The Elegant Variation: The John Banville Interview (2005):
TEV: So let's touch on each of [your] books, and perhaps you might share a memory, an impression, a sense of how the title sits in your esteem today.
JB: Well, I hate them all, you realize that? I loathe them.
TEV: All of them?
JB: Yes.
TEV: Because you did say —
JB: They're all a standing embarrassment.
Banville also says about one of his novels, “I don't understand why that book didn't do better. I gave them sex. I gave them violence. What more do they want from me?”
Now consider that Google and other search engines, which are millions of people’s portals to the whole information environment — to the news, to history, to basic facts about the world — are actively working to replace traditional search results, which point to external websites, with AI summaries that the tech companies control. The source for your entire worldview, if they get their way, will be bots with access to the most vulnerable parts of your psyche and the capacity to influence your thinking, without you ever noticing, in directions the owners of the bots control. Even allowing for the fact that most of the puffy narcissists pulling the strings in tech haven’t had a functional master plan since about 1997, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to look at this situation and feel nervous.
All this suggests that there is a chance for a deep reordering of the earth’s power systems, in every sense of the word “power,” offering a plausible check to not only the climate crisis but to autocracy. Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply. The sun and the wind are available everywhere, and they complement each other well; when sunlight diminishes in the northern latitudes at the approach of winter, the winds pick up. This energy is impossible to hoard and difficult to fight wars over. If you’re interested in abundance, the sun beams tens of thousands of times more energy at the earth than we currently need. Paradigm shifts like this don’t come along often: the Industrial Revolution, the computer revolution. But, when they do, they change the world in profound and unpredictable ways.
I would share McKibben’s excitement except for one thing: It’s in the interests of the most powerful people on the planet to make sure this “paradigm shift” doesn’t happen.
My fifth entry on Sayers and Constantine is up. One more to go. However, I have a problem: I recently re-watched Hail, Caesar! and now whenever I read Constantine’s dialogue I hear it in the voice of Baird Whitlock as Autolycus Antoninus.
I believe this is a situation in which the cost of bad advice outweighs the benefit of quick help by 10X, at least. I can, in fact, figure out how to do X using the real docs. Only the doc bot can make things up.
As Kafka says, “A common experience, leading to a common confusion.”
If you’ve ever wondered whether the debate at the Council of Nicaea really mattered, please read my fourth post on Sayers’s play The Emperor Constantine.
I was down at Laity Lodge last week and it rained the whole time I was there, but the Frio Canyon remained and remains safe, even though it’s no more than 20 miles from the Guadalupe. I drove back to Waco in heavy rain, and near Gatesville my car hydroplaned: I slid across the southbound lane — no cars were coming — and crashed sideways into a tree. I was unhurt and, amazingly, I could drive my battered car home. It was a close call and I am a bit shaken, but what happened to me was one of the least serious things that can happen when too much water falls onto bare limestone. I am so grieved for the lost lives — especially the young lives. I don’t know how the families can be comforted, but I pray they will be.
Finished reading: We Don’t Know Ourselves by Fintan O’Toole. A brilliant, fascinating, disturbing book. It’s marred by its relentless Manichaeanism: in O’Toole’s moral world there’s nothing bad to be said about people like him, the “sophisticated” and “cosmopolitan” — words he uses unironically and even uncritically —, and nothing good to be said about Catholicism. But if like O’Toole (who’s my age) I had grown up amidst the spectacular moral corruption of the Irish Church, I would probably feel just as he feels. 📚
Finished reading: Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast by Patrick McGilligan. A fascinating book in many ways but Lang was such a despicable person that I feel I need a palate-cleanser of some kind. 📚
Kieran Healy has just become a citizen of the U.S.A.:
I know the nationalities of my fellow oath-takers because of the next stage of the ceremony. This was the Roll Call of Nations. I did not know this was going to happen. Every country of origin represented was announced in turn. As your country was named, you were asked to stand up, and remain standing. Afghanistan came first. Then Algeria. The last person to stand, immediately to my left, was from the United Kingdom. There were twenty seven countries in all, out of only fifty or so people. For me this part in particular was enormously, irresistibly moving. It perfectly expressed the principle, the claim, the myth — as you please — that America is an idea. That it does not matter where you are from. That, in fact, America will in this moment explicitly and proudly acknowledge the sheer variety of places you are all from. That built in to the heart of the United States is the republican ideal not just that anyone can become an American, but that this possibility is what makes the country what it is.
Randall Jarrell famously defined the novel as “a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.“ My books are prose arguments or expositions of some length that have many things wrong with them. In fact, the wrong things are the only things I remember about my books.
I’m delighted to see this review of Paradise Lost: A Biography — by the great Dana Gioia! Dana is absolutely correct to say that Malcolm X should have been in the book. He’s in my notes… I’m not totally sure how he didn’t make it into the final version.
There are young people spending the most carefree years of their lives mapping themselves out, categorising themselves for companies and advertisers. So much of their thinking is consumed by this. They don’t have memories anymore; only evidence, explanations, timelines of trauma. They don’t have relationships; only attachment figures, caregivers and co-regulators. And I think this is it, the cause of so much misery. We taught a generation that the meaning of life is not found outside in the world but inside their own heads. We underestimate it, this miserable business of understanding ourselves. I feel for the girls forensically analysing their childhoods while they are still in them, cramming their hope and pain and suffering into categories, reducing themselves down to trauma responses. It hurts to see this heartbreaking awareness we have inflicted on a generation, whose only understanding of the world is this militant searching, this reaching around for reasons. God, the life they are missing.
First post of a series on Dorothy L. Sayers, the emperor Constantine, and the Council of Nicaea.
Via Basic Apple Guy. I understand and in some cases approve of Apple’s move away from skeuomorphism, but I also think that every iteration of this icon gets worse. You want icons that communicate their meaning even before they’re consciously “read,” and for me the earlier versions do this better.
