Milliner on beauty: Barth and Maritain.

I'm more or less recording this for my own reference, since I have absolutely nothing to add, but Matthew Milliner's been on a roll, writing-wise.

He wrote a blog post called “Beauty and the Barthians,” which explains why, for all the good things to be found in Barth's theology, Barth is a dead end as far as theological aesthetics are concerned. I'm just dipping my toes into Barthian waters now, and I'm really glad that Milliner has already mapped out how Barth relates to Hart, whose book The Beauty of the Infinite I read and enjoyed several years ago.

And then, a few days after showing us a dead end, Milliner points to the more promising paths explored by Jacques Maritain in an article for Public Discourse about “The New Maritainians.” Clearly, I'm going to have to chase down some of the books he's mentioning here.

Really, millinerd.com just keeps getting better and better.

An exchange about David Foster Wallace.

New York Magazine's Vulture blog is running a discussion panel about a recently published long-form interview of David Foster Wallace. The interview was conducted in 1996 or thereabouts, around the time Infinite Jest came out. It will probably be quite some time before I get around to reading it, for the following reason, which was offered by Garth Risk Hallberg:

The urge to turn our dead artists into motivational speakers is perhaps a symptom of the peculiarly American disease Wallace is concerned to treat in his fiction. It works well enough for pop music, which after all is an art already made out of sound bites; I'm as heartened as the next guy when I pass that ride on Coney Island with an airbrushed Tupac and Biggie presiding over the kiddie cars, friends in death, as they couldn't be in life. But as someone who was imaginary friends with David Foster Wallace, there's something unsettling about the compelling simulacrum this book offers.

It's maybe unfair to pit an interview against a novel this way, or to judge a book by its cover. But if you're really interested in Wallace's "astonishing, humane, alert way of looking at the world," and are new to it, Vulture readers, don't start with this book, and don't listen to the revisionists who tell you DFW's journalism is his great achievement. Get thee to a bookstore, and go read Infinite Jest.

I don't have enough global experience to know if this is an exclusively American danger, but a book-length interview seems like a way to try to get around wrestling with the books and stories and essays.

Weird drain.

I have wanted to link to this for a while. It's a blog post about a strange drain in a reservoir, designed in such a way that it presents “an edge over which it is impossible to look”:

“Because you can see the endless walls of the abyss both below you and facing you, nothing is hidden except what is down the hole. Standing on the rim, you are very close to a mystery: a space receiving the light of the sun into which we cannot see.”

Really, take a look.

(via Alan Jacobs)

Revelation.

“In some strands of evangelicalism, especially in fundamentalism, God's revelation is depicted as a static deposit of truth that is directly accessible to man's reason. But this subverts the idea that God is sovereign even in his revelation, that God remains hidden until he gives himself to be known. The knowledge and grace of God are not simply available to man even in the Bible, and this means that God remains the Master and man the servant even in the area of the knowledge of God.”

-Donald Bloesch, in Essentials of Evangelical Theology, Vol. I: God, Authority, & Salvation

I'm only about fifty pages in, but I'm enjoying this book. It's succinct, highly readable, and the author draws on a wide variety of sources. It's got to be good for me to take occasional tours across the wide domain of evangelical theology. One should know one's tradition.

Arkansas castles.

Someone is building a medieval fortress in rural Arkansas. At first this seems like another one of those weird Americana things, like the Nashville Parthenon, but the Ozark Medieval Fortress folks are trying to use actual medieval building techniques, so it seems like there's actually a whole lot to be learned from this project.

Anyways, if I'm ever within seventy miles of this place I'm going to do whatever I can to make a visit.

I have a feeling that it is going to be an important place in the post-apocalypse.

Via Eve Tushnet.

Music and misery.

This is relevant to the post I just wrote about Weezer over at The League.

"... some of these songs I have listened to around once a week, on average (three hundred times in the first month, every now and again thereafter), since I was sixteen or nineteen or twenty-one. How can that not leave you bruised somewhere? How can that not turn you into the sort of person liable to break into little bits when your first love goes all wrong? What came first--the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?

"People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands--literally thousands--of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives."

-From Nick Hornby's High Fidelity

Karl Barth / public faith.

"Faith means choosing between faith and unbelief, wrong belief and superstition. Faith is the act in which man relates himself to God as is appropriate to God. For this work takes place in a stepping out of neutrality towards God, out of any disavowal of obligation towards Him in our existence and attitude, out of the private sphere, into resoluteness, responsibility and public life. Faith without this tendency to public life, faith that avoids this difficulty, has become in itself unbelief, wrong belief, superstition. For faith that believes in God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit cannot refuse to become public."

-Karl Barth, in Dogmatics in Outline

Video games will save the world.

I didn't like Jane McGonigal's TED talk that much on first listen, but the more I think about it, the more I think she's on to something.



All that time I spent playing Grand Theft Auto when I could have been doing useful things… McGonigal's right that the structure of achievement in video games gets at something important in human psychology. The most compelling video games out there find ways to give the player challenging-but-doable tasks. My favorite games made me feel like I was accomplishing a lot, though when I thought about it later I would always realize that I hadn't done much of anything. McGonigal's idea is to build "games" that give the player incentives to do little things. If somebody made a Facebook app that gave people arbitrary "points" every time they volunteered at a soup kitchen or worked at a habitat house or something, I bet some people would get really into it. McGonigal seems pretty sharp, so I hope she finds a way to create something along these lines that really works.

Big money and local politics.

When Citizens United came down, the national media quite naturally focused on how the ruling would affect national politics, which is where big money dukes it out with big money. But who was thinking about the little races? Certainly not me.

Thank goodness for Carter Wrenn. He's watching the battle between Alcoa Corporation and the Stanly County Commissioners over chemical dumping in Badin Lake. Here's the key final paragraph:

Alcoa’s an international behemoth conglomerate. Its Chairman is from Brazil, its President is from Germany, it’s partnered with the Chinese and its world headquarters is in Pittsburgh, old Andrew Mellon’s hometown. It smelts aluminum everywhere from Iceland to the Amazon Rainforest and its annual budget is bigger than the State of North Carolina’s – so what hope on earth do three local County Commissioners (who may raise $5000 in their entire campaigns) have of winning re-election if Alcoa with its $20 billion annual budget is dead-set on retiring them?

You ought to know that Wrenn played a major part behind the scenes of some of the roughest campaigns in recent NC history, so he knows a little something about the power of TV advertising.

OK so NOW I live in Baltimore.

Tonight I watched the Orioles while eating crabs and drinking Natty Boh. NOW I live in Baltimore. That's all I wanted to say.

Blogroll.

I've added FLG (Fear and Loathing in Georgetown) to the blogroll. The other day, FLG offered an interesting description of the variety of subject matter on his blog: there's no problem with “addressing both sex with inanimate objects, pirates, and also politics, philosophy, and economics.” That's about right. I should have added him this a while ago, but, you know, hiatus.

Charm city.

I've moved to Baltimore, Maryland, and I'll be here for a while. I hope that wandering around in a new city will give me more to write about, and that this blog will kick back into gear. But I can't yet offer any guarantees.

Tourists and pilgrims.

I am always impressed by Matthew Milliner. Here's something he had to say about tourists and pilgrims:

“The tourist seeks interesting places. The pilgrim seeks to realize the way that a particular place freshly articulates the truths of faith. Hence the pilgrim, like the tourist, can be deeply impressed by the scale of the Parthenon, but equally overwhelmed by Mars Hill just below, where Paul's message, then mocked, would soon make of the that Parthenon a church. The pilgrim, like the tourist, will be awestruck by the Roman forum, but struck all the more - looking out at the mushrooming church domes over the Eternal City skyline - that the forbidden religion overcame imperial might. Pilgrims, like tourists, can’t help but be affected by the pyramids, only to then sense the shattering contrast of the Sinai wilderness, where the man-made pyramids are dwarfed by far larger natural ones, and where Pharonic splendor is both tempered and judged.”

If I kept quoting the good stuff I'd just steal the entire post.

Self-indulgence.

I am thinking about using the League to post some of my late-night Garageband covers of North Carolina bands. Is this a good idea or a bad one?

Bad ideas.

I wrote something for the League on Friday and Saturday, realized it was sort of dumb on Sunday, and posted it anyway on Monday. The first comment is right: I do make mountains out of molehills. I spend lots of time on conceptual points with no direct application to anything at all. Sorry! But I'm not going to change.

Miscellany.

Just a few short notes:

• My favorite thing about driving through Virginia would have to be the “SPEED LIMIT ENFORCED BY AIRCRAFT” signs. Surely aircraft alone are insufficient to enforce speed limits; presumably what happens is that observation aircraft relay information to patrol cars, and the patrol cars pull the car over and write the tickets. I can only think of two ways that the aircraft alone could enforce speed limits, both of which are awesome to think about whenever some wild driver blows past at twenty-five miles over the speed limit. The first is strafing, and the second is using some sort of giant magnet to physically remove the car from the roadway.
• I am about three-quarters of the way through Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. It's a tough book to get through, and I probably don't have the background to get as much out of it as I could, but it's rewarding in an interesting way. I've been surprised to find that my way of thinking is really congenial to historicism of many stripes. Another way of saying this is that Rorty's way of thinking doesn't seem as weird or scary as I thought it would.
• Brahmagupta once said that anyone who could solve x²-92y²=1 in less than a year is a mathematician. The other day I wrote a program that can do this in milliseconds, but I used a method from Wolfram's MathWorld so I am not sure it counts.
• I picked up the new Spoon album and I really like it. Every song is interesting, and it all fits together in a really nice way. I haven't read any reviews aside from Peter Suderman's small endorsement on The American Scene. I have noticed that the Internet encourages people to quickly and reflexively compare their reactions to art or music with the internet median instead of taking time to meditate or struggle with the experience. While this is part of the process of enjoying a show like Lost, it's the wrong way to go about appreciating anything that may turn out to have deeper meaning.
• Dickens: “I don't know where she was going, but we saw her run, such a little, little creature, in her womanly bonnet and apron, though a covered way at the bottom of the court; and melt into the city's strife and sound, like a dewdrop in the ocean.” Maybe it's a little sentimental, but there are lines in Bleak House that stay with me for days.
• I probably could have tightened some of this stuff up for Twitter, but I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that I am not nearly clever enough to be tweeting.
  

A human-centric internet.

“The architecture of the internet must support a global, universal micropayments capability. In this way, anyone could charge for information made available online, whether it is music or a program for a future robot. A silly YouTube-like prank might generate a windfall for a silly teenager, while a scholar’s writing might be only occasionally accessed, but over a long period might still generate enough income to be of use. People could then re-create the best social formula that has been achieved thus far in human experience. Middle class people could own something- the information they produce- that would give them sustenance as they have children and age.

“In order for this scheme to work, there would have to be some structural changes introduced gradually, as I explain in the book. This direction is the only way to create a human-centric internet, instead of one that serves the cultists who believe in information more than people. It would not attempt to make information free, but instead make it affordable. It is worth noting that this is exactly how the web would have developed if the initial design proposal for it, dating back to the 1960s, had been carried out. (This was Ted Nelson’s vision.) It is the obvious way to design the network if people are your top priority.”

-Jaron Lanier

I read Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget last night. It has me thinking pretty hard about what I want to use internet tools for. Lanier imagines a different web ethic than the one we have now, with a primary difference being that creators are compensated for their work instead of expected to give it away and make money on knicknacks. Though I’m not sure I buy everything Lanier has to say about the need to get away from the command line or the sorry state of music (though he’s certainly right about the sorry situation of musicians), it’s a book that demands critical thinking about the technologies we have so often uncritically adopted.

The NYT visits the Levine Museum.

There’s a piece in today’s New York Times on Charlotte’s Levine Museum of the New South. I spent an afternoon at the museum last month and I think the article is spot-on. I should also take this opportunity to recommend Tom Hanchett’s book Sorting Out the New South City, which is a wonderful supplement to a museum visit. (Link via Lew Powell.)

McCarraher on Radical Orthodoxy.

Eugene McCarraher has given a three part interview to the Other Journal. McCarraher’s a Christian socialist who is one of the most visible and ferocious critics of the First Things crowd. I find him to be consistently interesting, even if I have trouble understanding his confidence. Here's what he had to say about the Radical Orthodoxy (RO) movement in the third part of the interview:

“Before I go on further about McCabe, let me offer a critique of RO, because if RO led me to McCabe, McCabe led me away from RO. Like a lot of Christian intellectuals over the last two decades, I quaffed a bit of the Kool-Aid served up by those in the RO constellation. Well, if I can extend the Kool-Aid metaphor a bit, drinking from the cistern of RO was refreshing and stimulating, particularly the idea that theology can be a distinct and compelling form of social and cultural criticism—of all the literature on that score, I think Graham Ward’s Cities of God is a real milestone. But as I’ve watched how some of this has played out or not played out over the last decade, I’ve concluded that the theological renaissance these figures embodied not only has waned, but also has encouraged some very bad mental and political habits. For one thing, I’m tired of hearing ‘modernity’ and ‘liberalism’ treated as though they were the spawn of Satan. Along with the other usual suspects—instrumental reason, science, universal rights, cosmopolitanism, ‘the Enlightenment project’—modernity and liberalism get hauled into the docket and found guilty, usually after a perfunctory trial, of the Judeocide, ecological catastrophe, capitalism, nuclear war, abortion, et cetera, ad nauseam. Give me a frigging break. When modernity and liberalism are this all-encompassing, they’ve become nothing more than verbal ciphers, containers for everything the writer doesn’t like, bestowing license to utter all manner of grandiose and stupid pontifications. With a lot of these people, liberalism equals nihilism, which equals the lowest circle of the inferno. The theological problem with this view is that it tends to completely strip the created world of its goodness. Can’t liberal modernity mediate grace or partake of beatitude in some fashion? Since when did Gothic architecture and the like become the only sanctioned media of Trinitarian love? Since when did Brave New World become the final word on modernity? So if you want to deride instrumental reason and technology, fine, but just remember all that when you have a toothache, or if the specialist discovers a tumor in time, or if your wife needs emergency assistance during childbirth. If you want to curse cosmopolitanism, fine, but just stop jetting across the oceans and using the Internet to do it, all the while lecturing the rest of us about nestling in the homespun joys of localism.”

I am a little curious as to how McCarraher would relate this to MacIntyre, for whom he has kind words in another section of the interview. But more generally, I think this paragraph describes pretty well an excess to which I was especially prone for several years. I don’t think I’ve adopted another point of view on the matter; I’ve just gotten much less confident in my ability to know what the boundaries of “modernity” and “liberalism” really are.

Solving the harder problem.

I've not been writing much for the Internet recently. One of the things I've been doing instead is trying to improve my rather meager programming abilities. Since I have a giant Java reference book in my possession and all the necessary stuff already on my computer, Java has so far been my language of choice. If anyone has any suggestions on what might be a better language to learn, I'm open to them.

I've been using Project Euler as practice. Project Euler is a list of math/programming problems. Most of them would be either extremely difficult or exceedingly time-consuming to solve by hand, whereas an efficient algorithm can solve each problem rather quickly. At least for the early problems, the good solutions take less than a second to finish.

When you solve a problem, the website gives you access to a forum where you can see how other people solved problems. Some of the top solvers use a language called J which looks really, really cryptic, even for simple operations. For example: “c=:%:@:(+/)@:*:” creates a formula for the Pythagorean Theorem. Many of the statements just look like someone going to town on the top row of the keyboard. But it's a really powerful little language, and I've been trying to get the hang of it for the past three or four days.

Well, Project Euler's Problem 29 gave me some trouble because I misread it. The question is “How many distinct terms are in the sequence generated by a^b for 2 a 100 and 2 b 100?” See where it bounds a and b at 100? Well, I accidentally did the problem for 2 ≤ a , b ≤ 1000. Doing the problem for 1000 created a whole bunch of rounding errors, because, say 999^1000 is a pretty gigantic number. So I got around this by taking logarithms on one axis, which at the time seemed like a mildly creative way of getting around the problem, though in hindsight it’s the obvious thing to do. I found a second way of checking the answer which also worked nicely. And then I return to the webpage to enter the solution, and find that my bounds were way too high. The real problem was smaller, and when I ran my first line of J code it turns out that I didn't hit any rounding errors after all.

Oh well. The nice thing about math is that when you solve the harder problem, you usually learn enough that it doesn't even feel like a waste of time.