Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 117

mapping the books

I love this idea from my buddy Austin Kleon: not listing but rather mapping the books you’ve recently read. I have never thought of this but am convinced that I need to try.

bloggy

A friend of mine wrote the other day to commend some of my recent posts for being “bloggy.” There can be no higher praise. I love blogging bloggily, but it’s not easy to do.

I’ve spent decades practicing the craft of writing for book publishers and periodicals, and that craft requires me to seek clarity, coherence, and completeness. But those aren’t the virtues of blog writing: the Blog Imperatives are exploration, experimentation, and iteration. You’ve got to be willing to try out ideas that you’re not wholly comfortable with, ideas you don’t yet have a firm grasp on; and then you need to circle back later to revisit and reconsider. 

In fact, one of my writerly tasks in the coming weeks is to read through old posts here and see if I can find some dots to connect; if I do, I will connect them through linkage and tagging. Keep an eye peeled for these Posts of Revisitation. 

If you think my bloggy work here is valuable, you may support it through my Buy Me a Coffee page — see the link at the top of this page. I wrote an update for my supporters today: you may read it here. 

ascending

In many of my courses I ask my students to explicate certain key passages from the texts we read — to dig in to the details, to see how the passages do their work. Here’s a selection from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago — the chapter called “The Ascent” — that some of my students are writing about: 

You are ascending…. 

Formerly you never forgave anyone. You judged people without mercy. And you praised people with equal lack of moderation. And now an understanding mildness has become the basis of your uncategorical judgments. You have come to realize your own weakness — and you can therefore understand the weakness of others. And be astonished at another’s strength. And wish to possess it yourself. 

The stones rustle beneath our feet. We are ascending…. 

With the years, armor-plated restraint covers your heart and all your skin. You do not hasten to question and you do not hasten to answer. Your tongue has lost its flexible capacity for easy oscillation. Your eyes do not flash with gladness over good tidings nor do they darken with grief.

For you still have to verify whether that’s how it is going to be. And you also have to work out — what is gladness and what is grief. 

And now the rule of your life is this: Do not rejoice when you have found, do not weep when you have lost. 

Your soul, which formerly was dry, now ripens from suffering. And even if you haven’t come to love your neighbors in the Christian sense, you are at least learning to love those close to you.

Those close to you in spirit who surround you in slavery. And how many of us come to realize: It is particularly in slavery that for the first time we have learned to recognize genuine friendship!

And also those close to you in blood, who surrounded you in your former life, who loved you — while you played the tyrant over them….  

Here is a rewarding and inexhaustible direction for your thoughts: Reconsider all your previous life. Remember everything you did that was bad and shameful and take thought — can’t you possibly correct it now? 

Yes, you have been imprisoned for nothing. You have nothing to repent of before the state and its laws. 

But … before your own conscience? But … in relation to other individuals?

From a 1999 interview with the members of The Police: S...

From a 1999 interview with the members of The Police:  

Sting: People thrashing out three chords didn’t really interest us musically. Reggae was accepted in punk circles and musically more sophisticated, and we could play it, so we veered off in that direction. I mean let’s be honest here, “So Lonely” was unabashedly culled from “No Woman No Cry” by Bob Marley. Same chorus. What we invented was this thing of going back and forth between thrash punk and reggae. That was the little niche we created for ourselves.

Stewart Copeland: It was also the first time Sting said ‘screw the punk formula’. Sting started playing the song and I distinctly remember Andy and I making farting noises and going, ‘Yeah, right’. But then he got to that steaming chorus, we looked at each other and realised that maybe we should give it a try. In spite of our kerfuffling, Sting persevered and made us create something new.

Sting: The other nice thing about playing a reggae groove in the verses was that you could leave holes in the music. I needed those holes because, initially, I had a hard time singing and playing at the same time. So if we had a signature in the band it was…

Andy Summers: Big holes?

some thoughts on Tim Keller

If you read Tim Keller’s books or listen to his sermons, some things will (or should) become quite clear to you:

He thinks of himself first and foremost and always as a pastor.His job, as a pastor, as he understands it, to make disciples of Jesus Christ, and then form and strengthen and encourage those disciples.When trying to understand how to do that, Keller — as a conservative Protestant with a high regard for Scripture — turns to the Bible.There he sees Paul on the Areopagus reasoning patiently with the intellectuals of Athens; there he sees Paul counsel the followers of Jesus at Colossae to “clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience”; there he sees Paul tell the church in Galatia that “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control”; there he hears Jesus bless the meek and the poor in spirit.He draws the conclusion — again, as someone with a high view of Scripture — that this counsel is counsel for us as much as it was for its original audience.So he teaches his congregation and his readers accordingly.

If he is wrong so to teach now, then he was also wrong thirty years ago. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever; in him there is no shadow of turning; therefore the lives of His faithful disciples, while they may vary in details according to circumstance or personality type, will always take the same essential form.

Those who say that Keller’s message is not suited to this political moment, that it is not an effective political strategy, are therefore, I believe, laboring under a category error. Keller’s pastoral role has not been to articulate a political strategy, but to make disciples. If he is correct in thinking that the counsel of Scripture is indeed counsel for all of us, and if the passages I cite above are indeed in the Bible, then it doesn’t matter whether obeying them is politically effectual (according to whatever calculus of effectiveness you happen to employ) or not. The task of serious Christians is to become Jesus’s disciples, to become formed in the image of Christ — including Christ in His suffering — whether that “works” or not.

That’s never easy, but it has the merit of being simple. So there’s no need for me, as a Christ-follower, to raise my wetted finger to test the prevailing cultural winds. I know what I’m supposed to do and to be. Woe unto me if I don’t.

zine!

Julia Evans makes really cool zines for people who want to know more about computer programming, or, more generally, about being a power user of computers. Her most recent zine is called How DNS Works, and it’s excellent — plus, there are some leftover pages about registering and maintaining your own domain. For example:

Other images with more detail here.

Longtime readers of this blog will know that I am a big fan of owning your online turf — or coming as close to it as you can get — for reasons I explain in detail in this essay. Evans’s zine-within-a-zine about domain registration and maintenance does a great job of explaining exactly how it works — and in the process, I hope, makes it seem less intimidating than it otherwise might.

In David Thomson’s The Big Screen, largely a history of m...

In David Thomson’s The Big Screen, largely a history of movies, there’s a chapter on television that contains a sentence, a simple and straightforward sentence that’s nonetheless worthy of serious and extended reflection: “This book is not interrupted every sixteen pages by a cluster of advertisements.”

the speed of God

Many of the key ideas in Andy Crouch’s new book The Life We Are Looking For emerge from his definition of the human person, which he derives from the Shema of Deuteronomy 6, as adapted by Jesus in Mark 12 (keywords emphasized):

One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

Thus Andy: “Every human person is a heart-soul-mind-strength complex designed for love.” Simple and direct; but the more you think about it the more complex and generative a definition it is.

Early in his book, Andy talks about Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who want to give us “superpowers.” And he says:

Here is the problem: you cannot take advantage of a superpower and fully remain a person, in the sense of a heart-soul-mind-strength complex designed for love. This is not an unfortunate side effect of superpowers or a flaw that could be overcome with future improvements. It is the essence of their design because superpowers are power without effort. And power without effort, it turns out, diminishes us as much as it delights us.

Elsewhere in that same chapter he quotes the Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama saying that “the speed of God” is three miles an hour because that was the speed at which Jesus moved through his world. So may be, and I think this is one of the chief burdens of Andy’s book, what makes the most sense for us is to try whenever possible to move at the speed of God – and in that way refuse the offer of superpowers.

Of course, this dovetails with a lot of things people have been writing lately about slowness, but what I like about Andy’s book is that it specifies why we can find ourselves responding so warmly to the possibility of slowness. What happens when we seek superpowers, and especially super-speed, is the sacrifice of what I want to call our proper powers – the powers through the exercise of which we (heart-soul-mind-strength) flourish in love.

Let’s take a peek into Koyama’s Three Mile an Hour God:

Jesus Christ came. He walked towards the ‘full stop’. He lost his mobility. He was nailed down! He is not even at three miles an hour as we walk. He is not moving. ‘Full stop’! What can be slower than ‘full stop’ ‘nailed down’? At this point of ‘full stop’, the apostolic church proclaims that the love of God to man is ultimately and fully revealed. God walks ‘slowly’ because he is love. If he is not love he would have gone much faster. Love has its speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It is ‘slow’ yet it is lord over all other speeds since it is the speed of love. It goes on in the depth of our life, whether we notice or not, whether we are currently hit by storm or not, at three miles an hour. It is the speed we walk and therefore it is the speed the love of God walks.

Thus: “I find that God goes ‘slowly’ in his educational process of man. ‘Forty years in the wilderness’ points to his basic educational philosophy.”

When the economist Gary Becker delivered his Nobel Lecture in 1992, he titled it “The Economic Way of Looking at Life.” Here’s a key quote:

Different constraints are decisive for different situations, but the most fundamental constraint is limited time. Economic and medical progress have greatly increased length of life, but not the physical flow of time itself, which always restricts everyone to twenty-four hours per day. So while goods and services have expended enormously in rich countries, the total time available to consume has not.

So it turns out that “the economic way of looking at life” – which is pretty much the American way of looking at life, and certainly the Silicon Valley way – means that you think of time as a scarce consumable resource. Which is indeed how most of us, it seems, think about time, and that, in turn, is why we might experience the idea of traveling at the speed of God as not just wrong but, more, offensive – a failure to maximize consumption.

Breaking that habit of thought, and imagining how to move at the speed of God – these are real and vital challenges. Maybe the first thing we need to learn how to repair is our disordered sense of time — time is not a scarce resource but rather a gift. 

mid-century modernity

Over the past few months, I have been thinking a lot about the remarkable cultural transition that took place, especially in the West but really all over the world, in the middle third of the twentieth century. Think about it: as that era opened we had the music of Louis Armstrong and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times; as it closed we had Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Those latter works come from something that most of us recognize as in some general sense our current world; the earlier ones seem so distant as to be alien. (Fascinating, yes, but alien.)

As I say, I’ve been thinking a lot about this transition, because I believe that we can’t understand where we are, culturally speaking, without understanding where we come from. And it’s not simply a matter of waving a hand and saying “The Sixties” — the transformation is more complex and gradual than that. Even a story like The Lord of the Rings seems to be ours in a way that nothing before the Thirties is. I’m trying to figure this out, and will continue to do so.

So note the tag on this post. It’ll be turning up often. And I have gone back to tag some earlier posts that are relevant to this inquiry, though I’m only beginning that task. Keep your eyes peeled for regular updates!

Nick Russo:To wrap up his rowhomes project, Hytha’s plan...

Nick Russo:

To wrap up his rowhomes project, Hytha’s planning to sell a collage of all 100 images that comprise it, and he expects the collage to sell for as much as $40,000. In the meantime, Hytha has been meeting with local organizations that specialize in home repair and tangled titles in an effort to figure out how to put the money to the best possible use. Whether it ultimately helps Philadelphians with rowhome repairs, tangled title resolutions, or both, Hytha’s donation will help protect the historical legacy and architectural vibrancy of the city’s oft-neglected neighborhoods. In so doing, what started for Hytha as an art project celebrating the tragic beauty of urban decay in Philadelphia’s built environment will have become a force counteracting that very decay.

Hytha shows us, then, that it’s possible to use NFTs without severing economic action from morality, and further, that the new technology actually opens up new frontiers for local civic engagement. With sufficient skill, hard work, and good fortune, struggling artists now have a realistic chance at becoming powerful community pillars—all while doing what they love. Moreover, while NFTs are often criticized for being detached from the world and devoid of real value, Hytha shows us that it’s possible to ground them in one’s environment and use them to help people appreciate the physical world instead of escape from it into cyberspace. 

An argument worthy of serious reflection.