Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 19

repairers

Via Jeff Bilbro, I see this useful reflection by Bonnie Kristian on what a Christian “vision for repair” might look like. Kristian points out that repair has become a theme among thoughtful evangelicals in recent years, and following her links … okay, let me be honest here: I was wondering whether anyone had noticed that this is a theme I wrote about often and at some length for a couple of years, starting with this post. (For more entries, click the tag on that post or this one.) And nope: not one reference to my work. 

I wonder about this! I don’t have analytics enabled on this site (and never will) so I don’t know how many readers I have — if I have 17 readers, then it’s no surprise that I haven’t been cited. If I have a good many more than that, then two possibilities seem likely: 

(a) I’ve prompted some people to think along these lines who wouldn’t have done so otherwise, but they forgot they got it from me — which is something that happens on the internet all the time. For instance, I often link to something without remembering to cite the person who alerted me to it, or indeed without remembering that anyone alerted me to it. It’s the way of the internet, and if you’re going to write on the internet you have to expect it. 

(b) All those other people are simply riding the same wave I was riding — following, perhaps, some of the same writers I cite in that original Invitation & Repair post. 

I would like to know which of these it is. I am not craving credit, I’m really not, I promise! (You should believe me if and only if you think I have sufficient self-knowledge to be trusted on this point.) But if you’re a writer it’s always useful to know whether you’re making a difference or are simply part of a trend that would go on just the same without you.  

build beautiful

If you search for “why don’t we build beautiful buildings any more” or any similar combination of terms you’ll get a great many articles, essays, blog posts, and YouTube videos on the subject. (Ross Douthat’s column is an especially good one.) Most of them agree with the question’s premise, but there are some who don’t, some who say that modern architecture doesn’t reject beauty so much as offer an alternative kind of beauty. Okay. But I’d suggest a little experiment.

1. Look at any 20th- or 21st-century building that you admire.

2. Look at the octagon tower of Ely Cathedral:

Click each image for a larger version. 

two quotations on humility

David French:

Pope Francis wasn’t watering down the Christian faith; he was expressing existential humility. He was unwilling to state, definitively, the mind of God and to pass judgment on the souls of others. His words were surprising not because they were heretical in any way, but rather because existential humility contradicts the fundamentalist spirit of much of contemporary American Christianity. His words were less a declaration of truth than an invitation to introspection, a call to examine your conscience. 

G. K. Chesterton: 

But what we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert — himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt — the Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time. The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether. 

my forever lament

Also: Every time I get to the copy-editing stage of a book project I want to write a long angry post about how much I hate Microsoft Word. But I have done it, and other people have done it. Here I am in 2016.

And here’s Charlie Stross back in 2013:

The reason I want Word to die is that until it does, it is unavoidable. I do not write novels using Microsoft Word. I use a variety of other tools, from Scrivener (a program designed for managing the structure and editing of large compound documents, which works in a manner analogous to a programmer’s integrated development environment if Word were a basic text editor) to classic text editors such as Vim. But somehow, the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production systems. They have warped and corrupted their production workflow into using Microsoft Word .doc [.docx] files as their raw substrate, even though this is a file format ill-suited for editorial or typesetting chores. And they expect me to integrate myself into a Word-centric workflow, even though it’s an inappropriate, damaging, and laborious tool for the job. It is, quite simply, unavoidable. And worse, by its very prominence, we become blind to the possibility that our tools for document creation could be improved. It has held us back for nearly 25 years already; I hope we will find something better to take its place soon. 

(Fat chance of that.) And Louis Menand, all the way back in 2003:  

When, in the old days, you hit the wrong key on your typewriter, you got one wrong character. Strike the wrong keys in Word and you are suddenly writing in Norwegian Bokmal (Bokmal?). And you have no idea how you got there; you can spend the rest of the night trying to get out. In the end, you stop the random clicking and dragging and pulling-down and have recourse to the solution of every computer moron: with a sob of relief, you press Ctrl/Alt/Del. (What do Control and Alt mean, by the way? Does anyone still know?) A message appears: “You will lose any unsaved information in all programs that are running.” O.K.? Cancel? End task? End life? The whole reason for rebooting was that you didn’t have access to your information, so how can you save it? You can always pull the plug out of the wall. That usually ends your “session” (a term borrowed — no accident — from psychoanalysis).

I could use some psychoanalysis right about now. 

behind the scenes

In the long slow complicated process that leads to the publication of a book — in this case, my biography of Paradise Lost — I am at the copy-editing stage, and whenever I am at that stage with a book, I remember Lauren Lepow. 

In the publishing world, there are many different kinds of editor — or rather, many different editing tasks, more than one of which any given editor is likely to perform. For instance, an acquisitions editor will probably not just acquire your book but will also be for it a developmental editor, a structural editor, maybe even a line editor — that is, one who goes through the book line by line. The great Robert Gottlieb famously did all of these things, which is why he was just called (and called himself) an editor. No adjectival limitation. 

But one task is almost always given to a person called the copy editor. He or she is the person who goes through your text just before it gets to production — that is, just before it is designed, laid out, and typeset — to make sure your spelling is correct, your command of grammar and syntax competent, your quotations and citations (in a scholarly book) appropriate, accurate, and consistent. This is sometimes thought to be a rather mechanical job, so it is often outsourced to freelancers. But some projects place more demands on the copy-editor than others, and for such cases a press dedicated to excellence will have the best in-house copy editor it can find. 

Lauren Lepow — who worked for Princeton University Press from 1991 until illness forced her to retire at the end of 2022, just months before her untimely death — was the copy editor than whom no greater can be conceived. Lauren elevated copy-editing to a high art form. She worked on the first two Auden critical editions I did for PUP, and in both cases I was simply staggered by how much she noticed — she saw every little error, every tiny inconsistency, from one end of the book to the other, and cheerfully corrected it or asked me to do so. She was terrifyingly fast and terrifyingly precise and after that first time working with her I wanted her to copy-edit every book I wrote. 

But that was not possible. I recently wrote to Fred Appel, my (acquisitions, developmental, structural) editor at PUP for the Paradise Lost book, to say how much I miss Lauren — even when the copy-editing process is going just fine, as it currently is — and he replied: 

My colleagues and I miss Lauren Lepow terribly and we still mourn her passing. I was in awe of her ability to cite chapter and verse of the Chicago Manual of Style, and also of her great judgment, thoughtfulness, and thoroughness. I can’t tell you how many PUP authors who had been copyedited by her who then requested her services — in some cases, pleaded for her services — for their second or third books with us. 

I was of course one of those pleaders, back when I wrote my biography of the Book of Common Prayer. But she was then largely occupied with the massive and technically demanding task of copy-editing Auden’s Complete Works, a job that occupied her right up to her retirement. 

When I learned that Lauren had died, I wondered whether I had ever thanked her properly for all that she did for me. Searching my email, I discovered that I had: in late 2017, when I was struggling with the production of The Year of Our Lord 1943, I sent her an effusive message of gratitude, to which she replied, “Thank you for your very kind words — the best possibly holiday gift!” 

Copy-editing is often invisible labor, thought by many to be grunt-work and not really intellectually demanding. This is unfair to every competent copy editor, but grossly unfair to Lauren, who in her thirty years at Princeton must have made hundreds of books far better than they would have been without her. She did an important job, and she did it better than I have ever done anything. 

modes of representation

Like many of my posts, this one is a kind of sketch or draft of ideas I want to develop more fully later. 

Last year I wrote a post about maps of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and mentioned in passing that the book’s scenes 

veer from hard-coded allegory to plain realism, sometimes within a given sentence. One minute Moses is the canonical author of the Pentateuch, the next he’s a guy who keeps knocking Hopeful down. But the book is always psychologically realistic, to an extreme degree. No one knew anxiety and terror better than Bunyan did, and when Christian is passing through the Valley of the Shadow of Death and hears voices whispering blasphemies in his ears, the true horror of the moment is that he thinks he himself is uttering the blasphemies. 

Bunyan always wants to present us with the most vivid representations possible of the various spiritual conditions within which we might dwell — but he’s an utter pragmatist about what representational mode best serves his purpose at any given moment. 

This is just the sort of thing that Tolkien despised. He was so strict about following what he believed to be the rules of narration — absolute consistency (historical, physical, metaphysical, linguistic) within the frame of the writer’s “secondary world” — in his own stories that he just couldn’t understand other writers who didn’t feel the need. The appearance of Father Christmas in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe made him apoplectic. Now, to be fair, that’s not CSL’s finest moment; but Tolkien failed to see that while consistency is a virtue in world-building it’s not the only virtue, and certain important effects, as we see from the example of Bunyan’s great story, can be created only by disregarding consistency. 

I’m thinking of these matters because right now I’m teaching Gulliver’s Travels, and Swift offers a master-class in the varying of representational modes. We all know that the book offers a satirical take on certain current events, but note the different ways British society is represented in the different Books. 

Book I is fairly straightforward, especially in Chapter IV: the Lilliputians’ conflict with Blefuscu — the country from which they are separated by a narrow channel — over which end of an egg to crack is a simple (simplistic, I’d say) allegory of the mutual hatred of French Catholics (Big-endians) and English Protestants (Little-endians). Within Lilliput, the “two struggling parties in this empire, under the names of Tramecksan and Slamecksan, from the high and low heels of their shoes, by which they distinguish themselves” are (equally obviously) the High and Low Church parties. 

But in Book II, Chapter VI we turn from allegory to realistic narration, as Gulliver eagerly and enthusiastically explains the political, legal, and economic system to the King of Brobdingnag — who, to Gulliver’s surprise and dismay, is not impressed. (“Yet thus much I may be allowed to say in my own vindication, that I artfully eluded many of his questions, and gave to every point a more favourable turn, by many degrees, than the strictness of truth would allow. For I have always borne that laudable partiality to my own country, which Dionysius Halicarnassensis, with so much justice, recommends to an historian: I would hide the frailties and deformities of my political mother, and place her virtues and beauties in the most advantageous light.”) 

And then in Book III we’re back to allegory again, allegory indicated largely by anagrams and near-anagrams: Britain, or England, becomes “Tribnia, by the natives called Langden” — this preceding an attack on journalists and other writers. This diatribe, interestingly enough, is by Gulliver himself, and seems to indicate that some of the critiques of British society by the King of Brobdingnag have hit home. They come from Gulliver’s mouth now, though only in disguised form — as though his “laudable partiality to [his] own country” does not allow him to speak too straightforwardly.

And then of course in Book IV we get the truly Utopian vision of the land of the morally and intellectually excellent Houyhnhnms and the disgusting Yahoos — the former being an allegorical representation of what humans might have been, the latter being a savagely realistic picture of us as we are. 

Swift’s representational modes are thus always shifting to meet the narrational and satirical needs of the moment. Tolkien wouldn’t have liked it, but it works. It’s a kind of narrational bricolage. 

a numbers game

First there was the Bacon Number. Then there was the Erdös Number. Then there was the Erdös-Bacon Number. 

I feel that there ought to be a whole new set of numbers prompted by the remarkable life of Terrence Malick. For instance:

Malick as a young scholar met Martin Heidegger, and Patti Smith is in his movie Song to Song. Heidegger-Smith Number: 2. 

Malick took a class at Harvard from Paul Tillich and later dated Carly Simon. Tillich-Simon Number: 2. 

Malick played basketball with Fidel Castro and is friends with Arvo Pärt. Castro-Pärt Number: 2. 

This could go on for quite a while. Note that I’m not even mentioning movie people. When Malick was studying at the American Film Institute he met Jean Renoir, and it is said (I have not been able to confirm this) that he went to Bolivia to meet Che Guevara and arrived the day after Che was killed — had he come a couple of days earlier he might have a Renoir-Che Number of 2 also. 

one more enchanted evening

The story so far:

My post on the recent vogue for “enchantment”Brad East’s replyMe againBrad again

I think we’re converging on a shared position — mostly. Brad is less persuaded than I am by the argument that Judaism and Christianity are disenchanting forces in relation to their pagan/animist neighbors, but that’s okay, because I like this very much:

Christianity from the beginning is interested — discursively and performatively — not so much in disenchanting the various purported beings and rituals that populate the all too porous reality of daily human life as it is in dethroning it. Early Christian apologetics and polemics are indeed at pains to unveil the object of pagan sacrifices — as demons, though, not as fictions. The bedrock assumption of exorcism, inasmuch as exorcism encapsulates the entire problematic of enchantment, is that the pagans are absolutely right: the world is a dark and terrifying place in which humans are constantly harassed, assaulted, and tormented by numberless, nameless hostile intelligences that cannot be stopped or silenced apart from the name and the power of Jesus Christ.

Amen! This leads me to one of my favorite themes, which is Jesus as the conqueror of the Powers. See for instance this post, some of which makes its way into this massive essay on Thomas Pynchon. Closely related is my attempt to sketch out a demonology. Basically, I find the language of “enchantment” less appealing, and less descriptively sound, than the Pauline language of Jesus overmastering the kosmokratoras (the Cosmic Rulers), the archai and exhousai, and bringing them to bow before Him – He who has conquered not through strength but through weakness, not through self-exaltation but through self-emptying. 

An “enchanted cosmos” without Jesus at the absolute center of it is a terrible place to be: you find yourself in the situation of almost all pagans, struggling to navigate a landscape populated by forces that you mainly just hope to evade. As Brad says, “the world is a dark and terrifying place in which humans are constantly harassed, assaulted, and tormented by numberless, nameless hostile intelligences that cannot be stopped or silenced apart from the name and the power of Jesus Christ.” Escaping their notice is often the best scenario. “How can one enter into a strong man’s house, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man?” Can you bind the strong man? I can’t. Which makes it strange to me how small a part Jesus plays in the current discourse about enchantment, even among people who claim to be Christians. 

Can We Talk! | Ian Frazier:Unexpected languages turn up a...

Can We Talk! | Ian Frazier:

Unexpected languages turn up all over. Daniel Kaufman, another of the ELA’s codirectors, learned some Tagalog (a language of the Philippines) from a man he played speed chess with in Washington Square Park. At the bodega across West 18th Street from the ELA’s offices in Manhattan, one of the cashiers speaks Ghale, “a little-documented language of Nepal,” and the guy behind the deli counter speaks Poqomchi’, a Mayan language from Guatemala. Of course these employees also know English; speakers of small languages become multilingual by necessity. 

Ian Frazier is great, and this is a fun essay-review, but it’s pretty strange to have Tagalog, a language spoken by a couple of million Americans, lumped in with two “small” — presumably this means “little-spoken” — languages. Tagalog shouldn’t be “unexpected” in any large American city. Heck, I’ve heard it spoken in Waco. 

the Jane Harrison show

Mary Beard:

Harrison’s reputation rested on her public performances, where she stripped away the technicalities and was (as she put it herself in Reminiscences) ‘almost fatally fluent’. Flamboyantly dressed and armed with what were hailed as the most up-to-the-minute visual aids, in the form of stunning lantern slides, she drew vast crowds to her open lectures – on one occasion, so she said, attracting 1600 fans in Glasgow to a presentation on the topic of Athenian tomb sculpture. She even created something of the same atmosphere in her university lectures. ‘The hushed audience would catch the nervous tension of her bearing,’ wrote one of her academic colleagues about her teaching of classical archaeology. ‘Every lecture was a drama.’ Several years ago, some of Harrison’s slides were rediscovered, buried in a cupboard in Newnham. They didn’t quite live up to the hype, but they were exquisitely painted on glass, with key words etched onto them (almost the equivalent of a modern PowerPoint).

This is interesting just as an entry in the history of instructional technology — I am tempted to visit Cambridge just to investigate those slides — but of course I am intrigued because, as I have already mentioned, my work on Dorothy L. Sayers has gotten me deeply interested in the place of women at Oxford and Cambridge in the first decades of the twentieth century. Here’s a telling little item from Mary Beard’s essay: 

One of the most chilling pieces of trivia preserved in the Newnham archive is a copy of a note written to the university librarian by a senior classicist (the otherwise very liberal Henry Jackson) pointing out that he had spotted ‘Miss Harrison’ with a library book in her possession. As women were not allowed to enter, let alone borrow from, the library, he concluded that some male friend must have illicitly borrowed it on her behalf and that an investigation should ensue. Such casual surveillance and such officious, sneaky betrayal seem almost worse than the exclusion in the first place.

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Portrait of Jane Harrison by Augustus John