All
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.
I understand that many people work in soul-sucking corporate jobs that remind you of the uselessness of your efforts while keeping you shackled to doing them. And that sucks. But that’s a symptom of a much larger toxicity within late capitalism, and I can assure you that figuring out how to just do nothing is not going to fix your feelings of purposelessness and malaise. Indeed, many people find that they achieve escape from the drudgery of contemporary white collar existence through finding avenues to actually work in more intuitively meaningful and purposeful ways. Sometimes that means leaving their actual jobs for other types of employment that are more tangible and satisfying, oftentimes at the expense of making less. For others, this means embracing hobbies enjoyed in their off-hours that look an awful lot like jobs — building things, crafting things, fixing things. People get through “work” to then go engage in activities that many human beings once regarded as enervating labor. We’re a funny species like that. And yet alongside this persistent human attachment to various forms of effort and creation that sure do resemble an unpaid job, you have this seemingly limitless ambient sense that all forms of effort are best avoided, that if you can find a way to fob work off on someone (or some algorithm) else, you should, that we are all looking to find more time in which to be in a state of total leisure. But leisure is only really satisfying when it exists in contrast with purposeful effort.
A couple of years ago I wrote something along these lines.
I’m conscious of the fact that it is, in some sense, stupid of me not to be on Substack. At the very least, I could be sending my newsletter for free, instead of paying a hundred bucks a month! Yet I suppose I think it’s the stupid choices that are the important ones. And I suppose I think the standard for art is that it doesn’t just play the game, but invents it. On an internet crowded with creators climbing over each other to obey each platform’s demands, follow its Best Practices (which harden into mandatory genres: quick-setting concrete), there is, I believe, an incandescence to stubborn specificity.
Everything in this post could’ve been siphoned straight from my brain. This is exactly why I’m on the open web rather than on a platform that, while increasingly prominent, is also increasingly enshittified.
“Far Away Blues” (1923):
We left our southern home and wandered north to roam
Like birds, went seekin’ a brand new field of corn
We don’t know why we’re here
But we’re up here just the same
And we are just the lonesomest girls that’s ever born
How Does God Say “I Love You”? - Mockingbird:
But the word that shows our need is also the word that loves us in and overcomes our need. The answer to the anguished “Who will deliver me?” is the merciful surprise of grace: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord… There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” This is the well that washes, the word that gives the crucified and risen Jesus and thereby does the divine work that raises the dead, forgives the sinner, and finally says to the fearful and lonely, “You are my beloved child.”
This is my friend Jono Linebaugh talking about his The Well That Washes What It Shows: An Invitation to Holy Scripture. It’s a superb book, especially for people who are new, or relatively new, to the Bible. It’s full of hope.
16 June 1939 the Daily Telegraph ran the following news story:
Village children at Hurst House School, Staplehurst, Kent, are being given regular television lessons in school. Nearly all the children come from nearby farms.
Citizenship and ‘general knowledge’ are taught through the study of news reels and the televising of events like Trooping the Colour and the departure of the King and Queen for Canada
The television lessons have been started by the headmaster, Mr H. Farrington, who says that television and the informal talks that follow the programme are probably of more real educative value to the children than most lessons given in class.
And so it begins.
As if all of this hassle wasn’t enough, consider the fact that you have to tend the turntable like a fire, flipping and adding logs as needed. And that’s where all of this inconvenience pays off. Like a fire, those records keep you company, asking for nothing but a little reciprocity and attention in return for sharing their warmth. It’s not something unfair and it’s not something unreasonable. They just ask you to care.
My phone asks me to turn on notifications. It also asks me to share my location data, install updates, and rate my in-app experiences. Sometimes scrolling on it literally makes me car sick but it keeps asking me to scroll, ignorant of my displeasure.
Smartphone life makes me miss the good old days when everything was a little more scarce and a little more meaningful. We missed our friends when we didn’t know what they were up to every second. We looked forward to taking girls on dates instead of staring at strangers on Onlyfans. Going to the video store to rent a few movies was an event in and of itself. What could feel more like the good old days than sitting next to the fire, cell phone on silent in another room, while enjoying the annoying crackle of remnant dust stuck in the supposedly ultrasonically cleaned grooves of a used Tal Farlow record?
Via Robin Sloan.
Beautiful engravings by Rachel Reckitt, for a never-published edition of The Mill on the Floss.
I wrote about The Devils’ Citadel (focusing largely on Humphrey Jennings), and now here’s The Devils’ Citadel Extended (focusing largely on John Ruskin).
A useful mental exercise: when people say “AI isn’t going anywhere” or “AI is here to stay,” substitute for “AI” the word “cancer.” A great many things that are here to stay are really bad and should be resisted as energetically as possible. Maybe AI isn't as bad as many fear. But the not-going-anywhere assertion is a way to avoid asking the key questions.
UPDATE: Just after posting this, I saw a review by Brad East of a new book celebrating online worship, and what does the author of the book say? “Church online is here to stay.” Of course he does. But this is even less defensible than “AI is here to stay,” because while it would be very difficult if not impossible to shut down the AI companies, any church can stop offering online worship at any time.
Note that I am not saying that online services are bad. My own parish church offers many online services, and I am not (yet) convinced that it’s as bad a thing as Brad says it is. (But “almost thou persuadest me….”) I am just decrying an all-too-common rhetoric that tries to invoke inevitability as a way of foreclosing debate before it gets started.
Whether on Twitter or Bluesky, nobody learns anything.
It’s an odd thing to say about the figure of Jesus in the Gospels, but I’ve always been struck by it — from time to time there’s a deep impatience in Jesus: How can I make this clear to you? You’re an unfaithful generation. He bursts out in exasperation at the disciples. Do you understand nothing? Even in exasperation of the crowds. Jesus said: You’re all looking for miracles.
In a strange way, I feel that’s a rather compelling aspect of the story of Jesus. There’s more going on in him than he can express, and sometimes it kind of bursts out. And when I think of what the divinity of Jesus means in that context, one of the signs of it is that feeling he’s got more to say than human language can carry. As he says in St. John’s Gospel, “I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”
And it’s almost as if Jesus goes to the cross saying: The only way of telling you what the love of God is like is to absorb this monumental violent injustice and show you that God is not crushed by it.
The whole conversation (with Pete Wehner) is fantastic.
Terry Eagleton's tribute to Alasdair MacIntyre is the best I've read so far:
All this makes MacIntyre one of the great moral philosophers of the 20th century. He was a radical Scottish puritan, austere and high-minded, who ended up supporting the revival of monasticism and switched his sympathies from the Bolsheviks to St Benedict. His dissent from the priorities of the modern age took an incongruous variety of forms but remained wholly self-consistent. If he turned back to Aristotle and Aquinas, it was in order to move beyond what he saw as the scepticism and subjectivism of the present. His work showed up the limits of rationalism, but was deeply averse to the irrational. It could win praise from both Leftists and conservatives, but gave no comfort to neoliberalism. MacIntyre refused to subscribe to the view that the individual was at the centre of the universe; that reason is timeless and independent of practical social life; and that relations are primarily contractual and actions chiefly instrumental. In contrast with a mean-spirited utilitarianism, he saw society not as a means of individual self-promotion but as a good in itself. He was interested in practices like playing chess or writing poetry whose goods, as he would say, were “internal” to themselves rather than external goals to be pursued.
When Busman’s Honeymoon, the play co-written by Sayers and Muriel St Clare Byrne, opened in London it did so at the Comedy Theatre … which reminds me that decades later that venue would stage many Harold Pinter plays, and Pinter became its major patron. After a while he started hinting that the place should change its name to the Pinter Theatre. When management resisted, Tom Stoppard wrote to Pinter with a suggestion for resolving the impasse: “Have you considered changing your name to Harold Comedy?” (Lo and behold, the name was changed to the Harold Pinter Theatre, but only after the poor man’s death.)
Sometime in September 1935 Sayers finished Gaudy Night and sent it to her publisher, Gollancz. Victor Gollancz wired Sayers on 26 September to say that he very much liked the book. It was immediately copyedited, typeset, and printed, and hit the bookstores on 4 November. To any writer today that sounds impossible: Surely it was published in November 1936?? Nope: it went from submission to publication in little over a month.
In late 1936 the publishers Hodder & Stoughton asked Dorothy L. Sayers to complete the novel Dickens left unfinished at his death, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Sayers firmly declined, saying “nothing could induce” her to try that. But of the many people who have completed the novel, none of them were as well-suited to the task she she was. I regret her decision.
My dear mother-in-law, Margaret Collins, is one hundred and one years old. Here’s the email she just sent me — the general context being my wife Teri’s frequent visits home to Alabama to help her brother and sister-in-law care for her mother:
Dear Alan,
We are looking forward to seeing you and Wesley next week. Maybe we'll have some dry weather by then. Teri said you had rain there, which I hear is prized in Waco.
Alan, for some time I have wanted to tell you how much I have appreciated your being so gracious and generous concerning Teri's visits. She is such a joy and very helpful. It gives Lynn and Anne a little break from the care of this old lady, too.
I am so proud of you and your many accomplishments. You don't just have them handed to you — it takes much hard work and “staying the course.” I believe your best days are still ahead.
May God bless, guide and reveal His love for you in all the years ahead.
I love you and keep you in my prayers,
Mama C
Is that not adorable? I’ve written in the past about being welcomed into the Collins family.