Lord Dunsany, from The King of Elfland’s Daughter:
There passed ten years over the fields we know; and Orion grew and learned the art of Oth, and had the cunning of Threl, and knew the woods and the slopes and vales of the downs, as many another boy knows how to multiply figures by other figures or to draw the thoughts from a language not his own and to set them down again in words of his own tongue. And little he knew of the things that ink may do, how it can mark a dead man’s thought for the wonder of later years, and tell of happenings that are gone clean away, and be a voice for us out of the dark of time, and save many a fragile thing from the pounding of heavy ages; or carry to us, over the rolling centuries, even a song from lips long dead on forgotten hills.
My friend and colleague Elizabeth Corey:
If there’s anything that could shake the confidence of the conservative warrior, it might be to consider what he’s sacrificing. I would put the question this way: what have you given up in fighting your political battles, in making your shocking and polemical arguments? Have you been calm and open toward your family, receptive toward the people who live alongside you, devoted to your students? Or has your soul changed, such that you no longer speak to old friends or write them off as traitors? Fighting can corrupt the soul. Nobody can be in Ithaka and Troy at the same time. And while you’re in Troy, Ithaka may well be crumbling — especially if nobody is there to tend it.
My disposition is fundamentally conservative, in that I am grateful for the cultural, spiritual, and artistic inheritance I have received and wish to preserve it, contribute to it, and transmit it to later generations. Even my increasing commitment to anarchism arises from my belief that anarchist practices best enable conservation. And like Elizabeth I lament that so many people nowadays call themselves conservatives when they have absolutely zero interest in conserving anything. They’re all fighting like madmen at Troy and have utterly forgotten Ithaka. It’s war for war’s sake.
This timeline of studio gear is awesome.
This house, designed by Richard Neutra, was destroyed by a hurricane just weeks after its completion in 1938.
Faster is obviously better, he says.
Ethan Iverson’s notes from Albert Murray’s memorial service in 2013. I would give a lot to have been there. Murray is a totemic figure for me, as I explained in this essay.
Chesterton, from Orthodoxy:
Stories of magic alone can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege. I may express this other feeling of cosmic cosiness by allusion to another book always read in boyhood, Robinson Crusoe, which … owes its eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry of limits, nay, even the wild romance of prudence. Crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea: the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck. The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea. It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island. But it is a better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape: everything has been saved from a wreck.
Thomas E. Miles on getting a liberal education in prison:
Brightness dawned over us. Our hearts and minds — our very souls — were bathed in “all the Light” Locke wrote about. It showed, too. It showed in our faces, in our comportment, in our demeanor, in our vocabulary, in our writing. Indeed, it showed in the mirror when we looked at ourselves.
This is why the professors came. They came to shed light on us: light that allowed the discernment of the new, resurrected image of each of us, formed by each new, additional bit of us, placed just so in a mosaic that made us once more visible to others, to one another, to ourselves. We were no longer shadow people, no longer hollow, condemned specters. We became men again. That is the point, and that is why college in prison is worth the bother.
I often wonder how things might have gone for my father, a highly intelligent but self-destructive and immensely cynical man, if an opportunity like this — or, altnernatively, Christian prison ministry — had been available to him when he was imprisoned. (He was a two-time felon.)
Study in blue
If you do not believe that it is possible for someone’s life to be changed by reading and thinking together then I wish you well, but I do not think we are in the same profession and I am not sure we’re on the same side. I can tell you that some years ago now, a young man who was still a convinced atheist read Augustine’s Confessions and found in its pages an account of evil and responsibility that overturned his entire moral picture of the world. That same young man took in Plato and Machiavelli and Hegel and Marx in great gulps the following year and felt like he had fewer and fewer solid places to stand but a much better sense of where he was. He was fortunate enough to know other young men and women who felt the same way around the same time, and their late-night conversations (including several genuine toga-clad symposia) changed how they all saw the world and one another. This story is mine; it also looks a lot like the stories of a lot of people who’ve seen that it’s possible to teach and learn in a way that does not speak to making a living but simply to living.
Generative AI sabotages the proof-of-work function by introducing a category of texts that take more effort to read than they did to write. This dynamic creates an imbalance that’s common to bad etiquette: It asks other people to work harder so one person can work — or think, or care — less. My friend who tutors high-school students sends weekly progress updates to their parents; one parent replied with a 3,000-word email that included section headings, bolded his son’s name each time it appeared, and otherwise bore the hallmarks of ChatGPT. It almost certainly took seconds to generate but minutes to read. As breaches of etiquette go, where this asymmetric email falls is hard to say; I would put it somewhere between telling a pointless story about your childhood and using your phone’s speaker on an airplane. The message it sent, though, was clear: My friend’s client wanted the relational benefits of a substantial reply but didn’t care enough to write one himself.
If Frisbee Dan and Sun God can’t get along, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (2009):
This seemed to be happening more and more lately, out in Greater Los Angeles, among gatherings of carefree youth and happy dopers, where Doc had begun to notice older men, there and not there, rigid, unsmiling, that he knew he’d seen before, not the faces necessarily but a defiant posture, an unwillingness to blur out, like everybody else at the psychedelic events of those days, beyond official envelopes of skin. Like the operatives who’d dragged away Coy Harlingen the other night at that rally at the Century Plaza. Doc knew these people, he’d seen enough of them in the course of business. They went out to collect cash debts, they broke rib cages, they got people fired, they kept an unforgiving eye on anything that might become a threat. If everything in this dream of prerevolution was in fact doomed to end and the faithless money-driven world to reassert its control over all the lives it felt entitled to touch, fondle, and molest, it would be agents like these, dutiful and silent, out doing the shitwork, who’d make it happen.
Was it possible, that at every gathering-concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back East, wherever — those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear?
Shoutout to Waymo for setting such a good example for the rest of us to follow.
Tell you what, a walk along the Austin riverside (especially on the south bank) is always Life’s Rich Pageant.