Vibrant.

Thomas Frank tackles vibrancy:

Every city is either vibrant these days or is working on a plan to attain vibrancy soon. The reason is simple: a city isn’t successful— isn’t even a city, really—unless it can lay claim to being “vibrant.” Vibrancy is so universally desirable, so totemic in its powers, that even though we aren’t sure what the word means, we know the quality it designates must be cultivated. The vibrant, we believe, is what makes certain cities flourish. The absence of vibrancy, by contrast, is what allows the diseases of depopulation and blight to set in.

This formulation sounded ridiculous to me when I first encountered it. Whatever the word meant, “vibrancy” was surely an outcome of civic prosperity, not its cause. Putting it the other way round was like reasoning that, since sidewalks get wet when it rains, we can encourage rainfall by wetting the sidewalks. But to others, the vibrancy mantra is profoundly persuasive. [...] Specifically, vibrancy transforms communities by making them more prosperous.

-Thomas Frank, "Dead End on Shakin' Street"

Some thoughts:

1. Well, now that I've read this, "vibrant" has gone into the category with "quirky" as words I can only use with implicit reference to marketing campaigns.
2. This is of course an attack on city- and corporation-subsidized vibrancy, not actual urban life. Baltimore has a big foundation-funded street fair called Artscape ("America's largest free arts festival," whatever that means). For five years or so, a local artists' collective ran an independent DIY festival called Whartscape as explicit counterprogramming. It's the nation's Artscapes that are under consideration, not our Whartscapes.
3. How much money is actually going towards vibrancy efforts? Frank talks about "blowing millions setting up gallery districts and street fairs": at a representative event, where does the money come from? How much does the Station North Arts District in Baltimore actually cost the city? Probably the answer varies a bit from city to city.
4. Even if vibrancy as a whole can't be measured, particular events are perfect fodder for pie charts and presentations. It's way easier to report "we got two new galleries" or "festival attendence was up 11%" than it is to tackle the problem of public schools or build consensus for a bigger policy change. Which doesn't excuse going for the easy path.
5. If foundations are trying to solicit donations from corporations and rich businesspeople, wouldn't you expect them to lean pretty hard on the idea of attracting a big base of yuppies for corporations to hire? Whereas if in practice a lot of money gets put toward smaller-scale community efforts, they wouldn't make that the main part of the pitch, would they? It'd help to see some numbers on where arts funding goes.
6. Throughout the article there's an assumption that cities are using vibrancy efforts to compete with each other. What if they're actually trying to compete with their own suburbs?

Too good for Twitter.

I know I'm going to want to remember the wording of this at some point in the future and I'll never recover it from Twitter:

christ, weakened by scandal and floundering in the political fight of his life, ignores advisors' advice and plays the grace card

-@markleidner

Mark Leidner, if you're wondering, is a poet who's written, among other things, a great little book of aphorisms. I'm not sure if he's just after the "grace" pun or means something more serious. That dissonance of meaning is probably the point, but what do I know.

Progress.

Pritcher had watched the phenomenon of Lens Image expansion before but he still caught his breath. It was like being at the visiplate of a spaceship storming through a horribly crowded Galaxy without entering hyperspace. The stars diverged towards them from a common center, flared outwards and tumbled off the edge of the screen. Single points became double, then globular. Hazy patches dissolved into myriad points. And always the illusion of motion.

-from Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov

There's nothing like old science fiction to make you feel like you're living in the future. Here, Asimov has a character in the far, far future be unnerved by what's basically that old Windows starfield screensaver.

Transcendental Youth news.

I've been failing to bother people with excessive Mountain Goats posting. That used to be a big part of this blog, and now all I can do is collect a few things related to the forthcoming album.

As the Convergence of All that I Love* continues, John Hodgman's written an appreciation of the Mountain Goats as part of the Transcendental Youth album press release. In part:

These are the consolations; and if some of his songs suggest that there are real hells on earth, other songs remind that the heavens are equally close at hand. 

(Sometimes they are even the same songs.) 

It is my impression that this is the ecstasy John Darnielle is feeling: that thrill of having survived, escaped for even a second to enjoy those small transcendent delights, and to sing of them.

And then there's a new single, "Cry for Judas":
The Mountain Goats - Cry for Judas by MergeRecords

UPDATE: Horn arrangements are by Matthew E. White, whose music, it turns out, is ear-grabbing:
Matthew E. White "One of These Days" by Matthew E. White

*Superchunk, the Mountain Goats, and John Hodgman all used to be separate pop-culture obsessions for me. But then the Mountain Goats hired Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster, and soon enough Mountain Goats singer John Darnielle was appearing on Superchunk albums and releasing records on Superchunk singer Mac MacCaughan's record label. As these three merge (so to speak) into a single entity, I'm finding you can get to most of the other things I dig in just two or three steps.

Batman.

If you want a good perspective on Christopher Nolan as a filmmaker, read Richard Brody's review of The Dark Knight Rises:

Nolan doesn’t hang dollar signs on his screen; he’s not looking to impress viewers with the colossal scale of his project, but, rather, with his own grim and relentless labors. “The Dark Knight Rises” is not a movie of conspicuous consumption but of conspicuous production, with Nolan himself playing the unfortunate Atlas who bears a cinematic world of dour doings on his lonely shoulders, all the while needing viewers to know how hard he’s working for them. The problem with the movie isn’t any lack of warmth or humanity (qualities that don’t need to be displayed because they’re often effectively evoked through cold and inhuman means) but a lack of wonder. Nolan never seems to surprise himself, and his own inventions have little inspiration but, rather, a sense of a problem solved.

But for the sake of the kid that read the whole Knightfall series over a series of summer Saturdays spent not buying anything in Borders, I'll say I enjoyed the way they handled Bane in this movie.

But, hey, everybody's got a review of this movie. I've got a theory about Christopher Nolan's artistic past and future. Inception was a movie about making movies, right? What if we read Nolan's whole career this way? Here's what I'm thinking:

• At some point in the hazy past, the Nolan brothers wrote a script for a romantic comedy. It would have been their All the Real Girls. It would have summed up all their hopes, dreams, and joys. The writing retreat was perfect, idyllic even. They were sure that this would be their classic.
• Something went wrong. Perhaps a professor critically eviscerated the screenplay in cold blood, or perhaps it was just a tragic accident. Or maybe it turns out that Christopher Nolan DESTROYED IT HIMSELF AND CAN'T EVEN REMEMBER.
• The Nolans, tormented by the loss of the screenplay, turned their anguish towards the obsessive creation of clockwork thrillers about obsessive men trying to solve the problem of the past by mastering some dark technique.
• However, several years ago, Christopher Nolan found a new idea for a screenplay. Perhaps it's not the story of young love he wrote and lost as a young man. But it involves children somehow. He wants to write a movie about parenthood. (We see the first hints of this turn in The Prestige, where one of the men obsessed by his craft far beyond the point of reason has a child and thereby gets a little perspective on life.)
• But he's in too deep with the studios. They won't let him get out. Desperately, he takes on one last big-budget blockbuster. This one's the toughest of all. He puts together the best team he's got, but there's just not enough time. The script doesn't make any sense. They improvise. They have to. Because if they can just make a gazillion dollars for Warner Brothers, Christopher Nolan can go free.

So that's the coded message here. Nolan, like Bruce Wayne, needs to put the thriller business behind him. The question is, what kind of movie is he going to make next?

My money's on a comedy about two zany suburban couples each trying to secure their respective toddlers a spot in an elite preschool, starring Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Scarlett Johanson, and featuring Michael Caine as the quirky headmaster. But there's also some chance it's a story that follows a married couple (Christian Bale and Marion Cotillard) for two decades as they raise a family in a weird composite of Chicago and London, featuring Michael Caine as the husband's dad or publisher. The possibilities are endless, but the actors are few.

Two reviews.

No doubt faithful readers noticed that I abandoned this poor blog for Twitter. But if there are dark days ahead for Twitter, maybe I should take a look back at ol' Blogspot.

Anyways, since it's nice to have links that stay up at the top of the page a little longer and are properly archived, here are two reviews I've recently written:

• Review of The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, for Fare Forward - My friend Peter's starting a Christian review of ideas, aimed at millenials, and he asked me to review this book for the first issue. (My favorite essay from the issue, by the way, is Margaret Blume's "Beauty and the Beast.") I think that if I ever review another novel, I need to do more to preserve my first reactions. By the time I started writing this particular short review, I'd read the book three times and had lost all sense of perspective. But I think the space constraints kept me from messing it up too badly.
• Review of Precious Remedies against Satan's Devices, by The Welcome Wagon, for Mockingbird -  I got to see The Welcome Wagon's CD release show in Brooklyn, and enjoyed it quite a bit. Spent a few e-mail paragraphs dissecting the songs with friends, and so I had some ideas rattling around in my head. Then, when I was down in Charlottesville catching up with DZ from Mockingbird, he was interested in a record review, so it worked out nicely. I'm happy with this one. I usually try to keep my guard up about day-to-day faith when I'm writing online, aiming instead for the objective tone, but I didn't worry about that so much here.

I'm working on another book review, and if it gets published I'll post about that one as well.

Controvers scriptores.

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.

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:

1. 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
2. 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.
3. 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.

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?

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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:

1. I have to manage that story carefully and make all sorts of constant little decisions about what I'm telling people.
2. 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.

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.

"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.

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]