Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 231

excerpts from my Sent Folder: to someone who wants to be a writer

Here are some thoughts:

Wanting to “be a writer” is, generally speaking, not a good sign. That suggests not a commitment to a vocation but wanting to see yourself, or to be seen, in a particular way by others. By contrast, to have a story that you’re desperate to tell; to have some truth you want to serve, and share with others; to find the crafting of sentences irresistible — those are good signs, because they suggest a person turned outward rather than inward, and the most worthwhile writing is done by people who are turned outward.
Writing that matters will therefore be in service to something or someone, and in order to serve well, you must undergo training and discipline. You have to learn things. You have to have a full mind as well as a lively heart. First you must develop the expertise of crafting sentences, and this can only be done by, first, reading and reading and reading. There is no other path than hard-earned expertise to producing anything that’s worth the time and attention of readers. Why should anybody care what you think? You must earn their care through especially vivid writing, or especially clear thinking, or especially detailed knowledge — or (ideally) some combination of the above.
It takes many years to develop any genuine expertise. That doesn’t mean you don’t share your thoughts along the way, but remembering it should keep your expectations in line. Remember, Jesus didn’t begin his public ministry until he was thirty; all those previous years were spent in preparation.
Normally I despise self-help books and “creativity” books, but there are two exceptions, and both of them are by the same person, Austin Kleon: Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work . Small books, but really wise. They’ll lead you to some other good things, also.

praise and worship

This long article about the state of praise and worship music today provokes several thoughts:

Very few things depress me to the extent that praise music does. Many things anger me more, frustrate me more, arouse my righteous indignation, but praise music has an extraordinary power to depress my spirits and make me want to do away with myself.
It’s not going away, though, is it? Its empire shall increase. 
Because what Christians (leaders and lay people alike) can’t seem to unlearn is the idea that church should resemble as closely as possible our everyday lives. The buildings should look the same, the people should dress the same, the technology should be the same, and the music should sound the same. Church cannot under any circumstances be allowed to differ, to set itself apart. 

Sincerely, Edward Abbey

Edward Abbey to a correspondent:

The ideal off-road journey? I’ll tell you: under water. I would like to see every four-by-four on earth, every three-wheeler, every dirt bike, trail bike and Big Foot truck driven straight into the Marianas Trench, three thousand feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, and parked there — left there — for the duration.

For the duration of what? For the duration of this techno-industrial-commercial slime-mold that is transforming our planet into one vast battleground of Cretins against Nature. With the Cretins winning.

What’s wrong with the horse? Or the burro? Or the bicycle? Or even, God help us, the human foot? Why should not Americans especially learn to walk again? There is this to be said for walking: it is the one method of human locomotion by which a man or woman proceeds erect, upright, proud and independent, not squatting on the haunches like a frog.

counsel for preachers (and other Christians)

From a letter by John Wesley, written in August 1760 to a preacher named John Trembath:

Certainly some years ago you were alive to God. You experienced the life and power of religion. And does not God intend, that the trials you meet with, should bring you back to this? You cannot stand still; you know this is impossible. You must go forward or backward. Either you must recover that power, and be a Christian altogether, or in awhile you will have neither power, nor form, inside nor outside.

Extremely opposite both to one and the other, is that aptness to ridicule others, to make them contemptible, by exposing their real or supposed foibles. This I would earnestly advise you to avoid. It hurts yourself. It hurts the hearers. And it greatly hurts those who are so exposed, and tends to make them your enemies. It has also sometimes betrayed you into speaking what was not strictly true. Oh beware of this, above all things; never amplify; never exaggerate any thing. Be rigorous in adhering to truth. Be exemplary therein…. I pray, be exact in this. Be a pattern of truth, sincerity, and godly simplicity.

What has exceedingly hurt you in time past, nay, and I fear to this day, is want of reading. I scarcely ever knew a Preacher read so little. And, perhaps, by neglecting it, you have lost the taste for it. Hence your talent in preaching does not increase. It is just the same as it was seven years ago. It is lively, but not deep: there is little variety; there is no compass of thought. Reading only can supply this, with daily meditation and daily prayer. You wrong yourself greatly by omitting this. You can never be a deep Preacher without it: any more than a thorough Christian. Oh begin! Fix some part of every day for private exercises. You may acquire the taste which you have not: what is tedious at first, will afterwards be pleasant. Whether you like it or not, read and pray daily. It is for your life: there is no other way; else you will be a trifler all your days, and a pretty, superficial Preacher. Do justice to your own soul: give it time and means to grow. Do not starve yourself any longer. Take up your cross and be a Christian altogether. Then will all the children of God rejoice (not grieve) over you; and, in particular, yours, &c.

J. WESLEY

I think this is an extraordinary letter, and profoundly applicable to Christianity as it is (mal)practiced today, not least by many of its leaders. Wesley grasps here some vital points:

That in the Christian life one cannot simply maintain a status quo. “You must go forward or backward.”
That it’s cheap and easy, in preaching and teaching and writing, to attack those you believe to be wrong, and that in so doing you do not help anything but rather hurt everyone involved — including yourself. (Seeking to expose the foibles of others is a sure way to “go backwards.”)
That the desire to expose and ridicule others will lead you away from strict adherence to truthfulness.
That nothing is more to be shunned, by the faithful Christian, than looseness with the truth.
That — this is only implied, but it is strongly implied — preachers are led into these temptations by a failure to read: a failure to fill their minds with substantive knowledge, in the absence of which they can only be superficial “triflers.”
That such reading is vital because preachers cannot feed others unless they first feed themselves. (“Do justice to your own soul: give it time and means to grow. Do not starve yourself any longer.”)
That taking on this kind of intellectual discipline is one of the ways that Christians must take up their Cross.

why you need to take a break from social media

Imagination is strong in a man when that particular function of the brain which enables him to observe is roused to activity without any necessary excitement of the senses. Accordingly, we find that imagination is active just in proportion as our senses are not excited by external objects. A long period of solitude, whether in prison or in a sick room; quiet, twilight, darkness — these are the things that promote its activity; and under their influence it comes into play of itself. On the other hand, when a great deal of material is presented to our faculties of observation, as happens on a journey, or in the hurly-burly of the world, or, again, in broad daylight, the imagination is idle, and, even though call may be made upon it, refuses to become active, as though it understood that that was not its proper time.

However, if the imagination is to yield any real product, it must have received a great deal of material from the external world. This is the only way in which its storehouse can be filled. The phantasy is nourished much in the same way as the body, which is least capable of any work and enjoys doing nothing just in the very moment when it receives its food which it has to digest. And yet it is to this very food that it owes the power which it afterwards puts forth at the right time.

— Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism

abandoned mansions

Mr Wellmon’s university

For the last couple of years I’ve read several essays by my friend Chad Wellmon about the state of the American university, and the place of the humanities in that university, and while I have found each of those essays enormously thought-provoking, I have also struggled to discern an overall account of the university in Chad’s writings. He seems to do a lot of “on the one hand, on the other hand” stuff. But today, listening to this talk, I think I see some pieces of the puzzle fall into place. I now discern three interrelated themes in Chad’s recent writing on these subjects.

Utopian promises lead to dystopian responses. The more dramatic the claims that university leaders make on behalf of their institutions — We create great citizens! We’ll make you rich! We have the best sports teams, and they will fill your leisure hours with delight! We’ll be a home for you better than your actual home! We are the sole source of Knowledge! — the more certainly they create a backlash that portrays universities as cynical, corrupt exploiters of its students, sold out completely to the neoliberal order or to every leftist trend — depending on your politics. (My politics are such that I suspect selling out on both sides, but that’s a story for another day.)

Proximate goods are not ultimate, but they’re still goods. The purpose of the university is not to reveal to you The Meaning of Life, or to Save the World — though some university presidents might hint at such powers — but at the university you can learn to think better, to evaluate evidence, to test hypotheses, to formulate arguments, and to do all this in daily relation with others who are developing the same skills — though perhaps not always in quite the ways, or with the results, that you’d prefer. But this too, this negotiating with imperfect partners, is a discipline and a skill.

Institutions, even deeply flawed institutions, are where the formation of persons happens. And in a society that is rapidly disempowering or dismantling so many institutions, from the family on up, do we really want to destroy one that, however inconsistently and imperfectly, does the pedagogical work described above? If there were no university, then where, in our society, would those disciplines and skills be pursued? Twitter? Facebook groups? (Clay Shirky used to think so. Not so much anymore.) Or do you expect individuals to do the necessary work themselves, asocially and non-institutionally?

In brief: If you pay attention to what universities actually do — again, however inconsistently and imperfectly — as opposed to what their PR-driven leaders promise — you might be better positioned to understand their value, and our society’s complete inability to build other institutions that might provide similar value.

Chad thinks he’s a liberal, but this sure looks like a conservative argument to me — an old-fashioned case for the wisdom of limiting one’s ambitions and expectations alike — a Chesterton’s fence kind of argument. I like it. (Assuming, that is, that I have understood Chad properly.)

one person here understands what Easter is all about

Mikhail Svetlov / Getty

Tending the Digital Commons

Facebook is unlikely to shut down tomorrow; nor is Twitter, or Instagram, or any other major social network. But they could. And it would be a good exercise to reflect on the fact that, should any or all of them disappear, no user would have any legal or practical recourse. I started thinking about this situation a few years ago when Tumblr—a platform devoted to a highly streamlined form of blogging, with an emphasis on easy reposting from other accounts—was bought by Yahoo. I was a heavy user of Tumblr at the time, having made thousands of posts, and given the propensity of large tech companies to buy smaller ones and then shut them down, I wondered what would become of my posts if Yahoo decided that Tumblr wasn’t worth the cost of maintaining it. I found that I was troubled by the possibility to a degree I hadn’t anticipated. It would be hyperbolic (not to say comical) to describe my Tumblr as a work of art, but I had put a lot of thought into what went on it, and sometimes I enjoyed looking through the sequence of posts, noticing how I had woven certain themes into that sequence, or feeling pleasure at having found interesting and unusual images. I felt a surge of proprietary affection—and anxiety.

Many personal computers have installed on them a small command-line tool called wget, which allows you to download webpages, or even whole websites, to your machine. I immediately downloaded the whole of my Tumblr to keep it safe—although if Tumblr did end up being shut down, I wasn’t sure how I would get all those posts back online. But that was a problem I could reserve for another day. In the meantime, I decided that I needed to talk with my students.

— Me, earlier this year. With Tumblr in the news I was reminded of my argument here, and would like to remind you of it as well.

Warhol

Despite its subtle and not-so-subtle ravishments, a Warhol canvas is expressively vacant. “There’s no place for our spiritual eye to penetrate it,” the art historian Neil Printz has said of the work. “We’re just thrown back on the surface.” That’s true, though the effect is more dreadful than that. What made Warhol so perishingly cold was the implication that the “spiritual eye” never existed in the first place. Warhol, one observer put it, “wanted to be Greta Garbo, he wanted to be Marilyn Monroe,” and to better convert himself into an icon, he withdrew behind an affect as lifeless as one of his Marilyn paintings. The deadpan rigmarole was total. It functioned as an anti-elegy. It said that nothing was lost, that nothing of depth or value had been surrendered to the image.

— Stephen Metcalf. Is it Warhol who is “expressively vacant”? Or is it the world that he so faithfully represents? Imagine if Warhol, a faithful Ruthenian Catholic, had been born not in Pittsburgh but in the Carpathians two hundred years ago: Would you expect that an artist of his gifts, so culturally placed, would produce “expressively vacant” work?