william writes about the world around him

Controvers scriptores.

2011-11-15T09:01:00.004-05:00

Attention Brendan:

"Some controverters in divinity are like swaggerers in a tavern, that catch that which stands next to them, the candlestick, or pots; turn everything into a weapon: ofttimes they fight blindfold; and both beat the air. The one milks a he-goat, the other holds under a sieve. Their arguments are as fluxive as liquor spilt upon a table; which with your fingers you may drain as you will. Such controversies, or disputations, (carried with more labour, than profit) are odious: where most times the truth is lost in the midst, or left untouched. And the fruit of their fight is that they spit on one another, and are both defiled. These fencers in religion, I like them not."

-Ben Jonson

I recently found out what Twitter is for.

2011-11-08T12:40:00.000-05:00

I was on Twitter for a long time before I had any idea what it was for. I don't think it's quite this...

Freddie deBoer:

"I am angry, because Avent didn't just dismiss my essay without argument. He instead decided to attack my field. [...] This is what Twitter is for, and this is indicative of the entire operation of prominent bloggers: socially and professionally connected people who defend each other no matter what, excluding and marginalizing dissent, ignoring unpalatable arguments that they can't answer, and in every way undermining as illegitimate criticisms that don't operate from a position of privilege and social authority."

To blame this all on Twitter is a little much. It's less "what Twitter is for" and more "what prominent bloggers and media personalities use Twitter for."

What I'm using Twitter for:

Sharing links, punning, and brief inspirational quotes can all be done comfortably within the space of a tweet. I could put these things on the blog, but I think it saves time for everyone if I just drop them in the
Short, troll-free conversations with bloggers. Easy questions and further links are easy to get, and unwanted, uninteresting, or unhelpful responses are easy to cut out of the conversation, and even blocked if need be. This is as opposed to comment sections on blog posts, which get flooded to the point of uselessness on websites of any size. It's also nice to have all these conversations in one place, rather than distributed across a bunch of websites you have to hold open in tabs.
As for the troll filter: yeah, this cuts both ways, and can be used to exclude unpopular perspectives, especially if you've got a ton of followers. But, oh my goodness, the spatial metaphor is so much nicer. I've really grown to hate the entitlement complexes of trollish commenters on unmoderated blogs. Would you come into my house and say these things?

In summary, I use Twitter to cover functions of the RSS reader and the comment box, and I do my best to stay positive. It works all right.

From a James Wood review.

2011-10-28T12:12:00.001-04:00

James Wood writing about the protagonist of Adam Gordon's Leaving the Atocha Station:

Adam--at once ideological and post-ideological, vaguely engaged and profoundly spectatorial, charming and loathsome--is a charming representative of twenty-first-century American Homo literatus. He is a creature of privilege and lassitude, living through a time of inflamed political certainty, yet certain only of his own uncertainty and thus more easily defined by negation than by affirmation, clearly dedicated to poetry but unable to define or defend it (except to intone that poetry isn't about anything), and implicitly nostalgic for earlier, mythical eras of greater strength and certainty.

If the book is sufficiently savvy about this guy, it's probably worth reading. I sometimes think that if not for the Holy Spirit, I'd turn into a character like this.

(Though maybe Christianity just keeps me from being either too charming or too loathsome?)

Why are shows about bad people so popular?

2011-10-26T12:21:00.001-04:00

The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad are popular television shows about people who do terrible things. I haven't seen Deadwood or The Shield, but perhaps those also fit in this genre. If you read the websites I read, you'd think that these are the most popular television shows; in fact, they're niche entertainments compared to NCIS or the various CSI franchises. They're shows for young Bobos, more or less. Two hypotheses:

Deep down, we see ourselves as morally compromised. We know that we have and use more than we deserve, and we don't want to give it up. We tell ourselves that we're avoiding our just deserts for the sake of our families.
We like badassery, but we also need an excuse for our interest. The psychological angle gives us the illusion of moral distance. So we can tell ourselves that we're not interested in evil, but rather in the analysis of evil's effects.

There are two motions here: there's a larger structure of judgment, within which the characters' bad choices are shown to be harmful, but scene-by-scene the viewer's enticed by the allure of the anti-hero. I suspect that this is not moral seriousness, but rather the sense of it.

UPDATE: Should have given credit where credit's due. I started on this line of thinking after reading something Freddie wrote on G+.

Three generations.

2011-10-25T17:30:00.000-04:00

In the last few months I've read both Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose and Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex. The juxtaposition of these novels was accidental, but it's given me a lot to think about. Each novel is narrated by an abnormal man digging for courage and wisdom in the story of his pioneering grandparents. In Middlesex, the grandparents move from Greece and find their home in Detroit; Angle of Repose describes an East Coast woman's struggle to adjust to life in the Rockies.

Of course, the comparisons break down quickly. Stegner's protagonist's physical problems only emerged late in life, leaving him crippled and isolated from the outside world; Middlesex's Cal has an unusual genetic feature that's invisible to casual observers. And Cal strives resolutely to bridge past and future, while Angle's Lyman Ward sees the West he loves as having largely disappeared, replaced by the noxious culture of the Sixties.

It's impossible to read Angle of Repose without wanting to learn more about Mary Hallock Foote, the real-life basis for the character of Susan Beecher Ward. The book uses sections of her letters and memoirs, and these provide some really lovely passages. But Stegner brings his A game too, and I'm a sucker for the sorts of landscapes he spends plenty of time describing. It helps that a good chunk of the book takes place in Leadville, Colorado, which I visited this summer.

As for Middlesex, it's hard to imagine how a book could do more to inspire empathy for a character with a condition that many readers will find very icky at the outset. I held off on Middlesex for years because I thought of it was a "novel about a hermaphrodite" -- but it's not that; it's a novel about a person and a family. Eugenides, unfortunately, is less likely than Stegner to draw the curtain of propriety. Still, it's a large-hearted book and a good read.

I'm suddenly curious about the genre of three-generations-of-a-family novels. It's a subheading, I suppose, of family saga novels. On a first thought, Dickens and Austen didn't write them. When did they start appearing?

Reading Iris Murdoch.

2011-10-24T17:14:00.002-04:00

From The Idea of Perfection:

"Do we really have to choose between an image of total freedom and an image of total determinism? Can we not give a more balanced and illuminating account of the matter? I suggest we can if we simply introduce into the picture the idea of attention, or looking, of which I was speaking above. I can only choose within the world I can see, in the moral sense of 'see' which implies that clear vision is a result of moral imagination and moral effort. ... One is often compelled almost automatically by what one can see. If we ignore the prior work of attention and notice only the emptiness of the moment of choice we are likely to identify freedom with the outward movement since there is nothing else to identify it with. But if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over. This does not imply that we are not free, certainly not. But it implies that the exercise of our freedom is a small piecemeal business which goes on all the time and not a grandiose leaping about unimpeded at important moments. The moral life, on this view, is something that goes on continually, not something that is switched off in between the occurrence of explicit moral choices."

-Iris Murdoch. "The Idea of Perfection" in The Sovereignty of Good. New York: Schocken Books, 1971. (36-7)

I find this view very appealing. I don't know if it's true.

Crossover.

2011-10-05T08:28:00.003-04:00

Last night I heard Christopher O'Riley and Matt Haimovitz perform pieces from their new album Shuffle.Play.Listen. I'll have more to say about the album once I listen to it, but the concert was an evening well spent. The program was a mix of twentieth-century composed ("classical") music and O'Riley's piano/cello arrangements of rock songs.

This sort of mixed program -- Webern to Radiohead to Stravinsky -- is great for someone coming from indie rock to classical because it draws connections from things I understand fairly well to things I don't really get yet. The way Haimovitz absolutely shreds on that John McLaughlin solo, you suddenly start to wonder if "shredding" is a good way of understanding the Stravinsky tarantella. Or when he somehow captures Regine Chassagne's phrasing and intonation on the melody of Arcade Fire's "In the Backseat," you start figuring out how to follow the phrases in Martinu's "Variations on a Slovak Folksong." Even if I'm not the best person to judge the quality of the musicianship, which, to me, seemed incredibly high, I can tell when musicians are revealing new layers in songs I know well and introducing me to songs and compositions that I ought to know well.

Churches and tax exemptions.

2011-10-04T06:24:00.001-04:00

Yglesias argues that non-profits shouldn't get property tax exemptions. He says that you'd think conservatives would love the pro-business implications of this argument, except for one thing:

Unfortunately, the main beneficiary of nonprofit tax bias is churches, and conservatives love churches. The church case is, however, a particularly pernicious one since one-day-a-week religious services are an exceptionally poor use of scarce land and it’s simply not the case that building more lavish church structures attracts God’s favor.

So, yes, the main sanctuaries of large churches generally don't get used throughout the week (though many chapels have daily services). But off the top of my head, I know of many churches that run day-care centers or schools during the week. They're often willing to make space available in the evenings for AA or NA meetings. Now I'm curious about what proportion of churches do this, and marking it down under TO RESEARCH.

Also, I know he's kidding around, but just in case any of you are thinking about doing this: trying to "attract God's favor" is a bad reason for building a Christian church.

Front porches and front stoops.

2011-10-03T07:16:00.000-04:00

One further thought after last weekend's conference...

As I see it, the tension between Front Porch Republic's agrarianism and urbanism has something to do with what Caleb Stegall describes as "standing on your own two feet." People who take inspiration from Wendell Berry emphasize doing things for oneself, or knowing the people who do the things you can't do. "Self-reliance" is the wrong phrase for this virtue, because that's too individualistic. Perhaps we should say: flourishing in a community requires attention to place.

Now, an urbanist can certainly pay attention to her city. But the problem I'd expect Front Porchers to split on is how community itself can flourish in urban settings. Because I'll admit it's hard to know your neighbors. Do you locate the problem in post-war urban design's capitulation to automobile culture? Is it the organizational necessity of impersonal institutions? Is there something in the nature of cities that undermines attention to community and place? Do the distributivists think that there's an inherent problem in city dwellers' renting of abodes? I'd love to see some of the Porchers tackle these questions.

The Crunchy Con Conference.

2011-09-30T15:23:00.002-04:00

I blame the weather. Now that the worst part of summer has passed, I've spent more time walking around Baltimore and less time with the computer. And so it's taken me almost a week to get out a quick blog post on the conference I went to last weekend in beautiful Emmitsburg, Maryland. The event's title was "Human Scale and the Human Good: Building Healthy Communities in a Global Age," but everyone knew that it was really the Front Porch Republic conference.

I should admit now that I haven't been a regular reader of Front Porch Republic in a while. It's a general thing about writers or groups of writers: once you get the main themes, sometimes you need to move on. But I wanted to see these guys in the flesh, so I paid my registration fee and reserved a rental car for my trip to Western Maryland. I'll talk about some of the speakers below, but I won't say much about some of the other talks I enjoyed: Christine Rosen on geolocation technology, David Cloutier on luxury and choice, Darryl Hart on the dangers of Protestant ecumenism, and Caleb Stegall on Jayhawk Federalism.

This being a Front Porch Republic gathering, the brand of localism on offer was decidedly agrarian. I'm a city dweller, so my mind kept moving to the problem of urbanism. Patrick Deneen spoke about Wendell Berry's two American tendencies: the strong tendency to displace ourselves and the weaker tendency to put down roots. I wondered what it looks like to put down roots in a city. Mark Mitchell talked about local currencies in western Massachusetts, but he didn't mention the BNote, Baltimore's fledgling currency. And Phillip Bess's excellent presentation on small-town urban design certainly held lessons for larger cities, but he seemed to despair of getting past municipal bureaucracies.

Perhaps the most obvious opportunity to raise the question of urbanism came during Allan Carlson's lecture. Carlson described vividly the agrarian civilization of pre-WWII Iowa: the civic associations, the regional artists and poets, the local farms. But he also pointed out that fecund farming cultures produce too many children for them all to remain in the community: the non-inheriting children move to cities or try to find another place to buy farms of their own. (Apparently, the small-farm owners in France have managed to keep themselves reproducing more or less at the replacement rate, but this will be more difficult for the kind of devout Catholic agrarians that read Front Porch Republic.) So if an agrarian civilization produces spillover, it seems that we ought to talk about cities.

Another, less obvious opportunity to bring up urbanism came with the keynote speaker, Bill Kauffman. Kauffman gave a hilarious, feisty speech lecture on the beauties and banalities of life in Batavia, NY. It was full of love -- not abstract nostalgiac love, but angry and hard-earned love -- for the people of the town and scorn for the highway-building technocrats who would tell his people that they live in an insignificant backwater. You know who Kauffman reminded me of more than anyone? He brought to mind David Simon (creator of The Wire) talking about Baltimore: about how the city he made his life in continually screws itself up, how it's looked down on by New Yorkers, how abstract technocratic institutions screw up the lives of ordinary people. Despite the gulf in political opinions, there's something there.

So how does agrarian localism approach localist urbanism? I imagine that this question would show some real fault lines in the FPR crowd. But maybe it's just my myopia.

(A big thanks to John Schwenkler for helping organize the conference and inviting me to make the trip!)

Facebook offers to write your own personal "Look Homeward, Angel."

2011-09-23T09:42:00.004-04:00

Well, it looks like Facebook is making another decisive move in the direction of being a site that "help[s] tell the story of your life," in Mark Zuckerberg's words, and then analyzes "the story of your life" with reference to the stories of your friends' lives and offers you stuff you might like to buy. I wrote about earlier movements in this direction back at the League over a year ago.

The problem with a service that offers a comprehensive "story of my life" is that it gives me two options:

I have to manage that story carefully and make all sorts of constant little decisions about what I'm telling people.
I let Facebook manage most of that stuff for me, algorithmically.

Option 2 is out of the question. Option 1 isn't natural for me, since I'm used to a public-private distinction that Facebook wants to discard, and it looks like it's going to take up more and more time to adjust to changes. For a while now, Facebook has been a service I wouldn't sign up for if it were pitched to me fresh.

Of course, I'm not mad about anything, and I don't think I'll particularly miss "the old Facebook." But this stuff is going to come up again and again for the rest of our lives, and it's worth thinking about our choices in this new networked world.

Practically, I think I'm going to deactivate my account. There's no great reason to delete it permanently; I might rather be able to get back into the system to adjust settings the next time the site makes a huge perverse data-sharing move.

William Deresiewicz's list of influential postwar criticism.

2011-09-20T19:29:00.001-04:00

From a TNR review of Harold Bloom's new book. For my own future reference.

When I think of the most important works of postwar criticism, I think of Frye’s Anatomy [of Criticism], Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending, Stanley Fish’s Surprised by Sin, Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight, Said’s Orientalism, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, and Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men—books that launched or largely defined, respectively, myth criticism, narratology, reader-response criticism, deconstruction, postcolonial criticism, feminist criticism, New Historicism, contemporary Marxist criticism, and queer studies. The Anxiety of Influence—idiosyncratic, impacted, hermetic—launched nothing, except more books by Bloom.

I don't know which of these I'll ever get around to reading, but I hope to make my way through a few of them. Deresiewicz also recommends Frank Kermode as a model critic.

Note-taking, and planning a work.

2011-09-16T16:02:00.001-04:00

"Keep notes made after thinking, and with moderation. In order to avoid first-minute surprises, the effect of some passing preoccupation, or the enthusiasm sometimes aroused by a brilliant form of words, do not definitely include the passage in your notes wihtout letting some time elapse. Quietly, at the right distance, you will judge of the value of your harvest and store up only the good grain in your barns." (188-9)

"We must beware of a certain craze for collecting which sometimes takes possession of those who make notes. They want to have a full notebook or filing cabinet; they are in a hurry to put something in the empty spaces, and they accumulate passages as other people fill stamp and postcard albums. That is a deplorable practice; it is a sort of childishness, and risks becoming a mania. Order is a necessity, but it must serve us, not we it." (194)

-A. G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1987.

I've had what seems to me to be a workable idea for a series of essays on Christianity and literature, and I'm going to be starting on a little research plan I've drawn up for myself. I'm hoping to keep up the variety on this site, but William Writes may take on the aspect of a niche blog for a few months. If this gets annoying to any readers, or seems like something that deserves its own blog, please speak up.

Anyway, I've been thinking about how I'm going to keep track of my notes, and I'm settling on that old favorite: notecards. But I've also wondered what the tech-savvy people do when they need to take notes. Is there software for this? Or do people still use their old notebooks?

Attracted and repulsed.

2011-09-15T18:11:00.001-04:00

J.M. Coetzee on Australian poet Les Murray:

In the eyes of most people, higher education offers students a chance to improve themselves and perhaps move up the social ladder. This is what, back in 1957, Sydney University offered Les Murray, son of a struggling tenant farmer. The young man’s response was confused. He missed classes, failed examinations, dropped out to lead a vagrant life, yet finally returned to complete his degree. In Murray’s own account of that period of his life, he took only what he wanted from the university—the resources of its library—while resisting its more insidious sociopolitical project. But the very vehemence of Murray’s polemic against higher education—a vehemence in which there is more than a touch of hysteria—suggests a supplementary reading: that the young man was as much attracted as repulsed by the promise that submission to the rituals and mysteries of the academy would allow him to shed his origins and be reborn declassed.

[via Alan Jacobs]

A Feast for Creeps.

2011-08-29T07:44:00.004-04:00

There was a big discussion over the weekend at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen about sexism in George R.R. Martin's popular A Song of Ice and Fire books, inspired by Sady Doyle's review, in which she justifiably concludes that "George R.R. Martin is creepy." I'm posting a version of what I said in that conversation because I had to think pretty hard about why I continue to read these books despite reservations about the content.

These books contain some really disturbing stuff, and it's important not to play that down. If Martin doesn’t win you over somewhere in the early part of A Game of Thrones, the rest of the series is going to be quite a slog. It’s really important in these discussions to distinguish between “if you’re disturbed, you’re reading it wrong” and “this stuff is disturbing, though I think there’s a point to it.”

The way I read these books, there are two reasons Martin writes creepy scenes. First, he’s trying to undermine (or maybe even “critique”) the conservative impulse to revisit feudal societies. He’s constructing an outsized version of medieval Europe with a deromanticized and Machiavellian patriarchal feudalism, and it should be clear to the reader that this is a bad system. In A Feast for Crows, Martin lets a character speak at length about the horrors that war inflicts on common soldiers; at this point in the book, we've seen that war is no picnic for the nobility, but it's hell for the troops. So a major project of the books is to flip the common tropes of fantasy literature. (As a side note: it shouldn't be taken for granted that these books give any kind of window into actual history, but that's a post for another time.) This take on Martin is, of course, nothing new. And I think this explains why he’s set up the large architecture of the novel in the way he has.

But it doesn't explain why he writes specific sections the way he does. Specifically, there's a ton of stuff that's way more intense than it needs to be: why the incest? Why the sexual abuse? Why the cannibalism? And why in such detail? I think the answer to all these questions is that Martin, as a storyteller, likes to try to get away with really dark stuff, and that's the second source of creepiness in the books. So in one instance there's a subtle implication that a man secretly kills and cooks one group of his enemies, and then proceeds to serve human meat pies to another group of enemies. If there's some kind of political-philosophical statement being made in this passage, I'm missing it. More obviously, Martin uses one subplot to give his readers an inside view of the Viking-like rape-and-pillage culture of the Iron Isles. Even if the point is to show that a culture based on rape and slaughter is not the best society to live in, I find these chapters to be incredibly unpleasant!

So, for those of us who like the books, I think it’s good to talk about what Martin is really aiming at, and to figure out where his critique falls short. But even if there’s some plausible liberal-humanist explanation of every single creepy incident in each one of the books, (a) people who find these incidents off-putting would not necessarily find them any less off-putting if they understood the purpose behind them, and (b) the very fact that bloggers are dispassionately parsing out the dynamics of consent and abuse in some of these hideous fictional situations might be off-putting in itself. Not everyone will agree or assume that these books are worth reading. That might actually be a good thing. There may yet be some decency left in this world.

On what grounds would I actually defend Martin’s writing, given how uncomfortable it makes me at times? Primarily, I enjoy the density and complexity of the narrative. In the best sections of the book, the drama comes from a clash of plausible competing interests. Clues to various mysteries are planted thousands of pages before the reveals. (Think LOST, but less ad hoc.) In short, I find the story compelling in all the ways a big novel should be compelling. Which makes me think that if I want more of that sort of thing I should finally get around to War and Peace.

Gray areas.

2011-08-25T07:41:00.001-04:00

In Salon:

Many react to the idea of someone having zero interest in sex as offensive. It goes against everything we understand about what makes the world go 'round, so it's an inherently confrontational concept. With this disbelief often come attempts to write asexuality off as a result of repression or sexual trauma (as of now there's no evidence of that). It becomes even more complicated for people to understand when they discover all the variation within the asexual community.

Is this discussion of "asexuality" where the notion of "sexual identity" really starts losing its usefulness?

What I'm seeing is that some people are finding that they don't fit any of the sexual identities on offer -- homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, and so on. They're are positing yet another sort of identity. And I'm sure this solution is helpful on some level, but I take the existence of the problem as an indication that there's something wrong with how we're using these ideas in the first place. So my reaction to this article is think that the framework of sexual identity is just not the best way to approach questions about "what intimacy is, what human connection is, and how you build that."

On the other hand, maybe modern people just don't have another framework available.

[Via The Dish]

The Influence of American Sea Power.

2011-08-23T12:16:00.002-04:00

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry argues against Ron Paul's foreign policy at The American Scene and Business Insider. In short (from BI):

From bases in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, the US military protects the world's shipping lanes, making sure the clockwork of the global economy runs smoothly and goods and oil can be shipped to and back. This is the part of the global American military footprint that actually matters, not the wars. These wars may be very bad ideas, but Ron Paul and his ilk don't just want to end those wars. They want to end America's global military hegemony.

So here are some questions for Gobry: is the structure of the United States military really suited to this end? What's the relationship between shipping-lane protection and the Global War on Terror? And, most importantly, why don't Paul's opponents make this response in debates? (Forgive me if they do. I am not keeping track of the GOP primaries.)

This position isn't the usual one for the defenders of the status quo, because mere protection of global trade doesn't justify the US Military's current goal of "full spectrum dominance," that is, the ability to defeat any conceivable threat from any other power. If the United States only needs to be hegemonic enough to protect the global economy, there's still a lot of room to slash military spending.

And then there's this:

We're all for blasting illegal, unwinnable, endless foreign wars of choice. We're all for smashing the national security state that treats grandma like a terrorist if she wants to board a flight. We're all for howling at the insidious and wasteful military-industrial complex, and cutting the unsustainable Pentagon budget.

At the risk of being flippant, no we're not. What Gobry describes here is a minority position in US politics. I know of pundits who take this line: Ross Douthat comes to mind. But can anyone show me a politician who votes against wars of choice, the security state, and the military-industrial complex, but publicly articulates the importance of a pax Americana for world trade? I have a hunch that such a figure won't appear unless Ron Paul's brand of anti-imperialism gains enough momentum to frighten Washington.

Doctors of the Church.

2011-08-23T07:21:00.001-04:00

I enjoyed this post on the Doctors of the Church, both for the content and for the creative use of text tools to convey information. It's hard not to mark a "dark age" between John Damascene and Peter Damian. Also interesting:

Some notable and influential theologians who very likely meet all the criteria but haven't yet received the designation: Gregory of Nyssa (whose absence is very noticeable), Epiphanius of Salamis, Jeanne de Chantal, Jean Eudes, Louis de Montfort, Bernardino of Siena, Veronica Giuliani, Birgitta of Sweden, Gertrude of Helfta, John Bosco, Lorenzo Giustiniani, Antonino of Florence, Thomas of Villanova, Ignatius of Loyola, Vincent de Paul.

Prescriptivism.

2011-08-22T12:34:00.000-04:00

From David Bentley Hart at First Things, writing about English usage rules:

Everyone who cares about such matters engages in both prescription and description, often confusing the two. So does every dictionary. Everyone, moreover, knows words shift in meaning over time. The real question, at the end of the day, is whether any distinction can be recognized, or should be maintained, between creative and destructive mutations.

[...]

The analytic, lexically antinomian line is that, in themselves, words mean nothing; persons use them as instruments to mean this or that. But, conversely, persons can mean only what they have the words to say, and so the finer our distinctions and more precise our definitions, the more we are able to mean.

While this is about "usage" in the sense of language, there's also a lesson here for a certain breed of technology enthusiasts.

Two things from our newspapers of record.

2011-08-19T17:23:00.002-04:00

John Wilson, editor of Books and Culture, has an editorial in the Wall Street Journal on faith and science:
What is at stake in these disputes is not a choice between following biblical authority on the one hand or science on the other, as the matter is often misleadingly framed. Rather, we see rival theological commitments, rival understandings of how to read Genesis.
I think this puts it nicely, though Wilson goes on to understate the consequences of adhering to reading Genesis as a literal description of the origins of the world. Young Earth Creationists have to explain how the scientific community gets things so wrong, and so it seems rather common to consider the scientific establishment as mendacious, incompetent, or ideologically biased to a terrifying degree. If the scientists are so bad at geology, how could they do any better on climatology? So while Young Earth Creationism is not essentially a "disdain for science," such disdain tends to follow.
In the New York Times, an essay on David Foster Wallace's prose style, and those on the internet who learned all the wrong lessons from it:
I suppose it made sense, when blogging was new, that there was some confusion about voice. Was a blog more like writing or more like speech? Soon it became a contrived and shambling hybrid of the two. The “sort ofs” and “reallys” and “ums” and “you knows” that we use in conversation were codified as the central connectors in the blogger lexicon. We weren’t just mad, we were sort of enraged; no one was merely confused, but kind of totally mystified.

[...]

How we arrived at the notion that the postmodern era is the first ever to confront the tension between sincerity and irony despite millennia of evidence to the contrary is no mystery: every generation believes its insights are unprecedented, its struggles uniquely formidable, its solutions the balm for all that ails the world. Why so many of our critics are still, after all these years, making their arguments in this inherently self-undermining voice — still trying to ward off every possible rejoinder and pre-emptively rebut every possible criticism by mixing a weird rhetorical stew of equivocation, pessimism and Elysian prophecy — is another question entirely.
That's a stew I like making more than eating. This is worth thinking about.

How influence works in Evangelical culture.

2011-08-17T17:44:00.004-04:00

Ryan Lizza's New Yorker piece on Michele Bachmann set some bloggers to complaining about "strange inferences" and the occasional "stupid and dishonest" claim. My impression of the piece is that it's Lizza's well-intentioned but failed attempt to explain a subculture that baffles him.

The section on Francis Schaeffer is obviously the most egregious. For a Christian to express admiration for Schaeffer is not necessarily to endorse all of Schaeffer's ideas. Rather, it's to endorse his commitment to Christian engagement with culture, as contrasted with a fundamentalist shunning of the secular. That notion that a theologically conservative Christian could write about existentialism, hit movies, and art history was incredibly important for evangelicals in my father's generation. (I take a very negative view of the content of Schaeffer's contribution, and think his achievement consisted almost entirely in getting better thinkers to take up the issues he raised.)

Anyways, I'd say that neither the Lizza article nor Michelle Goldberg's related Daily Beast essay on "Dominionism" rings true when it comes to patterns of influence in the religious right, though my only reason for thinking so is personal experience with fairly conservative Christian schools, and with moderately conservative churches.

Though David Sessions is getting closer here, it's not just about the numbers:

Here’s the reality: Dominionism as a term or a school of thought is virtually unknown even to conservative evangelicals of the type who adore Bachmann and Palin. [...] It is difficult to overstate how fringe it is in its purest forms, how tiny the number of people who are aware of and embrace its arguments.

What's also missing in these articles is a solid analysis of the institutions of evangelical culture. Do these ideas have traction in the so-called flagship universities, like Wheaton? What about seminaries? Did Christianity Today take a position? How about the radio networks? Are the ideas popular in the Christian entertainment industry?

As an example of how that last question might be answered, Schaeffer's influence led Chuck Colson to push the notion of the "Christian Worldview," defined by Colson's organization as "a framework for understanding and interacting with the physical world, other humans, and the Divine." The Christian rock band Audio Adrenaline, in turn, included a song called "My Worldview" on their 1993 album Don't Censor Me. Listen at your own risk.

Does anyone sing about Dominionism?

Neither static nor stagnant.

2011-08-16T07:24:00.001-04:00

I finished R.W. Southern's The Making of the Middle Ages, from which I've already posted a few excerpts on this blog. The book is deliberately restricted to Latin Christendom between 972 and 1204, which means it's about the rise of only one part of medieval civilization. (I'll have to read books on Germany and the Slavic countries some other time.)

But there's still plenty of good material on some of the most interesting events and phenomena of European history. For example, there's Prester John, legendary Christian king of a distant empire, about whom legends began circulating in the twelfth century. There's a recounting of the sad, strange Fourth Crusade, where crusaders trying to get to Jerusalem ended up conquering Constantinople, which was at the time the greatest city in Christendom.

The main part book is structured on a set of organizational transformations: the thickening of hierarchies in both secular and religious organizations, and the new intellectual rigor that helped make these shifts possible. There are also some compelling discussions on medieval ideals, the most stirring of which were the descriptions of the feudal conception of liberty (worth studying as a contrast to our modern ideas) and of the admiration of Rome as a spiritual capitol (which faded as the papacy assumed a more active political role).

This book would not make a good first dip into medieval history: it assumes a basic knowledge of major events (the council of Clermont, the Battle of Hastings) and personalities (Gregory VII, Bernard of Clairvaux) of the period. There are many fascinating details about the historian's work: for example, one source for comparing styles of monastic poetry is a scroll that a monk carried across Europe to collect eulogies on. I really don't know how it's regarded in the field these days, and would be curious to find out. The book is well-sourced and doesn't seem to be pushing any conspicuously modern ideologies. The Making of the Middle Ages portrays early medieval society as dynamic and imaginative: an age with its share of troubles, to be sure, but neither a static time awaiting technology nor a stagnant era awaiting enlightenment.

No, seriously, watch the throne.

2011-08-15T17:39:00.003-04:00

OK, I think this is funny:

'Watch the Throne' (Roc-a-Fella/Roc Nation/Def Jam) is one of the first major hip-hop releases in years to avoid significant prerelease leaks--something that seemed virtually unavoidable in the digital age. [...] Jay-Z and West implemented an Internet-free recording space. While travel schedules had reduced much of the creation of 'My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy' to a series of emailed session tracks, Watch the Throne was recorded in-person in makeshift setups. Tracks were saved directly to password-protected external hard drives that remained locked in Goldstein's Pelican briefcase. At no point during the album's creation did works-in-progress reside on laptop hard drives. [...] Outside producers for the project, such as Q-Tip, the RZA, the Neptunes, Swizz Beatz, Hit-Boy and No I.D., were asked to appear in person to preview and submit potential beats. Email wasn't an option to send mixes; when West wanted to hear a track, he would demand that producers travel to his location to work on a track."

On the other hand, it worked. It was quite nice to hear a big new album all at once and recognize only the single.

Those melancholy children.

2011-08-13T16:16:00.004-04:00

For a while, I was reading "3eanuts", a website that prints only the first three panels of old Peanuts cartoons. "Charles Schulz's Peanuts comics," the site's text says, "often conceal the existential despair of their world with a closing joke at the characters' expense." This was not always the case.

In the very first Peanuts strip ever published, a boy and a girl sit on a step by the sidewalk. The boy says, "Well! Here comes ol' Charlie Brown." As Charlie Brown walks by (not yet wearing his famous jagged-stripe shirt), the boy says, "Good ol' Charlie Brown. ... yes, sir!" In the third panel, Charlie Brown has left the frame. "Good ol' Charlie Brown," the unnamed boy trails off. Then, with a look of fierce disgust: "How I hate him!" Already, young children hide their contempt behind a facade of collegiality.

In the second strip, a little girl reflects on the niceness of little girls for the first two panels, punches a baffled Charlie Brown in the face in the third, and skips along again in the fourth panel, untroubled by the gap between her actions and her assertions. The third strip depicts the same little girl dumping water on a flower-carrying Snoopy, ruining his flower and leaving him wetly sad. Even the simple act of watering flowers can become a vehicle for cruelty.

In early Peanuts, despair is the closing joke.

Maturity as romance.

2011-08-10T12:27:00.000-04:00

In a Beliefnet article entitled "How to Fall in Love with Yourself," a woman named Christine Arylo is interviewed her approach to a fulfilling life.

Eventually, she learned to listen to her intuition and it led her to a revelation.

"I was with a good friend of mine -- a girl who had just gotten divorced and was miserable," she says. "She was trying to find herself and couldn’t. We were dancing in the living room to Frank Sinatra. All of a sudden, it just hit me. I looked at her and I said, 'You need to fall in love with yourself.' It was like the universe said this to me. I’m the one that’s going to teach women how to love themselves."

[...]

Through her spiritual journey that continues to unfold, Christine Arylo’s message remains the same and it springs from the vows she made to herself: "You really have to love yourself first. Honor yourself first. Trust yourself first. You have to develop a partnership with yourself first."

It seems that there are a good many people who can only conceive of a healthy interior life in the terminology of romantic relationships. Which is fine if it helps people become better people, and apparently it does, but talking about a "relationship with yourself" makes it hard to question the concept of the romantic relationship, which is probably the source of the problem in the first place.

On the other hand, there's Kierkegaard: "[t]he self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation [which accounts for it] that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but [consists in the fact] that the relation relates itself to its own self."

Abbottabad.

2011-08-09T17:39:00.002-04:00

I was pleased to see that the August 8th New Yorker had a long feature on the Bin Laden raid. I wasn't disappointed on first read. It was detailed and riveting, and I recommended it to friends.

Weird to find out that the author didn't speak to any of the SEALs who went on the raid. I thought that was the whole hook of the piece, especially since there's a sentence about the account being based on the SEALs' recollection of the raid. Turns out he means an account based on accounts of the recollections.

I've got a lot of goodwill for the New Yorker, but I wish this had been more straightforward.

A judgment I'll never be able to make for myself.

2011-08-09T17:34:00.000-04:00

Ambitious writing in the eleventh century is nearly always obscure, full of heavy pedantries and strange words--the relics of the learning of a former age. Clarity was a quality achieved by the best writers of the eleventh century, but it was achieved with difficulty: we can appreciate the difficulties when we try to follow the arguments of so accomplished a writer as Berengar of Tours. He lacked the vocabulary for subtle argument and the writers who aimed at stirring the emotions lacked the art for doing so. Of course, limitations of language can themselves be a source of strength, and St. Anselm (alone among the writers of his century) was the master of a language equally capable of conveying profound and subtle argument as of expressing the outpouring of an intimate devotion. But his language could never form a model for others: it was a mirror of his own mind and sensibility, a finely polished language of carefully cultivated art. It was not a popular language.

-R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages. New York: Hutchinson's University Library, 1953. (215)

I look at my plans, and there's no place in them for learning to read eleventh-century Latin and making judgments about style. Of course, the road may swerve, and so forth.

I'll note that Southern's not the only one who likes Anselm's style.

Good advice.

2011-08-03T18:31:00.002-04:00

Strictly speaking, the first sentence is not true, but this is still really good advice:

There is no such thing as being too into something. There is such a thing as being into it in a way that feels selfish and uninclusive. Always be focused as much on your date as on your interest. Always make an effort to give him/her a chance to participate in the conversation. Always allow him/her to ask questions — and ask questions of your own. As Smolinski says, “Be an enthusiast, not an obsessive.” Enthusiasts share their excitement. Obsessives hoard it.

Eagleton at Duke.

2011-08-02T17:36:00.003-04:00

David Sessions scored an interview with Terry Eagleton and (for some unexplained and probably inexplicable reason) sat on it for months. But it's up at Patrol Magazine now. I'd just like to point out the possibility that Eagleton might have missed a joke at my alma mater's expense:

I once arrived at Duke to teach Marxism and they said, “If you teach Marxism here they will flock to your classes, you won’t even be able to get in the door. If you teach it five miles down the road, they’ll shoot you through the head.”

I don't think this is really a UNC joke, but that "five miles" gets you most of the way between campuses.

Rest in peace, John Stott.

2011-07-28T12:13:00.000-04:00

“Here then are two instructions, ‘love your neighbor’ and ‘go and make disciples.’ What is the relation between the two? Some of us behave as if we thought them identical, so that if we have shared the Gospel with somebody, we consider we have completed our responsibility to love him. But no. The Great Commission neither explains, nor exhausts, nor supersedes the Great Commandment. What it does is to add to the command of neighbor-love and neighbor-service a new and urgent Christian dimension. If we truly love our neighbor we shall without doubt tell him the Good News of Jesus. But equally if we truly love our neighbor we shall not stop there.”

-John Stott (quoted by Fred Clark)

I never met the man, nor read any his books from cover to cover, nor heard him speak. But John Stott is one of my father's heroes, and in that way Stott has had a decisive influence on me. All for the best, I think.

If there's birdwatching in heaven...

(News via A Thinking Reed.)

Eternities.

2011-07-22T08:07:00.000-04:00

Some of the recent talk about eternity at the Fear and Loathing in Georgetown blog came to mind when I read this, in an essay by Robert Jenson (who may someday be thought of as "the theologian of Time," given his steady conviction that time is not just stuff our souls happen to be halfway stuck in):

But there are many putative eternities and correspondingly many putative gods. There is, for example, the kind of eternity of which Plato spoke, that is to say, the still point at the center of the wheel of time, a depth of reality in which time simply does not move, a great nunc stans, a standing present tense. At an opposite extreme of sophistication, the point about ancestors in animistic faith is that an ancestor is someone who has gotten so old that nothing surprises him or her any longer, so that in consultation with the ancestor the surprising things that time brings forth are unveiled as not surprising at all.

-Robert Jenson, "Faith and the Integrity of the Polity." Essays in Theology of Culture. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995. (98)

Vita voluntaria.

2011-07-21T17:44:00.000-04:00

Quite possibly what freedom looks like in a non-voluntarist society:

When Ivo, Bishop of Chartres, wrote to dissuade a canon, living according to the Rule of St. Augustine, from becoming a hermit, he raised the objection that the life of a hermit was a vita voluntaria. By this he did not mean that it was a life voluntarily adopted, but that every detail of the life was at the will of the individual: the life governed by a well-established rule was higher, and essentially freer.

[...]

Freedom could only be defined by reference to the law, by which those who were free were governed. Freedom was not a status like serfdom; it was a quality which was attached to the status of all who were not serfs. This quality was the quality of rational order. The mere freeman, with no further qualification, was a man who stood on a zero line: it was not easy to decide on which side he stood, and he could easily be pushed across the line into unfreedom. It was only when the quality of freedom was articulated by being attached to the status of knight, burgess or baron that it could be observed, analysed and measured.

-R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages. New York: Hutchinson's University Library, 1953. (107-8)

Movie report: Czech animation.

2011-07-20T18:25:00.000-04:00

As I've mentioned before, some of my friends here in Baltimore have put together a film club. The newest member of our club studied animation in Prague, and her first selection was a set of short films from notable Czech stop-motion animators. My favorite of the bunch was Jan Švankmajer's "J.S. Bach: Fantasia in G Minor", which sets images and animations of windows, walls, and doorways to Bach's organ music. About two-thirds of the way through, there's a marvelous series of doorways...

We also watched Jiří Barta's "The Vanished World of Gloves," which I imagine is a must-see for any student of film history.

Two interesting articles on art.

2011-07-19T18:21:00.003-04:00

Via Anti-Climacus, an NYT review of a book that wrestles with high art's often confused relationship with violence and violation. Excerpt from the review:
This is an important and frequently surprising book. By reframing the history of the avant-garde in terms of cruelty, and contesting the smugness and didacticism of artist-clinicians like the notorious Viennese Actionist Hermann Nitsch and other heirs of Sade and Artaud, Nelson is taking on modernism’s (and postmodernism’s) most cherished tenets. After all, aesthetic shock has underwritten most of our cultural innovation for over a century.
This seems like a work that would fit comfortably alongside volumes of theological aesthetics.
An article at The Curator called "Eclipsing the Object," in which the writer first diagnoses pathologies in contemporary art criticism and then attempts a healthy essay that really looks at the art. Not that I can really vouch for the diagnosis, but it's quite certainly not the usual traditionalist rhetoric. (A quick side note: Maritain makes a big deal about concepts being tools by which we grasp things themselves. Perhaps the Thomist account of intellection pushes you inexorably toward the seeing described in this article, whereas a "modern" epistomology continually retreats into conceptual frames. If so, that's one answer to my earlier questions about intellection...)

"Perhaps axiomatic, perhaps even dogmatic..."

2011-07-18T12:38:00.001-04:00

Excuse the Monday morning snark, but I read Anat Biletzki's NYT Opinionator essay on human rights and religion (via FLG) as saying, "Well, maybe we can't account for human rights as well as you religious folk can, but at least we can be fanatically and totally devoted to them!"

You take what you can get, I suppose.

Byzantine policies.

2011-07-14T17:45:00.002-04:00

Liudprand was the Bishop of Cremona from 961 to 972. He made a journey to Byzantium in 968 and tried to bring back some of Byzantium's fine purple silk, but his silk was confiscated by customs officials. Here is the letter he sent to Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor in Germany:

So, you see, they judge all Italians, Saxons, Franks, Bavarians, Swabians--in fact all other nations--unworthy to go about clothed in this way. Is it not indecent and insulting that these soft, effeminate, long-sleeved, bejewelled and begowned liars, eunuchs and idlers should go about in purple, while our heroes, strong men trained to war, full of faith and charity, servants of God, filled with all virtues, may not! If this is not an insult, what is?

- Liudprand of Cremona, quoted in R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages. London: Hutchinson's University Library, 1953. (33-34)

R.W. Southern's gloss on the passage: "Of course, anyone might write like this after a brush with customs officers."

Tree of Life spoiler alert.

2011-07-02T07:09:00.000-04:00

There's a rapturous review of Tree of Life up at Books and Culture. As an aside, I'm not faulting the reviewer for being enthusiastic. Had I written a review, it would have been, if possible, more positive. But the interesting part comes at the very end, when the reviewer argues that everyone (including me) misinterpreted the end of the film:

Contrary to nearly every review, the final scenes of the film are not a vision of the afterlife (Jack never dies) but rather a highly abstract rendering of the experience of stepping into faith. After nearly two and a half hours of recounting the tuggings of grace, The Tree of Life attempts to capture the moment of reconciliation with God.

If I were tasked with responding to this, I'd say that in the nexus between conversion and eschatological vision lies Christian hope. That is, the moment of conversion is bound, not to a literal vision of the afterlife, but to a taste of the life of the world to come.

Hodgmania.

2011-07-01T17:57:00.000-04:00

There's a great long interview with John Hodgman at the AV Club. My favorite line:

"You see them arriving in this city, New York, practically every 30 seconds—and all of us who live here, unless we were born here, was one of them at some time—who are drawn like moths to a cliché, to things that will destroy them, to a completely unnecessary complication in one’s young or not-so-young life, to live in a completely implausibly expensive city and sacrifice savings and sanity and living space to be here for some period of time. I guess it’s like experimenting with smoking cigars in college: Sometimes you just have to get it over with, and unfortunately for some people, it becomes a lifestyle."

Also, the beginning of an interesting train of thought on affectations:

"The mustache is an affectation that I grew as a joke, and then just sort of enjoyed, and it allows me to really embrace wholeheartedly the idea of affectedness, and affectations in one’s personality. ... [S]omehow when I started the affectation of wearing the mustache, and started thinking about affectations, I was reminded of someone I know from the literary world who is extremely affective, unapologetically so. ... I obviously can’t reveal who that person is, because it would be mean."

Maybe I'll better understand what he's getting at if I ever watch Bored to Death, because that's what he's talking about.

Also, I had no idea that Phil Morrison, director of the excellent Junebug, was the man behind the camera for those Mac vs. PC commercials.

Movie report: Heart of a Dog.

2011-06-28T22:07:00.001-04:00

Some of my friends here in Baltimore have put together a little Monday night movie club, and we've watched some interesting stuff. (My picks so far have been The Lady Eve and Spirited Away.) This week's pick was a 1988 Russian film called Heart of a Dog. It was adapted from an old book of the same name by Mikhail Bulgakov; this book was an important piece of samizdat (underground literature) under the Soviet regime.

The movie is set in mid-1920s Moscow, as Russian society is adjusting to the communist regime. A hungry stray dog is taken in by a famous doctor, only to become the subject of the doctor's experimental cross-species pituitary-implant surgery. The experiment's unexpected result: the dog slowly turns into a human being, and a wretched, brutish one at that. As the dog-man falls in with the local Soviets, he makes life more and more unbearable for his wealthy caretakers. There's quite a bit of barbed humor: when the doctor asks his research subject to demonstrate his skills on the balalaika for a crowd of scientists, the dog-man's song and dance decays into feverish proletarian doggerel (so to speak). When the dog-man needs a job, he becomes the city's official stray cat catcher/killer, and takes an unseemly joy in his work. All in all, it's a biting satire on Soviet attempts to elevate human nature.

Now, this was clearly a product of the perestroika era: at no point before Gorbachev could a director have gotten away with portraying the Soviet functionaries as officious morons. But it was interesting that it took me a few minutes to understand that the wealthy doctor's decadence was also meant to be off-putting, even immoral. My eyes, apparently, are used to a Hollywood glamorization of wealth (not our only approach to wealth, but nevertheless a common one). But if you pay attention, it appears that most of the doctor's surgeries involve transplanting animal organs into rich people to "rejuvenate" their libidos. In that light, the doctor's insistence that he deserves his well-decorated seven-room flat rings as hollow as the dog-man's later claim, on the grounds of a certificate he somehow managed to acquire from a bureaucrat, to his own "thirty-seven square feet" of the place.

Maritain.

2011-06-28T06:08:00.000-04:00

I've started reading John Trapani's Poetry, Beauty, & Contemplation: The Complete Aesthetics of Jacques Maritain. I picked this one after reading Matthew Milliner's hearty recommendation in the pages of First Things (subscription required). I've been thinking about what I hope to get out of such a book.

Philosophical theories of aesthetics need to account for both the experience of the person encountering an artwork and the creative work of the artist. My particular interests follow that division. First, how do I account for my own range of responses to art, high and low? A good book on aesthetics will help me understand my own judgments, and perhaps render comprehensible works that have thus far been mystifying. Second, what is the proper function of artistic communication in a Christian community? This question takes special weight for an evangelical like me, who has concluded that the artists of his subculture, though well-intentioned, generally got it wrong.

Maritain is a promising figure. He was a Thomist philosopher, which certainly embeds his work in the Christian tradition. But he was also a well-connected Parisian intellectual in the first half of the twentieth century, and counted as his friends artists whose work is decidedly modern. So I expect to find his pre-modern philosophy in conversation with more contemporary theories of art.

My worry has to do with the Thomism. As best I understand the history, Thomas Aquinas follows Aristotle in positing a human faculty that deals directly with the essences of things. When I look at an apple, I get some information from sight, but my soul's grasping that this is an apple means not just that I've applied a label to what I take to be a single thing, but that my soul has perceived that this is appleness itself. (I'm writing roughly, and surely have all the terms wrong.) I expect that Maritain will also take this view of intellection in his discussion of beauty, and argue that encountering beauty is something other than finding a pleasing conceptual arrangement "in my mind" or experience a complex sensory pleasure. The problem is that this view of the soul doesn't seem at all natural or intuitive to me.

So what would it take to convince me? I'm not sure if this book will put Maritain's theories in conversation with those of other thinkers, or if it will merely give me the framework to chase down these conversations in Maritain's own texts. But judging from the first few chapters, the book won't be a bad read, and I'll post my findings here as I go.

Envy.

2011-06-27T12:23:00.000-04:00

Apparently Alan Jacobs happened to see a guerrilla performance of one of my favorite pieces, Tallis's Spem in Alium. It's a motet for forty voices, and it's pretty clear that standing among the singers is the right way to hear the piece. Alas, I've had to make do with various stereo systems. Here's the video:

The sound quality's pretty low, so here's a better recording:

Corporations.

2011-06-24T07:27:00.002-04:00

I had an idea for something like this history of the corporation when I was an undergraduate. I wanted to start with early corporate forms and trace their evolution to the present day. At the time, though, I didn't know where to start, and nothing ever came of it. So I'm inclined to swipe some books from this guy's reading list and give it a half-hearted go now. In particular, the one about the East India Company looks fascinating.

Not having gotten into the history yet, I can't do much about the body of the essay except express curiosity. But the section on framing modernity is problematic:

The human world, like physics, can be reduced to four fundamental forces: culture, politics, war and business. That is also roughly the order of decreasing strength, increasing legibility and partial subsumption of the four forces ... Culture is the most mysterious, illegible and powerful force. It includes such tricky things as race, language and religion. Business, like gravity in physics, is the weakest and most legible: it can be reduced to a few basic rules and principles...

Maybe it's particularly modern to put race, art, and religion all under the same label, and it'll take a little more work to convince me that "culture" in this setting doesn't just mean "forces I can't easily analyze." If Christianity is true -- as whole cultures have believed it to be -- then God's interaction with mankind would presumably deserve a top-tier category of its own. It's hard to imagine the Greek philosophers accepting this particular ranking of politics, war, and business, and they weren't unobservant. And what about science and scholarship? This fourfold division is cute, but I don't find it all that useful.

But even though I find the overall framing a little silly, he's got a nice description of the way that the corporation form shifted its goal from spatial domination to ownership of time, and an interesting suggestion about the diminishing returns in this practice.

Ravens harrassing eagles.

2011-06-17T12:25:00.003-04:00

Here's two short nature videos, one where a raven steals a piece of meat from an eagle, and another where a raven messes with some young eagles doing a courtship dance. I also like the tumbly raven.

These links go to a PBS site; I won't be surprised if they don't last for more than a few months.

What in water...?

2011-06-16T13:05:00.001-04:00

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and donwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent overflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomatic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, iceflows: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the wandering moon.

Happy Bloomsday, everyone.

I want to party with you, cowboy.

2011-06-08T12:16:00.001-04:00

The Colbert Report
Tags: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

I just have to transcribe some of this stuff:

Herzog: "I do believe that these very intelligent people invented God, but it took God a while to grow up and create the world."

Colbert: [long pause]

Colbert: "I don't usually have guests this deep, so you shook me there for a second."

And:

Herzog: "In Cave of Forgotten Dreams there's a postscript when all of a sudden you see radioactive albino crocodiles in the film. I called the producer from when I was shooting and he was in a pet store in Vancouver and just had bought a cage for a hamster and he said 'I just bought a cage of a hamster' and I said 'I'm filming albino mutant crocodiles, radioactive crocodiles.' And I hear this clatter. He dropped the cage! And said, 'you are shooting WHAT?' And I said I am shooting albino crocodiles, and they will be in the film."

And:

Herzog: "You see, if I were only fact based... you see, the book of books then, in literature, would be the Manhattan phone directory. Four million entries, everything correct. But it dusts out of my ears and I do not know: do they dream at night? Does Mr. Jonathan Smith cry in his pillow at night? We do not know anything when we check all the correct entries in the phone directory. I'm not this kind of a filmmaker."

You're not punk.

2011-06-07T12:14:00.000-04:00

The Mountain Goats cover Jawbreaker

I knew these guys would knock it out. Love that he replaced "Kerouac" with "Didion."

Much love to the Neighborhood Theater.

2011-06-07T06:46:00.002-04:00

A friend passed along a CNN feature on Charlotte that includes a video about the Neighborhood Theatre, which I'm sad to hear almost had to close. Here's the basics of the CNN story:

With unemployment at a minuscule 4.2%, the city had engineered a light rail public transit line, a modern public transportation center and a multi-million dollar indoor sports arena. Restaurants and retail moved in. Museums built new spaces .The plan was to transform the city into a savvy center of the modern South.

Then there's the "after."

[...]

In the last four months of 2008, the Charlotte area lost more than 3,000 financial jobs. Unemployment jumped to 6.6% starting in 2008, then 8%. By February of 2011, the number reached its terrible peak: 12.9%, even higher than the national rate of 9.7% at the time.

If anyone wondered why I moved to Baltimore...

I'm curious about the book cited in the article, called Banktown: The Rise and Struggles of Charlotte's Big Banks. Hope to get to read it sometime soon.

Pocket diary.

2011-06-06T17:58:00.001-04:00

In the Foreword to Lolita: A Screenplay, Nabokov writes:

As early as October 28 (New York, Hampshire House, room 503) I find the following plan penciled in my little book: "a novel, a life, a love--which is only the elaborate commentary to a gradually evolved short poem." The "short poem" started to become a rather long one soon after the Queen Elizabeth ("Buy dental floss, new pince-nez, Bonamine, check with baggage-master big black trunk on pier before embarcation, Deck A, Cabin 71") deposited at Cherbourg on November 7. Four days later, at the Principe e Savoia in Milan and then throughout the winter in Nice, in a rented flat (57 Promenade des Anglais) and after that in Tessin, Valais, and Vaud ("Oct. 1, 1961, moved to Montreux-Palace") I was absorbed in Pale Fire, which I finished on December 4, 1961.

Today I'm starting a "little book" of my own. Though there are certainly Internet- or computer-based options for this sort of thing, I think the portability and simplicity of the small notebook wins out for now. Even if I had an iPhone (and I'm sure there are nice apps for this sort of thing, or ways to integrate it in a calendar), it's nice to not have to worry about an inability to transfer the data to some future gadget. You can't export from a notebook, but on the other hand you don't need to worry about it going haywire and refusing to let you read it.

I hope that this will pay off, and that years down the road I'll be able to follow Nabokov's example and bask in details that my brain has long since left in the fog.

Pruss on truth.

2011-06-02T17:55:00.000-04:00

Three interesting posts from Alexander Pruss:

The sacramentality of assertion: "Some Catholic thinking about sexuality goes something like this: There is a sacramentality to the marital act. The giving of self to another, and the seeking of the other's receiving and reciprocation, is a symbol of the union between God and his people, and maybe even has a Trinitarian significance of imaging the self-giving and generative nature of God. [...] I think it is worth thinking about the sacramentality in assertion as well."
Is it good to be the sort of person who is never willing to lie?: "There are cases where it seems that great harm comes from a refusal to lie. Thus there appears to be a strong consequentialist case against an absolutist position against lying. But I think that if we shift from act-consequentialism to what one might call character-consequentialism, there may be a case for an absolutist position."
The truth shall set you free: "So it seems that in concluding that one should embark on the Socratic quest for self-knowledge and the truth about the deep things of life one is optimistically supposing that the probability of finding soul-crushing despair is not so great as to make the quest too risky."

Prophets and tensions.

2011-06-02T12:38:00.001-04:00

I've joined a Bible study for the summer. The first topic was "Human Sacrifice in the Old Testament." Yes, this is already shaping up to be a good Bible study.

We didn't get a chance to finish the planned arc of the evening, so we ended without really finishing our discussion of these passages:

"[The children of Israel] have turned to me their back and not their face. And though I have taught them persistently, they have not listened to receive instruction. They set up their abominations in the house that is called by my name, to defile it. They built the high places of Baal in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to offer up their sons and daughters to Molech, though I did not command them, nor did it enter into my mind, that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin."

-Jeremiah 20:33-35 (English Standard Version)

"Moreover, I gave them statutes that were not good and rules by which they could not have life, and I defiled them through their very gifts in their offering up all their firstborn, that I might devastate them. I did it that they might know that I am the LORD."

-Ezekiel 20:25-26 (English Standard Version)

So which is it? "I did not command them" or "I gave them statutes that were not good"? The prophets are apparently and perhaps truly at odds here.

The New International Version text, as published in 1984, reads some Pauline theology back into Ezekiel by translating part of verse 25 as "I also gave them over to statutes that were not good." This translation echoes the phrasing in Romans 1:21-25, and thus reverses the direct and indirect objects of the sentence by comparison to the other translations I've looked at.

However, the current NIV text has backed off and merely says "I gave them other statutes that were not good."

I don't have a problem with the solution the 1984 NIV proposes; but I am surprised that I grew up with a translation so brazen in pre-resolving difficult passages in scripture.

Leadership.

2011-06-01T07:35:00.000-04:00

Any community or organization needs good leadership, just as they have a need for people who set out to improve the way things work, but setting out with the primary objective of being a leader or changing the world is a good way to accomplish the opposite of either of those goals. Effective leadership arises out of circumstance and experience, when it is needed. The people who start off with the driving desire to be leaders are the problem, not the solution. I don’t want to tell any of my students that they’re already leaders, or that they’re being trained for it.

-Timothy Burke, "When We Think We Lead We Are Most Led"

Alert: I'm a linker.

2011-05-31T18:18:00.001-04:00

"William Writes" is just a blog. I post something if I suspect I'll want to remember it later, or if a friend might enjoy it. Blogging has also been a nice way of finding kindred spirits.

I'm neither a coolhunter nor a curator.

Richard Wilbur.

2011-05-31T12:11:00.000-04:00

Over the long weekend, I spent some time dipping into Richard Wilbur's 2004 Collected Poems. What initially sent me to the library for this volume was an essay about Wilbur in First Things (paywall'd). This essay praised Wilbur's quiet way of writing as a Christian. That's certainly cool, but what I enjoyed most was "Mr. Wilbur's virtuosity in meter and rhyme" and "the springy elegance of his mind," as Richard B. Woodward put it in the Wall Street Journal.

Memorial Day.

2011-05-30T09:00:00.000-04:00

Amid today’s cookouts and household projects, find time to remember those who went off to war and never came home: remember the brave reckless recruits, the desperate conscripts, the steadfast soldiers, and the many who were a bit of each.

We'll be jumping and having fun.

2011-05-28T06:32:00.003-04:00

Wednesday's post about Purcell's bawdy tavern songs began as a response to one of Ned Resnikoff's posts, but I didn't have a lot of time and couldn't make the connection.

What happened was that Ned's remark about the "poverty of ambition" of pop culture producers got me thinking about how in Purcell's time the same guy could write tavern songs as well as the music for the Queen's funeral. This was at least two distribution systems ago: not only before the rise of recording and amplification, but before the major development of the middle-class concert-hall system. So the sort of role that Purcell doesn't exist anymore, and probably can't.

Yet I don't think it's crazy to admire and desire a cultural form supple enough to be appropriate to a wide range of human experiences. We can use pop music for its sentimental evocation of experience, but its mawkishness at weddings and funerals (and I hope you know what I'm talking about) reveals its limitations.

However, after watching the first two episodes of Treme's first season, I'm thinking that maybe the jazz culture in New Orleans is healthy in the same way as English baroque culture was in the seventeenth century. In just those two episodes, Wendell Pierce's trombonist performs in a festive street parade, in a bar where Elvis Costello is hanging out, at a funeral, and in a strip club. Want better culture? Figuring out what pre-Bach composers and New Orleans jazz have in common is a good start.

El Paso.

2011-05-26T21:49:00.002-04:00

I really liked my friend Meaghan's essay about her hometown of El Paso:

I can’t forget my little stucco house on Guthrie street. At dusk the light would catch Guthrie’s street sign, shooting glares through my bedroom window, affixing the memory of that sight at the front of my memory. Oakbridge and Rockwood didn’t puzzle me, but Guthrie, what was that? I’ve never known how to shut my mind off when it settles into speculation. For my parents this meant an unrelenting eagerness to question everything. But answers to the real questions, not why a brain freeze happens, or why the stop lights are red, yellow, and green, but the questions with consequences, those questions I sometimes wish went unasked. As for that Guthrie street sign, it’s fun to think of it as a signal from the “Dust Bowl Troubador” himself, Woody Guthrie, picking me out early on, singing to me before I had answers that hurt the both of us.

At one point, Meaghan had the idea of having everyone in our group of friends write essays about where we're from and putting them in an anthology. I never got around to writing mine, but I probably should.

(Here's another chapter for that anthology, this one about Medicine Hat, Alberta.)

Bawdiness.

2011-05-25T19:14:00.003-04:00

Henry Purcell was a seventeenth-century English composer. He wrote a lot of serious and beautiful music in an English baroque style. But he also wrote and published “catches,” or men's tavern songs. Some of these are stunningly explicit. (Explicit enough that I'm not comfortable quoting them on my blog.) Going from Dido and Aeneas or Funeral Anthems for Queen Mary to the bawdy catches is jarring.

In modern pop-culture terms, it would be like the same person writing L'il Wayne's lyrics and “Tabula Rasa.” Or maybe it would be like Seth Rogen secretly writing the screenplay for The Lives of Others.

Anyway, for a pretty tame Purcell catch, try “Come, come let us drink.”

Pet names.

2011-05-24T06:31:00.002-04:00

George Washington had many dogs at Mount Vernon. Names included:

Madame Moose
Gunner
Pilot
Tipsy
Old Harry
Chloe
Pompey
Frish

Mark Twain, on the other hand, liked cats. Names included:

Abner
Apollonaris
Motley
Fraulein
Famine
Cleveland
Buffalo Bill
Sour Mash (!)

I'm slightly curious about this next thing, but probably won't track it down:

“Toward the end of the author's [i.e., Twain's] life, his cats were photographed and the images were subsequently published as ‘Mark Twain's Cats’ in the Pictorial Review.”

-Katherine C. Grier. Pets in America: A History. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2006. (38, Gen. Washington's dog names can be found on page 26)

For more historical pet names, see “Dog People v. Cat People” in John Hodgman's The Areas of My Expertise. I must warn you that Hodgman's lists are made up.

No gadget in the middle.

2011-05-23T07:47:00.005-04:00

I have a thought that I can't quite fit into a tweet. It has something to do with Ned Resnikoff's post on e-books, and Freddie deBoer's response. But not directly.

Lurking behind the question "Is the printed book dead?" is an assumption that the e-book has the power to kill the printed book. We've all seen formats kill other formats: the DVD killed video cassettes, and streaming video could easily kill the DVD. The CD killed vinyl (sort of), and MP3 and streaming audio could well kill the CD. And so one might think that, just as digital music and movies displaced analog, digital books will replace physical books.

But CDs, vinyl records, video cassettes, and DVDs all require some mediating piece of technology, and nobody wants to maintain a whole bunch of these devices. So when our CD players break, we replace them iPod docks. Books (codices, to be specific), don't require a mediating gadget — anyone who can read a book's language can just pick it up and use it — so printed books aren't as easy to displace. A both-and solution for e-books and p-books is therefore much more plausible than it is for audio and video.

140-word reductions of this post will be welcomed.

Things found, again and again.

2011-05-21T07:21:00.001-04:00

Timothy Burke uses an article on a weird theory about the calendar to talk about how the same conversations constantly recur on the internet:

Read enough forum threads across a wide enough range of websites and you ought to become fairly expert in predicting the range and distribution of responses and even of anticipating where you’re likely to fall in that picture yourself, should you choose to join the discussion.

[…]

What I get the increasing sense in experiences like these multiple articles and conversations about Phantom Time Syndrome is of the acceleration of a “Groundhog Day” dimension to culture, that we will be having the same conversations about some of the same prompts again and again and not really know that we’ve done so.

I mean, that's the idea, but the whole thing is worth a read.

Kiarostami.

2011-05-20T12:56:00.001-04:00

A while back, I saw Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy. On Monday, I watched Taste of Cherry, a Kiarostami film from 1997. Both of them were entrancing and baffling in nearly equal measure, paced like Antonioni films but somewhat looser. (I liked them.) Found this great bit from an AV Club interview:

AVC: You’ve said in the past that you’re not offended if people sleep during your films, as long as they dream about them afterward.

AK: I’ve said that many times, and I’m not sure if it has been understood right, because very often they take that as a joke, whereas I mean it. I really think that I don’t mind people sleeping during my films, because I know that some very good films might prepare you for sleeping or falling asleep or snoozing. It’s not to be taken badly at all. This is something I really mean.

I know he must have seen Certified Copy a hundred times in editing, but it's funny that he dozed off during his own Cannes screening.

Hipsters and the tea party: close, but not quite.

2011-05-20T07:16:00.002-04:00

Hipster Tea Party with Ryan Hansen from Ryan Hansen

I think that if I say the "hipsters always get into everything ironically, and were into it before you were" angle is played out, I'm falling into some kind of trap. So... the "BASSIST NEEDED!!" poster is funny.

Leafsnap!

2011-05-19T17:43:00.000-04:00

"Leafsnap" is the first thing I've ever seen that makes me want an iPhone. Seriously.

In the long run, though, it might be better for me to get handy with a field guide.

(Via Kottke.)

"(as our shadows still walk without us)"

2011-05-18T17:46:00.001-04:00

From Shakespeare's Timon of Athens IV.iii.436-40:

The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea; the moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun;
The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears.

Professor Charles Kinbote's re-translation of the passage from a Zemblan edition:

The sun is a thief: she lures the sea
and robs it. The moon is a thief:
he steals his silvery light from the sun.
The sea is a thief. it dissolves the moon.

I'm very much enjoying Nabokov's Pale Fire on my second trip through. Lolita might be the more artful/significant work (who am I to say?), but Pale Fire hits the sweet spot between it and what I've read of Pnin.

"Founding Gardeners."

2011-05-18T12:04:00.000-04:00

There's probably a way to relate this brief review of Andrea Wulf's Founding Gardeners to Michelle Obama's anti-obesity initiatives and then blast the Tea Party, but I don't have it in me. Instead I'll just quote my favorite sentence:

As seen with Washington in New York, the Founders' near obsession with horticulture seemed at times to obscure their judgment—almost no pressing issue could dissuade them from visiting another garden—but it also spoke to their commitment to the agrarian ideal.

"Discipline is not a mystery."

2011-05-17T17:44:00.000-04:00

Via Meaghan Ritchey, an article on just sitting down to do it. Simple instructions for artists, which happen to line up perfectly with what Sertillanges recommended for aspiring thinkers:

Choose a time to make work and hold that time inviolate. If you lack inspiration, wait. Don't do anything else.

The work will come.

How not to sway someone toward climate change skepticism.

2011-05-16T18:22:00.001-04:00

There's some good stuff in the new issue of First Things: Anthony Esolen and Alan Jacobs turn in solid essays, there's an overture toward dialogue with Muslim theologians, and George Weigel's essay about John Paul II might be interesting to people who haven't yet read Witness to Hope. But William Happer's attack on the global-warming consensus is . . . problematic. There are no fewer than five places where Happer compares his opponents to dictators or fictional authoritarians:

"This damnatia memoriae of inconvenient facts was simply expunged from the 2001 IPCC report, much as Trotsky and Yezhov were removed from Stalin’s photographs by dark-room specialists in the later years of the dictator’s reign."
"Global warming alarmists have something like Gadaffi’s initial air superiority over rag-tag opponents in Libya."
"Skeptics’ motives are publicly impugned; denigrating names are used routinely in media reports and the blogosphere; and we now see attempts to use the same tactics that Big Brother applied to the skeptical hero, Winston Smith, in Orwell’s 1984."
"We know from the Soviet experience that a society can find it easy to consider dissidents to be mentally deranged and act accordingly."
"Not unlike functionaries of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in 1984, with its motto 'Ignorance is Strength,' many members of the environmental news media dutifully and uncritically promote the party line of the climate crusade."

Granting for the sake of argument that Happer is completely right, what we'd have is a case of massive funding skewing research results and leading to bad policy, with some scientists being unable to publish their legitimate research. Nobody is being tortured, murdered, or sent to the gulag. Comparing the climate change movement to Stalinism, as Happer does, is almost actively offensive; it certainly trivializes the moral horrors of the twentieth century.

Lady Baltimore.

2011-05-13T18:08:00.001-04:00

Baltimore is a city that went crazy for civic monuments, and you find them in all sorts of places. When you find one of these old monuments in a neighborhood that’s going to seed, the effect can be almost overwhelmingly symbolic, concentrating all of the history, squalor, and hope of Baltimore into a big carved stone.

For a while, I thought that Baltimore’s Washington Monument did this best. Last fall, a van careened into the iron fence surrounding the monument, and now this grand monument in a historic neighborhood has fifteen feet of unsightly chain-link fence covering the gap. (It’s possible that this will get fixed soon.)

But walking to work this morning, I wandered by a Lady Baltimore statue, and I think this one really gets it. The Monument City blog describes it:

The Lady Baltimore loosely holds a sledgehammer in her right hand, while a shield, with the Battle Monument on it’s front, rests to her left. An anchor, gear, anvil and steam engine are represented around the base of the sculpture. Situated in a small park at the foot of Druid Hill, the statue sits inside the well-maintained Mount Royal Terrace Park. A plaque adorns the front of the structure, listing the Commissioner and Engineer of the Saint Paul Street bridge.

A few things:

So there’s symbols for the major industries: shipping, health, manufacturing, etc.
The statue’s nose is broken off.
The plaque has been removed. Presumably, it was stolen and sold for scrap.
The nearby houses are beautiful, but they’re starting to fall apart .
The park is gorgeous—the roses are in bloom—but the noise of the nearby interstate highway is constant. In this park, you can feel viscerally the problems of city expressways.
At one point, a nearby hillside must have had a view down the valley toward the Jones Falls River, but, as I just mentioned, I-83 is in the way now.

As I described this scenario to some colleagues, a lifelong Baltimore resident told me I was totally wrong about this monument’s adequacy as a symbol of Baltimore. He argued that the appropriate symbol is actually Ravens Stadium, which represents power and year-to-year dominance. I leave it to the reader to judge.

Robot library.

2011-05-12T12:33:00.001-04:00

This is really cool. I've never seen a reading room that didn't have any bookshelves in it; most of the special collections I've been to have had locked shelves or reference works in the main space. I'd love to stand in that room and see if it feels right for reading. Also interesting that, with this setup, “browsing” can only happen in the browser, so to speak. Everything but the reading has been pushed back behind a computer interface. Not that this is too different from non-robotic closed stacks from the patron's perspective.

(Via Alan Jacobs, of course.)

Seriously? BHL?

2011-05-12T08:14:00.003-04:00

Say what you will about France, but their public intellectuals can get things done. This is so weird: philosopher/celebrity Bernard-Henri Lévy claims that he's the one responsible for convincing the French government to intervene in Libya, and that he did this by wandering into Libya to meet with rebel leaders to help them call up Sarkozy. I don't know how I missed this story, but I'm glad Ross Douthat referenced it in his latest blog post:

It is an extraordinary tale, about which neither the Élysée Palace nor the Foreign Ministry wished to comment, other than quietly urging a grain of salt. Mr. Lévy was in Egypt at the tail end of the Tahrir Square uprising, went to the Libyan border but had pressing business in Paris. But on Feb. 27, before returning to North Africa, he called Mr. Sarkozy, asking if he was interested in making contact with the rebels. He was, so Mr. Lévy rented a plane and flew to Marsa Matrouh, the Egyptian airport closest to Libya.

Accompanied by his oldest friend and longtime collaborator, Gilles Hertzog, and, of course, a photographer, Marc Roussel, Mr. Lévy walked across the border past hundreds of yards of refugees and foreign workers and flagged down a car, which was delivering vegetables every 20 miles on the way to Tobruk, the first Libyan city inside the border. He then went to Bayda, where he found Mustafa Mohammed Abdul Jalil, the former Libyan minister of justice and leader of the Interim Transitional National Council.

"Petrol" is British for "gas."

2011-05-11T07:34:00.002-04:00

Want to be a little bit more depressed about the United States? Try this article from the Economist about our national transit policy. Highways grow ever more congested, passenger trains shamble slowly along freight lines, and flying gets more difficult and more expensive at the same time. And we fund projects stupidly:

The federal government is responsible for only a quarter of total transport spending, but the way it allocates funding shapes the way things are done at the state and local levels. Unfortunately, it tends not to reward the prudent, thanks to formulas that govern over 70% of federal investment. Petrol-tax revenues, for instance, are returned to the states according to the miles of highway they contain, the distances their residents drive, and the fuel they burn. The system is awash with perverse incentives. A state using road-pricing to limit travel and congestion would be punished for its efforts with reduced funding, whereas one that built highways it could not afford to maintain would receive a larger allocation.

Formula-determined block grants to states are, at least, designed to leave important decisions to local authorities. But the formulas used to allocate the money shape infrastructure planning in a remarkably block-headed manner. Cost-benefit studies are almost entirely lacking. Federal guidelines for new construction tend to reflect politics rather than anything else. States tend to use federal money as a substitute for local spending, rather than to supplement or leverage it.

It's hard to imagine transit funding structures becoming a popular issue, so I guess we have to offer this one up to the lobbying process. A friend recommended looking at Transportation For America, a transit lobbying group, for a comprehensive national transit program.

Woodward on the raid.

2011-05-10T12:24:00.002-04:00

Hopefully everyone's already read Bob Woodward's article about the raid on the Bin Laden compound, but if not, here it is. As good as this one is, I'm still eager to read a longer telling of the story. Finding bin Laden has been a massive (and massively expensive) national project, and I'm curious to see what lessons we draw from the operation.

Interstates before interstates.

2011-05-10T07:15:00.002-04:00

From the Baltimore Sun's Getting There blog:

“U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is pointing out that this weekend marks the 200th anniversary of what could be called the United States' first interstate highway: the National Road from Cumberland to what is now Wheeling, W.Va.

“Construction of the road was authorized by Congress in 1806 but didn't begin until May 8, 1811 -- setting a precedent of road project delays that persists to this day.”

The weekend in question, by the way, was last weekend. I'm always glad to hear that the people in Cumberland had something to do on a Saturday.

Why aren't you reading Alan Jacobs yet?

2011-05-09T18:04:00.000-04:00

Alan Jacobs announces that he will be leading a faculty seminar at Wheaton next fall called “Christianity and the Book: Histories and Futures.” If patterns hold, the discussion will be spilling over onto Jacobs's excellent blog, Text Patterns.

For now, though, that initial post looks like a fantastic starting point for anyone interested in the history of Christianity or the history of books.

Sam Harris and the N.I.C.E.

2011-05-09T07:35:00.002-04:00

I've been re-reading C.S. Lewis's science-fiction novel That Hideous Strength. The villains of the piece are members of a nebulous research group called the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments. The N.I.C.E. wants to use impartial science to rebuild Britain in a rationalized way, though its leaders admit to each other that the real point of all their work is that they get to be the ones running the experiments — a power grab in the name of instrumental reason.

I would have said that Lewis's take on the modern scientific project is overly pessimistic, that our scientists do not really think like that, and that in our society the democratic project has a salutary oversight of the scientific establishment. I would have said that, but just this morning I read a review of Sam Harris's books at The Nation which made me second-guess my position. (I've only read Letter to a Christian Nation, and the review is on point about that one, so I'm hoping the reviewer is right about the other two books.) The reviewer sums up Harris's political project, and it's chilling:

These high-minded questions conceal a frightening Olympian agenda. Harris is really a social engineer, with a thirst for power that sits uneasily alongside his allegedly disinterested pursuit of moral truth. We must use science, he says, to figure out why people do silly and harmful things in the name of morality, what kinds of things they should do instead and how to make them abandon their silly and harmful practices in order “to live better lives.” Harris’s engineering mission envelops human life as a whole. “Given recent developments in biology, we are now poised to consciously engineer our further evolution,” he writes. “Should we do this, and if so, in which ways? Only a scientific understanding of the possibilities of human well-being could guide us.” Harris counsels that those wary of the arrogance, and the potential dangers, of the desire to perfect the biological evolution of the species should observe the behavior of scientists at their professional meetings: “arrogance is about as common at a scientific conference as nudity.” Scientists, in Harris’s telling, are the saints of circumspection.

Harris would fit right in at the N.I.C.E. — as long as he stuck with Frost rather than Wither.

(I found the article via David Sessions at Patrol.)

Phil Cook, a musician.

2011-05-06T12:23:00.000-04:00

There's a great write-up in the Independent Weekly on Phil Cook, a member of Megafaun and one of the best rock stars. Phil has a solo album coming out soon on Trekky Records. Give him a listen if you like rootsy folk and blues.

This stuff makes my day.

Theological aesthetics: Lewis and Hart.

2011-05-06T07:10:00.000-04:00

From the description of the eldils (basically angels) in C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength:

“In their eye s the normal [human] modes of being—engendering and birth and death and decay—which are to us the framework of thought, were no less wonderful than the countless other patterns of being which were continually present to their unsleeping minds. To those high creatures whose activity builds what we call Nature, nothing is ‘natural.’ From their station the essential arbitrariness (so to call it) of every actual creation is ceaselessly visible, for them there are no basic assumptions: all springs with the willful beauty of a jest or a tune from that miraculous moment of self-limitation wherein the Infinite, rejecting a myriad possibilities, throws out of Himself the positive and elected invention.”

-C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength. New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1965. (202)

Surely this passage came out of conversations with J.R.R. Tolkein, whose writings work out a theory and terminology for the aesthetics of sub-creation. I'm sure that someone out there has written about Lewis and Tolkein from the perspective of theological aesthetics after Hans Urs Von Balthasar, but I haven't yet found that work. There's clearly a sympathetic resonance between the passage above and this passage from David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite:

“It is in Bach's music, as nowhere else, that the potential boundlessness of thematic development becomes manifest: how a theme can unfold inexorably through difference, while remaining continuous in each moment of repetition, upon a potentially infinite surface of varied repetition. […] In Bach's music, though, motion is absolute, and all thematic content is submitted to the irreducible disseminations that fill it out: each note is an unforced, unnecessary, and yet wholly fitting supplement, even when the fittingness is deferred across massive dissonances by way of the most elaborate contrapuntal meditations.”

-David Bentley Hart. The Beauty of the Infinite. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman's, 2003. (283)

If anyone knows of an essay that compares Hart/Balthasar with Lewis/Tolkein, I'd love to read it.

Hysteria, and the morning after.

2011-05-05T07:13:00.001-04:00

The AV Club's had two interesting essays this week that are at least worth a skim for anyone interested in rock music.

The first one is a long account of the pop-cultural role of Def Leppard's Hysteria. The essay kicks off a series of reflections on various number-one pop records, and, suitably, there's a long discussion of what number-one records used to mean back in the days when there was a single dominant distribution machine.

…we live in a culture where the terms “mainstream” and “underground” have become virtually meaningless, as practically every song by every band ever is equally accessible, frequently at no cost, to anyone with an Internet connection and the interest to seek it out. “Pop” is no longer short for “popular”; it’s simply one choice in a sea of genres that can be programmed into your music player in order to block out all other kinds of music. Music-related fame has been democratized to a greater degree than at any point in the media age, dramatically eroding the concept of fame as we once knew it.

I think this overstates the case, but we're definitely on this trajectory. It's exciting, in a way, that the importance of channels of production (record labels, radio) are fading: I'm almost hoping we'll get to see some kind of ultimate showdown between aesthetics and marketing for the soul of music.

The second essay is about Pete Yorn's musicforthemorningafter, an album that got many spins on my discman in 2001. It does seem like the major labels never really found anyone to take the torch from Yorn and Ryan Adams (I'm really surprised that Adams's Gold doesn't get a mention). Perhaps I just got embedded in indie culture too soon after those albums to know what I'm talking about. But, on that note, I'll probably buy the new Fleet Foxes album this week.

Notes on Ephraim Radner's The End of the Church (1)

2011-05-04T21:07:00.002-04:00

Chapter 1: Scripture and the Divided Church

The first thing a non-theologian ought to know before getting into Ephraim Radner's The End of the Church: A Pneumatology of Christian Division in the West is the definition of “pneumatology.” A pneumatology is something like a theory of the action of the Holy Spirit. That being said, I'll do my best to use common language, even though there's no avoiding "pneumatology" when the book under discussion uses that word in its subtitle.

One of the points of agreement for ecumenically inclined mainline Christians on the one hand and the sort of conservative Christians who rally around "mere Christianity" on the other is the notion that division in the church is to be lamented. Yet we often follow that acknowledgment with an affirmation of one of the many doctrines that sets our particular tradition apart from others. What Ephraim Radner is doing in this book is trying to linger on the problem of disunity. What does it mean to lament our division?

Looking back to the Protestant Reformation, we see that Catholics and Protestants rarely hesitated to label each other's churches false. For example, my edition of the Westminster Confession says: “In no sense can the Pope of Rome be the head of [the church]. Rather, he is that Antichrist, the man of sin, and son of damnation, who glorifies himself as opposed to Christ and everything related to God.” But, for all sorts of reasons, we're not so quick to do this anymore. Many theologically serious evangelical Protestants find comfort in the work of unmistakeably Catholic writers. The mainline ecumenical movement was built on the recognition of saving faith among parties to the dialogue.

So many of us are now in conflict with Reformation-era Catholic or Protestant theology. Reformation Protestants argued that the Holy Spirit acts in the hearts and minds of individual believers as they read scripture; Catholics of the time claimed that the Holy Spirit only comes to individuals through their involvement in the true community of the Church. If we hold to either view of the Holy Spirit, one party must be illegitimate. Radner asks, “If the Spirit works preeminently neither to guide our hearing of Scripture nor to forge the common space for that hearing, what are we to say about the Spirit at all in its relation to Scripture and the Church?” (23)

The ecumenical movement, in Radner's telling, saw this difficulty and tried to get around it, but the results were disheartening. “[T]he ecumenical path for resolving the post-Reformation pneumatological contradiction was to redefine the Holy Spirit's office into that of mediating visible disunity into an invisible unity. … Incoherence … becomes itself a pneumatic virtue” (25). It's a harsh verdict, and Radner offers his alternative.

Turning to Scripture, one finds that the New Testament is not helpful in this particular matter: “How one understands the Church as itself a divided entity is not a topic the New Testament openly broaches” (34). And so we look to the Old Testament, and see the “figure” of Israel divided into two kingdoms just after Solomon's death. The key teaching point is that “partitioned Israel is ‘abandoned’ Israel; and this Israel, separated among its members, is separated too from the Holy Spirit” (37). This is the frightening thesis of Radner's book: in our division, we as Christians are in a position of disobedience, and we, like divided Israel, lack the spiritual fullness that marked an earlier time. Is it possible that our disagreements are so persistent precisely because of the condition of our division?

We already have resources for understanding what Radner means by “abandonment.” Both Protestants and Catholics have thought a great deal about how spiritual deadness functions in the individual life; what is needed now is to consider whether this deadness has a communal analogue. Radner considers St. John of the Cross's mystical writing as well as Puritan perspectives on spiritual “aridity.” Radner suggests that to explore how a negative condition can work to our betterment and God's glory, we should recall Pauline accounts of the “negative function” of the law as described in Romans and 2 Corinthians. Though spiritual deadness isn't discussed in this way, he thinks we can draw the analogy.

What's especially interesting is the model Radner ends up recommending as an alternative to division. Without endorsing any of their doctrinal claims, he points to the Jansenists, who would allow themselves only (as Pierre Nicole put it) a “simple and negative separation, which consists in the refusal of certain acts of community, without however involving positive acts of separation against the community from which one separates” (47). This might have been Luther's original intention; what might have happened had he stuck to it?

All of this would be very depressing if Radner hoped for some institutional process to overcome division. But, observing how divided Israel hoped for the coming Messiah, we must put our hope elsewhere. “Bodies,” Radner says, “especially bodies laid out with the pallor of insensibility, bodies of the dead, await not medical specialists, but Creators” (56).

I don't know if I'm able to endorse Radner's argument here, but I'll be reading with interest and posting my notes from future chapters as I get through them.

Monarchy, cont'd.

2011-05-04T07:41:00.000-04:00

Josh has written more on monarchy, and the first thing to note is that he pulls off a footnote trick that, to my knowledge, not even David Foster Wallace ever tried. Well done!

Anyway, I think Josh is right to get away from the question of whether a "yearning for monarchy" is in some way natural to humans. Beyond that, I don't have much to say. Of course there's no way to introduce a powerless monarchy in the USA, and the political problem that makes monarchy attractive (unlike Colin Firth in The King's Speech, all of our leaders want the job) has do be addressed by more democracy — more activity on the local level.

What's "detraction"?

2011-05-03T12:02:00.001-04:00

Alexander Pruss has just written about the sin of detraction. It's a term I'd never heard. "In detraction," says Pruss, "one discloses, without sufficient moral reason, the faults of another and one speaks the truth (or what one thinks is the truth)." This is different from slander, in which the speaker lies about another person.

He goes on to consider the puzzle of how refraining from speaking truth could be a good thing for Christians, who consider themselves people of Truth, and comes up with a number of reasons for refraining from detraction. I'm interested in the second and fifth points:

We are all sinners. By disclosing a hidden fault of another, we make it seem like this person is worse than all the people whose hidden faults are not disclosed. Frequently, the person is made to seem worse than the detractor. There is, thus, an injustice when there is no special reason to disclose the sins of this individual.

[...]

When the faults of another are disclosed to sinful humans, these humans will be tempted to take an inappropriate attitude towards these faults, an attitude of judgment rather than forgiveness. Thus, detraction is not only a sin against the person whose reputation is being unjustly tarnished, but also a sin against the listener who is being tempted into sin.

It's good to have a word for this thing I do too often.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

2011-05-02T18:20:00.000-04:00

If anyone reads this blog, lives in New York, and didn't hear it from me in person last weekend, Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams is another treasure of a documentary, and should be seen in the theater. I'll spare you an attempt at a description of the quality of the limitedness I felt when staring at resonantly beautiful art made by humans who lived in Europe three hundred centuries ago.

Here's hoping the 3D projection takes a trip through the rest of the USA.

And the release of a new Herzog film brings gifts beyond the film itself: we always get a new round of Herzog interviews. For example, here (via Kottke):

"The Polar explorations were a huge mistake of the human race, an indication that the twentieth century was a mistake in its entirety. They are one of the indicators.

"Adventure doesn’t feel right anymore. And something doesn’t feel right with artists anymore, the whole term. If you look at contemporary figurative art, you can tell there is a crisis of the term there."

And here:

"Sounding deep into the abysses of time, and into the origin of the modern human soul. It’s strange, I’m now doing a film with death-row inmates, and as a general umbrella title, I thought about “Gazing Into The Abyss,” and then I thought that would have been a fine title for the cave film. It fits for almost every film I’ve made. Bad Lieutenant, Aguirre, you just name it.

Kings and the problem of the center.

2011-04-29T12:05:00.000-04:00

Internet amigo Josh expressed revulsion ("ugh") at Ross Douthat's praise-of-monarchy post. If Douthat was really saying that we should have kings because, deep down, we like them so much, then "ugh" would be warranted.

But the assertion that "[i]n their hearts, most people want a king and queen" is not itself Douthat's defense of monarchy. It's the starting point for Douthat to explain (1) why we seem to want monarchs, and (2) why this is not a totally bad thing. The actual defense is Douthat's too-brief description of how a mostly powerless monarchy can be a helpful check on a modern democratic government.

Anyway, without committing myself to a position on the question of monarchs in the abstract, I'd like to post one of Robert Jenson's descriptions of "the problem of the center":

The problem is the problem of the center, of what joins you and me to be a unit other than either of us, within which each of us has a function for the other. If we are centered merely by a system or ideal, our society will be qualitatively old, and will reduce us to functions, for systems and ideals cannot love. Therefore, societies have regularly sought a person, a being who can love as the center: the King, the Führer, the theios aner of a state cult. But those who love and therefore die, and do not rise again, fail at love -- so that all societies so centered are at last distorted by the frenzied attempts of their centering persons to be immortal.

-Robert Jenson, “Eschatological Politics and Political Eschatology.” Essays in Theology of Culture. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995. (26)

Timid poets.

2011-04-29T07:34:00.004-04:00

When we're told stories of the great modern stylistic changes in Western art—representational to abstract, tonal to dissonant, formal to free verse—we always hear about photography's effect on visual art and we sometimes hear about the effects of recording and amplification on music. Maybe there's a story to be told about recording, reproduction, and poetry, but the poets seem to be keeping it to themselves.

But think of it this way: if you're writing short sequences of words in hopes that people will understand, remember, and repeat them, you'll want your words to be memorable. In English, rhyme and rhythm was one tried-and-true technique. These days, you can store documents, podcasts, and songs on your phone. From this perspective, I wonder if our poets have largely given up on rhyme because the public no longer needs to memorize. A poet can't count on an audience eager to remember; the best he can ever hope for might be half a minute of a New Yorker reader's time.

"The scales begin to fall."

2011-04-28T12:08:00.006-04:00

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a pair of posts about why he rejects the idea of the Civil War as tragedy. In short, he can't accept the moral equivalence (or near-equivalence) between North and South on which the brother-against-brother view relies:

It's really simple for me. One group of Americans attempted to raise a country on property in Negroes. Another group of Americans, many of them Negroes themselves, stopped them. As surely as we lack the ability to see tragedy in violently throwing off the yoke of the English, I lack the ability to see tragedy in violently throwing off the yoke of slaveholders.

J.L. Wall, writing at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, agrees (as do I) that the Civil War is not properly understood a tragedy of avoidable violence. However, he does describe a different sort of tragedy, and he does so with eloquence:

By the end of Gettysburg, as I have mentioned, exhilaration has given way to frustration, disgust, and tragedy. Rather than a misguided quest for glory, Jeb Stuart’s meandering during the first days of that battle are depicted as a lost child’s desperate search for his father. The scales begin to fall and the South’s “great” men are revealed to be self-serving (Bragg; the Hills; Hood; Stuart; etc.), blindered (Lee), or brutalizers of questionable sanity (Forrest; Quantrill).

[...]

For all the narrator’s fascination with Lee’s and Jackson’s underdog role in the first volume, by the end of the second, the South has condemned itself, militarily and morally.

It's stuff like this that keeps a fellow sticking around on the internet. The tragic arc of the Confederacy: a cultural rot so deep as to be inextirpable, slowly revealed to people that saw themselves as good. Chilling.

Three about trees.

2011-04-28T06:41:00.003-04:00

Still enjoying Colin Tudge's book The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter. Three things I've learned:

When I went to New Zealand, I took a tour at the Christchurch Botanical Gardens. On that tour, the guide explained that many of New Zealand's native trees have distinct juvenile and adult phases. In other words, some trees there start out looking one way and then look totally different after they grew up. Tudge explains that these trees come from the family Proteaceae. (When I start a band, I think I'll call it “Proteaceae.” It's a sign of aging that this no longer seems like a serious plan.) Too bad there aren't any native Proteaceae species in North America. (Reference: pp. 156-7)
Tudge discusses a species he calls “plane trees,” explaining that in North America, plane trees are known as “sycamores” or “buttonwoods.” And he adds: “the ‘sycamore’ referred to in the Bible is a species of fig, in the genus Ficus.” This is good to know. I was always a little bit confused about how Zacchaeus climbed the sorts of gigantic, peely-barked trees I was familiar with, and was tempted to view that bit of the story as mytho-poetic. (Reference: p. 157)
Tree vengeance: “Limes [these, not these] put up with heavy pruning and thus are often butchered as street trees (though they get their own back by attracting aphids, which secrete gum, which in turn attracts fungi, and so coat the cars parked beneath with what seems like tacky soot)…” I like to think that if trees really were mad at us, they'd be tricky pranksters rather than The-Happening-style crazy murderers. (Reference: p. 212)

"A hunter of sacred shades upon the eternal hills."

2011-04-27T18:40:00.000-04:00

I posted some links to the aphorisms of Nicolás Gómez Dávila a while back. Well, that website has run out of material, but not without leaving a link to a translation of "The Authentic Reactionary," a short essay Gómez Dávila wrote near the end of his life. In that essay, Gómez Dávila charts a course between Marxist historical determinism and philosophically liberal conceptions of human freedom.

History [...] is an assemblage of freedoms hardened in dialectical processes. The deeper the layer whence free action gushes forth, the more varied are the zones of activity that the process determines, and the greater its duration. The superficial, peripheral act is expended in biographical episodes, while the central, profound act can create an epoch for an entire society. History is articulated, thus, in instants and epochs: in free acts and in dialectical processes. Instants are its fleeting soul, epochs its tangible body. Epochs stretch out like distances between two instants: its seminal instant, and the instant when the inchoate act of a new life brings it to a close. Upon hinges of freedom swing gates of bronze. Epochs do not have an irrevocable duration: the encounter with processes looming up from a greater depth can interrupt them; inertia of the will can prolong them. Conversion is possible, passivity ordinary. History is a necessity that freedom produces and chance destroys.

-Nicolás Gómez Dávila, "The Authentic Reactionary." Trans. R.V. Young. Modern Age 52:1.

One does not have to be alienated from contemporary culture to enjoy or make use of this vivid depiction of liberty-in-dialectic. Indeed, the clarity of Gómez Dávila's exposition could probably help in understanding certain profound non-reactionary thinkers.

Worth watching.

2011-04-27T12:48:00.002-04:00

This whole movie:

And this performance:

Wye Oak covers Danzig

Is there any reason to believe this is a bad way of thinking about the budget?

2011-04-26T07:22:00.000-04:00

Like many people without much interest in economics, I tend toward the household-budget view of how the federal government should spend money. On some level, I get the macroeconomic argument that the government should spend more in a recession, but when one has no faith that the government will spend less in good times, it's hard to embrace that position.

So I read Jim Manzi's post on controlling the national debt with great interest. Unfortunately, the argument in the comments is almost completely about the Paul Ryan budget plan, rather than the general approach.

The ball we need to keep our eye on is not so much the theoretical ultimate cost, as how much time we have left before we crash. We should want a set of entitlement rules that we believe to be sustainable in perpetuity, but we need to push out the date at which we would have a crisis.

[...]

A real plan to address our debt problems, then, should focus on two key elements: (1) putting in place mechanisms for influencing future legislatures that we cannot command, and (2) enacting structural reforms that will simultaneously encourage general economic growth as they do this.

[...]

Like the FDR vision of the entitlement state that now appears to be in its death throes, whatever we put in place will eventually become antiquated and have to be replaced. Our job is to make sure that this happens 75 years from now, not 10 years from now.

Still thinking about this, but it seems more sensible (and more realistic about the sort of prudence that is possible in the political realm) than the household-budget approach.

We should know.

2011-04-25T18:22:00.000-04:00

Amy Davidson writes in her New Yorker blog:

Here are some of the reasons we’ve held people at Guantánamo, according to files obtained by WikiLeaks and, then, by several news organizations: A sharecropper because he was familiar with mountain passes; an Afghan “because of his general knowledge of activities in the areas of Khost and Kabul based as a result of his frequent travels through the region as a taxi driver”; an Uzbek because he could talk about his country’s intelligence service, and a Bahraini about his country’s royal family (both of those nations are American allies); an eighty-nine year old man, who was suffering from dementia, to explain documents that he said were his son’s; an imam, to speculate on what worshippers at his mosque were up to; a cameraman for Al Jazeera, to detail its operations; a British man, who had been a captive of the Taliban, because “he was expected to have knowledge of Taliban treatment of prisoners and interrogation tactics”; Taliban conscripts, so they could explain Taliban conscription techniques; a fourteen-year-old named Naqib Ullah, described in his file as a “kidnap victim,” who might know about the Taliban men who kidnapped him. (Ullah spent a year in the prison.) Our reasons, in short, do not always really involve a belief that a prisoner is dangerous to us or has committed some crime; sometimes (and this is more debased) we mostly think we might find him useful.

From a New Statesman article on the corruption of the New Orleans city police:

On 17 March this year, the federal department of justice (DoJ) decided that enough was enough and it has made moves to have the New Orleans police department (NOPD) placed under the supervision of a federal judge. The New Orleans jail system will likely follow.

The department released a report covering only the past two years and ignoring several current federal investigations of police officers for murder. It says, more or less, that the NOPD is incapable on any level; that it is racist; that it systemically violates civil rights, routinely using "unnecessary and unreasonable force"; that it is "largely indifferent to widespread violations of law and policy by its police officers" and appears to have gone to great lengths to cover up its shootings of civilians. "NOPD's mishandling of officer-involved shooting investigations," the report says, "was so blatant and egregious that it appeared intentional in some respects."

Rich Mullins on musicians.

2011-04-25T08:12:00.003-04:00

“What musicians do is they put together chords and rhythms and melodies. So if you want entertainment I suggest Christian entertainment because I think it's good. But if you want spiritual nourishment I suggest you go to church or read your bible or something. And let this [i.e., this performance] entertain you, but look beyond this for what you really need in life.”

-Rich Mullins, introducing the song “Elijah” in the “Live from Studio B” performance, which can be found on the Here in America DVD

Artists and critics who will say the Credo.

2011-04-20T12:46:00.001-04:00

Sort of puzzled by the closing sentences of Jonathan Fitzgerald's latest post at Patrol:

“We need critics who are Christians, who understand the importance of religious content in art and who can see it as art and not simply a means to an end. Likewise, we need artists who are Christians to make art and release it not only into the shallow pool that is evangelicalism, but to the world at large. This will be ‘Christian Art,’ and it will be art. It will be something we can be proud of.”

Is Fitzgerald suggesting that such artists and critics don't exist? Or is he just wrapping up an off-the-cuff blog post with a quick burst of rhetoric? At any rate, he's taking a swipe at Relevant Magazine here, which is almost certainly not where he's going to find what he's looking for.

I'd suggest Books and Culture as a place where Christian critics — evangelicals, even! — are doing good work right now. There's almost too much Christian blogging about the visual arts: see Dan Siedell, Matthew Milliner, and Curator, for starters. I'll admit I'm not sure where to go for music criticism; there used to be a magazine in New York that pressed hard on questions of faith in music, but I think they changed their focus. I'd like to give my friend Dave Zahl some attention, though with the warning that his writing on music is part of a much bigger blog. Also, Calvin College's Festival of Faith and Music just happened.

So much for the critics. As for the artists: do I really need to write another paean to Marilyn Robinson, Sufjan Stevens, Whit Stillman, or Terrence Malick? If the response to my praise would be another essay trying to explain why these mainliners are so much better at art than Evangelicals, I suppose I'd just have to break out my contrarian-hipster defense of Rich Mullins, Amy Grant, and Michael Card. And does anyone really want it to come to that?

Here's to shutting up.

2011-04-19T08:06:00.002-04:00

When someone who's still immature as a thinker starts a blog of ideas (academic, cultural, political, etc.) she's going to think she has something to say to the world. For a while, she'll make her case. If she's lucky — if she finds the blogging world at its best — thoughtful people will see her posts and offer criticism. Or maybe they won't see her blog, but the minor disciplines of linking, following, and commenting will bring her to writers that have thought through her problems already. And she'll come to realize her intellectual immaturity, and see that she needs to rethink some things.

There might be some who would say that it's a virtue of the blogosphere that our young blogger can keep writing, and that she should now write in the mode of a certain famous blogger who likes to opine fiercely and then let his readers help him make up his mind. They might say, further, that this is the democratic process in action, and that this is how blogs function as part of our public sphere.

I'd say that this kind of public thinking isn't really thinking, and that when an intellectually immature blogger has begun to exhaust a position, it's better to keep quiet and read carefully than to keep chattering. For when you've got a good idea to work with, the process and responsibility of public elaboration is helpful, but there's a necessarily private element in the weighing and thinking through of rival theories that remains until a thinker reaches maturity. Or so I would imagine, being an not-yet-mature thinker myself.

Jenson on Calvinism.

2011-04-18T18:32:00.005-04:00

"...Calvinism (unlike early Lutheranism) maintained the patristic and medieval doctrine of God unchanged. ... On the one hand, there is the metaphysical God, the final explanatory Ground of reality as we find it, who is reached by argumentative and mystical penetration back through reality as we find it. On the other hand, there is the proclaimed God, the Power of the future to differ from reality as we find it, who is known by words about Israel and Christ, addressed to historical and contingent hopes and fears.

[...]

"Thus the traditional doctrine of God shimmered with polarities between the two starting identifications of God, inside each, and crossways. In the system of medieval Christianity all these were reconciled and made religiously fruitful by the existence of the church. The church was a rationalized institution -- of miraculous grace. It was a public and political administration -- that administered inner power. It was a main structure of the standing order -- to make available eschatological transformation. It was the mediator between the distant exterior and public ground and the inner and private experience of Christ's presence. Remove this sort of church, leaving most else as it was, and you have classic Reformed theology.

"In Reformed tradition the two identifications of God, and the two appropriate relations to God, stand unmediated against each other. They are very nearly two different religions, united only by fiat."

-Robert Jenson, "The Kingdom of America's God." Essays in Theology of Culture. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995. (54-55)

This description of Calvinism as the traditional doctrine of God minus the mediating institution of the hierarchical church is both illuminating and, I think, basically fair. Illuminating because it explains the issue behind predestination and the other Calvinist sticking points. And, in my limited reading, the most interesting work in Reformed theology usually has to do with the attempt to elaborate a principle that overcomes precisely the tension described here. In other words, Reformed theologians seem aware that they need to find a way to escape what Jenson describes here, and Jenson's fair in leaving this as a possibility.

Later in the essay, Jenson asserts that Enlightenment Deism is simply the metaphysical side of Puritanism without the Biblical side. Though I haven't read much Karl Barth, I'm curious about whether it's accurate to say he did the opposite of what the Deists did.

Ah! A Wye Oak video.

2011-04-16T07:14:00.002-04:00

I haven't gone to many rock shows in Baltimore, and when I do, it's because North Carolina bands are coming through. Of the various Baltimore bands that are blowing up the blogosphere, the only one I've listened to is Wye Oak. A friend pointed me to this new video for the song “Fish”:

Wye Oak - Fish (Official Video) from City Slang on Vimeo.

I've enjoyed Civilian so far. Everything people are saying about the band's remarkable musical growth since The Knot is true. I'm curious to see what they do next.

Also interesting is what lead singer Jenn Wasner has to say about being in a popular indie band:

“I don't want to sound ungrateful, because I do realize I have the best job in the world, but there's no other job I can really think of that when you are working as hard as you have ever worked in your entire life, everyone pretty much assumes you're at a party or on vacation, you know?”

Corals avoid the International Style.

2011-04-15T07:58:00.003-04:00

Stumbled on a good aesthetic/ethical urbanism blog this week. Updates aren't frequent, but there's some good stuff. E.g., this:

“The main thing is that both humans and corals have evolved the capacity to build their own permanent residences, and in so doing to change the nature of the land or sea around them.

“The humans, who are an argumentative lot (one of the many ways they might appear to be inferior to the corals), might point out that corals build by blind instinct, whereas humans have an innate sense of beauty and order. Yet the corals consistently produce works that are breathtakingly beautiful to humans, whereas humans—by our own admission—more often produce breathtakingly ugly architectural excrescences that you’d never catch a self-respecting coral living in.

“One of the ironies of human nature is that we tend to turn out ugly cities when we put the most thought into them. Left to grow by itself, a city may have ugly sections, but the city as a whole is almost invariably beautiful. Subjected to the whims of urban planners, the city suddenly finds itself shot full of holes, empty spots where the urban planner has decreed a pedestrian mall or ample free parking.”

Milliner on friendship and education.

2011-04-14T18:42:00.001-04:00

Public Discourse has a new essay by Matthew Milliner, one section of which I'd like to endorse:

Christopher Olaf Blum’s essay “Newman’s Collegiate Ideal” explains that Newman’s focus on friendship enabled the university to be “not a chance collection of individuals building their careers, but a kind of fellowship, even a friendship, whose characteristic activity was to ‘rejoice in the truth’ (gaudium de veritate).” Common meals were the soil where acquaintanceship grew into friendship, which Aristotle understood to be among the highest of life’s rewards. Genuine learning without the “pure and clear atmosphere of thought” fostered by true friendship was difficult to achieve. Like Origen, Newman understood that “personal influence… was the means of propagating the truth.”

In an age of unmanageable class sizes and overworked (and out of work) professors, advocating such an intimate scale of virtue-based learning may seem naive. Yet such ideals are probably closer to most of our own learning histories than we might think. If a given class distilled more than mere information, but instead shaped our lives and futures, some kind of friendship probably played a role. Wherever our own education occurred, or is occurring, transformative learning continues to happen as it always has—through communities of friendships upheld by some measure of mutual virtue.

The best thing that ever happened to me, intellectually, was that my friends and I had to take the same classes and read the same books. Our discussions gave me a stake in my coursework, which touched off a cycle. Imagining higher education based on a principle of friendship — why, one might think that the striving for wisdom is the second paradise of world.

“Still the picture flips.”

2011-04-14T09:02:00.001-04:00

Now that I've written this post, I don't feel like blogging on the Mountain Goats' new album All Eternals Deck anymore, which works well, since this is the last song on the album.

With “Liza Forever Minnelli,” we’ve got a song about someone wandering around Los Angeles, feeling stuck and lonely, and eventually lying down with his cheek to Liza Minnelli's walk-of-fame star because he or she feels some connection to the actress. It's a sweet and sad image, as fitting for the close of the album as the fury of “Damn These Vampires” was for the start.

And so that's the new album. I hope I've convinced someone to give it a listen or two, but if not, that's all right.

All Eternals Deck, part twelve of thirteen.

2011-04-13T19:16:00.000-04:00

I'm blogging on The Mountain Goats' new album All Eternals Deck until I feel like stopping.

I feel weird writing about “Never Quite Free.” You see, this song is not for me. It's for survivors. So if this song sounds like a series of positive-thinking platitudes — “you'll sleep better when you think you've come back from the brink,” “it's so good to learn that from right here the view goes on forever” — I have to admit that maybe I should just let a comforting song be a comforting song.

But that reading doesn't quite hold. You've got the title of the song, and the ominous warnings: “when you see him, you'll know.” Life gets better, the careful listener hears, but the past will sneak up on you. This aspect of the song plays against the optimistic sentiment of the poppy arrangement, to moving effect. The music asks us to forget the darkness completely, but the lyrics tell us to think twice.

And, once again, there's something eschatological in all this.

Gifts of the internet.

2011-04-13T08:00:00.000-04:00

Dr. Boli posts an advertisement from the borough police, who are selling some special services to the public as a way of making up their budget shortfall. Services include "Motorcades for Prom Night" and "Rivals Discouraged." Act now!