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The Homebound Symphony

Stagger onward rejoicing

Tag: me (page 1 of 2)

February 28, 2025

retirement

Universities love to have productive senior faculty, and when they can they pay such faculty well — but they also don’t really mind when the people near the top of the salary ladder retire. (I say “they,” meaning primarily the people who handle the budgets.)

Here at Baylor there’s been a program in effect for the past few years that gives a gentle nudge to people trying to decide whether it’s time for them to retire. If a person eligible for retirement gives two years’ notice — and does so by signing a binding contract! — then the university

  • provides a nice little cash bonus
  • promises a decent pay increase for each of the faculty member’s last two years
  • exempts the faculty member from service on committees
  • allows the faculty member, in his or her final year, to (a) teach half time for the whole year or (b) teach full time for one semester and take the final term as a farewell sabbatical

I never seriously considered this option — thinking of myself as, if not a young whipper-snapper, then at worst a semi-grizzled veteran — until I learned that the year 2024 marked the end of the program. I could take advantage of it then or say goodbye forever to the cash bonus, the sabbatical, and (above all) the exemption from committees. And in any case I’m not that far from retirement….

So I signed up.

My most recent paycheck contained the lagniappe. Then, just this week, I got an email from Baylor’s Committee on Committes asking me to fill out a form identifying the committees I am serving on, the ones I would be willing to serve on, etc. I clicked the link and the first page gave me a series of options by which I could identify my status. One of them was “I have signed a retirement contract.” I clicked that one and the next screen of the questionnaire bade me a courteous farewell. At that moment I knew I had made the right decision.

When I retire, in December 2026 (though I will be paid through May 2027), I will have been teaching for forty-four years — and I love teaching as much as I ever have. My students are a joy to me, they really are. With a few exceptions, of course, let’s be honest — but few, very few.

But the increasing bureaucratization of the university is the opposite of a joy — it is a misery. The endless and often incomprehensible online forms (many of them obviously designed by trainee or incompetent programmers); the annual online “learnings” (shudder) about Title IX, racism and sexism, travel policies, etc. etc.; the Finance Officers and Accommodation Offices; the annual enrollments in ever-changing health insurance policies … all this has worn me down, and the genuine joy I experience in teaching is being overwhelmed by these characteristic demons of late modernity. I’m ready to quit. 

Or was at the time I made the decision; the prospect of Elon and his merry pranksters blowing up Medicare was not yet on anyone’s bingo card when I had to make the call. If it had been, I very likely would have chickened out. The deed is done, so all I can say is what I often say: Fare forward, voyagers. 

And — this is something I think about a lot — maybe my retirement will mean one more job for a highly-qualified humanist in a terrible job market. Of course, I might not be replaced at all … or I’ll be replaced by a scientist or an engineer or a marketing consultant … but there’s at least a chance that I’ll be replaced by someone who loves literature and ideas. Someone better qualified than I was when I entered the workforce all those years ago, but a kindred spirit who might not otherwise find a tenure-track position. One can but hope.

But after all these decades of teaching, how will I cope without the foundational temporal structure of my life for the past sixty years: the annual round of the blessed School Year? Honestly, I don’t know. I’m hoping that I will finally be fully governed by the rhythms of the church year. At the moment all I’m really thinking about is the books and essays I may now finally have time to write — perhaps that time will compensate for the loss of structure — and the loss of regular human connection, especially with young people who have not yet become jaded.

I have always thought that one of the greatest moments in all of literature, in all of human art, comes at that point in The Tempest when Miranda — who all her life has known only her father, Caliban, and Ariel — sees the party of the Milanese court approaching and cries, “O brave new world, that hath such people in it!” To which Prospero: “‘Tis new to thee.” What makes the moment so absolutely brilliant is that both of them are right. We really need both ways of viewing the human creature. But what will I, a ragged and grumpy old Prospero, deprived of staff and book, do without my Mirandas?

January 2, 2025

ancestry

As I’ve often noted, it’s been a regular experience for me, over the decades, to have to tell people that I’m not Jewish. My surname is common among Jews (though it’s not exclusively Jewish), people say I look Jewish, and, as the political scientist Alan Wolfe once told me, “You sure talk like a Jew.” My paternal grandfather’s name was Elisha Jacobs, for heaven’s sake.

One I was speaking to a group of rabbis — it’s a long story — all of whom figured I had to be One of Them, and I explained things. I also commented that my explanation tends to be greeted with suspicion: people just think I’m a self-hating Jew. Said one of the rabbis: “There’s some other kind?”

These exchanges happened so frequently that, while I’m not really interested in genealogy, I couldn’t help wondering whether I might be Jewish after all, whether somewhere a few generations back my ancestors were the American South equivalent of conversos. So it was probably inevitable that I would at some point start fooling around on family-genealogy sites and, when the option became available, submit my saliva to a DNA-testing service. 

Of course, neither of those options is highly reliable. So I tried two DNA-testing services and explored several genealogy sites, and got essentially the same answers. That doesn’t mean that the answers are right, of course; but the account is plausible and not without evidence. 

Basically, I’m English. Very English. Two-thirds to three-quarters English, with almost all of the rest being French. No measurable Jewishness. Now, the genealogy sites get far less reliable as you go further back, but for what it’s worth, they suggest that the French elements of my ancestry come in around the time of the Norman Conquest — after that it’s England all the way. The names are Harrison, Brown, Browning, Woodruff, Hale, Hill, Comer, … and, um, Jacobs. 

And they also suggest that almost all my ancestors come from the same general part of England: the West Midlands and nearby counties. Staffordshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Bedfordshire, Leicestershire, Berkshire. A small handful from Devon and Somerset. My people are from Mercia and Wessex — the realm of Alfred the Great! 

Perhaps this accounts for my strong attraction to authors from the same region: Shakespeare of course, but more important to me Tolkien, George Eliot, the Gawain poet. Those are the writers who make my chromosomes tingle. 

Well, it’s fun to think so. 

One other thing, from the part of the story that’s better-attested: My oldest American ancestors are all from Virginia. Then they start moving down the coast, to the Carolinas and then Georgia; a few to Tennessee. Only in the past hundred years do they come to Alabama. And there’s not one Yankee among them: I appear to have no American ancestors from above the Mason-Dixon line. When I went to grad school at UVA I was returning to my roots — some of my (probable) ancestors were actually from Albemarle County — but when I moved to Illinois and then to Texas I betrayed my people. I shall weep for this. 

June 18, 2024

Soyinka and the mythical method

I have an essay in the new issue of Harper’s called “Yesterday’s Men: The Death of the Mythical Method.” It traces the interest in myth and myth-making from Giambattista Vico to George Lucas, tries to explain why myth has ceased to be an appealing and useful category to our intelligentsia, and asks whether there might be a case for restoring it to a place in our conceptual toolbox. 

I do think such a case can be made, and while I do not in this essay make that case in any formal way, I conclude by pointing to the example of Wole Soyinka, who (I’ve been saying this for decades) just may be our greatest living writer. If you don’t know anything about Soyinka, here’s an introductory essay I wrote about him more than twenty years ago. 

I’d love to make a few converts to Soyinka. If you’re just starting out, I’d recommend two of the plays in the first volume of his Collected Plays: The Strong Breed and The Swamp Dwellers. Then move on to his greatest play, and one of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century, Death and the King’s Horseman. 

Soyinka has also written several volumes of memoirs, the best of which are the first two: Aké: The Years of Childhood and Ìsarà: A Voyage around “Essay” — “Essay” being the nickname of Soyinka’s father, S. A. Soyinka. The former is still in print and easy to find; the latter has been ignored, which is a great shame. They are wonderfully rich, evocative, and perceptive accounts of childhood, and a window into a certain class of Nigerian Christians around the time of the Second World War. (The passages in Aké about the widespread fear that Hitler would invade Nigeria are very funny. In fact, you will find yourself smiling often as you read these memoirs.) 

The next level of difficulty would be his more ambitious plays (A Dance of the Forests and — I discuss this one in my essay — his Yoruba/Christian/Greek version of Euripides’s Bacchae), and then his remarkable novel The Interpreters. 

Also, here are some photographs of the Soyinka family I put up for one of my classes and have yet to annotate. The third photo is of the formidable Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, whose women’s march for tax relief is the climactic scene of Aké — she was a pioneering Nigerian feminist and activist, Soyinka’s great-aunt, and the mother of the great Fela Kuti. Which means the one of the greatest African singer-songwriters and one of the greatest living writers are cousins. 

Finally, here are some photos I took in 1991 when I visited the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove in the heart of Yorubaland. 

May 24, 2024

a petty resentment

My paternal grandfather, Elisha Creel Jacobs, was for many years an engineer on the Frisco railroad. His standard route ran from our city, Birmingham, to Memphis and Kansas City — and then back home. Our house was about a mile from the big freight yard on the west side of Birmingham, so that commute was easy, but things got a little more complicated when he took the route that ran between Amory, Mississippi and Pensacola, Florida. Grandma needed the car while he was away, so she would drive him to Amory (or pick him up there at the end of a run) and I would go along for the ride. That was also an opportunity for us to visit his sister Lillie, who lived in Amory. She was a very sweet old lady who lived in an ancient rambling tree-shadowed house that smelled like her. I liked Aunt Lillie and her house. 

When I was around ten, Gran was forced to retire after a horrifying accident: he had a stroke while driving to work and smashed up his car and his body, both beyond repair. Soon thereafter he was diagnosed with lung cancer, and I tried my best to help Grandma care for him. He was always very loving towards me, and as he lay dying, was oddly insistent that I be given the beautiful pocket watch he had received from the railroad on his retirement. I desperately wanted that watch, but my mother said that she’d keep it safe and give it to me when I got older. 

Some years later, when my father got out of prison, he wanted to get drunk but had no money. So he fished out that watch, pawned it, and used the proceeds to go on a bender. Afterwards he couldn’t have redeemed it, even if he had had the money, because he didn’t remember where he had pawned it. And of all the bad things my father did to me, to all of us, many of them objectively worse than his stealing and pawning that watch, that’s the one I have had the hardest time forgiving him for. 

September 25, 2023

my testimony

This is an except from my least-read book, a small treatise on narrative theology called Looking Before and After. Much of the book concerns the question of what it means, if it means anything coherent, to say that I have a “life story.” At one point I tell a bit of my own story, as I understand it, and that’s what follows. 

The summer before I was to begin high school, my family moved from one end of Birmingham, Alabama, to another. “Zoning” had begun in Birmingham a few years before, and had we remained in our old neighborhood I would have been one of ten or so white students in a high school with a total population of more than a thousand. My parents didn’t believe that would be such a good thing for their son, so we moved to an all-white neighborhood within the “zone” of a mostly white school. My parents considered that the move encouraged fresh starts in other ways too, so within a few weeks they had picked out a nearby church, 85th Street Baptist, and we became fairly regular attendees — at least on Sunday mornings. (Sunday evening services or Wednesday prayer meetings remained well beyond the scope of our discipline.) This lasted only about a year before we lapsed back into our old habits of rare attendance, but in the meantime I got myself saved. Or so I think.

Southern churches — I have learned that this is a source of amusement to many of my fellow Christians from outside the South — often schedule revivals, bringing in guest evangelists to stir up the faithless and backslidden. But even with a revival a week away, our pastor, Brother McKee, still conducted his usual invitation at the end of the Sunday morning service. (I was an adult living in the Midwest before I ever heard the term “altar call.”) I had sat throughout the service with my friends, giggling and whispering as usual, and in silent moments doodling on the little magazine of devotional articles for teenagers that had been handed out in Sunday school an hour earlier and for which I was always thankful, since it provided fifteen minutes or so of distraction. The sermon eluded my attention, but I stood up with everyone else as the choir sang “Softly and Tenderly” — or perhaps it was “Just As I Am.” I was thirteen years old.

At that moment the Holy Spirit, with overwhelming force, called me to walk down the aisle and make my profession of faith. My will was clearly being commanded by something not me — something I knew could only be God. When, years later, I read John Wesley’s account of how in a meeting his heart was “strangely warmed,” I thought I knew just what he meant: I seemed for those moments to be heated from within. I had never experienced anything remotely like it before; nor, I must say, have I since. It was all I could do not to run down the aisle; but I did not run down the aisle. In fact, I remained fixed in my place. I stood as the choir and congregation sang, gripping the pew in front of me fiercely — I can see even now, in my mind’s eye, my knuckles going white with the effort of restraining myself from flying toward the pastor.

I was ashamed. I knew that I had paid no attention during the service, that I had snickered with my friends, and I feared their mocking judgment and that of any adult observers of my antics. I felt certain that if I walked down the aisle and “made my profession of faith,” everyone would be puzzled — they would wonder if I was joking, or, worse, mocking. So I stayed rooted at my pew.

Nevertheless, the experience shook me. I tried all week to forget it and was able occasionally to put it from my mind; but I could not pretend that I had any other explanation for what had happened to me — I knew that the power that had invaded me was not me, and I knew its real name. The sense of being strangely warmed remained with me through the week.

The following Sunday, as I walked once more with my parents into the church, a large banner outside proclaimed that the revival would begin that evening. Our pastor’s sermon topic, in his last message before the revival, was an interesting one: he said that sometimes God gives you only one chance to repent; we cannot presume upon his grace, we cannot count on His offering endlessly repeated opportunities to turn aside from our evil ways and dark paths. He told a story about a young man who rejected an opportunity to repent and was almost immediately thereafter struck by a car and killed — not as punishment, mind you: it was just that the fellow’s time was up, and he had wasted all of his chances.

The service drew to a close; we sang a final hymn; and Brother McKee did not issue an invitation, but merely dismissed us with a prayer and a reminder of the evening service.

At home, over lunch, I told my parents that I thought I would like to go to the revival that evening. They looked blankly at me. My father shrugged; my mother said, “Well, good for you.” I walked the eight blocks to the church, taking extreme care when crossing streets; I arrived early and took a seat on the right side, in the second row. I heard as little of this sermon as I had of the one preceding my unexpected Call, though for very different reasons. When the preacher began to intone the familiar words of invitation from what I now think of as the Southern Baptist revival liturgy — “with every head bowed and every eye closed” — and asked for a show of hands from those interested in repenting, my arm shot upward. At the first opportunity I bolted for the front. A few Sunday evenings later I was baptized.

And that was all. I had my insurance; if I wandered into the street and got hit by a car, I would be OK. Before long we stopped going to church. I gave God no thought for another six years. 

September 15, 2023

fabulism

I was a fabulist as a child, and indeed, well into my adolescence. It was perhaps the signal trait of my character. I have a fairly elaborate justification for my habitual lying: it begins with the fact that I was two years younger than my classmates through most of my school years. I had started first grade at age five and then skipped second grade, something that would not be done now because of a greater awareness of the psychological and psychosocial damage such a practice inflicts on a child. But in my now-distant youth, I guess people didn’t know any better. I was also quite small for my age – I didn’t get a growth spurt until I was fourteen, at which point in just a few painful months I went from five feet to six feet tall. Before that, in comparison to the people I spent my days with I was tiny, and that gave them ample opportunities to bully me. The bullying happened day after day and year after year, and it never occurred to me to think that anything could be done about it by an authority figure. So I had to find my own way of addressing the problem, and the strategy I came up with was to become a teller of tales – a fabulist.

On the way to school, I might see a couple of cars barely avoid each other at an intersection; but by the time I got to school that had turned into a violent collision that left dead bodies sprawling out of the open windows of their automobiles. Certainly there would have been blood, perhaps a severed limb or two. All the way to school I would silently elaborate and edit the story, trying to find that sweet spot where the spectacular shakes hands with the believable. After a while lying became more normal to me than telling the truth. After all, what would be the point in telling the truth if you could make up something better? It made life always interesting.

Moreover, I discovered that the better I became at lying, and indeed the more consistently I lied, the more attention I got from my classmates. They wouldn’t be yanking my hair or punching me in the stomach as long as they were waiting to see how the story came out. It took me a very long time to break the habit of lying; it was only after I became a Christian, during my college years, that it dawned on me that this habit might be morally questionable. (Before that I had only considered the possible reputational damage of getting caught in a lie. My category was shame, not guilt.) And I’ve never broken the habit of internal fabrication. I still see ordinary everyday events and instinctively create a more dramatic narrative – I just don’t share that invented reality with other people.

One of the consequences of this history of fabulism, for me, has been an instinctive and unsuppressable skepticism towards stories told by other people. Whenever anyone writes about some extraordinary experience they’ve had – well, I simply don’t believe that it happened. I don’t think about it; I don’t consciously make a judgement. That’s just the immediate response that springs up in me wholly unbidden.

I remember being very surprised to learn that other people were surprised to learn that David Sedaris’s stories are mostly invented. I had never imagined that a single word of them was true. It never occurred to me to believe that he had sung the Oscar Mayer Wiener theme song in the voice of Bille Holiday to his music teacher, or that he had been Crumpet the Elf. Just the other day, I was reading an essay by Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s father, about an accident he had while hiking in the Swiss mountains and I assumed, unreflectively, that he had made up the whole thing, simply because for a long time that’s what I would have done.

I find that this skepticism is most intense – actually rising to the level of conscious disbelief – whenever I encounter writers talking about writing. Oh, how they love to narrate spectacular personal drama: extended periods of profound misery, depression, antisocial behavior, substance abuse, irrational and compulsive actions of a hundred kinds. You listen to their stories, and if you take them seriously, you think nothing could be more dramatic than being a writer. But I am a writer and I don’t believe a word of it.

I don’t think that these people never get drunk, never abuse drugs, never suffer depression. What I cannot believe is that any of this behavior has anything to do with their creative process. I think their writing lives actually go something like this: They set an alarm for a reasonable hour of the morning, they get up and made themselves a cup of coffee, they browse through social media, and then they sat down to write, promising themselves a cinnamon roll or a smoke if they get through 1000 words. And they just do this most days. They’re like Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend, they can’t write until they drop a lit cigarette into their tumbler of rye to make it undrinkable. That’s how they work, I’m sure. I simply lack the capacity to assent to their more dramatic tales.

It’s possible, of course, that I’m wrong about all this, that my skepticism is unwarranted. And maybe that’s the price that I pay for being a reformed fabulist. I’ve lost my ability to trust other people’s stories, unless of course, they explicitly own them as fiction. As Sir Philip Sidney wrote more than four hundred years ago, “the poet” – by which he means the teller of tales – “never maketh any Circles about your imagination, to conjure you to believe for true, what he writeth … and therefore though he recount things not true, yet because he telleth them not for true, he lieth not.” And in turn is wholly believable.

But all that I told you at the outset about my own career as a fabulist? Every word is true. You believe me – don’t you?

UPDATE 2023-09-21: “Emotional truths.”

July 21, 2023

Unanswered Questions

Over the past few months I’ve occasionally made oblique references to a book I’m working on. That book is tentatively titled Unanswered Questions: The Art of Terrence Malick. It will be an exploration of the whole arc of Malick’s career as a filmmaker, though its structure will not be linear. A linear structure, working chronologically through all the movies, would not be a very Malickian way of doing business, would it? That said, the book will begin with a moment from Malick’s first movie, Badlands (1973) — this moment: 

Badlands this very moment

But it will quickly move on from there to later films, then back to earlier ones … you’ll see when the time comes what my initial perception is, and how it will shape everything that comes later. (One hint: it involves Ralph Waldo Emerson.) 

I won’t be writing about the project here, because that would reduce the likelihood of my eventually placing it with a publisher — and this is a book that I’m genuinely unsure I will be able to place. Books about movies are less common than they used to be, for reasons not totally clear, though some people think that real movie fans are more likely to invest their money in social Blu-Ray editions of their favorites, complete with commentaries and other special features, than in books. And this one will not have a conventional structure, so … well, we’ll see, in time. And this will take time: I won’t be able to finish it until Malick’s next film appears, and I don’t know when that will be. In the meantime, I want to write as much as I can, while remaining aware of the possibility that this great-work-to-come will change my mind about many things.  

In the meantime I will be posting here about movies in general. Watching and thinking about other movies has helped me better to understand Malick, who makes movies unlike anyone else’s — he has his own distinctive cinematic grammar and syntax and vocabulary, and I find that by having a clearer sense of the movie languages he is departing from, I am better able to describe what he’s up to. (I once saw an interview with Christopher Nolan in which he commented that on the basis of a 30-second clip you can with absolute confidence identify a movie as Malick’s — though he went on to say that if you ask him to explain how he recognizes it as Malick he can’t do it. I’m hoping to achieve more explanatory power.)  

Anyway, check out the “movies” tag for more. But probably not much more about Malick.  

IMG 2811

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.)

March 4, 2023

Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow Turns 50 – by Ted Gioia:

Pynchon may still have many admirers, but few who are willing to follow in his footsteps. Even an explicitly Pynchonian novel of more modern times, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, eventually rests its fictive universe on a compassionate, humanistic foundation, one that has no equivalent in Pynchon’s worldview. If Pynchon’s books were boats, they would be ones without a sea floor on which to set anchor. 

Ted is wrong about this, as I explain at some length — as in fifteen thousand words — in a forthcoming essay for the Hedgehog Review: “The Far Invisible: Thomas Pynchon as America’s Theologian.”  

February 20, 2023

Albert Murray and me

From my new essay for Comment on Albert Murray’s “blues idiom”: 

For white North American Christians who perceive themselves as marginalized, disparaged, despised, maybe even persecuted — well, a road map for that territory is all around us, in the experience of black Americans, especially as formulated by the great Albert Murray. And I think Murray would have been glad to see his work applied in this way: he thought, and said all the time, that the lessons of the blues idiom are universal human lessons. “When the Negro musician or dancer swings the blues, he is … making an affirmative and hence exemplary and heroic response to that which André Malraux describes as la condition humaine.” 

The essay is behind a paywall for another month — unless you subscribe to Comment, of course. (Nudge nudge wink wink.) By the way, I love the artwork the editors and designers chose to illustrate the essay, e.g.: 

IMG 1508

February 16, 2023

Continuing the recent reflections on fantasy, it me:

Like many other fantasy writers, [Hope] Mirrlees is interested in what happens if the power of Fairyland cannot be wholly excluded from our well-buffered society. In this case, we see what happens when magic begins to creep back into well-ordered and well-buffered lives. To figure this as essentially a drug war — an inevitably unsuccessful attempt to prevent the smuggling of what one character in the story significantly calls the “commodity” of fairy fruit — is a wonderful conceit and developed with delightful panache, tracing an elegantly oscillating line between the economic and the metaphysical. When one character tells a senator that he should be more aware of the high levels of consumption of fairy fruit among the poor, I find myself murmuring, Fairy fruit is the opiate of the masses.

February 4, 2023

doin thangs

Big bear 2

I haven’t written much over the years about what people call “productivity,” partly because I don’t have a lot to say. A few years ago I thought I would permanently be a Zettelkasten kind of guy, but then I discovered that I need different methods for different projects. But some things have remained constant: 

  1. I have two guiding principles; 
  2. My only task-management tool is a calendar; and 
  3. I use that calendar to schedule regular times for reviewing my notes and drafts. 

I haven’t written about that third one before, but it’s really the key ingredient. Many people think that having the right note-taking tool is essential to productivity, but I don’t. Sometimes I make notes on my computer in text files; sometimes I write in notebooks (of various kinds and sizes); sometimes I make voice notes on my phone. I just use whatever happens to be easiest at the moment — though when my mind is overfull I always sit down with a notebook and hand-write my thoughts for at least an hour. But I could probably do that with a voice note just as well. 

No, the tools don’t really matter to me, and I have learned not to fuss about them. What’s essential is scheduling time — I set aside an hour each Monday morning and a whole morning on or near the first of every month — to go over all of those notes and do a kind of self-assessment. I sit down with my notebook and my computer and ask: Where am I in my current projects? What did I accomplish last week? What do I need to think about further? Is there any research or reading I need to be doing? What should be my priorities this week (or this month)? That kind of thing.  

I could have the best note-taking system in the world and I’d still be lost if I didn’t have regular periods for review and reflection. 

January 9, 2023

projects and methods

Perhaps because I write different sorts of books, one of the most important writerly skills I have developed is the ability to adapt my working methods to the project at hand. Not every project calls for the same approach, the same model of organization, or the same tools.

For instance, when I was writing The Year of Our Lord 1943, with its five protagonists, the two most essential tools for me were (a) a color-coded timeline in Excel, so that I could see what each character was doing at any given time, and (b) a set of index cards. I had five protagonists so I got cards in five colors, and gradually accumulated information. Then, laying the cards out on a table or pinning them onto a cork board, I was able to understand the relations among those different pieces of information.

However, when I was writing How to Think I didn’t need that kind of system — I needed something very different. In that book, I had a sequential argument to make, one in which each chapter or section built upon the previous one. So I used OmniOutliner to lay out the whole argument in outline format, and then fill in the details.

When I was writing Breaking Bread with the Dead neither of those two methods would work for me. I was trying to create a kind of mosaic of ways in which we can encounter the past — a task that did not require and indeed did not admit a rigid argumentative or historical sequence. I had rather a set of portraits of people engaged in the complex activity that I call breaking bread with the dead, and each of those portraits needed to be coherent, vivid and, to some extent, self-contained. So in writing that book I just kept a set of text files open on my computer. I could go back and forth among them, but I didn’t need to do that very often, because each chapter had its own integrity. And on any given day, getting whatever chapter I was working on properly shaped was my primary task. 

But now I’m starting a new book. I’m not yet ready to talk about what it is, though I’ll get to that point before too much longer. For now, I’ll just say this: After fumbling around for a while to figure out how I could organize my thoughts in for this project, I realized that once again, the good old multicolored index cards were my best friends. And it’s actually been very pleasurable to go back and, for the first time in several years, build up a collection of cards and figure out how to relate them to one another. I use my own version of the Zettelkasten system, and maybe one day I’ll write a post about what that looks like.

But for now I just want to say that I think writers make a mistake when they try to use the same method, the same organizational system, for every book. The character of the project — its structure, its form, the demands it makes upon you as a writer — should determine the way you write the book. If you’re writing the same kind of book every time — like Robert Caro, for instance — then by all means use the same system. But if not, exercise your imagination! 

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December 28, 2022

reading Pynchon

Some years ago I tried to write a book that I called Anthropocene Theology … well, actually, I did write that book, but once I had written it I wasn’t satisfied. It arose from a series of blog posts on my old Text Patterns blog, and perhaps for that reason I couldn’t make it sufficiently coherent. I dunno, maybe someone would have published it anyway, but I wouldn’t have been happy with it, and I don’t need another book on my CV. So I set it aside. 

There was a lot about Thomas Pynchon in it, ideas that were and are important to me, so a couple of years ago I extracted all that and tried to make a book out of it also. But editors told me that the book was too short to be published in the form I sent it. (I own many shorter books, but hey, you can’t argue with editors about stuff like that.) Alas, it is also too long to be published as an essay. I will get it out into the world some day, even if only as a self-published thing, but in the meantime I want to share an offshoot of the project. 

Pynchon is a notoriously difficult writer, but also, in my view, a very great one who is not read as widely as he should be. So it occurred to me that it might be useful for me to write a kind of introduction to Pynchon: an overview of his life and work that might entice new readers and guide them in their efforts. So I did, and here it is. I hope some of you will find it useful. 

UPDATE: I’m very pleased to report that the long essay on Pynchon is not, after all, too long and will be published in the Summer issue of The Hedgehog Review! 

September 15, 2022

shorts

I have read a great deal about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and I have many thoughts — and a few strong opinions — but I am keeping them all to myself. Why? Because I don’t have any first-hand or even second-hand knowledge about the matter. It’s a useful spiritual discipline for me to shut up about all this. Indeed, over time I want to increase the number of things I shut up about until I finally achieve perfect silence. 

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The primary — not the only, but the primary — reason journalists decline to name their sources is simply this: They don’t want us to be able to evaluate those sources. Readers fear some things and hope for other things, and journalists stay in business by feeding the fears and the hopes alike. They can best do this by writing that “an expert told me that the worst will indeed happen” or “a person close to the situation told me that the event you’ve all been praying for will soon come to pass.” The expertise of the supposed expert might not bear up under inquiry, nor the closeness of the person supposedly close to the situation; so identities stay under wraps. 

• 

The vast majority of journalists, TV talking heads, talk-radio hosts, and politicians never ask themselves whether what they are about to say is true. They ask whether they’ll get in trouble for saying it. 

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A line from an entry in my journal: “Everybody lied, and lied all the time.” Could be about any period, any place. (I’d say more about this, but I have an essay forthcoming on lying and truthtelling, so I’ll save my comments for its appearance.) 

• 

Another line from my journal: “Nobody can be bothered to find out how the world actually works.” 

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Charles Spurgeon (on Luke 15:20): “The eyes of mercy are quicker than the eyes of repentance. Even the eye of our faith is dim compared with the eye of God’s love. He sees a sinner long before a sinner sees him.”

July 31, 2022

smooth things and rough ground

There are many links in what follows. I would encourage you to read this through without noticing the links, and then go back to them later if you’re so inclined. 

Around a year ago I wrote a post in which I said this: 

I obviously write about a good many things, but over the last decade my work has been largely devoted to a single overarching theme: what we attend to and what we fail to attend to. This started with the work on my old Text Patterns blog that fed into my 2011 book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, and since then I have pursued the various connected issues and problems down several paths. My set of Theses for Disputation, “Attending to Technology,” is my most explicit articulation of these concerns, but even when I didn’t seem to be thinking about these things I really was. Even my biography of the Book of Common Prayer was an attempt to understand the prayer book as an instrument for the focusing of the attention of wayward Christians on that to which they should primarily attend. As the BCP almost says, “We have attended to those things we should not have attended to, and we have not attended to those things which we should have attended to, and there is no health in us.” The relevance of these questions to How to Think will be obvious to anyone who has read it, but I could say the same about the two books that I published since then, The Year of Our Lord 1943 and Breaking Bread with the Dead. In each case I am concerned with the forces in our culture that inhibit enriching attentiveness, that enforce enervating distraction, that direct our minds always towards the frivolous or the malicious. 

I then went on to say that I am shifting towards a new general project, which at that time wasn’t perfectly clear in my mind. And I was fine with that, because as far back as 2014 I understood that it is important for me, as I transition to the final stage of my career, not to know where I am going. “Old men ought to be explorers.”

But matters are coming into a focus a bit. It has recently occurred to me that much of what I am writing these days circles around an imperative that Wittgenstein famously articulated in the Philosophical Investigations: “We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!” 

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The goal of the attention merchants is to keep us on the ice, to keep us sliding in the direction they choose, to keep us believing that the frictionlessness of the sliding is a sign that “the conditions are ideal.” But I want to walk — I need to walk, so I can learn to move at the speed of our three-mile-an-hour God. 

Repair is harder, rougher, than discarding the replacement; invitation of others to collaborate in repair is rougher than going it alone. 

So the quest for a constructive friction is what my work keeps circling around these days. It’s why I seek to practice handmind; it’s why I am interested in anarchism, because anarchism is a determination to achieve through the patient work of negotiation and voluntary association what all the forces of metaphysical capitalism would prefer to sell us. It’s why I want to distinguish between “productivity” and good work. It’s why I seek the messiness of the unfinalizable human world rather than allowing myself to be transformed into a server. To resist mechanization and its monoculture; to practice a cosmopolitanism of difference; to recover piety towards flawed and even broken institutions — these are all ways of finding and exploring the rough ground. Strategies and practices of roughness. Because the rough ground is where walking — a human life on a human scale — is possible. 

The Essenes, those fearsome ascetics of the profound desert, denounced their spiritual enemies — probably the Pharisees specifically, certainly all the Jewish leaders who lived and taught others to live in frictionless comfort with the Ruling Powers — as seekers of smooth things. The phrase comes from Isaiah 30: 

For they are a rebellious people, 
lying children, 
children unwilling to hear 
the instruction of the Lord; 
who say to the seers, “Do not see,” 
and to the prophets, “Do not prophesy to us what is right; 
speak to us smooth things, 
prophesy illusions, 
leave the way, turn aside from the path, 
let us hear no more about the Holy One of Israel.”   

But if you invite your leaders to speak to you only smooth things, you will dwell in illusion; and in a state of illusion you will be vulnerable to powers far greater than yourself; and, as Isaiah goes on to say, all the vessels will be broken, and you will be unable to carry fire from your hearth or draw water from your cistern.

I’m not an Essene; I lack the requisite fierceness. I prefer to walk on that rough ground with what I have called the “peaceable irony” of the Taoist sage (or the Franciscan friar, a similar figure). Or maybe like Les Murray’s apostle of sprawl:

Sprawl leans on things. It is loose-limbed in its mind. 
Reprimanded and dismissed 
it listens with a grin and one boot up on the rail 
of possibility. It may have to leave the Earth. 
Being roughly Christian, it scratches the other cheek 
and thinks it unlikely. Though people have been shot for sprawl. 

Those with ears to hear, let them hear. 

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June 24, 2022

transcription

I like this from my buddy Austin Kleon: A solution to writer’s block: Transcribe yourself — I do something similar, though not for writer’s block, because that’s an affliction I have never experienced. (“More’s the pity,” some of you are saying.) I use dictation as a means of generating unfiltered ideas, and transcription of the audio files as a way of filtering the ideas I’ve generated.

But I don’t use my phone. I use this:

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Why use a separate device when I could use my phone? Because this thing ain’t connected to the internet. When I’m sitting down to do some serious reading, I don’t want any internet-connected device within reach. If I have a thought about something in a book, I grab this little recorder, note the book and the page, and briefly describe the idea. Sometimes I read a relevant passage into the mic.

Many people want a way of recording ideas that has less friction — for instance, they want a device that will transcribe their spoken thoughts for them. There are times when I use such services (Dragon is great), but I avoid them in my idea-generating phase because I think friction is my friend. It helps me a lot to have my thoughts on a device that I just have to listen to. When I do my weekly review sessions, usually on Monday mornings, I go through all the little audio files I’ve recorded in the past week to listen for ideas that have some value. Then I type out clarified and condensed versions of them, which makes them usable for essays or posts. Again: unfiltered recording, filtered transcription.

June 2, 2022

From David Copperfield, Chapter XV:

Mr. Dick and I soon became the best of friends, and very often, when his day’s work was done, went out together to fly the great kite. Every day of his life he had a long sitting at the Memorial, which never made the least progress, however hard he laboured, for King Charles the First always strayed into it, sooner or later, and then it was thrown aside, and another one begun. The patience and hope with which he bore these perpetual disappointments, the mild perception he had that there was something wrong about King Charles the First, the feeble efforts he made to keep him out, and the certainty with which he came in, and tumbled the Memorial out of all shape, made a deep impression on me. What Mr. Dick supposed would come of the Memorial, if it were completed; where he thought it was to go, or what he thought it was to do; he knew no more than anybody else, I believe. Nor was it at all necessary that he should trouble himself with such questions, for if anything were certain under the sun, it was certain that the Memorial never would be finished. It was quite an affecting sight, I used to think, to see him with the kite when it was up a great height in the air. What he had told me, in his room, about his belief in its disseminating the statements pasted on it, which were nothing but old leaves of abortive Memorials, might have been a fancy with him sometimes; but not when he was out, looking up at the kite in the sky, and feeling it pull and tug at his hand. He never looked so serene as he did then. I used to fancy, as I sat by him of an evening, on a green slope, and saw him watch the kite high in the quiet air, that it lifted his mind out of its confusion, and bore it (such was my boyish thought) into the skies. As he wound the string in and it came lower and lower down out of the beautiful light, until it fluttered to the ground, and lay there like a dead thing, he seemed to wake gradually out of a dream; and I remember to have seen him take it up, and look about him in a lost way, as if they had both come down together, so that I pitied him with all my heart. 

I identify with Mr. Dick. I think if I could take all this stuff I write and make a kite from it, I’d be happier … as long as I could keep the kite aloft. 

June 1, 2022

There are men who always confound the praise of goodness with the practice, and who believe themselves mild and moderate, charitable and faithful, because they have exerted their eloquence in commendation of mildness, fidelity, and other virtues.

– Samuel Johnson, Rambler 28 

I feel seen. 

May 14, 2022

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Self-portrait as I begin eight months of research leave

May 2, 2022

a memory

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At UVA, they’re stripping Alderman Library pretty much down to the frame, which may mean that this room won’t be long for the world. (I don’t know the details of the plan for renovation, but the photos on the linked page look pretty stark.) I still have a vivid memory of an afternoon forty-two years when I heard a talk there by Jean LeClercq, the Dominican monk and scholar. We sat in an intimate semicircle and he spoke quietly of monastic life in the Middle Ages. When it was over I headed for Heartwood Books to buy a copy of The Love of Learning and the Desire for God — which I still have: 

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It’s a great book. Maybe time for a re-read? 

Also, UVA’s photographer Sanjay Suchak has used the rebuilding of the library as a chance to get up high for an unusual view of the Rotunda and its corner of the Grounds: 

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April 27, 2022

department of corrections

My friend Joe Mangina — who, unlike me, is a real theologian — has written to correct something I wrote in my sketch of a demonology.

I would only question your naming of Sin and Death as being among the Pauline “principalities and powers.” It seems to me that these fall in a fundamentally different category. The principalities are created realities, of God knows what ontological status, but anyway created and, tragically corrupted. But Sin and Death aren’t created. They are names for the corruption — for Evil — itself. This may seem a theologian’s quibble, and I’m happy to acknowledge that from the ordinary mortal’s point of view these are all powers or systems opposed to God that enslave humans. But it does make a difference. The powers can be — at least eschatologically and in principle — redeemed; Sin and Death, not so.

This is precisely right, and not at all a quibble. (And I knew better! Annoyingly sloppy on my part.)

We don’t really understand the “ontological status” of the Powers: I wrote about some of the complications here. Demons, whom I describe as the agents of the Powers, are equally difficult to fix ontologically, as we may note when we hear “My name is Legion, for we are many” (Mark 5:9).

Moreover, it has not always seemed clear to Christians that angels, demons, and human beings exhaust the categories of sentient creatures. Milton writes darkly of “middle Spirits” whose nature lies “Betwixt the angelical and human kind” (Paradise Lost, Book III). In The Discarded Image C. S. Lewis details the medieval belief in creatures whom he calls longaevi — these are very close to Tolkien’s Elves — whose place in the drama of human salvation is uncertain and debatable. In That Hideous Strength Lewis has one character speculate about the existence of “neutrals” — beings who originally were not concerned with the spiritual warfare that dominates the human world but who are being drawn into that conflict, being compelled to choose a side, as we all ultimately will.

But in the end, this much can be said about all sentient creatures: At the name of Jesus every knee shall bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:10–11). That includes the Powers, the angels, the demons, the rulers of this world (kosmokratoras), and humans made in the image of God.

But it does not include Sin and Death, which shall be eradicated. That’s the key difference: All powers and rulers, whether in the end redeemed or not, will confess the One Lord who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. But Sin and Death will be altogether destroyed.

April 11, 2022

Demons

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I got a lot of problems with you people, and you know what the top one is? Many of you are possessed by demons. Or at least oppressed by them. And it needs to stop.

But as always, the first step is acknowledging that you’re afflicted by powerful forces beyond your control. So I try to lay out my demonology in this essay.

You’re welcome.

March 16, 2022

Mars Hill Audio

One of my favorite experiences is to be interviewed by Ken Myers for Mars Hill Audio. Ken is both a great interviewer and a great editor of audio, so he always makes me sound smarter than I am. A wondrous gift. What he does is absolutely unique: an audio journal filled with in-depth interviews, thoughtful meditations on culture by Ken, lots of music … a whole world of art and ideas. It’s unique and irreplaceable. I earnestly, passionately encourage you to subscribe. (By the way, MHA has a really excellent mobile app, for iOS and Android.)

The immediate prompt for this post: I’m in the new issue, talking with Ken about Breaking Bread with the Dead.

March 15, 2022

“Money clarifies; so does war.”

— me, over at the Hog Blog, on Realities Soon To Be Revealed

March 14, 2022

The Monday morning ritual: reviewing whatever inchoate ideas emerged during the past week and putting the useful ones in a text file. Sometimes I write by hand, sometimes I dictate thoughts, sometimes I type them. My so-much-missed dog Malcolm is on the cover of my notebook because I want to be like him: calm, sweet, and always a pleasure to be around. (He was also beautiful, but I don’t aspire to that.)

March 13, 2022

civil heart, disinterested charity

Well, it was very odd what Mr. Sammler found himself doing as he lay in his room, in an old building. Settling, the building had cracked its plaster, and along these slanted cracks he had mentally inscribed certain propositions. According to one of these he, personally, stood apart from all developments. From a sense of deference, from age, from good manners, he sometimes affirmed himself to be out of it, hors d’usage, not a man of the times. No force of nature, nothing paradoxical or demonic, he had no drive for smashing through the masks of appearances. Not “Me and the Universe.” No, his personal idea was one of the human being conditioned by other human beings, and knowing that present arrangements were not, sub specie aeternitatis, the truth, but that one should be satisfied with such truth as one could get by approximation. Trying to live with a civil heart. With disinterested charity. With a sense of the mystic potency of humankind. With an inclination to believe in archetypes of goodness. A desire for virtue was no accident.

New worlds? Fresh beginnings? Not such a simple matter. (Sammler, reaching for diversion.) What did Captain Nemo do in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? He sat in the submarine, the Nautilus, and on the ocean floor he played Bach and Handel on the organ. Good stuff, but old. And what of Wells’ Time Traveler, when he found himself thousands of years in the future? He fell in square love with a beautiful Eloi maiden. To take with one, whether down into the depths or out into space and time, something dear, and to preserve it — that seemed to be the impulse. Jules Verne was quite right to have Handel on the ocean floor, not Wagner, though in Verne’s day Wagner was avant-garde among the symbolists, fusing word and sound. According to Nietzsche the Germans, insufferably oppressed by being German, used Wagner like hashish. To Mr. Sammler’s ears, Wagner was background music for a pogrom. And what should one have on the moon, electronic compositions? Mr. Sammler would advise against that. Art groveling before Science.

— Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet

October 8, 2021

I am of course WEIRD, but it just occurred to me that as a Cis-Het Able-bodied White Man I am also a CHAWM. I am a WEIRD CHAWM. 

August 16, 2021

Tolkien and Auden

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J. R. R. Tolkien and his wife Edith with their grandson Simon, at their home on Sandfield Road, Oxford, 1966. Photo from the Oxford Mail.

Tolkien was not an easy man to be friends with, as he himself knew. But relatively late in his life he became friends with the poet W. H. Auden, thanks to Auden’s reviews in the New York Times of the first and third volumes of The Lord of the Rings. Those came at a moment when the success of LOTR was by no means assured, and indeed those who hated the book — most notably Edmund Wilson — made a point of including Auden in their denigration. There were moments of tension later on, most notably when a London newspaper quoted Auden as having said that the decor of Tolkien’s home was “hideous”; and Tolkien — so it seems to me anyway — was never fully at ease with non-Catholics. But in the main the friendship remained firm, if rather distant, and was a source of pleasure and comfort to both men. When some medievalists produced a festschrift for Tolkien on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, Auden contributed “A Short Ode to a Philologist”; and when Auden received a sixtieth birthday festschrift in the journal Shenandoah, Tolkien offered a lovely tribute, “For W.H.A.,” in both Anglo-Saxon and modern English. 

You can read about their relationship in the biographies that Humphrey Carpenter wrote about each man, and also in Tolkien’s letters. But it seems to me that the relationship is interesting enough that it deserves some kind of artful presentation; perhaps one that portrays their friendship as more intimate than it really was. And I have always been haunted by the fact that, though Tolkien was fifteen years older than Auden, they died within a few weeks of each other: Tolkien in Bournemouth on September 2, 1973, and Auden in Vienna on September 29. 

So I wrote a short play about them. 

There I imagine a conversation between them — taking place probably in 1967, though don’t try to pin me down about that — a conversation based on things they actually said to each other, usually in letters, and things they said or wrote on matters of mutual interest. That is, Auden really did invent a parlor game called Purgatory Mates, and Tolkien really did say that Auden’s proposal to write a book about him was “an impertinence.” Auden’s final words in the play are based on an encounter he had with the young Jay Parini. And so on. So, the play is Based on True Events and Words, even though I seriously doubt that they ever would have had a face-to-face conversation like this. Auden had become by this point in his life too garrulous, and Tolkien too mumblingly reticent. (In both cases excessive alcohol consumption played a part.) So I had to make Auden more shortly-spoken than he was in real life, and Tolkien more articulate. 

Anyway, it’s probably really terrible, but I enjoyed writing it. It scratched an itch. 

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August 1, 2021

An Italian born in Texas named Jacobs has just won an Olympic gold medal … this Italophile Texan named Jacobs is verklempt. 

June 15, 2021

Betjeman & Burnham

You probably don’t expect to see an essay that links John Betjeman and Bo Burnham. I certainly didn’t expect to write one, but I did.

When I first came across Bo Burnham’s videos, several years ago now, I didn’t care for them at all. I thought he was childishly eager to pluck all the lowest-hanging comic-satirical fruit, and was all too eager to flatter the sensibilities of his audience. So I stopped paying attention to what he was doing. But people were praising his new Netflix special so extravagantly that I had to check it out, if only so I could say how wrong everyone is.

Instead, I loved it. I think it is a tremendously successful and genuinely significant work of art. I keep thinking: I’m having this reaction to a Bo Burnham show?? And yeah, I am.

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 6, 2021

This is either the cover of the Turkish edition of Breaking Bread with the Dead or else the album art for my new ambient jazz record.

April 1, 2021

It’s only the ambidextrous who are truly pure! As an ambidextrous person, I endorse this verdict. Though — if I must be truthful — I’m not in any straightforward sense ambidextrous, because while there are things that I do much better with my left hand and things I do much better with my right hand, there is almost nothing that I do equally well with both hands. I think I would’ve been more left-handed except that my parents when I was very young encouraged me to use my right hand for things they noticed, like writing and throwing. But things that they didn’t pay attention to  — brushing my teeth, combing my hair, shooting pool, archery — I did, and do, with my left hand. (Well, not brushing my hair, because my hair is too short to brush. But when I buzz my head or trim my heard, I hold the clippers in my left hand.) In general, my right hand is the Hand of Power, and my left hand is the Hand of Precision. Anything that requires fine motor skills: left. Anything that requires strength, like opening a tightly-sealed jar: right.

February 18, 2021

the next wave

  IMG 1949 We’re spending much of the day harvesting snow so we’ll be able to flush our toilets when the inevitable comes: a period without water. When the thaw arrives, probably sometime tomorrow, frozen pipes will start to burst. As we near 32º I’ll turn off water to our property and hope for the best. The warming will be gradual, which I hope will help.

The situation itself has been difficult but obviously survivable, a condition that will continue if we lose our water for a while. I’m sure there are people in charge of various things here in Texas who could have and should have done their jobs better, but this is as close to a black-swan event as one is ever likely to see, so let’s please be reasonable in our criticisms.

But who am I kidding? The most simply annoying element of the whole situation has been the constant noise of axes grinding among the politicians and commentariat, whether the lefties gleefully mocking Texas as a “third-world nation” — their rhetoric is indistinguishable from Trump’s, with his sneers at “shithole countries” — or the right-wingers blaming everything on wind turbines and/or Joe Biden’s powers of weather manipulation. (Between Biden attacking Texas with his crack team of polar vortices and the Rothschilds wielding their cleverly targeted space lasers, these sure are hard times for solid Christian folk like me.) The greatest frustration I have with American axe-grinding is the way everyone always grinds the same axe, grinds it to absolute powder, then grabs a clone of it and starts grinding that. For partisans on both sides, every story has a moral and every story has exactly the same moral. And they never stop chanting it, transfixed as they are by their politico-verbal OCD.

Okay, time to fetch more snow.

February 13, 2021

Kafkaesque

Is it just because I was teaching Kafka last week that I keep having these Kafkaesque experiences? Or is it the state of our civilization?

Example A: I needed to make an appointment with my primary care doctor, so I went to the website to make an appointment online. I received the message that I am not “certified” for booking online, though I have done so before. So I tried to find the hours during which I can call to make an appointment, and saw this information: “Call our office to find our current opening hours.” I did, and got a recorded message: “We are currently closed. Please call back when the office is open.” Click. I felt like Joseph K.

Example B — and this one’s a doozy: At Baylor we’re all doing weekly covid tests, which is a very good thing, and we’ve been sent emails that link to a webpage where we are told “Go to this page and fill out the form to sign up for a time.” So I went to the page and discovered that all of the times, forever, are “not available.” Hmmm. I tried the page in different browsers, on different devices: same result everywhere. I wrote to our HR department to tell them what happened and ask how I am supposed to book a test. Five days later I got an email message asking me to log into our new “portal” to find my answer. The answer, as it turned out, was just an email, but an email that they make you go to the portal to read. So let’s recap: They send me an email telling me that I have am email that I cannot read in my email client but must log into a “portal” to read.

Okay then. I read the reply, and it said, “Go to this page and fill out the form to sign up for a time.” That is, whoever replied to me copy-pasted from the webpage whose inaccurate information had led me to write in the first place.

So I made a phone call. Wait, hold, transfer, etc. Explained the situation to a new person. She said, “The message you received gave you inaccurate advice, I’m really sorry.”

… Okay. So it’s not just me, nobody can book a covid test on that page?

“That’s right.”

So maybe you all should delete that page and correct the website, don’t you think?

“I’ll make a note of that. Can I do anything else to help you?”

Yes, you can tell me how to book my weekly covid test.

“Oh, you don’t have to book it, you can just walk in.”

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.

February 3, 2021

Daoism and Cosmotechnics

My recent New Atlantis essay on the way beyond what I call The Standard Critique of Technology is now unpaywalled. This is an important essay for me personally, though I have no idea whether anyone else will find it valuable. It’s peculiar.

The basic question I ask is this: What if Neil Postman and Ivan Illich and Ursula Franklin and Albert Borgmann are all absolutely correct in their critique of how modern technocracy has developed — but as a result nothing has changed? What do we do now?

The basic answer I give is: There may be considerable resources available to us through the philosophical (as opposed to the religious) tradition of Daoism.

It may seem odd that as a Christian I am looking to Daoism, but again, it is to Daoism as a philosophical tradition (daojia) rather than Daoism as an organized religion (daojiao) to which I turn, and Christian thinkers have typically been open to the adaptation of non-Christian sources of thought. If Thomas Aquinas can appropriate Aristotle then I see no reason why I can’t appropriate Laozi. There are certain elements of Christian spirituality — especially from the Franciscan tradition: as I say in the essay, St. Francis is a kind of Daoist sage — that echo the Daoist approach to technology, but they remain, I think, underdeveloped. That’s something I want to work on in the coming years.

January 29, 2021

Yesterday I posted, and then almost immediately took down, a reflection on the most recent public kerfuffle at Baylor. I decided that it deserves more than a brief post, so I am going to try to write something at greater length, as soon as I am able. 

January 26, 2021

calculations

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I wrote a post about love and death.

UPDATE: A helpful comment from my friend Tim Larsen about people  who think as Ezekiel Emanuel does: “They also don’t seem to mention that an awful lot of people have worked very hard, quite unpleasant jobs their whole ‘active’ lives and have earned a bit of play and rest.  Maybe if your career is being a cultural critic you think it would be a step down to give it up to play shuffleboard or dominos, but if you cleaned hotel rooms for 47 years, it presumably looks rather different.”

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. 

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.

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