Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 16

Shield the Joyous

Chad Holley is a dear friend of mine, but I wouldn’t say this if it weren’t true: his new novel Shield the Joyous is a beautiful and moving book. It’s most obviously a book about boyhood — boyhood in the American Deep South at a certain moment in history, yes, but more accurately boyhood — and yet I find it even more meaningful as a meditation on memory, memory as in some ways a burden, in other ways a comfort, and always a kind of gift to those remembered. 

There are other things I could say, but the story has a unique mood and tone, one to dwell in and with, and I think it’s best simply to ask readers to pay this world a visit. It will amply repay your investment of time and attention, and it will remain with you long after you set the book down. 

excerpt from my Sent folder: unions

From an email to a British friend

One more contributor to Trump’s win that hasn’t been sufficiently acknowledged: it’s one of the consequences of the collapse of labor unions. My father (Teamsters) and my paternal grandfather (Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen) were both union men. Back in the day, almost every union man in America was a Democrat, because the GOP was the party of Big Business. That is also why the GOP was, it seemed permanently, a minority party. 

But when industrial production started moving overseas and the unions got weaker, their leaders tried to play a weakened hand as though it were still a strong hand. (This of course happened in your country as well. I started to write “R.I.P. Arthur Scargill” but did a quick check and he’s still alive!) It was no longer necessary for the Dems to please the unions, and the party soon left them behind — and the people who belonged to them, and the people who never joined unions but did the same kinds of work — and pursued the more interesting clientele of student activists and their professors. 

Meanwhile the GOP continued to be the GOP, so there was no party left to advocate for blue-collar workers. There were of course isolated figures who upheld the old commitments, most notably Bernie Sanders; but Bernie was from the Northeast and therefore an alien to most of the nation’s workers, for whom “socialism” is a dirty word anyway.   

Then Donald Trump came along and said to the workers “I’ll be your defender.” Few politicians could be a less plausible fit for that role, or less likely to keep promises … but he was the only one to show up. It was a classic businessman’s move: He saw a large and wholly untapped market and he moved into it. And here we are. 

I find myself remembering early 2016, when in my neighborhood — which is somewhat mixed: there are doctors and lawyers, but there are also plumbers and electricians and office workers of various kinds — was filled with political signs. About half of them were for Trump, and about half for Bernie. There were none, and I mean none at all, for Hillary Clinton. When she was crowned as the Democratic nominee, the Bernie signs disappeared, leaving only Trump signs. Looking back, it seems like a moment freighted with symbolism, for those who can interpret it. 

on linkage and editorials

Interrupting my hiatus for a quick thought: 

Return with me, children, to the days before the recent election. Jason Kottke and John Gruber really liked this brief NYT editorial. And “really liked” is an understatement. Kottke: “Each of those links is like a fist pounding on the desk for emphasis — bam! bam! bam! bam! bam! Here! Are! The! [Effing]! Receipts!” 

Well … it depends on what you mean by “receipts.” The point of the links is not to say “Here’s proof that Trump lies” but rather “Here’s proof that we have been saying that Trump lies.” As Nick Heer rightly points out, each one of these links is to previous pieces, largely (in fact if not always in name) opinion pieces, in the Times itself — and the Times is notoriously reluctant to link outside its domain. I think of this particular editorial simply as a pushback to those critics on the left who think the Times hasn’t been tough enough on Trump. It’s not really an attack on Trump, it’s a self-defense move: Don’t blame us, we endorsed Kodos.

What Kottke and Gruber think a powerful piece of rhetoric I think of as a sign of exhaustion. When I was a teenager and my father got exasperated with me, which happened quite often, he would screw up his eyes and swing his head back and forth and chant “I have told you and told you and told you and told you…” That would go on for quite some time. I was afraid enough of his occasional violence that it usually took me a while to realize that he had gotten into told-you double digits — at which point it finally got funny, because he was working off steam and was therefore unlikely to hit me. 

That’s what the Times editorial sounds like to me. “We have told you and told you and told you and told you….” I.e.: What good would it possibly do us for to say it all again? If you’re a person who takes your opinions from the Editorial Board of the Times, or finds your home-grown opinions faithfully mirrored there, you may well find that editorial powerful. I found it comical. 

But something that Gruber says in his post about hypertext is great, and vividly expresses why I love the kind of writing I’m doing right now. That editorial, he says, 

brought to mind how social media has largely kneecapped true hypertextual writing by not enabling it. You can, of course, add links to web pages in social media posts on any of the various basically-the-same-concept-as-Twitter platforms like X, Threads, Bluesky, or Mastodon, but you do so by pasting raw URLs into posts. (Instagram, by far the world’s most popular such social network, doesn’t even let you paste hyperlinked URLs into the text of posts.) The only links that work like web links, where readers can just tap them and “go there” are @username mentions. On social media you write in plain un-styled text and just paste URLs after you describe them. It’s more like texting in public than writing for the real web. A few years ago these social networks (and private messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp) started turning URLs into “preview cards”, which is much nicer than looking at an ugly raw URLs. But it’s not the web. It’s not writing — or reading — with the power of hyperlinks as an information-density multiplier. If anything, turning links into preview cards significantly decreases information density. That feels like a regression, not progress. 

This is exactly right. Hyperlinks are so great because they allow people who want simply to read a story or an argument to do so unhindered by apparatus — but they also allow people who want to fact-check, or seek further information, to do so. As Gruber says, they provide “information density,” but in the least obtrusive way. You get to experience someone’s writing and then return for a deeper dive. That’s brilliant, and that’s perhaps the chief reason why, if all things were equal, I’d write only for the web. 

All things are not equal, however. Maybe a subject for a later post. 

what’s up

The Finnish comedian Ismo has a nice routine in which he describes how hard it is to learn the nuances of spoken English. The best-known part of the routine (justifiably!) is when he explains why he thinks the most complicated word in English is “ass.” But I also like his comment that it took him a long time to learn that the proper response to the phrase “What’s up?” … is the phrase “What’s up”?

I thought about that when I took a look at an essay many people have recently recommended: this one by Nathan Pinkoski. The first sentence of the essay is: “Twentieth-century civilization has collapsed.” And my first thought at reading that first sentence was: Has it? Has it really? Because, you know, a whole lot of what I see around me looks a great deal like what I saw around me in the twentieth century. I mean, many things have definitely changed — there’s a lot more internet, for instance. But we have the same banking system, the same car manufacturers, the same hostilities in the Middle East, the same attempts to “dismantle the canon” in university English departments, the same tours by Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, the same dumb artistic provocateurs making the same dumb provocations. We’re voting the same way we voted in the twentieth century, except that more of us get to vote early. We’re less religious then we were fifty years ago, but more religious than at other times in our history, and in any case there doesn’t yet seem to be a obvious correlation between irreligion and civilizational collapse. 

But that’s just in America. What about elsewhere? Well, immigration has altered European civilization, but “collapse” seems even there to be a strong word. China and India are richer and more powerful than they were in the twentieth century; China in particular may be headed for trouble, but “collapse”? 

I could go on, but you get the point. 

Who didn’t get the point was me, who for a moment took Pinkoski’s statement as a declaration of fact. My bad! It was actually a liturgical greeting, as when we Anglicans exchange the Peace in the middle of the Eucharistic rite. Technically we should (I think) be saying (1) “The peace of the Lord be always with you” followed by (2) “And also with you.” But usually we say (1) “The peace of the Lord” and (2) “The peace of the Lord.”

Similarly, people who (like me) grew up as University of Alabama football fans know how to greet each other: Salutation: “Howyadoin, Roll Tide.” Response: “Howyadoin, Roll Tide.”

Initially, I took Pinkoski’s first sentence as a statement of fact when in fact it was a tribal salutation, the proper response to which is the same phrase: (1) “Twentieth-century civilization has collapsed, what’s up?” (2) “Twentieth-century civilization has collapsed, what’s up?”

But I’m not a member of that tribe, so I didn’t say the phrase. Nor did I read any further. The essay clearly wasn’t meant for me, and it was kind of Pinkoski to begin with the tribal salutation that informed me of that. 

just asking questions

Jessa Crispin:

Is it important to read Faulkner? Probably not, but I think you should do it anyway. (I don’t like Faulkner, just fyi.) Because it’s good to do difficult things. Because hating something can be as interesting, sometimes more, as loving something. Is reading Faulkner going to make you a better person? Absolutely not, but the whole universe wants you to be optimized, productive, monetized. And sitting around and reading a work of art when it is not your job to do so is a rebellious act that insists I am a human being, actually, and not a cog, not a good little worker, not a cozy girl eating the slop that is fed to me. And developing the parts of myself that are unproductive, ugly, and a drain on resources is a beautiful act of rebellion.

But — and I think Crispin would agree with this — we should be clear that the value of rebellious self-development is not a reason to read Faulkner. That’s a reason to “do difficult things,” or perform “a rebellious act that insists I am a human being, actually, and not a cog.” There are ten thousand ways to achieve that other than reading Faulkner — other than reading literature — other than reading.

Crispin’s post confuses several different things, I believe. In the passage I’ve quoted she asks whether it’s important to read Faulkner; but the prompt for the post is a controversy about whether a white teacher should have read aloud to his class a passage from a Faulkner story that uses the n-word. If you read the report in the NYT, you’ll see that the black student who complained to the teacher did not argue that her teacher shouldn’t have assigned the story. “I don’t take issue with reading stories with the N-word in them. I understand the time period and that it’s a work of fiction. I do take offense when non-Black people say the N-word.” (The professor replied that he didn’t get the difference between reading the word and hearing a white person say it aloud, which strikes me as … obtuse.) 

If you look at the entire context for this debate, you might ask the following questions: 

Should white professors avoid uttering racial slurs in class, even when they’re quoting someone else?Should professors assign fiction that uses racial slurs?In what kinds of classes should professors assign fiction that uses racial slurs? For instance, might it be something to avoid in compulsory general-education courses, but permissible in courses for a major, or pure electives? Does it matter whether the writer who employs the racial slur is a member, or not, of the group insulted by the word? That is, should we evaluate the use of the n-word by Faulkner differently than we evaluate its use by James Baldwin or Richard Wright? Is the racist language employed by characters in Faulkner’s fiction one of the reasons to read his fiction — because he is the faithful portrayer of a particular social world — or are we reading him for other reasons, the power of his prose for instance, or his grasp of the tragic character of human life? How important is it for professors to assign Faulkner, and in what kinds of courses? If Faulkner should be assigned in at least some courses, which students really need to read him? If you’re not a university student but want to be well-read, is Faulkner an important writer to encounter?Is Faulkner worth reading?

You will, I trust, notice that each of those questions leads to further questions, but we need to figure out which one is our starting point, because the issues involved in these various cases can be radically different. So many of our arguments are fruitless because we’re not clear on what we’re arguing about. 

the Mathom-house

So, though there was still some store of weapons in the Shire, these were used mostly as trophies, hanging above hearths or on walls, or gathered into the museum at Michel Delving. The Mathom-house it was called; for anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom. Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms, and many of the presents that passed from hand to hand were of that sort. 

— J. R. R. Tolkien, “Concerning Hobbits” 

When I see something online that I think I might want to read, I send it to Instapaper. As I have commented before, if I wait a few days before checking my Instapaper queue, I typically find that at least 75% of the articles I have saved are no longer of interest to me, so I delete them. That has happened to me so often that I have incorporated it into my intellectual method. But usually a few of the things I’ve saved seem worth reading. 

Sometimes when I’m reading them I’ll see something that I know I want to write about — I may even know precisely what I should say about it. In such cases the relevant passage goes straight into a text file and I begin drafting, or anyway sketching out, a post or an essay. 

But often I read something, find it possibly intriguing, but don’t know quite how to respond. In that case it becomes for me a mathom: I have no immediate use for it, but I am unwilling to throw it away. I have always been uncertain what to do about such textual mathoms, and have tried several different strategies over the years, none of which have really worked for me, for reasons too tiresome to explain. 

The best answer has always been available to me: post the passages to this blog, and tag them accordingly so they can more easily be found later and linked to related writings. Now, that practice inevitably creates misunderstandings, because most people online think that if you post something you obviously agree with it, unless you explicitly attack it. Before the day is out I’ll get emails from people shocked, shocked, that I posted something related to Renaud Camus without denouncing him. But spending a few minutes a day deleting angry emails is a relatively small price to pay for having a better way to sift and reflect on what I read. 

So look for this blog to become something like Cory Doctorow’s Memex Method, a commonplace book as a public database — though I prefer to call it the Mathom-house Method. There will be more posts here, I think. But for heaven’s sake if you don’t like, or don’t agree with, or otherwise disapprove of something I quote, don’t send me an email about it. 

I’ve tried a number of times over the years to read Terry...

I’ve tried a number of times over the years to read Terry Pratchett, without success or a great deal of enjoyment. But that may be a result of my starting with the early novels, when he was still learning the craft. In any case, he has now clicked for me in a way that promises much pleasure in the future, so hooray for that. And I find this 2017 post from Adam Roberts enormously helpful in getting a handle on Pratchett’s distinctive value as a writer:

I didn’t know Pratchett personally, although I did meet him a few times at publishers’ dos, bookshop events and the like; and once I was on a BBC Radio 2 bookish roundtable with Simon Mayo, China Miéville and him. And I know people who did know him, with varying degrees of intimacy. When they talk about him they do so with love, and loyalty to his memory; but one thing that comes up is how unlike the cuddly humorous old granddad popular-culture version of him he was in life. He was, I have heard more than one person say, capable of real and focused anger. Injustice and unfairness made him angry. There are many things to say about his novels (and to be clear, before I go any further, I should say I consider him clearly one of the most significant anglophone writers of his generation) but the two things that stand-out for me most are: his extraordinary command of comic prose, a very difficult idiom to master and doubly difficult to maintain at length; and the repeated and unmissable ethical dimension to his writing. He was a moral writer above all, arguably even before he was a comic one, and certainly (I think) before he was a worldbuilder, or a creator of character, or a popular metaphysician about gods or existence or death or anything like that; important though all those elements were to his writing. Nor can his moral purpose, and his anger, be separated out.

Harrington on Camus

Mary Harrington’s three essays on Renaud Camus and the implications of his work are fascinating.  

One: “In what follows, the first of a three-part series, I’ll argue with Camus that replacism is not a conspiracy. And yet, polemic aside, it addresses something real: a structural blind spot across the Western world concerning the nature and meaning of human culture, predicated on the idea that peoples have no collective attributes, only individual ones.” 

Two: “I’ll set Camus’ reading of [Frederick Winslow] Taylor against my own of Martin Heidegger’s classic 1954 lecture on technology, looking in particular at the epistemological violence Taylorism both enacts and occludes: a kind of unseeing, that I’ll connect with Camus’ own coinage: ‘nocence’. I’ll discuss how this manifests in our built environment, and in the wider sociocultural implications of what I’ve called ‘the nomos of the airport’. And with these references in place, I’ll explain how Camus’ work deepens my own inquiry into the the industrialisation of humans: what we might call the replacism of the body.” 

Three: “I’ll link this framework more closely to my own ongoing enquiry into the relation between women, family, and the technological mindset. I’ll draw on Ivan Illich to show how the replacist anthropology is inextricable from the history of modern family relations, how this order is a core precondition for modern market society, and how this culminates in an increasingly literal technologisation first of women’s bodies and finally of ‘human’ bodies whose sex has come to be understood as an optional bolt-on.” 

Her concept of “globo homo economicus” dovetails nicely with her powerful analysis elsewhere of “Meat Lego Gnosticism.” 

In (Partial) Defence of Jeff Bezos – by Ian Leslie:In th...

In (Partial) Defence of Jeff Bezos – by Ian Leslie:

In the early twentieth century, as information became more valuable, newspapers put more emphasis on being accurate reporters of reality. Journalism developed into a profession with a commitment to the truth regardless of political interests. These two roles, advocacy and objectivity, have co-existed somewhat uncomfortably ever since; embodied, in the US, by the separation of opinion and editorial departments.

But in the twenty-first century, the world is overflowing with opinion and activism, and desperately short on fair, objective reporting. Newspapers should still host individual opinion columns, which help people think about the news, but their most important and valuable function is to bring the news. The idea that they should endorse political candidates or positions as institutions makes as much sense as it does for universities. It’s not just that doing so is superfluous; it’s that, as Bezos says, it actually undermines journalism at a time when the profession is in crisis.

essaying architecture

Elisa Gabbert, “The Essay as Realm”:

This lecture I’ve been working on has itself become a place. It started as notes, ideas on paper, but as I built them into sentences and paragraphs it took on the impression of a frame. There’s a point when the frame seems finished; I’m reluctant to change the fundamental shape. But I’m adding walls and doors and windows, light fixtures, furniture. I’m building from the inside. All of this is functional, but also aesthetic. What kind of place do you want to be in? When an essay starts to get a bit ungainly, I often think about the Winchester Mystery House, which, it won’t surprise you to hear, I read about in that book from my grandmother. Sarah Winchester, the heir to the Winchester rifle fortune, believed she was haunted by the ghosts of the victims of Winchester guns. On the advice of a medium, she attempted to appease them by building them a house. The house is full of peculiar, seemingly useless features like one-inch-deep closets, stairs leading up to the ceiling, doors on exterior walls of upper stories that open onto nothing. It was under continuous construction until she died.

As I modify the house of my essay, all the corners and transitions and passageways start to create different wings, which have their own moods. They give the essay what we might call sub-realms. Christopher Alexander, writing in the 1970s, said that many modern buildings give us feelings of acute disorientation. I think of endless hospital hallways, or apartment complexes with multiple clonelike constructions differentiated only by numbers or letters. It induces mazeophobia, the fear of getting lost. A navigable building has “nested realms” you can easily draw from memory, mappable realms, and, as Alexander writes, the realms “must have names”: “This requires, in turn, that they be well enough defined physically, so that they can in fact be named.” The sub-realms in an essay needn’t actually be named — though they can be, as in Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, with its many little titles, for each sub-realm and sub-sub-realm: “The Fear of being Touched.” “The Open and the Closed Crowd.” “Invisible Crowds.” “Slowness, or the Remoteness of the Goal.” But the sub-realms must be distinct enough in shape or in mood or both that they could be named. As readers, we love essays that have sub-realms because they allow us to enter the essay in multiple ways. People like to be able to roam through a building by their own path, to choose their own doors, which is why guided tours can be unsatisfying. 

This is beautiful. I love essays about essays, especially when they’re this imaginative. I’ve written a few myself, including this one.