Alan Jacobs

Charlie Kaufman and Dan Harmon (the creator of NBC’s show Community) have set a record for fundraising on Kickstarter. By that, I don’t mean that these relatively wealthy people have donated money to some worthy project by a bunch of idealistic kids. No, instead 5,770 supporters have given them nearly $406,237. The idealistic kids are funding the Establishment now.

I’m sure Harmon and company can put together a nice stop-motion film. But could they really find no one in Hollywood willing to part with $500,000?

This happens over and over again on the internet. Twitter was announced with a lot of hot hair about how both you and Lady Gaga are limited to 140 characters. And sure, a few people have become notorious on Twitter. But Lady Gaga has over 29 million followers. Even some of the most famous-for-Twitter properties are nowhere near that. @ShitMyDadSays has just over 3 million followers.

I’m glad for the internet. But it isn’t ushering in some new era of meritocracy. The easiest way to go viral now is no different than it was in the 1950s: have a hit on television or radio.

[The Smiths’] career prospects were always held in check by a problem that grew worse as their success increased: Morrissey’s refusal to employ a manager or submit to the standard promotional grind, both of which were at odds with his almost pathological griping about chart positions, radio play and the esteem in which they were or were not held by their record company, Rough Trade.

As he seemed to see it, if the Smiths were commercial underachievers, it was always someone else’s fault – but if you refuse to make videos, blow out TV appearances at a moment’s notice and cancel European tours in the airport departure lounge, then “the margins” are something you will never quite escape. Moreover, without a big figure to oversee the business side of their lives, any comparable group would have probably buckled, something beautifully captured in one Marr quote: “I’ve never met anyone who thinks that the 23-year-old guitar player of a really big band should be the manager.”

We may swear simply because it makes us feel better. In a 2011 study led by Keele University’s Richard Stephens, researchers measured how long participants would keep a hand in a container of freezing water. On one trial, participants repeated a swear word of their choice. On another trial, the same participants immersed their hand without cursing. (Sometimes the no-cursing trial occurred first, sometimes second). When cursing, participants’ heart rates increased, as did the amount of time they were capable of withstanding the freezing water—from about a minute to a minute and a half. But the swearing-as-painkiller method, though intriguing, becomes less effective with repeated use: this “swearing benefit” is largest for those who swear least.

Since his death, there seems to be an emerging interest in Wallace’s religious views, and to cast him as more religious and spiritual than he was. What do you make of that?

Eric Been, speaking to David Foster Wallace’s biographer D. T. Max. Note the simple assumption that anyone who takes Wallace’s religious history more seriously than Max does is “cast[ing] him as more religious and spiritual than he was.” The possibility that Max might have underrated or misunderstood the place of religion in Walace’s life is not even considered. But it ought to be considered:

• People who knew Wallace when he lived in Bloomington, Illinois say that he was a regular church-attender. Max does not mention this anywhere in his big book. He does quote at one time a memo Wallace wrote to himself in which he outlines the ideal structure for his week, concluding it with “Church,” but it apparently does not occur to Max even to ask whether that item is on the list for a serious reason.

• Wallace frequently said that C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters was either one of his favorite books or his absolute favorite. Max does not mention this. One might think that a biography of a writer would note a book that that writer had made a point of announcing his affection for, but no.

• Max tells us that one of Wallace’s early AA sponsors taught him the prayer of St. Francis “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.” Much later in the book he mentions, quite in passing, that Wallace made a point of pinning a copy of that prayer to a wall of his house, along with certain other documents that were especially important to him. But Max sees no significance in this act.

I could go on. There are many such examples. Nota bene: I do not think that Wallace would have described himself as a Christian; I do not think it likely that he was a Christian. But it is possible that he was, and engagement with Christianity (and with religion more generally) obviously played a far larger role in Wallace’s life than Max is prepared to admit. The parts of his work where he does so directly — for instance, the asterisked passages in his long essay on Dostoevsky — go unmentioned by Max. There is no doubt that in these matters Christians see what they want to see; there is equally no doubt that D. T. Max manages to avoid seeing what he doesn’t want to see.

For most of us, being hit by lightning and kicked out of the circus would be an extraordinary turn of events. For [Edward Payson] Weston, it was a pretty typical week. Weston, whose story is recounted in the spectacularly entertaining book A Man in a Hurry, by the British trio of Nick Harris, Helen Harris, and Paul Marshall, lived one of those fevered American lives that seem to hurtle from one beautiful strangeness to the next. By his mid-teens, he had already: worked on a steamship; sold newspapers on the Boston, Providence, and Stonington Railroad; spent a year crisscrossing the country with the most famous traveling musicians in America, the Hutchinson Family Singers, selling candy and songbooks at their concerts; and gone into business for himself as a journalist and publisher. In his 20s and 30s, he somehow became one of the most celebrated athletes in the English-speaking world despite the fact that he was physically unprepossessing — 5-foot-7, 130 pounds, with a body resembling “a baked potato stuck with two toothpicks,” as one journalist wrote — and that his one athletic talent was walking. Just straight-up walking made Weston, for a while, probably the biggest sports star on earth.

Experimental course • ENGL 380

How is the rise of digital technologies changing some of the fundamental practices of the intellectual life: reading, writing, and researching? How does writing on a computer differ from writing on a typewriter, or (still more) writing by hand? Have we lost anything by doing our research primarily by running online searches, as opposed to plowing through card catalogues and browsing shelved items? Is the experience of reading on a Kindle or Nook significantly different from that of reading a paper codex? Moreover, how are these changes affecting the intellectual culture and communal practices of the Church?

We will explore these questions through using a range of digital tools — blogs, wikis, Twitter, Zotero, etc. — and through an extensive set of readings, including essays or books by Marahall McLuhan, Walter Ong, N. Katherine Hayles, Cathy Davidson, Nicholas Carr, James Gleick, Friedrich Kittler, and others.

Please consider joining me for a course that will help you grapple seriously with the technologies that are changing your life and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

(Friends: email me or tweet with suggested readings, etc.)

The other thing for which I am grateful to philosophy is that, at least in the world in which I first sought to make a name for myself, one was required to write clearly, concisely, and logically. Wittgenstein said that whatever can be said can be said clearly, and that became something of a mantra for my generation. At one time, the British journal Analysis sponsored regular competitions: some senior philosopher propounded a problem, which one was required to solve in 600 words or less, the winner receiving as a prize a year’s subscription to the magazine. Here is an example of the kind of problem, propounded by J. L. Austin, that engaged Analysis’s subscribers: “What kind of ‘if ’ is the ‘if ’ in ‘I can if I choose?’ ” (Hint: it cannot be the truth-conditional “if ” of material implication, as in, “If p, then q.”)

I tried answering all the problems, and never won a prize. But the exercise taught me how to write. The great virtues of clarity, concision, and coherence, insisted upon throughout the Anglo-American philosophical community, have immunized the profession against the stylistic barbarity of Continental philosophy, which, taken up as it has been since the early 1970s by the humanistic disciplines—by literary theory, anthropology, art history, and many others—has had a disastrous effect, especially on academic culture, severely limiting the ability of those with advanced education to contribute to the intellectual needs of our society. It is true that analytical philosophers, reinforced by the demands of their profession to work within their constricting horizons, have not directly served society by applying their tools to the densely knotted problems of men, to use Dewey’s term for where the energies of philosophy should be directed. At one point it became recognized that “clarity is not enough.” It is not enough. But the fact that it remains a stylistic imperative in most Anglo-American philosophy departments means that these virtues are being kept alive against the time when the humanities need to recover them.

[This] is our movement. We will not consider you a part of it, we will not work with you, we will not befriend you. We will heretofore denounce you as the irrational or immoral scum you are (if such you are). If you reject these values, then you are no longer one of us. And we will now say so, publicly and repeatedly. You are hereby disowned.

The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully. Illustration:

A brune figure in winter evening resists
Identity. The thing he carries resists

The most necessitous sense. Accept them, then,
As secondary (parts not quite perceived

Of the obvious whole, uncertain particles
Of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt,

Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow
Out of a storm we must endure all night,

Out of a storm of secondary things),
A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real.

We must endure our thoughts all night, until
The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

So decrepit and so abused is the language of the Judeo-Christian religions that it takes an effort to salvage them, the very words, from the husks and barnacles of meaning which have encrusted them over the centuries. Or else words can become slick as coins worn thin by usage and so devalued. One of the tasks of the saint is to renew language, to sing a new song. The novelist, no saint, has a humbler task. He must use every ounce of skill, cunning, humor, even irony, to deliver religion from the merely edifying.