Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 72

Italo Calvino:I belong to that portion of humanity—a mino...

Italo Calvino:

I belong to that portion of humanity—a minority on the planetary scale but a majority I think among my public — that spends a large part of its waking hours in a special world, a world made up of horizontal lines where the words follow one another one at a time, where every sentence and every paragraph occupies its set place: a world that can be very rich, maybe even richer than the nonwritten one, but that requires me to make a special adjustment to situate myself in it. When I leave the written world to find my place in the other, in what we usually call the world, made up of three dimensions and five senses, populated by billions of our kind, that to me is equivalent every time to repeating the trauma of birth, giving the shape of intelligible reality to a set of confused sensations, and choosing a strategy for confronting the unexpected without being destroyed. 

Same. 

Here’s a wonderful post by Ian Paul on the Epiphany story...

Here’s a wonderful post by Ian Paul on the Epiphany story — what Matthew and Luke have in common and how they differ; the unconfronted assumptions of many biblical critics; the Parthians’ use of horses and camels. All the good stuff.

Honestly, I’m glad about this. The team’s behavior was di...

Honestly, I’m glad about this. The team’s behavior was disgraceful — and it starts with the manager. Arteta needs to understand that, because he has the youngest side in the Premier League, he needs to exhibit a compensatory maturity. But he doesn’t, and over the long run these outbursts (by him and his players) will hurt the team. Making every official in the country despise Arsenal is not a sound management strategy. 

why Kael matters

Of all the great movie critics, present and past, I suppose the one whose judgments about particular films I am least likely to endorse is Pauline Kael. But I would rather read her than anyone this side of James Agee, and that’s because of the sensibility she brings to her movie reviews. She’s so openly personal and invested — and this lasts for about twenty years, from her early work for literary quarterlies and radio stations to somewhere around the middle of her New Yorker career. As the eighties progressed she became more full of herself, more dictatorial, more insistent that her view was the only view. And of course at times she was dishonest. But before the rot set in she was consistently brilliant.

Just one example: here she is in 1968 writing about The Lion in Winter, which means writing about Katherine Hepburn, which means writing about so much more:  

Seven years ago, in Pocketful of Miracles, when Bette Davis became lovable and said “God bless” to Glenn Ford with heartfelt emotion in her voice, I muttered an obscenity as I slumped down in my seat. I slumped again during Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, because Katharine Hepburn had become sweet and lovable, too. The two great heroines of American talkies, the two who dared to play smart women (who had to), the two most specifically modern of women stars — the tough, embattled Davis and the headstrong, noble Hepburn — have both gone soft on us, have become everything we admired them for not being. They had been independent enough to fight the studios, but they have given in to themselves. The public has got them at last as it always wanted them. They have become old dears — a little crotchety, maybe, but that only makes them more harmlessly lovable. And though, of course, we can’t help prizing them still — because what they once meant to us is too important a part of our lives to be relinquished — there’s a feeling of dismay, and even of betrayal, when we watch them now. They make us fearful that they will humiliate us by turning piteous, and they mustn’t; we’ve got to have a few people who know how to age gracefully in public, who don’t go flabby with the joy of being loved every time there’s a fan or a reporter around. 

Everything about this is wonderful, but the key clause, the most completely Kaelian clause, is this one: because what they once meant to us is too important a part of our lives to be relinquished. 

Damon Krukowski:We are in a far worse situation than we ...

Damon Krukowski:

We are in a far worse situation than we were in 1991. Thurston’s part-jokey, part-deadly serious condemnation of the industry then — “When youth culture becomes monopolized by big business, what are the youth to do?” — feels like an understatement today. It’s no longer just about youth culture; it’s all cultural production that’s monopolized by big business. Thirty years of capital consolidation have created monopolies larger and more disconnected from “content” than we could have imagined even at our snottiest in the 90s. The major labels, music mags, and MTV still needed musicians, after all.

But Apple doesn’t – music is the least of their business. Same goes for Amazon. And what Spotify seems to need is to get away from music as fast as it can. With so much attention paid to Tesla’s precipitous fall in value, many seem to have overlooked that Spotify also lost nearly 70% of its market capital this year. 

I think this points to something important: Professionally-made music — music you buy, played by musicians you’d pay to see live — is now under the nearly complete control of companies that don’t give a rat’s ass about music or musicians. 

pre-empted

About a month ago I started drafting an essay about how Richard Rorty both predicted the rise of Trump and in a certain sense prepared the way for it. I was about 1500 words in when I got the January 2023 edition of Harper’s and saw that Mark Edmundson had already written my essay. I have never before been so comprehensively pre-empted. 

Owens Salvage, Wellington, Texas

Owens Salvage, Wellington, Texas

Cassiodorus College

For a few years, starting around a decade ago, I blogged at The American Conservative. Sometime in the not-too-distant past, they memory-holed all my posts — without bothering to inform me that they’d be doing so. Classy move, folks! Anyway, I might occasionally re-post stuff I wrote there — assuming I can find the drafts on my hard drive. (If I were desperate to retrieve anything, which I’m not, I could of course eventually find it with the Wayback Machine.) Here’s one to accompany my School for Scale idea. 

I think the world needs a quirky and extremely rich venture capitalist to fund my great project, Cassiodorus College. Tag line: Where the New Liberal Arts Meet the Old. Foundational courses will include:

Memorization and Recitation. An introduction to mnemomics, both through modern techniques and history. Books assigned will include The Art of Memory by Frances Yates and The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci by Jonathan Spence. Attention will be given to memorizing long poems, long speeches, meaningful numerical sequences, and nonsense.

Reading: Natural and Formal Languages. An exploration of the very different skills required to read natural languages and formal languages, especially computer programming languages. A key question will be: Why is computer code easier to write than to read, while natural language is generally the other way around. Attention will be given to the neuroscience of reading but also to the conditions under which reading can be intensely pleasurable.

Composition: Natural and Formal Languages. A course devoted to the exploration of three compositional modes: writing English essays, writing computer code, and the mediating experience of writing English essays while using markup languages, primarily HTML and LaTeX. The first part of this course will begin by having students spend extended periods hand-writing memorable poetry and prose in commonplace books, alternating that with typing into a terminal code examples from Donald Knuth’s Art of Computer Programming. Only very gradually will they progress to writing their own essays and their own code.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Stolen directly from Edward Tufte, whose books will be our texts. However, we will also explore the ways in which the various software tools available for making graphs, charts, and the like constrain our organizational and display choices. We will also give attention to the principles of excellent design, including the design of text.

Mathematical Reasoning and Rhetoric. An introduction to mathematics as a mode of thinking and a subsequent exploration of how the best principles of mathematical reasoning are routinely defied when numbers are presented to the public. Tufte is useful here too, for example, on how faulty presentation of data can lead to disasters.

Care of Plants and Animals. An idea stolen from W. H. Auden, who said that in his “daydream College for Bards” every would-be poet should tend a vegetable garden and care for a domestic pet. A great idea not just for bards. 

Please get in touch if you’re filthy rich and want to bankroll this glorious endeavor. 

Senator Ben Sasse says that the real divide in America is...

Senator Ben Sasse says that the real divide in America is between Pluralists and Zealots; I made the same case two years ago but called the parties Humanists and Manichaeans. 

the home’s sacred fire

In this book, Ralph Cudworth makes the following fascinating argument: 

Now the Tabernacle or Temple being thus a House for God to dwell in visibly, to make up the Notion of Dwelling or Habitation complete, there must be all things suitable to a House belonging to it. Hence in the Holy Place there must be a Table and a Candlestick, because this was the ordinary Furniture of a Room …  A Table and a Candlestick … suit the Notion of a Dwelling House. The Table must have its Dishes, and Spoons, and Bowls, and Covers, belonging to it, though they were never used, and always be furnished with Bread upon it. The Candlestick must have its Lamps continually burning. 

There must be a Continuall Fire kept, in this House of God’s, upon the Altar, as the Focus of it. 

Cudworth cites the Hebrew of Isaiah 31:9 — KJV: “the LORD, whose fire is in Zion, and his furnace in Jerusalem” — and renders it into Latin: Qui habet ignem suum in Sion, et focum suum in Jerusalem, or, “Whose fire is in Zion, and his hearth in Jerusalem.”

(I may be getting too deep into the weeds here, but: Cudworth’s rendering differs from the Vulgate, which has: cujus ignis est in Sion et caminus ejus in Jerusalem. Apparently caminus — which is a straight theft from the Greek κάμῑνος — can also mean “hearth” but is more likely to be used to describe a furnace, an oven, or a kiln. It’s only focus, as far as I can tell, that bears the familial associations.) 

It’s noteworthy that the Hebrew word that the KJV translates as “furnace” and Cudworth as focus is rendered in the Septuagint as οἰκείους — from the root οἶκος, meaning “household” or “home.” The LORD, whose fire is in Zion, and his household in Jerusalem. 

But now, as Christians have always said, through his sacrifice Jesus has himself become the Temple. (See Hebrews 10.) The place of sacrifice has been transformed into a place of feasting — as Paul says in 1 Timothy 3, the ἐκκλησία Θεοῦ (the assembly or church of God) is also the οἴκῳ Θεοῦ (the household of God) — and the focus, the central hearth, of that household is the altar. 

I love this notion of the church’s altar as the hearth of the Lord’s House, the place where we gather to warm ourselves and to receive nourishment — the focus of our worship in a distinctively familial and homely sense. 

Albert Borgmann talks about the relationship between focal practices and focal things — “things” being a poor choice of words here, because he means something more like “what or whom those practices centrally attend to.” When two people get married they are the central figures in the practice the old Prayer Book calls The Solemnization of Matrimony, but they aren’t things. I don’t know why Borgmann doesn’t just talk about focal practices and foci, but that’s what I will do: Participation in a service of Holy Communion is a focal practice whose focus is in one sense the altar — but in another and deeper sense Jesus Christ himself.