Pocket diary.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

"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)"

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."

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."

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.

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.