Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 92
September 19, 2022
rebellion against stability
I’m not a huge fan of the music of Kelly Lee Owens, but I am a huge fan of this interview:
“I grew up in a working class village in Wales and choirs were part of everyday life,” explains Owens. “It’s almost like National Service; everybody has to join a choir. People talk about this idea of finding your voice and I think that’s what happened when I was listening to those choirs. Hard men, ex-miners in their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s, singing with so much passion. Music had never hit me like that before. It made me want to explore my own voice. How could I express my emotions with this sound?
“The next step was Kate Bush,” she says, laughing.
Of course that’s how it works: you go from Welsh miners’ choirs to Kate Bush and then you become a successful musician. (Also: “My God, don’t you miss that? Don’t you miss hearing something that good in the Top 5?”) Later:
Much as I love working on the laptop, there is something about a machine like Dark Time that I find truly inspiring. You can program whatever you want and it doesn’t matter if it’s correct or not. It’s as if analogue is designed to go wrong because you always make mistakes. You press this button or put the kick here instead of here. So much of my stuff has that. I wish you could get plugins to fuck up more than they do. I think we need more of that randomness in music!
When the interviewer agrees and continues, “Obviously, you can do mouse clicks just as easily,” KLO replies,
But is it as much fun? Can you still create chaos? Will that kick be ridiculously late? Are you interested in making perfect music? I’m not. What does that even mean? Perfect music. What is perfect? A lot of time in the studio seems to be spent reintroducing variation and accident. I suppose you might call it humanness. Nudging things forward, nudging them back, dipping the volumes, trying to keep the listener engaged…. Analogue keeps things interesting. It rebels against stability.
Back to the rough ground!
September 18, 2022
Look for my forthcoming novel The Queue Towers
Look for my forthcoming novel The Queue Towers
file-selves
‘Man lives in the real world; but there’s also a parallel world: a paper one, a bureaucratic one. So the passport is the person’s double in this parallel world.’ The comment comes from a Russian woman in her thirties interviewed as part of a study in St Petersburg in 2008. She might have been channelling the philosopher Rom Harré, who called these bureaucratic doubles ‘file-selves’. It mattered a lot to Soviet citizens what their file-selves looked like: the wrong social class or nationality entered in an internal passport, or a notation restricting movement, could be a disaster. But file-selves matter elsewhere too. The Anglosphere – the UK, Canada, the US, Australia – may have eschewed the Russian/Soviet path of a compulsory internal passport, distinct from the passport required for foreign travel, but drivers’ licences and credit records often serve the same functions, and electronic identity cards may not be too far away. The British, while skittish about mandatory ID cards, have the largest number of surveillance cameras per capita of any country except China.
This is good … but maybe not as good as my essay on passports?
September 17, 2022
sequence, 2
my little soccer
Recently I was watching an MLS match and a familiar scene played out before me:
A player comes flying down the left wing with the ball at his feet, and a defender charges out to confront him. The attacker slows for a moment, which of course slows the defender, and then suddenly puts on a tremendous burst of speed that leaves the defender far behind. Now he’s all by himself out there near the touchline, with his teammates gathering in the box. He puts in a cross … and it sails far over everyone’s head and goes out for a throw-in — on one bounce. He overhits the cross by a good thirty yards.
As I say, a pretty (sadly) typical scene for the viewer of what my son calls My Little Soccer: absolutely elite athleticism combined with shockingly poor technique. This is also what makes it so difficult to compare MLS sides to the rest of the world. The FiveThirtyEight club ranking currently gives the Philadelphia Union the highest ranking among MLS teams, at 95th in the world — but that seems way too high to me: I just can’t see them beating any of the next 25 or so clubs on the list. Though every MLS team has some skilled players, the Union don’t have enough players with the requisite level of skill. But the strength and speed and stamina of the players are tremendously impressive.
Basically, when I watch MLS I feel that I’m watching world-class athletes from some other sport who just started playing soccer a year or so ago. I know that that’s not true, of course; I know that these guys have been playing soccer their whole lives. But it’s so rare — in comparison not just to the level of the European top five leagues, but to Championship and Bundesliga 2 sides — to see a delicate first touch, or an accurate cross, or close control of the ball in traffic, or several passes strung together, that that’s what it looks like. To me anyway.
I’d really like to enjoy MLS more, because, as I have noted, VAR in the Premier League is so utterly broken that I’m taking a break from watching that league. VAR can be shambolic elsewhere too, and in my view should be completely abandoned everywhere in the world — but the Premier League’s implementation of review is consistently appalling. If I’m going to regularly watch another league, though, it’s probably not going to be MLS.
September 16, 2022
Very much looking forward to Jamie’s latest, which seems ...
Very much looking forward to Jamie’s latest, which seems the natural — indeed the wonderfully inevitable — next step in his thoughtful and provocative Augustinian journey. I might want to read it in conjunction with a re-read of this.
Ken Burns’s ‘The U.S. and the Holocaust’ – Dara Horn:Burn...
Ken Burns’s ‘The U.S. and the Holocaust’ – Dara Horn:
Burns has a soft spot for Franklin and Eleanor, the subjects of one of his prior films, and here he treats them with kid gloves, blaming most of the missteps on State Department antagonists. The series makes a point of establishing the bigoted, racist atmosphere of the U.S. at the time, showing Nazi rallies in New York, clips of the popular anti-Semitic broadcaster Father Charles Coughlin, and colorized footage of a Nazi-themed summer camp in New Jersey. But the film goes out of its way to outline the pros and cons of Roosevelt’s decisions, leaving his reputation intact. To be clear, Roosevelt is an American icon and deserves to remain one. The problem with this approach is less about Roosevelt (there are plenty of convincing arguments in his favor, not least that he won the war) than about how it contradicts the rest of the film’s premise. The goal of the series is seemingly to reset America’s moral compass, using hindsight to expose the costs of being a bystander. But every bystander, including Roosevelt, can explain his choices. The film’s refusal to judge the commander in chief plays into a larger political pattern: offering generosity only toward those we admire.
Or whom we perceive to be on Our Team. The whole essay is excellent, but I especially appreciate the unpacking of this point: “Democracies, for all their strengths, are ill-equipped for identifying and responding to evil.”
Auden, nature, history
(A draft preface for my forthcoming edition of Auden’s book The Shield of Achilles, with some images and links that won’t be in the book.)
In 1952, Barbara Cohen and Marianne Roney, two recent graduates of Hunter College in New York City, started a company called Caedmon Records, with the goal of presenting the finest living poets reading their own work. They began with Dylan Thomas, who duly showed up in the studio with poems in hand – but only enough to fill one side of a record. Fortunately, he remembered that he had written a brief prose memoir that they could use to fill out the other side. Thanks largely to this casual inclusion of A Child’s Christmas in Wales the LP sold very well indeed and established the company’s reputation. The next year Cohen and Roney approached W. H. Auden, who entered a recording studio on 12 December 1953 to read enough poems to fill an LP.
His famous 1939 poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” was chosen to begin the record, but most of the poems Auden read were recently-written ones. The second poem on the first side is “In Praise of Limestone” (1948), which he describes, in the liner notes he wrote to accompany the record, as “a kind of prelude to the series of Bucolics on Side Two.” That he would think of this ambitious and complex poem as mere “prelude” says something about where his mind was at the time. The seven “Bucolics” fill the whole of Side Two, and his liner notes say that they “have in common the theme of the relation of man, as a historical, or history-making person, to nature.”
Here’s Auden reading “Woods” — one of the “Bucolics” — in an unfortunately echoey space. (The Caedmon folks improved their recording techniques over the years.) Never forget: “A culture is no better than its woods.”
This theme of our double lives — in a nature shared with the other creatures, in a history that those creatures cannot know — dominated Auden’s thoughts, and his verse, for a decade or more. On March 9, 1950, Auden visited Swarthmore College, where he had taught between 1942 and 1944, to deliver a lecture called “Nature, History and Poetry.” He had already given an almost identical lecture at Mount Holyoke College in January and at Fordham University in February, and would give it once more, on March 11, at Barnard College. Except at Barnard, he provided for the audience a typed, mimeographed handout featuring a poem he had recently written, “Prime,” and, curiously, two early drafts of that poem. The subject of his talk was the human experience of living in “natural time” but also in “historical time,” and how poetry might capture that twofold temporality.
Auden gave four versions of the same talk not only because it enabled him to make more money with less work – though surely that was a factor – but also because the themes had risen to the point of obsession for him. (And again, not just recently: After reading “Prime” to the Swarthmore audience he says, “Actually this poem was written last August, in Italy, but a number of things go back much further than that.”) Nones, the collection of poems that Auden published in 1950, while it contains some of his finest poems, including “Prime,” is best understood as a kind of bridge between his long poems of the 1940s, which are focused almost wholly on the inner life, and the complex, resonant account of living-in-nature and living-in-history that he would achieve in this collection, The Shield of Achilles.
September 15, 2022
redirect
I love this from Tom McWright: A script that redirects anyone who comes to his site from Hacker News to Google. He’s had enough experience with jerks who read Hacker News to make a point of sending them elsewhere. I might adapt that JavaScript to redirect people who come here from Twitter. I told a friend recently that my goal is to write posts that no one on Twitter will ever link to.
sequence
A: I don’t know, I think we need to get our own house in order before we launch into critiques of our enemies.
B: There’s no time for that! The situation is too dire.
A: But what if the situation is dire precisely because we never got our house in order, because we tolerated dishonesty, corruption, and short-term and shabby thinking for so long?
B: Maybe that’s true, but we can’t worry about that now. Our enemies are taking over and we have to stop them at all costs!
A: But isn’t that what you were saying years ago, in a situation that you now see as less dire than the current one?
B: This is a do-or-die moment. You’re just denying reality if you don’t see that.
A: You said that years ago also. If every moment is one of absolute crisis, then no moment is. I know a guy, a maker, a very successful small businessman, who is running way behind on his work. He’s facing a genuine crisis. And yet he just took six weeks off to completely reorganize his workflow and his workspace. He did so because he knows that (a) he should have done it long ago and (b) his problems won’t go away — unless people stop ordering his products because he doesn’t deliver. In that case his problems will have gone away because his business will have gone away. He’s taking a big hit to his business in the short term because that is the only way for him to be successful over the long haul. That’s precisely how we ought to be thinking. It is never the wrong time to get your house in order. And maybe the greater the crisis the more essential it is to take a good hard look at ourselves before flailing at our opponents.
B: Stop blaming the victims!
(P.S. I’m A. You wouldn’t have guessed.)
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