Alan Jacobs

The Court of Honor, World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893 (Photograph by C. D. Arnold)

The Franke Reading Room at the Art Institute of Chicago

The CGI in The Magician’s Nephew, as we see it in the trailer, makes the movie look like an ad for Skittles. 

This Leo Robson essay on Ralph Ellison is the single dumbest thing I have ever read in the LRB. Only a radically tone-deaf reader could make an assessment this triumphantly condescending: “Invisible Man, for all its intricacies and coiled ironies, has an element of stridency, and Ellison’s pronouncements leave little room for debate about his views.” Robson clearly thinks he’s much smarter than Ellison, and that arrogance makes him a disastrously bad reader of an endlessly complex book — and an endlessly complex person.  

UPDATE: Coming back to this, I find myself wondering whether Robson grasps the difference between a strident book and a book with strident characters in it. I’ve taught Invisible Man several times over the years, and my most thoughtful and engaged students have had lengthy debates about how we should assess the invisible man’s account of his situation. If Ellison left “little room for debate about his views,” what have my students and I been debating? 

Middlemarch:

Dorothea’s impetuous generosity, which would have leaped at once to the vindication of Lydgate from the suspicion of having accepted money as a bribe, underwent a melancholy check when she came to consider all the circumstances of the case by the light of Mr. Farebrother’s experience.

“It is a delicate matter to touch,” he said. “How can we begin to inquire into it? It must be either publicly by setting the magistrate and coroner to work, or privately by questioning Lydgate. As to the first proceeding there is no solid ground to go upon, else Hawley would have adopted it; and as to opening the subject with Lydgate, I confess I should shrink from it. He would probably take it as a deadly insult. I have more than once experienced the difficulty of speaking to him on personal matters. And — one should know the truth about his conduct beforehand, to feel very confident of a good result.”

“I feel convinced that his conduct has not been guilty: I believe that people are almost always better than their neighbors think they are,” said Dorothea. Some of her intensest experience in the last two years had set her mind strongly in opposition to any unfavorable construction of others; and for the first time she felt rather discontented with Mr. Farebrother. She disliked this cautious weighing of consequences, instead of an ardent faith in efforts of justice and mercy, which would conquer by their emotional force. 

As Dorothea goes on to say, “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?” In fact Lydgate, though guilty of many things (the kinds of things that everyone else in Middlemarch is guilty of), is innocent of what he is suspected of doing. But he cannot prove it, and in Middlemarch one is always guilty except when proved innocent beyond a shadow of a doubt. 

So much of our attention in this book goes to its flawed but lovable chief characters that readers tend to neglect Eliot’s slashing portrait of Middlemarch society as a whole: the town’s people are malicious gossips at best, vicious destroyers of reputations at worst. Even the eminently decent Farebrother turns to “this cautious weighing of consequences” in preference to defending those that Middlemarch has canceled. (He knows the rule: Defend the canceled, get canceled yourself.) By the end of the book, all of the major characters have left Middlemarch, even Fred and Mary, who live well outside of town at Stone Court. It is the nature of Middlemarch to drive all the interesting people away. 

Philip Jenkins:

As I remarked, my current work concerns the development of folk horror, and in that process, the whole Margaret Murray phenomenon is critical. Crucially, the theory (which endured powerfully into the 1970s) allowed modern writers to imagine ancient pagan cults surviving today, and entrapping unwary urban visitors. Whatever he actually intended, Robert Kirk offered a superb manual for such literature, with his entrancing portrait of those fairies in the adjacent realm, into which modern people could easily slip. Adding witchcraft to the mix created a very tempting brew indeed. Kirk offered later writers almost a pre-written script. 

I’m so glad Philip is turning to this — it’s something he’s thought about for years and years. It will be interesting to see how his work compares to that of Francis Young. 

Hi. 

PSA: I will post nothing further about AGI/machine learning. I will read nothing further on the topic (and am purging my RSS feed accordingly). I have other and better things on my mind and heart. 

Ring Rhyme in Latin - by Adam Roberts: “In terra Mordoris tenebrosissima” is especially fine.