Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 17

Court and Spark, half a century on

Joni Mitchell’s album Court and Spark begins with its title song. Give it a listen, and then maybe take a look at the sheet music. Some things to notice, mentioned by the guy who made the transcription: 

Points of interest include the 3 against 4 rhythms between the hands, the parallel (not relative) major/minor tonalities of E and E minor (by now a familiar feature of Joni’s composing, as well as Paul McCartney’s incidentally) and the frequent use of suspended “chords of inquiry,” as she called them.

“Chords of inquiry” is Joni’s term for sus chords — which “suspend” (i.e., don’t play) the third of a triad and instead go down to play the second or go up to play the fourth. When you remove that third the chord itself also becomes as it were suspended between major and minor. It is ambivalent; it moves us to inquiry into its character. 

“Court and Spark” is a piano song, but Joni was in her younger days an exceptional guitarist and used many alternate tunings to help her find and play more elegantly those chords of inquiry. You can hear a classic example of how she liked to play guitar here — a live recording made in a café in Ottawa in 1968 by a Joni fanboy. The recording was lost for half-a-century and only saved at all because that fanboy was … Jimi Hendrix. (By the way, here’s the guitar tablature for that song. Look at all those sus chords! And in a “Joni tuning,” with four strings tuned to D!) 

Back to the description of “Court and Spark”: the piano part’s three-against-four is noteworthy, but also you should listen for the big change in the rhythm (though not strictly speaking the tempo) at 1:14. And I haven’t even mentioned the singing: her endlessly flexible and imaginative timing, her trademark sliding up to target notes, etc. Or the distinctive elegance of the lyric.

So there’s a lot going on in this song, in pretty much all the ways that a song can have things going on. It’s haunting, meditative, reflective, full of musical inquiry — and this is how Joni Mitchell decided to start her album, which … 

… went to Number Two on the Billboard chart, and finished as the thirteenth-best-selling album of 1974. 

The big record labels today mastermind every step of a record’s making: they bring in songwriters and song consultants to write, edit, tweak, and doctor songs — Beyonce’s Lemonade famously had so many that no one seems to know the exact number (some say 60, some say 72). Then you get multiple producers and engineers, and arrangers who think only of whether songs can cross the 30-second mark on Spotify so people will get paid. The great majority of songs use four chords, the Axis of Awesome progression or one closely related. 

But fifty years ago an eccentric Canadian singer-songwriter, armed only with her own unique voice and musical imagination, wrote and sang — and produced! She’s the one who roped in the extraordinary musicians that play on Court and Spark — an album of songs that went almost to the top of the charts then and still sounds brilliant today. There’s a lesson here for those with ears to hear. 

articulation

To call a person “articulate” is to say something rather complex. One element of articulateness is the quick and easy summoning of words — but if the words summoned are not appropriate, we don’t call the person articulate but rather a chatterer, a windbag, a babbler. We call what comes out of their mouth “word salad.” Appropriate words are precise and also information-rich. The articulate person is able to speak fluently but also to the point. 

I say all this by way of noting something curious: The current Presidential candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, are surely the least articulate Presidential candidates in American history — the least able to speak in reliably coherent complete sentences, the least likely to summon relevant information in discussing a topic, and most prone to extended and expansive servings of word salad. 

During the 2020 Presidential campaign a meme arose comparing Biden and Trump to Kennedy and Nixon debating in 1960, and sure enough, if you listen to the 1960 debates it’s astonishing how … well, articulate both men are. They navigate their way smoothly from subject to verb to object in every sentence; they have massive amounts of information at their fingertips. The only Presidential candidate of this century who wouldn’t sound foolish in their company is Barack Obama. 

Sixty years ago, and throughout previous American history before that, a certain level or articulateness was thought essential to Presidential leadership. Not everyone had it in the same degree, or was articulate in the same way — Lincoln and William Jennings Bryan, for instance, both used biblical cadences, but Lincoln was straightforward and measured (in his high-pitched voice) while Bryan was an orotund thunderer. Calvin Coolidge was notoriously laconic, but terseness can be a form of articulateness also; his style of speech was essential to his self-presentation. Only someone like Eisenhower, whose appeal to the American people was grounded in something wholly other than his command of language, could get away with being a poor speaker. 

The one great exception to this rule, at least if H. L. Mencken is to be trusted, was Warren G. Harding. The “G.” stands, remarkably enough, for Gamaliel, and Mencken insisted that Harding spoke in an idiolect best called Gamalielese. 

I have earned most of my livelihood for twenty years past by translating the bad English of a multitude of authors into measurably better English. Thus qualified professionally, I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and half a dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean-soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash. 

Such linguistic incompetence was noteworthy at the time; now it’s the norm. We may only choose between pish and posh, between flap and doodle, between balder and weave. 

The question is: How did we get here? How did we get to the point at which our Presidential candidates are actually less articulate than the average person? How did we manage to create a Presidential campaign season which resembles nothing so much as a pack of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights? 

I dunno. But I have one theory: To speak articulately, in an age in which one’s every utterance is recorded and analyzed, is to court refutation and correction. Perhaps this is evolutionarily adaptive behavior for politicians: nobody can call you out if you just hang the tattered washing on the line. 

Or maybe we’ve just ceased to care about anything being done well. So let’s enjoy the word salad while we can. Because we’re about three elections away from Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. Though, come of think of it, President of America Camacho is pretty articulate, in his own distinctive way. 

juxtaposition

Yesterday I began my Great Texts of the 18th and 19th Centuries class by asking my students to turn to the last chapter of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Our discussion was mostly complete, but there was one more thing I wanted to cover. I pointed out that Austen seems less interested here at her novel’s conclusion in resolving her love story than in pressing us to reflect on what is, after all, the book’s great theme, and one common in Austen’s fiction: the education of young women.

We see “poor Sir Thomas” reflecting at length, and with great chagrin, on the failures of “his plan of education” for his daughters Maria and Julia. His “mismanagement” had two aspects. On the one hand, he had never effectively countered the constant “flattery” and “indulgence” of the girls by their aunt Mrs. Norris. But more important:

Something must have been wanting within, or time would have worn away much of its ill effect. He feared that principle, active principle, had been wanting; that they had never been properly taught to govern their inclinations and tempers by that sense of duty which can alone suffice. They had been instructed theoretically in their religion, but never required to bring it into daily practice. To be distinguished for elegance and accomplishments, the authorised object of their youth, could have had no useful influence that way, no moral effect on the mind. He had meant them to be good, but his cares had been directed to the understanding and manners, not the disposition; and of the necessity of self-denial and humility, he feared they had never heard from any lips that could profit them.

The key word here is “disposition,” because Austen, in her Christian-Aristotelian way, thinks of virtue as a settled disposition to moral excellence. And while Maria and Julia might have been taught to refrain from certain grossly sinful deeds, they were never taught to love and desire the good — especially what is good in and for others — or to seek the excellent even when the impulses of the moment might lead one in a different direction.

In Austen’s work, this failure of disposition is not just a problem for young women: here in Mansfield Park, for instance, Henry Crawford loses his chance to marry Fanny Price because when he re-encounters Maria Bertram, with whom he had once flirted, “Curiosity and vanity were both engaged, and the temptation of immediate pleasure was too strong for a mind unused to make any sacrifice to right.” But young women in this society are more vulnerable than young men in many ways, and their shortcomings less readily (or never) forgiven, so it is their situation that Austen particularly attends to. She wants to show that if girls are merely taught to be charming and decorative and to avoid obvious sin, their minds and hearts alike will remain unformed, and they will never become all that they ought to be. They will become indolent and thoughtless like Lady Bertram, or sniping and manipulative like Mrs. Norris; they may well marry unwisely, like Fanny’s mother.

There are, Austen suggests, so many ways that the education of young women can go wrong, and so few that it can go right. But any genuine Christian morality, she indicates here and elsewhere, will consist in training in virtue. And this is not simply the avoidance of vice, but the cultivation of a steady inclination for the good, the true, and the beautiful. (It’s noteworthy that Fanny is profoundly formed by her knowledge and love of poetry, especially the poetry of William Cowper.) One must learn to steer wisely between extremes, finding the path of virtue that lies between two opposing ways of vice. On this account, the Christian life is a life of moral virtue. We are occasionally reminded that Fanny is a young woman of faith who brings her religion “into daily practice,” and that her beloved, her cousin Edmund, is about to become a country vicar who hopes to teach his people virtue by both precept and example.

“It’s all very beautiful,” I said, setting the book down and picking up the next one we were to discuss: Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. “But what happens when the God you serve and follow orders you to kill your own son?”

a complaint about complaining

I am of course an Arsenal supporter, but I don’t like what the club is turning into: a whining machine. Mikel Arteta’s ceaseless complaints about unfair treatment — which sound exactly the same when he has a strong case and when he doesn’t have a leg to stand on — have now become the default position for the players and for the fanbase. The result has been twofold.

First, it has tended to make what had been a dynamic and exciting young side extremely unlikeable. Nobody likes whiners, and Arsenal never stop whining. I love Arsenal with a kind of helpless love, but I don’t like this side. They’ve become obnoxious.

Second, the moaning about unfair treatment has deflected the players’ attention from their own behavior. By making it a habit to blame everybody except themselves, they have lost the discipline and focus needed to succeed against top competition. William Saliba is a great defender, but his brain-dead red card against Bournemouth not only cost his team that match but may well be catastrophic for the upcoming test against Liverpool. And I truly believe that he would not have had that lapse in concentration if his manager (over the past few weeks especially) had spent less time complaining and more time teaching accountability.

You could scarcely have a more obvious red-card offense than Saliba’s against Bournemouth, but of course a large chunk of the fanbase is baying for the ref’s blood. As I say, the moaning and whining have become habitual now, a matter of reflex. Arteta has finally woken up enough to say that these red cards — three in eight matches! — need to be “eradicated,” but will he be able to change his own habits of finger-pointing? After all, Arsenal have been plagued with red cards since Arteta took over — five more than any other Premier League side in that period — and he seems not to have asked himself any hard questions. Now his strategy for dealing with the constant indiscipline is to ignore it and hope it will go away.

Time will tell, and the season is still young, but the Premier League is an unforgiving one, and it seems to me highly unlikely that Arsenal can overcome both Man City and Liverpool. The title may already have slipped from Arsenal’s grasp, and if so, it’s not the refs’ fault. It’s Arsenal’s fault, and primarily Mikel Arteta’s.

trustfulness

I know some people who teach at Columbia University, and I’ve been worried about them. Reading the reports of student unrest there, and especially of the surge in antisemitism, I’ve wondered how they have been holding up in what must surely be impossible conditions for teaching. Feeling guilty for my neglect, I decided I needed to check in. 

Turns out they’re doing just fine. Yes, they have to show their ID cards to be admitted to what had previously been an open campus, but that simply revealed just how many of the protestors last spring had no connection to Columbia. On the first day of classes a protest was held just outside the gates, and the local TV stations — thinking like old-time movie directors on severely constrained budgets — placed their cameras to make the crowd look enormous. But one of the professors I know happened to be arriving on campus at that time and paused to count them: forty-two people. And after an hour or so they all wandered away. 

This fall there have been rallies on campus — pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel — but it appears that those have been both brief and relatively uneventful. Yes, there are a handful of extremely noisy and aggressive student protestors, but one professor tells me that a number of students who got involved in the protests last spring are now feeling embarrassed about the whole business and glad to be able to return their focus to their classes. Indeed, for some, and maybe for a great many, classrooms where serious ideas can be explored and discussed provide a welcome refuge from overheated political tribalism. 

Reading such reports, I started laughing — ruefully — at my naïveté. I realized that, though I know perfectly well the almost inevitable over-dramatization of events by journalists desperately for eyeballs and clicks, I had somehow suspended my usual skepticism in this case — maybe because it’s New York City, which on other grounds is typically described as a city in crisis. I was, I realized, imagining professors navigating the life-threatening horrors of the subway only to arrive at the second hellscape of Morningside Heights, where police in riot gear marched through clouds of tear gas to break up roving gangs of masked (and possibly armed) protestors. 

I slightly exaggerate. And I don’t mean to suggest that New York doesn’t have real and serious problems. But I’m reminded that several New Yorkers have complained to me that the whole subway system is frequently described as broken, when in fact the problems are largely confined to certain lines at certain times. Now, to be sure, they themselves may be downplaying the seriousness of the issue — people who have invested their lives in a place don’t often want to think the worst of it. But when you hear only reports from an industry principially devoted to alarmism, even a little civic boosterism can be a useful corrective, and a reminder not to be overly trusting in news reports. 

And in the case of Columbia University, I am grateful to have on-the-ground evidence that many students and faculty, while they know perfectly well that protests continue, manage without much difficulty to keep their focus on the studies that brought them to the university in the first place. Others may feel the effects of the protests more strongly, of course; but consider this as an account from actual insiders who have been watching and reading news reports with bemusement and annoyance. I was told, “Come and see for yourself!” 

To be sure, one correspondent reports that a fresh-vegetable stand has popped up just outside the gate where he typically enters the university. But, he says, he just walks boldly past the looming asparagus and mushrooming mushrooms. New Yorkers are made of stern stuff. 

true believers

David Brooks:

In days gone by, parties were political organizations designed to win elections and gain power. Party leaders would expand their coalitions toward that end. Today, on the other hand, in an increasingly secular age, political parties are better seen as religious organizations that exist to provide believers with meaning, membership and moral sanctification. If that’s your purpose, of course you have to stick to the existing gospel. You have to focus your attention on affirming the creed of the current true believers. You get so buried within the walls of your own catechism, you can’t even imagine what it would be like to think outside it.

When parties were primarily political organizations, they were led by elected officials and party bosses. Now that parties are more like quasi-religions, power lies with priesthood — the dispersed array of media figures, podcast hosts and activists who run the conversation, define party orthodoxy and determine the boundaries of acceptable belief.

This is brilliant by Brooks, so read the whole thing. But than I would think so, wouldn’t I, because this converges with points I have been making for years. When the Repugnant Cultural Other becomes the Repugnant Religious Other — when the Other is a heretic out to destroy your very soul — then being “buried within the walls of your own catechism” is the Prime Directive. (“For the love of God, Montresor, don’t tear down this wall.”) 

Wow, that’s three allusions in, like, ten words. I should be on BookTok or something.

Anyway, this analysis helps to explain one of Brooks’s key points, which is that none of the priests who lead these two competing religions seem interested in making converts, only in dissing the other side.  As I wrote in another post, 

Recently I was reading Minds Wide Shut by Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, and while I venerate GSM just this side idolatry, I don’t think the book quite works as intended. At the risk of oversimplification, I’ll say that its core argument is (a) that our culture is dominated by a set of fundamentalisms — “At the heart of any fundamentalism, as we define it, is a disdain for learning from evidence. Truth is already known, given, and clear” — and (b) that the fundamentalist mindset is incapable of persuasion, of bringing skeptics over to its side. 

All of which is true, but (and this is a major theme of my How to Think) what if people don’t want to persuade others? What if they don’t just hate their Repugnant Cultural Other but need him or her in order to define themselves and their Inner Ring? 

If I may cite myself one more time: Hatred alone is immortal. This is our problem in a nutshell. 

two roads diverged

A number of people I know and respect — including Phil Christman — think that Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book The Message is a very good one. I, on the other hand, believe it to be one of the worst books that I’ve read in years. Normally when I bounce off a book that hard I don’t finish it, but I kept hoping that it would correct itself. (I’ve seen Coates do that in the past.) I lost all hope when his primary reaction to a visit to Yad Vashem was to sneer at what he calls “the moral badge of the Holocaust,” but I was close enough to the end that I decided to keep going. I found Coates in this book to be intellectually and morally incurious and strangely self-absorbed — self-absorbed in ways that make for bad writing, as Parul Sehgal shows in this review.

Or at least I think she shows it. Presumably the people who like the book wouldn’t agree.

So what do you do when your response to a book is so different than that of other readers whom you admire and know to be thoughtful — especially when your own response is strongly negative? One strategy is to simply say de gustibus non disputandum est and go on with your life. Certainly that’s what I’m tempted to do in this case. I suspect, though, that I have failed in charity, which would not be good. I don’t want to let myself off the hook with the de gustibus line.

But: I really hated the book and find myself resenting the time that it cost me, time that I think I could better have spent in other ways. Revisiting it now would feel pointlessly self-punitive; plus, I doubt that I could read the book any more charitably while in this frame of mind.

So I will wait. I will just live with the uncertainty and the cognitive dissonance and in the meantime hope that, at some point down the line, I’ll be able to revisit the book in a cooler mood and see if it strikes me differently. There is of course a good chance that I’ll never get around to it; other challenges, other difficulties, the tyranny of the urgent always tend to crowd out such revisitation. But that’s life, you know? There are always things we want to think about, to pause and reflect on, but the flow of experience keeps moving. As Kierkegaard famously said:

It is quite true what philosophy says: that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle: that it must be lived forwards. Which principle, the more one thinks it through, ends exactly with the thought that temporal life can never properly be understood because I can at no instant find complete rest in which to adopt the position: backwards.

I just wanted to dislike a book in peace, and now I have this existential dilemma facing me! Man, self-examination sucks.

Rorty’s bastard children

Charlie Warzel:

The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet. The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel. Among them: Infowars’ Alex Jones, who claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were “weather weapons” unleashed on the East Coast by the U.S. government, and “truth seeker” accounts on X that posted photos of condensation trails in the sky to baselessly allege that the government was “spraying Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton” in order to ensure maximum rainfall, “just like they did over Asheville!” 

The sentence from this paragraph I want to focus on is this: “The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel.” I think very few people take such posts as gospel. Or at least not in the sense that Warzel means it. 

Warzel errs here in assuming that when people in MAGAworld make declarative statements, and endorse or amplify the declarative statements of others, they do so because they believe those statements to be true. They don’t; nor do they believe or know them to be false. In my judgment, truth and falsehood do not at any point enter into the equation — such concepts are non-factors, and it is a category mistake to invoke them. 

In MAGAworld, declarative statements are not meant to convey information about (as Wittgenstein would put it) what is the case. Declarative statements serve as identity markers — they simultaneously include and exclude, they simultaneously (a) consolidate the solidarity of people who believe they have shared interests and (b) totally freak out the libtards. That’s what they are for. They are not for conveying Facts, Truth, Reality — nobody cares about that shit. (People who call themselves Truth Seekers are being as ironic as it is possible to be.) Such statements demarcate Inside from Outside in a way that delivers plenty of lulz, and that is their entire function. In that sense only they articulate a kind of dark gospel. 

Thus it is pointless to insist that Democrats have not in fact unleashed weather weapons on Florida and the Carolinas; even more pointless to argue that if Democrats had such weather weapons they would have used them when Donald Trump was President in order to discredit him. Whether it is factually true (whether “it is the case”) that Democrats have and deploy weather weapons could not be more irrelevant; what matters is that this is the kind of thing we say about Democrats — so if you want to be part of this “we,” you’d better say it too. 

And the account I am articulating here is, at least sometimes, openly acknowledged by the leaders of MAGAworld. Think of Steve Bannon’s famous “flood the zone with shit” comment. And when confronted with his long chain of fantastical statements about immigrants in Ohio, J. D. Vance said, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” Because that’s what we do; that’s how we get what we want. 

The pundits and shitposters and, yes, elected representatives in our government whose real home is MAGAworld are in a strange and perverse way the bastard children of Richard Rorty. When, nearly forty years ago, Rorty rejected “systematic” philosophy for “edifying” philosophy — those terms come from his earlier book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, but the essay linked to expands on that essential distinction — he thereby rejected philosophy that wants to “correspond to the way things really are” for philosophy that builds “solidarity.” Such a philosophy in action “is changing the way we talk, and thereby changing what we want to do and what we think we are.” 

Rorty thought that this model of philosophical language would be a way of building a new, more just, more generous society — would help us “achieve our country.” What he never imagined was a huckster-turned-damagogue who thinks of language — every kind of language, every imaginable use-case — as a way for him to get what he wants and change who he thinks he is, and who by his example teaches tens of millions of Americans to use language for the same purposes. They want to achieve their country too. That is, they have a vision of what their country should be and are employing language to bring about that transformation. What do truth or falsehood have to do with it? Not a damn thing. 

AI Week!

Hey, AI Week at Baylor is coming! And to judge from that webpage, Baylor is the place to be if you want to feel really good about the giant AI companies. But if you want to think about

how those companies — especially now that OpenAI is abandoning its nonprofit status — follow in the footsteps of other recent Silicon Valley juggernauts in striving to make every human being on the planet utterly dependent on their servicesthe grossly unethical practice of harvesting and re-using, for profit, the words and sounds and images that human beings have labored their whole lives to makethe massive environmental damage that is sure to come from the ever-increasing demands for energy from the AI companies’ enormous server farms

— well, I don’t think those issues are being raised.

Whatever AI might be in some imagined utopian future, AI companies in our present moment extract and exploit — ecologically, ethically, and humanly. This is simply what they do, intrinsically, necessarily — in a perverse sense of the phrase, on principle. A Christian university ought to be saying so, or at the very least should be putting some challenging questions to our new AI overlords. We’re not going to achieve that utopian future without first confronting the largely dystopian present.

Also: I think instead of teaching our students how to use whatever Silicon Valley happens to be selling them we should be teaching them how to tend the digital commons. And the issues about attention and reading I’ve been talking about forever — see for instance this talk from a decade ago — are even more urgent now. But none of this is on Baylor’s radar, as far as I can tell.

Auden’s allusions and my errors

So I’ve done three Auden Critical Editions now, and each time I have experienced much joy in the labor … but also some frustration afterwards when discovering things I missed. It’s not surprising, of course! Auden was staggeringly widely-read and had an exceptionally adhesive mind: almost anything that entered into it was retained and later put to use. The sheer allusiveness is overwhelming. I can’t think of a better example than my recent post on Saturn and Mimas — only by pure accident did I discover the origin of a strange passage in The Age of Anxiety, one that could easily have remained inexplicable forever. And of course I didn’t discover it in time to put it in the book.  

There are many ways to be wrong, some of them more excusable than others. I missed another reference in The Age of Anxiety simply because I am not British, which worries me, because there’s nothing I can do about being a non-Brit. 

But I’m furious with myself that I missed the reference to Pausanias in “Winds” — the first of the “Bucolics,” the sequence with which The Shield of Achilles begins — that Adam Roberts caught. And I’m annoyed that there’s no way to go back and insert it!  

And here’s another one from that same volume, just shared with me by my friend Tim Larsen. The long lyric “Ode to Gaea” concludes with this image: “That tideless bay where children / Play bishop on a golden shore.” As Tim reminded me — I perhaps should say told me, because the story is so vague in my mind that I barely remember the outlines — this is a reference to a famous event in the early life of St. Athanasius: 

Once when Bishop Alexander was celebrating the day of Peter Martyr in Alexandria, he was waiting in a place by the sea after the ceremonies were over for his clergy to gather for a banquet.

There he saw from a distance some boys on the seashore playing a game in which, as they often do, they were mimicking a bishop and the things customarily done in church. Now when he had gazed intently for a while at the boys, he saw that they were performing some of the more secret and sacramental things. He was disturbed and immediately ordered the clergy to be called to him and showed them what he was watching from a distance. Then he commanded them to go and get all the boys and bring them to him.

When they arrived, he asked them what game they were playing and what they had done and how. At first they were afraid, as is usual at that age, and refused, but then they disclosed in due order what they had done, admitting that some catechumens had been baptized by them at the hand of Athanasius, who had played the part of bishop in their childish game. Then he carefully inquired of those who were said to have been baptized what they had been asked and what they had answered, and the same of him who had put the questions, and when he saw that everything was according to the manner of our religion, he conferred with a council of clerics and then ruled, so it is reported, that those on whom water had been poured after the questions had been asked and answered correctly need not repeat the baptism, but those things should be completed which are customarily done by priests.

As for Athanasius and those who had played the part of presbyters and ministers in the game, he called together their parents, and having put them under oath, handed them over to be reared for the church. 

So Rufinus of Aquileia in his church history. As Fred Sanders explains in this post, drawing on the work of Marcia Colish, this story would in the Middle Ages become the key text for some intense debates about what makes for a valid baptism. 

I just wish I had been able to put a note to this effect in my edition. Sigh.