consistently think about politics. The posts specifically on pluralism reflect something I think about a lot. Likewise my posts on ethics.
  • Here I write about certain pathologies and absurdities of academic life, and here I write about the nature and character of the university more generally.
  • I write sometimes about movies.
  • There are some lovely images in my posts on architecture and drawing, many of which feature John Ruskin.
  • In addition to Ruskin, I have posts on several thinkers who have been especially important to me over the years, including Rowan Williams, W. H. Auden, and Michael Oakeshott.

And finally, I have written some things that I want to revisit, for my own sake, on the uses and purposes of blogging:

This has been a useful exercise for me because it reminds me that, when I look at this blog along with my published essays, I’ve said all I ever need to say about a great many subjects. I don’t have to revisit the “What is an evangelical?” question again. I have fully developed my Unified Theory of Wokeness. I have no new thoughts about the character of the university and where it’s headed.

Moreover, with the release of Breaking Bread with the Dead I have completed my Pedagogical Trilogy, which is to say, I have now related for the benefit of the public pretty much everything I have learned as a teacher. For the next year or so I will be working on my critical edition of Auden’s Shield of Achilles and focusing on teaching, which will be challenging. So this will be a good time for me to do a lot of slow thinking about what to do next. I’ve got some ideas — but I want them to simmer slowly on the back burner for quite some time.

July 16, 2020

The Shield of Achilles

I’ve prepared two critical editions of long poems by Auden: The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (originally published in 1947) and For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio (originally published in 1944). I love this kind of job.

It requires patient and thorough archival work — Auden’s notebooks and manuscripts are scattered in several locations, but the work he did after his move to America is largely held in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library and in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas — and meticulous attentiveness to variations in published work. This latter is especially important for Auden, who was an inveterate reviser.

Then, once you have established the text, you have to annotate it carefully — not the easiest thing with a poet as learnedly allusive as Auden — and provide a synoptic introduction that will make difficult poetry comprehensible to its readers without inserting your own personality and preferences.

And maybe that’s what I like best about textual editing, and especially the preparation of a critical edition: Not one element of the job is about me. It’s completely focused on Auden, and on connecting him to his readers and potential readers. And then there’s this: Not one of the monographs I have written will last nearly as long as these editions will.

So I am extremely pleased to say that I am going to be editing another book of Auden’s — though this one will be a rather different enterprise. This time it’s not a long poem, but, in a first for the Auden Critical Editions series, a collection of lyric poems, The Shield of Achilles (1955). This is worth doing because of all Auden’s collections — counting them is complicated, but there are around ten — The Shield of Achilles is the most carefully organized and internally coherent. Individual lyrics, including the great title poem, sit in the middle of the collection, bookended by two magnificent sequences, “Bucolics” and “Horae Canonicae.” Teasing out the complex relations among these texts, and understanding the whole that they make, will be challenging but deeply enjoyable.

I am able to commence this task thanks to the invitation of Edward Mendelson, Auden’s best critic, literary executor, and editor of his complete works, and to the agreement of the fine folks at Princeton University Press. This will be my fourth time working with PUP, and the previous projects have been the best publishing experiences of my life, so I am looking forward to this more than I can easily say.

IMG 1175 2

January 27, 2020

a few items added

One little project that I’ve been working on as time allows — and time very rarely allows — is to move some things I’ve written from somewhere else online where they might disappear to this here site o’ mine. Here are three essays I originally published on Medium before I decided that Medium is a deceptive hellhole: 

And one more thing, not published elsewhere: An annotated anthology I was invited to edit — and then disinvited. 

December 31, 2019

summing up

I said in my previous post that I would be taking a break from this blog, but it occurred to me that a good way to mark that break would be to take a look back at the decade that’s just now concluding (or that everyone thinks is just now concluding, except for the precisians who insist that the decade will end a year from now).

For my family, it’s been eventful. Teri and I moved to Texas after twenty-nine years in Illinois, and have come to love Texas very much. Our son graduated from college and started his own life as a grown-ass man. I once again became a member of an Episcopal parish, something that in 2010 I would have deemed inconceivable. I entered my sixties. I am still a teacher.

I published six books, a few dozen articles, hundreds of blog posts, and thousands of tweets. I regret all the tweets and some of the blog posts. The rest of the blog posts did no harm, but also did precious little good. Given that I don’t regret the books or the articles, maybe I should focus on that kind of thing in the decade to come.

I miss Books & Culture, and the First Things that was: for many years those were my two periodical-publishing homes. I now write for several venues that I never imagined I would be able to write for, but I would have been very happy to spend the whole of my career writing long reviews for Books & Culture and essays for First Things. Now B&C is defunct and FT is not interested in the kind of thing I write — which is fair enough, I suppose, because I’m not interested in the kind of thing they now publish.

The world overall is not in the worst shape it could be in, but online life seems to be chiefly a cesspool. I am glad that it is only a part of life; I hope that in the coming decade it will be, for me and for others, a decreasing part. One can always hope.

I won’t say that I’ll never return here, but right now I feel that the blogging season of my life, which started around 2007, is over. I’m excited about the work to come, the reading and thinking and writing that awaits me, and I’m especially excited about doing all of it in a less internet-connected way.

A blessed next decade to us all!

December 27, 2019

unforthcoming attractions

This is why algorithmic time is so disorienting and why it bends your mind. Everything good, bad, and complicated flows through our phones, and for those not living some hippie Walden trip, we operate inside a technological experience that moves forward and back, and pulls you with it. Using a phone is tied up with the relentless, perpendicular feeling of living through the Trump presidency: the algorithms that are never quite with you in the moment, the imperishable supply of new Instagram stories, the scrolling through what you said six hours ago, the four new texts, the absence of texts, that text from three days ago that has warmed up your entire life, the four versions of the same news alert. You can find yourself wondering why you’re seeing this now — or knowing too well why it is so. You can feel amazing and awful — exult in and be repelled by life — in the space of seconds. The thing you must say, the thing you’ve been waiting for — it’s always there, pulling you back under again and again and again. Who can remember anything anymore?

— Buzzfeed. It’s really great to be out of all this. I’ve been away from Twitter and Instagram for more than a year now, and the thought of going back to either of them prompts nightmares. Partly, but not wholly, because of my recent troubles with WordPress, I have even become disillusioned with this blog. Step by step by step I’m removing more of my life from the online world.

I still love posting to my Pinboard page and writing my newsletter, so those are the primary places to find me in 2020. It’s also possible that I will post the occasional photo here, though I’m not sure about that. I will have another little project to announce … later. But I expect I will make that announcement, and others, on my official home page. There won’t be much, if anything, going on here for the near future.

December 26, 2019

a partial fix

Still lots of weird things going on in my WordPress installation; a complete fix would take, yeeeesh, weeks probably. ButI’ve sorted out a few things. More of the recent posts at least should appear in the timeline, and the posts tagged “Christmas” should all be there. So there’s that. 

December 24, 2019

something strange

Some very strange stuff is happening to my blog right now. Many posts, at least recent ones, have disappeared from the homepage, though they’re still online and visible if you know the URL. At first I thought only photo posts were missing — see for instance this and this and this — but now I see that some text posts are missing also. And tags don’t seem to be working properly: some of them turn up no posts, others turn up only a few when there are in fact many. 

Ironically enough, one of the posts missing is one in which I admit that I don’t own my turf. 

I don’t know when I’ll get a fix. Other things are on my mind this Christmas Eve! 

September 10, 2019

consolidation

One of the ongoing themes of my online life is accidental dispersal — I inadvertently accumulate sites of digital presence, and then at a certain point realize that I need to consolidate.

I realized recently that, as much as I enjoy having a blog devoted to soccer called The Pacey Winger, I just don’t post often about soccer to justify a dedicated blog. I also realized that I had created the blog in part because I thought that people who read the kinds of things I post here wouldn’t be interested in soccer — but you know what? Those people don’t have to read my soccer posts. Just pass them by, ain’t no big thing.

So here’s what I’m trying to do now: thoughts (about whatever) go here, and quotes — with, occasionally, a sentence or two of commentary — go on my Pinboard page. And that’s all.

There, I fixed it.

August 1, 2019

here and there

As some of you may have noticed, I’m not posting here very frequently. I think for the foreseeable future I’m only going to be using this blog for longer reflections — long by internet standards, anyway.

From day to day you’ll find me posting to my micro.blog account — and if you haven’t checked out micro.blog, please do! People sometimes describe micro.blog as a “Twitter replacement,” but that’s not quite right. It may be better to think of it as what services like Twitter and Instagram could have been if they had been devoted to the open web and not subservient to the demands of venture capital. It’s a great place for low-key connection with others, and the best possible way to get started in blogging. It’s not free, but then Twitter and Instagram aren’t free either — those services just make you may in currencies other than money. Micro.blog serves no ads, respects your privacy, and allows you to own your turf. Try it!

I continue to post bookmarks — with useful excerpts! — at my Pinboard page, which I have been using for … [checks site] … ten years and two weeks.

Finally, I think my newsletter is pretty fun — a bit of a break from the incessant seriousness of our political moment.

May 17, 2019

reasonably worthwhile blog posts from last year

It occurred to me recently that I do a lousy job of keeping track of my own blog posts — I regularly forget that I have written about something, and occasionally I discover a post that it would have been useful to me to remember. So I’m going to start keeping better records. As a beginning, here are the posts I wrote in 2018 that I want to remember:

March 18, 2019

interim tech report

Over the past year I’ve been making some significant changes to certain elements of my technological life — significant, but incremental and slow. I have tried not to change too many things at once, because when I’ve tried that in the past it has never worked out for me. Here’s a summary of my progress:

  • I deleted my Instagram account. (I have not had a Facebook account since 2007.)
  • I deactivated my Twitter account. I haven’t yet deleted it — I still wonder whether I might find a use for it some day. But I am not on Twitter and do not miss it, so deletion remains a possibility.
  • I have been using a Micro.blog account for short posts. The community there is almost wholly pleasant, but I have had just enough tense exchanges to make me wary. I feel that all of us have learned our social-media habits from Twitter and Facebook and it may take us a little time to become fully decent again.
  • I started a newsletter. 
  • I have almost completely eliminated reading daily news, which, for me, has primarily meant deleting news sites from my RSS reader.
  • I have shifted instead to reading more weekly and monthly magazines, especially in print, but sometimes on the Kindle. My new favorite magazine is The Economist — at which I looked askance for many years because I thought it a key mouthpiece of the neoliberal order, which it kinda is, but overall it’s a great magazine. I begin by reading the summary of the week’s news, and then turn with particular interest to reports from parts of the world that I wouldn’t ordinarily think about. It does a lot to put American kerfuffles into meaningful context.
  • I am moving more and more of my data out of the cloud, and am moving back towards regular backups to hard drives, supplemented by key files stored in Apple’s iCloud. I have pared back my use of Google Docs and Dropbox to the bare nub, and may well delete my Dropbox account altogether in the coming months.
  • I have moved all my online calendars from Google to iCloud, have moved my personal email from Gmail back to Fastmail — despite some problems I had with Fastmail last year, I am giving them another chance — and have deleted Google Maps from all my devices. (That last one is tough, because in my experience Apple Maps continues to be significantly inferior.) I have also moved to DuckDuckGo as my default, and since the move only, search engine. You can see where this is headed. Within a year I would like to have my Google account deleted.

Other than the Great De-Googling, a consummation devoutly to be wished, what do I hope to accomplish in the next year?

I want to go back to the analog system of task management that I had been using for a couple of years previous to this one. I am happiest and most focused when I track my responsibilities in a notebook, but last year I found myself, during a period of particular stress, nearly dropping a few balls, and that led me back to my favorite digital task manager, Things. Things is a beautiful and exceptionally well-designed app — those are two different things, by the way: some apps are beautiful without being well-designed, and vice versa — but I don’t want to get too dependent on it, because….

Mainly I want to eliminate day-to-day use of a smartphone. I don’t imagine that I can do without one altogether — they’re too valuable when traveling and in other special circumstances. But for my everyday life I want to get back to a dumbphone like the one I was using three years ago — before it stopped working with my network and the iPhone dragged me back in. (There’s a new and updated version of the Punkt.) I want a life in which I have only one internet-connected device, and that device is my laptop, and my laptop spends a lot of time in a bag.

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