Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 39

Jessica Grose:I’ve spent the past couple of weeks talkin...

Jessica Grose:

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks talking to teachers about their experiences with online grade books like Schoology and Infinite Campus, and many of their anecdotes were similar to what Miller shared: anxious kids checking their grades throughout the day, snowplow parents berating their children and questioning teachers about every grade they considered unacceptable, and harried middle and high school teachers, some of whom teach more than 100 kids on a given day, dealing with an untenable stream of additional communication.

Mitch Foss, who was a classroom teacher in Colorado for 19 years, told me that when he posted grades, he would hear from kids almost instantly via email or text. Sometimes they’d be waiting outside his classroom door to talk about their scores. “You might get emails from parents questioning the grade, wanting an explanation, and that’s for every single thing,” even assignments that had little bearing on students’ overall marks, “which can be overwhelming.” 

This sounds like the Hell that would be designed specifically for me. 

sound and effects

I recently listened to a 2020 BBC radio documentary on George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass. Very interesting in several respects, two of which I’ll mention today.

The production didn’t always make it clear who was speaking at any given time, but one guy made the fascinating comment that, in the Beatles, George was to the guitar what Ringo was to the drums: he didn’t play many solos, and when he did they tended to be worked out carefully in advance for the purpose of enhancing the songs. No guitar hero stuff; no drum hero stuff. (Of course, Ringo famously played only one solo in his career as a Beatle.)There’s an excerpt from an interview with Harrison during which he remarks on his dismay when he first heard Phil Spector’s production of “Wah-Wah”: “I hated it.” Then, he says, he got used to it, came to like it. But at another moment in the documentary, the engineer Ken Scott, who participated in the making of All Things Must Pass, talks about getting together with Harrison thirty years later to work on an anniversary edition of the album. They sat down to listen to it and simply laughed out loud at how bad it sounded. The interviewer didn’t like hearing this. He loves the sound of Spector’s production. He says it sounds contemporary. Yeah, I silently replied, contemporary crap. Compare Spector’s wall-of-crap sound with the demo that Harrison did with just his guitar and Klaus Boorman’s bass. The latter is infinitely superior.

Or so I think, and I don’t believe I am alone. You could make a plausible case that modern pop-music production on average makes songs worse than they would be if recorded as simply as possible. And that might help account for the otherwise odd fact that record labels reliably make money — not tons of money, grant you, but a profit — through releasing outtakes, alternative arrangements, and demos: those versions sound better.

Example: Flowers in the Dirt is one of Paul McCartney’s better solo recordings, but the finished record is a pale shadow of the acoustic demos Paul made with Elvis Costello. Those demos are, I think, the very finest work Paul has done in his post-Beatles career.

Example: Listen to the album version of Bob Dylan’s “Mississippi.” Good song, right? Now listen to the mostly-acoustic version, a sparer, simpler performance with a classic blues walking bass. Fantastic song.

Example: The Daniel Lanois-produced version of Dylan’s “Most of the Time,” from Oh Mercy. Cool — but not nearly as cool as this acoustic version, which sounds like it could’ve come straight from Blood on the Tracks.

Example: Noel Gallagher was doing a run-through of a song at a studio in Dublin — he didn’t even know he was being recorded — and, with just his voice, his acoustic guitar, and a supporting piano player, happened to come up with the performance of his career.

And wasn’t this the appeal of MTV Unplugged? — and also why some performers didn’t want to do it? Take away the studio tricks and you’re left with … you. Not everyone passed the test, but those who did created some magic. Nirvana is the most famous case, not unjustifiably, but there were some other cool surprises also — for instance, it was while watching Unplugged that a lot of us discovered that 10,000 Maniacs was a great band.

the personal blog and essayism

Brian Dillon: 

Essays, ancient or modern, can seem precious in their self-presentation, like things too well made ever to be handled. Touch them however and they are likely to come alive with the sedimented evidence of years; a constellation of glittering motes surrounds the supposedly solid thing, and the essay reveals itself to have been less compact and smooth than thought, but instead unbounded and mobile, a form with ambitions to be unformed. Which is to say — I can’t prove it yet — that the venerable genre of the essay has something to do with the future, with a sense of constant dispersal and coalescence. And for what it’s worth my attachment to it seems of the same conflicted order: I want essays to have some integrity (formally, not morally, speaking), their strands of thought and style and feeling so tightly woven they present a smooth and gleaming surface. And I want all this to unravel in the same moment, in the same work; I want the raggedness, the patchwork, a labyrinth’s-worth of stray threads. You might say I’m torn. 

Well, yes: exactly. 

John Stuart Mill:So long as an opinion is strongly rooted...

John Stuart Mill:

So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling, the worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded its adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is always throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair any breach made in the old. 

writing about the Beatles

What follows is a familiar story.

One summer morning when I was around seven years old, I was hanging out at my friend Jerry Livingstone’s house when his mother realized that she needed to pick up some things at Miller’s department store. So she bundled us into the car and off we went. When we arrived she did something that moms did in those days: she told us to stay in the car while she did her shopping, and kindly left the radio on for us. At some point during our wait, the DJ played a song that was unlike anything I had ever heard: “A Hard Day’s Night,” by the Beatles.

Even with just a few years under my belt, I had already heard a lot of music. Our car radio was always on the local country station, but we also had a console record player in the dining room – this kind of thing – and my grandmother played records while she did her housework and cooking. (Neither of my parents had any interest whatever in music.) Grandma had rather eclectic tastes for her generation: she may have listened to country in the car, but in my early childhood her most-played album was by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, and a few years later she became a big Neil Diamond fan. She had some 45rpm singles, too, and when I was allowed to select and play my own records, the first ones I remember choosing were Chubby Checker’s “Let’s Twist Again” and Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire.” (Herb, Chubby, and Neil are all still around and still performing; only Johnny has departed. The ways of Providence are strange and, frankly, indefensible.)

I enjoyed all this stuff, but none of it made an especially big impression on me. But “A Hard Day’s Night” just electrified me, for reasons that to this day I still can’t articulate. It was just … awesome, you know. Amazing. Cooler than anything I had ever heard.

Millions of people have stories like this. Dave Grohl, for instance, says that — when he was about the same age I was when I heard “A Hard Day’s Night” — he was having a sleepover with a friend, was tucked into his sleeping bag, ready to settle down … and then “Hey Jude” came on the radio. He never got to sleep that night because he couldn’t stop singing the “Na, na na, na-na-na-na” part.

Just as I entered adolescence the Beatles broke up, and that made them Yesterday’s News — nobody is more neophiliac and obsessed with the immediate than a 13-year-old, so I turned my attention to newer and (inevitably) less excellent things. But I never forgot that first hearing of “A Hard Day’s Night,” and eventually I made my way back.

The question of how to account for the sheer difference of the Beatles, their obvious and yet not-obviously-explicable superiority to all other pop music, has been worrying people since 1963. As I’ve noted before, even my own essay on resistance in the arts was largely prompted by my attempt to account for it. I’ve read a lot about the Beatles over the years, and the one book that has genuinely helped me to understand what’s unique about their music, and how it actually works, is Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head — a maddeningly opinionated, sometimes unfair, often brilliantly insightful, always provocative book.

But it’s just one book. The really remarkable thing about the vast outpouring of writing about the Beatles is how bad it is. Exceptions are very few. Mark Lewisohn’s two chronicles — one of the Beatles’ recording sessions, the other of the events of their career — are quite useful, but their value is purely informative. Lewisohn’s ongoing biography of the band will undoubtedly be the most comprehensive account possible, but I worry that (if he ever finishes it) any insights will be overwhelmed by the sheer detail. Nearly 20 years after signing his contract, Lewisohn has produced just the first of his three volumes, in a mainstream 900-page version and Lewisohn’s preferred “extended special edition”: 1700 pages. And all that only takes the story to 1962. No way I’m reading that. A while back Michael Holroyd wrote a four-volume biography of George Bernard Shaw, and then edited them down into a one-volume edition. If Lewisohn did something like that I’d read the abridgment.

Kenneth Womack has written several books about the Beatles, including a two-volume biography of George Martin, but … well, I have to say, they’re really badly written. Womack’s prose is … it’s hard to find a word that doesn’t sound insulting. He has trouble organizing ideas clearly, and even more trouble with, you know, words: his writing is grossly overpopulated with clichés — if music is a feast, you know what kind of feast it will be? A veritable one — and when he tries to avoid clichés the results can be even worse. For instance, he says that Abbey Road offers “a demure listening experience.” Demure?? It’s hard to read when you’re continually wincing; and as far as I can tell, most of what Womack offers is available elsewhere, especially from Lewisohn and, in the case of George Martin, from his autobiography. I need a better return on my readerly investment than I can get from Womack.

I could go on — there are more bad Beatles books that I could describe in a year. But let’s think of good things. Ian Leslie writes very well indeed about the Beatles — see this post and this one — and is currently working on a book about John Lennon and Paul McCartney. That I am very much looking forward to.

Sometimes I think that maybe I should do a book about the Beatles. But I’m more likely to write one about Bob Dylan, who also has been let down by (most of) his commentators. I’ll talk about that in another post.

P.S. I should make a distinction here between books that simply are not good and books that are of no use to me. If you haven’t read anything about Dylan, and Beatles, or The Beach Boys, then Luke Meddings’s What They Heard is a fine introduction to what those people were up to, especially between 1964 and 1966. But if you are familiar with the histories of those musicians, then 95% of it is old news.

two summative thoughts about AI

One: There was until recently a battle for the soul of AGI research and development, a battle between the stewards and the exploiters. The stewards understand themselves to be the duty-bound custodians of an ever-more-enormous power; the exploiters are interested in using that power to make themselves rich and powerful. Had the stewards managed to retain control, or even influence, then I would have been willing to keep a cautiously hopeful eye on developments. However, the stewards have been routed and only the exploiters remain. (OpenAI’s dismissal of Sam Altman was effectively The Stewards’ Last Stand.) I therefore consider it necessary to refuse any use of AI in any circumstances that I can control. 

Two: The powers of law are being summoned by people who see the exploiters as I do, which I guess is a good thing, but … in our society, can anyone as rich as the tech companies behind AGI lose, either in the courts or through legislation? I don’t see how they can. Everyone who stands in their way can be bought, and most of them are pleading to be bought. (Similarly, in Premier League football, Everton is small enough to be smacked down but I cannot imagine Manchester City or Chelsea ever suffering any penalty, no matter how grossly they have defied the financial rules.) As Dana Gioia taught us long ago, 

Money. You don’t know where it’s been,
but you put it where your mouth is.
And it talks.

structure and story

I regularly teach in the Great Texts program here in Baylor’s Honors College, which is based on the old University of Chicago model pioneered by – or anyway most fully developed – by Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler. Usually such courses are period-based, but draw on many genres of writing: fiction, poetry, drama, philosophy, theology, political theory, etc. For reasons I won’t go into here, but will probably write about one day, any such interdisciplinary course in the humanities has a natural tendency to be governed by the concerns of political philosophy; questions about how we human beings should live a common life can be discerned in pretty much everything we read. It requires a conscious effort from the teacher not to let political philosophy govern the entire course, though it probably should be structurally dominant.

In order to teach a class like this well, I think, you need a structure and a story. Right now I’m teaching the 19th century: Burke (yes, I know, he’s at the end of the previous century), Austen, Kierkegaard, Mill, George Eliot, Marx & Engels, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky. A motley crew! Which is why you need a structure, or, to be more precise, a strategy of heuristic simplification. Mine looks like this:

First, I divide the writers and thinkers of the era into three large groups:

the reactionariesthe melioriststhe revolutionaries

We’re probably not reading any genuine reactionaries in this class – people like Joseph de Maistre for instance – because their influence in their own time was not great. (Their influence on the 20th century is much greater.) I say we’re probably not reading any reactionaries because the case can be made that Dostoevsky is a reactionary, but I prefer to think of him as a revolutionary. More on that later.

Much of the first half of the course is devoted to the great English meliorist tradition, the intellectual world contested by conservative meliorists (Burke, Austen) and liberal meliorists (Mill, Eliot). Then we turn our attention in the latter part of the term to more radical figures, some of whose concerns had been anticipated by Kierkegaard.

So we’re focusing on thinkers and artists who believe that the social order needs to be changed, but differ about whether that change should be pursued by gradual or dramatic means. And they differ in other respects too, for instance:

the reasons change is neededthe arena in which change should primarily be pursuedthe means by which change should be pursued

What do I mean by “arena”? Perhaps I can illustrate by referring to my revolutionaries:

Marx & Engels give their attention to the arena of political economyNietzsche’s primary arena is intellectual and moral formationDostoevsky’s arena is the world of spiritual warfare (political economy and intellectual life being, for him, downstream of spiritual matters)

Another and simpler way to put this is to say that revolutionaries (like meliorists!) may want revolutions in systems and institutions or in hearts and minds – and we may note that if you’re focused on the former you’ll probably write treatises, while if you’re focused on the latter you’ll probably write novels. (Though George Eliot, maybe more than any other 19th-century writer with the possible exception of Tolstoy, manages to maintain a double focus in several of her books, most dominantly Middlemarch.)

That’s the structure I employ in this course. And from that structure emerges the story I tell. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide what that story is likely to be.

costs, continued

Once you face the real human costs of your preferred policies in peace or war, you may then

Warmly embrace them;Accept them with a shrug;Work to mitigate them;Decide that they’re too high and look for alternative policies. 

A combination of the sunk costs fallacy and the fear of shame makes the fourth option very rare indeed. Would that it were more common. 

Jennifer A. Frey:When Zena Hitz explains the Catherine P...

Jennifer A. Frey:

When Zena Hitz explains the Catherine Project (a series of online and in-person seminars) or when Nathan Beacom describes a revival of the Lyceum movement for adults, the reader is left to wonder whether the liberal arts need to be tied to our universities at all. This is no idle concern — the average annual cost of tuition at a liberal-arts college is $24,000 a year. If one can engage in liberating learning for a small donation to the Catherine Project, doesn’t it make more sense to learn in one’s leisure time rather than bother with an expensive four-year degree? Even if such study is liberatory, is it worth the student debt, especially when its own practitioners agree that it can be pursued just as profitably on the side for a pittance? In Ms. Hitz’s own words, “universities are wonderful, but they are not necessary for human flourishing.”

If liberal learning does not need the university, we might ask whether the university needs liberal learning. One might worry that, in trying to prove that the liberal arts are not elitist, we have only shown that we can uncouple them from universities and be no worse off for it. If liberal learning is for everyone and can be pursued anywhere — in prison, in elementary schools, by people in poverty — why would anyone pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for it? Is it because, as Don Eben argues, a habit of learning and analysis makes students better future white-collar workers? Or, as Rachel Griffis argues, because a liberal-arts education complements professional training, thus becoming a good financial investment? Is the only good argument for liberal learning in universities, ultimately, instrumental? 

Jennifer Frey is the dean of an Honors College at a private university; I teach in an Honors College at a private university. You could say that we both have an investment in keeping that flame burning. But I think even we ought to be asking the questions Frey asks here. As I have often written, these are good times for the humanities; they’re just not good times for humanities programs in universities. This is why I keep thinking about Emily St. John Mandel’s Traveling Symphony. Even as we try to keep the humanities-in-the-university afloat, I think we need to spend a lot of time imagining the humanities without the university. 

an update on motives

The other day I wrote:

Freddie (like many people, it seems) is critical of the reasons Ayaan Hirsi Ali has cited for her conversion to Christianity. I’m not. My view is that everyone has to start somewhere — she’s very forthright about being a newcomer to all this — and what matters is not where you start but where you end up. One person may seek a bulwark against relativism; another may long for architectural or linguistic or musical beauty; another may crave community. Christian life is a house with many entrances. I became a Christian because I fell head-over-heels for a Christian girl who wouldn’t date me otherwise, so how could I judge anyone else’s reasons for converting? As Rebecca West said, “There’s no such thing as an unmixed motive”; and God, as I understand things, is not the judge but the transformer of motives. 

This reminded the excellent Yair Rosenberg of something — something I knew nothing about. Yair wrote to me to share a passage from Pesachim 50b of the Babylonian Talmud: 

On the topic of reward for a mitzva fulfilled without intent, Rava raised a contradiction: It is written: “For Your mercy is great unto the heavens, and Your truth reaches the skies” (Psalms 57:11); and it is written elsewhere: “For Your mercy is great above the heavens, and Your truth reaches the skies” (Psalms 108:5). How so? How can these verses be reconciled? The Gemara explains: Here, where the verse says that God’s mercy is above the heavens, it is referring to a case where one performs a mitzva for its own sake; and here, where the verse says that God’s mercy reaches the heavens, it is referring to a case where one performs a mitzva not for its own sake. Even a mitzva performed with ulterior motives garners reward, as Rav Yehuda said that Rav said: A person should always engage in Torah study and performance of mitzvot, even if he does so not for their own sake, as through the performance of mitzvot not for their own sake, one gains understanding and comes to perform them for their own sake.

Those old rabbis, they knew a thing or two about human nature.