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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.