Whether or not one enjoys listening to the music of George Crumb, his scores are fabulous fun to read. β«Β
SO much great stuff in this year-end edition of Robin Sloan’s newsletter β and not just, or even primarily, because he links to a few things of mine. Though I will admit that when I posted the one he calls “a scintillating multimedia post that is, honestly, the most ‘hypertext’ thing Iβve seen in years” I thought: “If Robin doesn’t like this nobody will.”
The empire of money, war, and fire
cuts across the land.There are in the same country
shepherds watching their flocks.
One of the longstanding Christmas campaigns of my childhood was to forbid any reference to βXmas.β Anyone attempting to remove Christ from Christmas was surely of the devil. And yet, Xmas comes from the Greek letter chi (X) which happens to be the first letter of Christos (Ξ§ΟΞΉΟΟΟΟ), meaning βChrist.β It turns out that Xmas is a way of honoring Jesus, not extracting him. Furthermore, doesnβt the letter βXβ resemble something else? What if itβs a cross? Even if by accident, all signs point to Jesus.
I joined The Rest Is History Club four years ago, when the podcast was just a baby, a largely neglected, marginal baby β and now TRIH is the Apple Podcasts Show of the Year. I’m so proud.
The idea for the song had been with Berlin for years, and he knew that the finished work was momentous. He told his assistant that “White Christmas” was the best song he had ever written, possibly the best song anyone had ever written. Yet not even he gauged its full potential, its emotional resonance. Berlin received little encouragement from Sandrich and Paramount executives who heard him audition the score in September (when Bing was in Buenos Aires). They shrugged. They figured the score’s hit would be the Valentine’s Day ballad, “Be Careful, It’s My Heart.”
Crosby admired it from the start, a sanction for which Berlin remained grateful, often repeating the story of the day he auditioned the songs to get Bing’s okay. “I was nervous as a rabbit smelling stew. I sang several melodies, and Bing nodded quiet approval. But when I did ‘White Christmas,’ he came to life and said, ‘Irving, you won’t have to worry about that one.'”
One of the earliest surviving depictions of the Nativity in art, in the Byzantine Museum in Athens, depicts Jesus lying in a manger with the ox and ass and omits any other human figures at all (in fact, there are several early depictions of the infant Christ like this). Christ is here the unmediated Lord of animals, who recognise and adore him. It is easy for us, in a culture that takes a very low view of animals, to dismiss the role of the animals in the Nativity story as sentimental pap; but animals in the Bible are repeatedly endowed with agency.... From Balaamβs ass to the penalties for βcriminalβ animals laid down in Numbers and Leviticus, the ancient Hebrews clearly did not have a view of animals that sharply divided them from humans in the way we are inclined to do.Β
Biblical, medieval and folkloric views of animals are challenging to us because, under the influence of the mechanical philosophies of the 17th century and the Theory of Evolution in the 19th century we have convinced ourselves that humans and animals are unbridgeably different in kind. People in the more distant past did not see things this way; animals to them were far closer to being persons than they were to being automata. We have travelled so far in the other direction that any treatment of animals as persons, any suggestion that they too might reverence the Creator, takes on the status of sentimental anthropomorphisation in our culture. We see a depiction of animals kneeling at the crib or the repentance of the Wolf of Gubbio, and our minds leap to Disneyesque talking animals and childish fantasies. But people in ancient Israel and medieval Europe took completely seriously the idea that animals could be held responsible for their actions (at least to some extent) and that they had a duty of reverence to their Creator.
If you know how I adore Ella, then you’ll also know that when I say that this is one of her very greatest vocal performances, I am saying a lot. (Terrific orchestral arrangement also.)
Just one brief note on this viral essay about the shrinking opportunities for younger white men in many professional fields: the category “white” is a notoriously slippery one, but roughly speaking, 30% of Americans are white men. If you keep that in mind, you’ll see that some of the statistics in the essay are considerably more noteworthy than others.
Answerability Without Alibi β a message to my Buy Me a Coffee supporters.
Mark Hurst: 2025 showed why to get off Big Tech. Co-sign.Β
[George] Herbert desires to comprehend the infinity and timelessness of God in a finite and temporal world. His poetry is a record of a striving after glimpses of the divine in the human sphere. No difficult question is avoided, no agony of mind is shirked, and his work documents every turn of thought and feeling, from exaltation and a sense of union, to anxiety, doubt, despair, revival and eventual resurrection. Despite the complexity of this pursuit, it is chronicled in language of startling clarity. Herbert is an outstanding example from the Anglican tradition of the fact that one can convey the authentic struggle of heart and mind for the presence of God in simple dress, without having to resort to the idiom of the primary school.
I wrote about reconsidering my dependence on Apple.