Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 46

The Scriptural BCP

The Scriptural Book of Common Prayer is a wonderful resource that does its job a little too well. That job is to lead readers to the biblical sources that underlie almost every phrase in the prayer book. But some biblical sources are more important than others. 

The famous first line of the Collect for Purity is: “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid….” At the Scriptural BCP page, if you click on that line, here’s what you get: 

Gen 17:1 When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless.

1 Sam 2:3 Talk no more so very proudly, let not arrogance come from your mouth; for the Lord is a God of knowledge, and by him actions are weighed.

1 Kings 8:39 then hear in heaven your dwelling place, forgive, act, and render to all whose hearts you know–according to all their ways, for only you know what is in every human heart—

1 Chron 28:9 “And you, my son Solomon, know the God of your father, and serve him with single mind and willing heart; for the Lord searches every mind, and understands every plan and thought. If you seek him, he will be found by you; but if you forsake him, he will abandon you forever.

Job 42.4 ‘Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you declare to me.’

Ps 38:9 O Lord, all my longing is known to you; my sighing is not hidden from you.

Ps 44:21 would not God discover this? For he knows the secrets of the heart.

Ps 139:1-4 O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.

Jer 17:10 I the Lord test the mind and search the heart, to give to all according to their ways, according to the fruit of their doings.

Ezek 11:5 Then the spirit of the Lord fell upon me, and he said to me, “Say, Thus says the Lord: This is what you think, O house of Israel; I know the things that come into your mind.

Matt 12:25 He knew what they were thinking and said to them, “Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand.

John 2:24-25 But Jesus on his part would not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people and needed no one to testify about anyone; for he himself knew what was in everyone.

1 Cor 3:20 and again, “The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile.”

Heb 4:13 And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.

Rev 3:1 “And to the angel of the church in Sardis write: These are the words of him who has the seven spirits of God and the seven stars: “I know your works; you have a name of being alive, but you are dead.

Rev 3:8 “I know your works. Look, I have set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut. I know that you have but little power, and yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.

Rev 3:15 “I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot.

Acts 1:24 Then they prayed and said, “Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which one of these two you have chosen.” 

Just having so many sources listed is daunting. And some of them, like the passage from Job, seem unrelated to the collect, while others (1 Samuel 2:3, and the passages from Revelation, which are about our works, not our heart) are only tangentially related at most. I think all this might be more useful — especially for people new to the prayer book, or new to the Bible — if the references were confined to the essential ones. 

Nevertheless: a wonderful resource, and a testament to how skillfully and sensitively Thomas Cranmer and the other authors of the prayer book wove the words of Scripture into their liturgies. 

against apps, for wander lines

In 1980, a curiously polymathic Jesuit priest named Michel de Certeau (1925–86) published a provocative book called, in English translation, The Practice of Everyday Life. (The original and more evocative French title is L’invention du quotidien Vol. 1: Arts de faire.) In the book’s introduction he lays out a simple and yet wonderfully generative opposition between strategy and tactics; and that distinction will be key to what follows.

The terms are of course borrowed from warfare: strategy (the term derives from the Greek strategos, “army leader”) concerns the overall goals and general plans of a military campaign. It is the view from 30,000 feet. But when we speak of tactics we are viewing the situation from ground level: military tactics are the specific ways and means by which the overall strategic goals are pursued. Only strategoi formulate strategy, and they may have a good deal to say about tactics as well, but because conditions on the battlefield may be unexpected or volatile, subordinate leaders will be largely responsible for tactical decisions.

De Certeau looked around him and saw a world determined by the strategoi of multinational corporations, national governments, and what the Marxist theorist Louis Althusser called “ideological state apparatuses.” (Depending on the country, examples of such apparatuses might be educational and health-care systems – not necessarily directly controlled by the government, but regulated and overseen in ways that serve governmental purposes.) These Powers, as St. Paul might have named them, call the shots. In de Certeau’s terms, they identify an “environment” which they stand outside of and manipulate; they determine what within that environment is “proper” – and propre is a key word for de Certeau. What are the proper activities in environment X? What is the proper environment for activity X? The Powers organize and channel the energies of ordinary people into the proper, and do so according to their strategic purposes.

So what is left for ordinary people to do? Well, they can become mere drones, acting wholly and unthinkingly within the channels set by those Powers. But, de Certeau believed, few human beings are drones. Even in dire circumstances people can prove amazingly resilient and creative:

The ambiguity that subverted from within the Spanish colonizers’ “success” in imposing their own culture on the indigenous Indians is well known. Submissive, and even consenting to their subjection, the Indians nevertheless often made of the rituals, representations, and laws imposed on them something quite different from what their conquerors had in mind; they subverted them not by rejecting or altering them, but by using them with respect to ends and references foreign to the system they had no choice but to accept.

For example, these Indians could not decline to become Christians; but they could interpret the Christianity imposed on them in ways that harmonized with their traditional beliefs and practices – as long as they did not do so in open defiance of the boundaries of the “proper.” They could not defy the powers; but they could “make of” what the Powers imposed on them something other than what the Powers intended. This, de Certeau says, is tactical thinking, tactical practice.

In our own context, then, by employing similar tactics those who are designated as mere “consumers” can become “unrecognized producers, poets of their own acts, silent discoverers of their own paths in the jungle of functionalist rationality.” In describing how this works de Certeau employs a fascinating analogy, which will take some time to explain. He invokes the work of the maverick educator Fernand Deligny (1913–96), an extraordinary figure so completely neglected that, as I write, he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. But in addition to providing a key metaphor to de Certeau, Deligny provides also a model for the practices I think essential our moment. Think of what follows not as a digression from my presentation of de Certeau, but of de Certeau’s work as a way into the “Arachnean” (spider-like) thought of Deligny.

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Deligny and his colleagues, living and working in the Cévennes Mountains of southern France, intentionally separated from the institutional structures (the strategic structures) of French culture, tried to find new and more humane ways of supporting autistic children – especially those who did not speak, who were hors de parole (outside of speech). Deligny treated this silence as a choice to be respected rather than a disability to be overcome, and paid close attention to what such children did instead of speaking.

Leon Hilton, in a fascinating essay, explains that Deligny and his colleagues

began to follow their autistic counterparts as they made their way through the Cévennes’s rocky terrain, making rudimentary line drawings to indicate their direction of movement across the rural encampment and into surrounding wilderness.

The tracings soon became a central aspect of the group’s activities, and the maps grew steadily more detailed and elaborate. They developed visual systems for designating the various sounds and gestures encountered along their pathways, and started to use transparent wax paper to trace the children’s daily routes. No attempt was made to interfere with their movements, or to explain or interpret them. The focus remained on the process of tracing itself.

Deligny called these drawings lignes d’erre – erre not in the sense of “erroneous” but in the sense of the “knight-errant,” the wandering knight without fixed abode. Lignes d’erre are unstable because in motion, perhaps like a pilgrim’s path, which may have more order than it initially appears to. Wander lines, which precede the regularized and disciplined forms of letters. Hilton: “Yet distinct patterns began to emerge: certain trajectories tended to be repeated from one day to the next, and Deligny noted that some of the wandering lines seem to correspond to the conduits of underground waterways.” The children were wordlessly making their way along the paths of life, and and the adults let them do it. Or: rather than imposing a strategy on the children, they allowed the natural world to form the environment, and this empowered the children to become more than mere consumers, mere drones in the “proper” channels. The children became, to return to de Certeau’s language, “poets of their own acts, silent discoverers of their own paths in the jungle of functionalist rationality,” and though hors de parole they became also documenters of their wayfaring. If I thought it possible to rehabilitate a greatly-abused word, I’d say that they were networking.

One of the most famous moments in all of movies comes at the end of François Truffaut’s first feature, The Four Hundred Blows (1959). Antoine Doinel, a Parisian boy who has repeatedly been in trouble – with his mother, with his teachers, with the law – is sent to an institution for troubled youth, where he is subjected to a series of interviews with a psychologist who wants to excavate the causes of his unhappiness. But one day, when playing with some of the other children, Antoine crawls under a fence and makes his way, running, running, to something he had always wanted to see: the ocean. Truffaut freezes the camera on Antoine as he gazes at the wandering, drifting waves of the sea. As Leon Hilton explains, Truffuat worked out the concluding scene of the movie with the help of Fernand Deligny. 

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What is the value of Deligny’s work to de Certeau? The “wander lines” of the autistic children exemplify

‘indirect’ or ‘errant’ trajectories obeying their own logic. In the technocratically constructed, written, and functionalized space in which the consumers move about, their trajectories form unforeseeable sentences, partly unreadable paths across a space.

The autistic children Deligny worked with are admirable improvisers: pens and paper are for writing words, they serve the purpose of bringing people “inside written language,” but these children made something else of the tools, adapted the instruments to their own needs and desires. (This is what in my “Filth Therapy” essay, following yet another French thinker, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, I called bricolage: making do, employing what is to-hand, inventing new purposes for old materials.)

It is vital to de Certau’s argument to insist how commonplace such activity is – we fail to see how much we are like those autistic children in the mountains of France, how we too are tacticians:

Many everyday practices (talking, reading, moving about, shopping, cooking, etc.) are tactical in character. And so are, more generally, many “ways of operating”: victories of the “weak” over the “strong” (whether the strength be that of powerful people or the violence of things or of an imposed order, etc.), clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things, “hunter’s cunning,” maneuvers, polymorphic simulations, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike.

But what de Certau, writing nearly fifty years ago, did not foresee is the rise of a Technopoly, an ever-extending regime that unites the old forces of state and corporation into an unprecedentedly extensive endeavor with a Grand Strategy – a strategy I have called metaphysical capitalism. (See the relevant tag to this post.) Technopoly tells us that we own ourselves, and that everything we need to fulfill our own (unchallengeable) desires is available for sale in the marketplace. But of course this is a system that only works if what we desire can in fact be purchased; and since that cannot in advance be guaranteed, the initial imperative of Technopoly is to train our desires, to channel them towards what the system already has for sale.

And the greatest instruments ever devised for such channeling are our internet-connected devices, especially when we connect to the internet through apps. The reason? Because while pens and paper can be used in extraordinarily varied and unpredictable ways, apps can’t: the ways in which we can interact with them are determined with great specificity and no deviation from the designed user-interface paradigm is permitted. You can use a pen to write a poem in elaborate cursive, sketch a tree, play Hangman, or, in moments of desperation, scratch a mosquito bite or skewer a chunk of watermelon. (I am describing, not recommending.) With TikTok, you can … make TikToks. The app is so far the ultimate extension of what Albert Borgmann called the device paradigm. 

In short: in relation to the Grand Strategy of Technopoly, the essential purpose of apps is to eliminate the sphere of the tactical. It is to make the kind of improvisation I celebrated in my essay on Albert Murray impossible. It is to transform us all into drones, and then to make us like it – to make us accept a universal strategic imperative as desirable, and then to promise that our lines never shall wander.

what the bird said

Many spoilers follow.

Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City begins with a framing story: We seem to be watching a television show from the 1950s, and in that show our Host — something like the Stage Manager from Our Town — presents to us a new play called Asteroid City. From time to time we return to this framing story, in which we learn (in nonconsecutive order) how a playwright named Conrad Earp came up with the idea for his play, how the play was cast, how changes were made to it, how its director came to live backstage amid the props, and so on. We’re even told that the playwright died in an accident.

The play itself is presented to us in full color, featuring a slightly more-pastel-than-usual version of the typical Wes Anderson color palette. Though, as noted above, there is a backstage, and at one point we even see an actor leave the scene he’s playing to go backstage and ask the director whether he’s playing his part properly, the moment we’re placed within the world of the play we’re given a 360º camera rotation — in 90º increments: quarter-turn, stop; quarter-turn, stop; etc. — to demonstrate that the play’s world completely surrounds us, that for us there should not be, cannot be, any “backstage.”

Here’s what happens. It’s 1955. Many people converge on a meteor crater in the desert somewhere near the convergence of California, Arizona, and Nevada. Some teenage student scientists, along with their parents, have come to receive awards (from a general in the U.S. Army) for their inventions; a busload of younger students are there on a field trip; a country-and-western band get stuck when they miss their bus out of town. (Or “town” — the population is 87.) In the middle of the award ceremony a spaceship arrives and hovers over the crater; an alien descends from the ship and takes a basketball-sized chunk of the meteorite; the government confines everyone to the site for a week and forbids communication with the outside world. Tentative romantic relationships begin. One of the teenage scientists manages to get word out to his high-school newspaper; with the information embargo broken, the government decides to let everyone go home; before everyone can leave the spaceship returns to drop off the meteorite; the general re-imposes lockdown; chaotic resistance ensues; the actor has his motivational crisis and goes backstage; the lockdown is lifted; everyone goes home. So it’s a comedy, basically.

Or not. Many of Wes Anderson’s movies are tonally awkward, and this one more than most. The awkwardness here arises from one major plot point that I have omitted. That actor who has a crisis about his motivations? He’s playing a photojournalist named Augie Steenbeck … hang on. Let’s pause a moment to pursue clarity. You’ll see a lot of commentary on this movie saying that Jason Schwartzman plays Augie Steenbeck. This is not true. In the movie Asteroid City Jason Schwartzman portrays an actor named Jones Hall who, in the play Asteroid City, portrays a photojournalist named Augie Steenbeck who visits a town called Asteroid City. All clear now? Okay.

Well … perhaps I should add that, depending on how you understand this TV-show framing, it’s possible that Jason Schwartzman is playing an unnamed actor who, for the purposes of television, is playing the stage actor Jones Hall, who plays the photojournalist Augie Steenbeck. But let’s pretend I didn’t say that.

Augie Steenbeck has come to Asteroid City because his son Woodrow is one of the teenage scientists to be honored. He brings Woodrow and also his three younger daughters. He has a big problem, though: his wife, the mother of his four children, has been dead for three weeks and he hasn’t told them. Now, under pressure from his father-in-law, whom he talks to on the phone, he decides to tell them — and does, in the flat tones that all of Wes Anderson’s characters typically use, while holding her ashes in a Tupperware container.

Jones Hall, the actor playing Augie, doesn’t understand Augie. He’s doesn’t know what’s going on his Augie’s head — that emotionless flatness of tone hides Augie from the man performing him. He’s also confused about some of Augie’s actions, especially one odd thing: after he convinces Conrad Earp to cast him as Augie, he asks “Why does Augie burn his hand on the Quickie Griddle?” (Quickie Griddle pictured above, at the bottom of the frame. Augie is just about to touch it.) Augie has toasted a sandwich, and when talking to the woman he may be falling for, he suddenly places his palm on the hot griddle. But Conrad Earp doesn’t know why Augie does that: “He just sort of did it while I was typing.” Hall’s ongoing puzzlement about Augie then takes him backstage to talk to the director. “I still don’t understand the play,” he says. “Doesn’t matter,” the director replies. “Just keep telling the story.”

Hall is not satisfied. The big chaotic scene of resistance to the general’s diktat is still going on, and he doesn’t think he’ll be missed if he stays away a few moments longer. “I need some fresh air,” he says, to which the director replies, “You won’t find any.” But Augie goes out on the fire escape anyway and lights a cigarette.

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Think of a movie like The Grand Budapest Hotel. How might one defend treating a subject like the Bloodlands of the mid-twentieth century in this peculiar way, with its chocolate-box colors, farcical action, exaggerated and anti-naturalistic acting styles? Asteroid City is, I think, Wes Anderson’s attempt to answer that question. That’s what I’m slowly getting around to explaining.

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We primarily see Augie interacting with Midge, the woman he may be falling for, as they look at each other across the gap that separates his tiny motel cottage from hers. Each of them is framed for the other; they speak but are separated by the walls. And now, when Jones Hall goes out onto the fire escape, he finds himself immediately opposite another fire escape, one attached to another theater, and he is looking at another actor, another person who has left the theatrical space for some fresh air and a smoke — and it’s a person he recognizes. “Ah,” he says, it’s you, the wife who played my actress.” The inadvertent switch of nouns is of course telling.

In some earlier version of the play Asteroid City Conrad Earp had written a scene between Augie and his wife, a scene in which she advises him how to navigate his life without her. Jones Hall has forgotten the scene, but “the wife who played his actress” remembers it word for word, and quietly recites it to him as they look at each other across their respective fire-escape platforms. Jones Hall has traveled from the brightly-colored environment of Asteroid City to the disorderly backstage collection of props and makeup to what is for him the “real world” — the world of “fresh air.” Was the director wrong to tell him he wouldn’t find any?

What’s the opposite of “fresh”? One opposite is artificial, and it’s noteworthy that the actress who recites her discarded lines, her discarded part, is dressed for a period drama, wearing the rococo costume of an eighteenth-century aristocrat. Jones Hall learns something he needs to know about his character not through inhaling fresh air, not through re-entering the “real world,” but through a chance encounter with words of explanation, words rejected because they were too explicit, because they said too much — and delivered to him by a Goddess of Contrivance, the very embodiment of artifice.

Again, this is all part of the frame story, and the final part part of the frame story involves a flashback to a visit paid by Conrad Earp to a place very like the Actors Studio, an institution created in the very period in which our story is set. There Conrad Earp and the movie’s equivalent of Lee Strasberg encourage the actors gathered there — several of whom eventually make up the main body of the cast of the play Asteroid City — to “workshop” the dialogue of the play. Some of them enter, or feign to enter, a kind of trance state, in the midst of which the camera closes in on Jones Hall, who looks directly at us and says a single sentence, a sentence then taken up and chanted by the whole room: “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.”

You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep. I think this is as close as Wes Anderson has ever come to explaining and defending his very peculiar style of filmmaking. What he’s telling us is that the most vital and the most painful things in life cannot be confronted directly, explicitly, artlessly. There must be masks — contrivances, artifice — that distract us, lull us, distract our agitated minds. Tragic experience, to be properly worked through, must wear the mask of comedy. And perhaps for the deepest griefs a single mask is insufficient; you may need several. So here we see layer after layer being peeled away, but no matter how many layers we remove we just find more artifice.

And I think this is Anderson saying that he wants to make art about some of the most profound of human experiences — but doesn’t know how to make it explicitly and directly about those experiences. Or doesn’t want to. Or doesn’t believe in doing so. In some ways, then, you can see this movie as a kind of a commentary on his other films, above all, I think, The Grand Budapest Hotel. If you want to know why Wes Anderson takes such a mannered and apparently frivolous attitude towards matters of the greatest depth and significance, I think he’s explaining that in Asteroid City. He’s obeying Emily Dickinson’s instruction to “Tell the truth but tell it slant.” And he’s doing that because, as the bird says, “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.”

Tirzah Garwood

Regular readers of this will know of my fondness for the art of Eric Ravilious. Ravilious was married to another highly gifted artist, Tirzah Garwood, whose work I have posted a couple of times; but she deserves more attention than I have given her. (In the Ravilious painting above, that’s her on the right, accompanied by her friend Charlotte Bawden. I will write at some point later about the Bawdens, Charlotte and Edward.) Here they are together:

Here’s something of a self-portrait:

(Compare Ravilious’s “Train Landscape.”) Garwood worked in several media, and when you look at the image below you’ll wish she had done more in that curious medium, embroidery.

(Also perhaps a bit of a self-portrait?) Larger version here. 

Alas, neither Eric nor Tirzah were blessed with long life. In the Second World War Eric was an official “War Artist,” and in August 1942 his plane was lost somewhere over Iceland. He was 39. Tirzah suffered from recurrent cancer and died in 1951 at the age of 42. Their three children survived them, and their youngest, Anne Ullmann (born 1941), still celebrates and advocates for her parents’ work.

There Babylon is builded in the Waste, founded in Human desolation

Dylan’s conversion

From the 1978 Playboy interview with Bob Dylan:

PLAYBOY: Just to stay on the track, what first turned you on to folk singing? You actually started out in Minnesota playing the electric guitar with a rock group, didn’t you?

DYLAN: Yeah. The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta. I heard a record of hers in a record store, back when you could listen to records right there in the store. That was in ’58 or something like that. Right then and there, I went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustical guitar, a flat-top Gibson.

PLAYBOY: What was so special to you about that Odetta record?

DYLAN: Just something vital and personal. I learned all the songs on that record. It was her first and the songs were “Mule Skinner,” “Jack of Diamonds,” “Waterboy,” “ Buked and Scorned.” 

Though with Dylan you can never tell, I hope this is true. (Especially since Odetta and I share a home town.) 

Twenty-five years ago I wrote an essay about Dylan that was published first in Books & Culture and then at bobdylan.com — the former of which was a pleasure to have published and the second rather disorientingly exciting. (I got paid in CDs.) I think this is the B&C version. 

outreach and generativity

Over at the Daily Nous, Alex Guerrero, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers, argues that the traditional three branches of academic work — teaching, research, and service — needs to be augmented by a fourth: outreach or engagement.

Colleges and universities are supported (1) by the general public, through government funding; (2) by students and their families, through tuition and fees; and (3) by rich people, through donations. What education and what knowledge will be pursued in colleges and universities is not set in stone; it is, rather, a function of what those three groups want and demand. If we want philosophy to be part of the education and part of the knowledge that is pursued in the years to come, we need people in those three groups to want and demand philosophy. And for people in those three groups to want and demand philosophy, we need to reach out to them, engage them, make them aware of what philosophy is and why it is wonderful and valuable. Given what philosophy is, and given our contemporary situation, that task is monumental, and must be undertaken at many different levels, in many ways. No small number of us can do it on our own. Therefore, it should be a part of all of our jobs — quite literally — to do this work.

Such outreach can be accomplished in several ways:

There are obviously central enterprises: exposing children and adolescents to philosophy and serious humanities in K–12 education, for example, something that many are already doing. Writing “public facing” philosophy that appears in newspapers, broad circulation prestige venues, trade books, and so on. Creating online philosophy courses and videos and other broad access materials like podcasts. There are also more local, more intimate efforts: organizing a public philosophy week at a public library, running a philosophy club or ethics bowl team at the local high school, organizing community book groups and “meetups” to discuss philosophy, running “ask a philosopher” booths at the train station, farmers’ market, or mall. These activities bring philosophy to people outside of the academy and bring people into philosophy, giving them entry points and a better sense of what the subject is and why it is of value. They also are a lot of fun. And a ton of work to do well. And, for the most part, they are treated as outside of one’s job, falling outside of the big three: research, teaching, and service.

Obviously this idea would apply to many other disciplines (most of them? all of them?) and it certainly applies to mine. When I write here on my blog, or for non-academic magazines and websites, I am certainly and quite consciously practicing such outreach — but none of it has any value in the eyes of Baylor University. My position at Baylor is wholly due to my academic work. You could of course argue that that’s as it should be, that strictly academic work is what universities ought to value and support; but for what little it’s worth, I think that’s shortsighted.

I could cite several reasons for my view. For instance, some students want to attend the Honors College here at Baylor because they have encountered the public work, the outreaching work, that I and several of my colleagues do. We can in a similar way help with the recruitment of faculty also. But I suspect that there may be other benefits to my kind of public-facing work, benefits that are more strictly academic — even if the work itself isn’t academic, or not in the familiar ways.

Consider the career of the great computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra. Cal Newport recently wrote about Dijkstra’s work habits in a post that’s interesting in several way — but I just want to call attention to one thing: what Dijkstra did after he received a research fellowship from the Burroughs Corporation. Newport quotes one colleague of Dijkstra’s: “The Burroughs years saw him at his most prolific in output of research articles. He wrote nearly 500 documents in the EWD series.”

But hang on a minute. His entries in “the EWD series” were not in any conventional academic sense “research articles.” They were, basically, letters, originally typewritten and later handwritten with a Mont Blanc pen, which Dijkstra photocopied and mailed to colleagues. (He numbered and labeled them, and each label began with his initials, EWD, thus their familiar name. “I got a new EWD today!”) The initial recipients numbered only in the dozens, but since they had photocopiers too, it’s estimated that each EWD had hundreds or even thousands of readers.

Sometimes EWDs developed into proper research articles, but, as the home page for his archives notes, “the great majority of his manuscripts remain unpublished. They have been inaccessible to many potential readers, and those who have received copies have been unable to cite them in their own work.” The archive was created precisely in order to enable proper academic citations, since “personal communication from the author” is not a recognized form of documentation in the CS world.

So Dijkstra’s EWDs were not proper academic research, were not the sort of thing that one can put on a CV or include in a year-end report; nor were they “outreach” in Alex Guerrero’s sense, since they were directed to Dijkstra’s colleagues and peers rather than to the general public. Yet, as thousands of computer scientists over the decades have testified, the EWDs were enormously generative: they inspired and guided research throughout the field of computer science.

Universities know how to reward the dissemination of ideas through standard peer-reviewed publication; what they do not know is how to reward generativity. And, to be fair, that’s true at least in part because it’s hard to know in advance what ideas will generate other ideas, what projects other projects. It took a corporation to risk supporting Dijkstra, not knowing what the results would be; but perhaps there are expansive and stimulating thinkers in disciplines that no current corporation would care to support. Maybe that “fourth branch” should, in addition to outreach or engagement, also seek to discover and reward generativity.

The best service I could provide through this blog is to stimulate others (and not just, or even primarily, academics) to pursue ideas that I don’t have time to pursue myself, and while I don’t expect Baylor to reduce my teaching load so that I might have more time to hand-write letters to twenty or thirty colleagues — or, um, blog a lot — a guy can dream, can’t he?

Nick Cave:ChatGPT rejects any notions of creative strugg...

Nick Cave:

ChatGPT rejects any notions of creative struggle, that our endeavours animate and nurture our lives giving them depth and meaning. It rejects that there is a collective, essential and unconscious human spirit underpinning our existence, connecting us all through our mutual striving.

ChatGPT is fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imagination. It renders our participation in the act of creation valueless and unnecessary.  That ‘songwriter’ you were talking to, Leon, who is using ChatGPT to write ‘his’ lyrics because it is ‘faster and easier,’ is participating in this erosion of the world’s soul and the spirit of humanity itself and, to put it politely, should fucking desist if he wants to continue calling himself a songwriter.

Nick Carr:Well-turned sentences had a decent run, but aft...

Nick Carr:

Well-turned sentences had a decent run, but after TikTok they’ve become depreciating assets. Traditional word-based culture — and, sure, I’ll stick Twitter into that category — is beginning to look like a feeding ground for vultures. Tell Colleen Hoover to turn out the lights when she leaves. 

Part of Nick’s post is about the proposed purchase of Simon & Schuster by one of the nastiest corporations in the world, KKR. Cory Doctorow explains (a) just how vampiric KKR is and (b) why the purchase might not be approved by the FTC. 

R.I.P. Robbie

I’ve written before about the waves of death that are coming for some of our cultural giants, but this is a big one. Robbie Robertson’s influence has always been vastly underrated, and the music he and his bandmates made at the end of the Sixties is some of the most lastingly wonderful of that era. I would be hard-pressed to name five rock records better than the Brown Album, which I’ll be listening to tonight. Only Garth Hudson remains from a group that really did deserve to be called The Band.