“He, Satan, feels foolish and angry now seeing Mrs. McPherson welcomed with open arms in New York, the city referred to in small citied as the devil’s chief laboratory.“Satan, on his brazen throne, casts a sad eye over his dejected imps, saying to the hideous one with three heads, ‘That McPherson is worse than Billy Sunday.’”
—from the back cover copy of Aimee Semple McPherson’s The Story Of My Life, published in 1927 by Boni & Liveright. Follow at Liveright on Twitter.
The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct. Several European countries and a number of states of the American Union sterilize the criminal and the insane. This is not sufficient. The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.
‘Christian popsicles’ by Sebastian Errazuriz
Seeing Oppenheimer whole is as hard as it gets. Rabi thought the key was that Oppenheimer constantly worked to convince himself and others that he wasn’t really Jewish: it would have been better for him, the confidently Jewish Rabi said, “if he had studied the Talmud rather than Sanskrit … It would have given him a better sense of himself.” Monk agrees that Oppenheimer’s exquisite discomfort in his Jewish skin is a plausible solvent of the apparent tensions and contradictions, but he has several other candidates for seeing coherence. One is a less than whole-hearted suggestion that Hindu spirituality and metaphysics were serious bases for both scientific work and moral postures; another is a well-made case for the depth and pervasiveness of Oppenheimer’s patriotism, his “deep, and sometimes fierce, devotion to his country” – a patriotism which saw America as the unique place where Jews could be free, which informed Oppie’s attachment to communism conceived as a pure form of American egalitarianism, and which may have underpinned his ambivalent love-affair with the military. Monk’s master-story, however, has Oppenheimer striving always to move from the margins of any enterprise in which he was engaged towards somewhere “inside the centre”. But that’s the least persuasive strand in this otherwise superb biography: who doesn’t want to be somewhere near the centre of things?
Cranmer himself was married twice: first as a young scholar, to a woman he was willing to give up his Oxford fellowship to marry. But alas, she died in childbirth, as did their child. Only many years later did Cranmer marry again, and in the turmoils of that time the safety of his wife and children was an ongoing source of anxiety for him: when he saw that he himself was in danger, he had them shipped secretly off to the Continent.In light of Cranmer’s history as a married man, we might note one other small innovation. In medieval liturgies the husband’s vow read as follows: “I [name] take thee [name] to my wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death us depart.” Cranmer added one small phrase, just before the final clause: “to love and to cherish.”
For Augustine, the book’s closedness—that it could be grasped as a totality—was integral to its success in generating transformative reading experiences. Its closedness was the condition of the reader’s conversion. Digital texts, by contrast, are radically open in their networked form. They are marked by a very weak sense of closure. Indeed, it is often hard to know what to call them (e-books, books, texts, or just documents) without any clear sense of the material differences between them.But on another level we could say that digital texts don’t so much cancel the book’s closedness as reinscribe it within themselves. Where books are closed on the outside and open on the inside, digital texts put this relationship in reverse order. The openness of the digital text—that it is hard to know where its contours are—contrasts with a performed inaccessibility that also belongs to the networked text. There is always something “out of touch” about the digital. Consider Kenneth Goldsmith’s online Soliloquy (2001), which was initially published as a printed book consisting of transcripts of his digitally recorded speech over the course of a single week. In the online version, words on the screen only appear when touched by the cursor (the electronic finger) and then only one sentence at a time. Every time we move the cursor to illuminate another sentence, the one before it disappears, just as the one after remains invisible. Like a jellyfish, the textual whole slips through our fingers.
By the way, we’ve always known that my son Matthew has extraordinary hearing. He told me the other day that when we were in France, he took a hearing test at a science museum, and learned that he really can hear far outside the range of normal human hearing. He also said that once, when we lived in Philly, he went around the corner to an old-fashioned record store, and got the man to play a vinyl disc for him. He said he was knocked out by the texture of the sound. He’d never heard anything like that before, having been raised on digital recordings. I told him that I’d stored all my albums almost 20 years ago at a friend’s house here in West Feliciana, because she had a record player and I no longer did. Would he like to go hear them sometime? Yes, he said, that would be great. My 13 year old, in 2012, now wants to hear music in a format that became obsolete in the 1980s, because it sounds so rich and fat to his audiophilic ears. Maybe one day his son will want to know what it feels like to read text on paper, and will ask him to take down from the attic all those “books” he has stored up.
Marianne Moore born today in 1887.
If you come to a parish church in England after the service, what you will see is a (small) crowd of elderly people, middle-aged people and young families, balancing biscuits and cups of coffee in one hand as we do crowd control on the children with the other, and making slightly awkward conversation about the weather, holidays, cricket scores, the news, the progress of flowers and vegetables. We don’t necessarily have very much in common with each other, by all the usual standards. We’re embarrassed, probably. (After all, this is England.) And yet that’s not all that is going on. We’re also celebrating the love-feast. Our hearts are in our eyes as we look at each other. We are engaged in the impossible experiment of trying to see each other the way God sees us. That is, as if we were all precious beyond price, for reasons quite independent of any of the usual cues for attraction we apes jump to recognise: status, charisma, beauty, confidence, wealth, wisdom, authority.It’s an impersonal kind of loving, looked at one way, since it doesn’t ask what we ourselves want or like. Looked at another way, it’s very, very personal indeed, because its focus is all on the other, all on what they’re actually like, not as we can hope to know it, but as a loving sustainer could, who reads them illusionlessly from within, and delights in them anyway. It’s a kind of vision you fall out of again very fast, even with discipline, even with your best try at selfless attention, but something is retained, something in the trick of it is catching and gets laid down as habit. Some ground is gained, somehow. And it’s a mode of pleasure, too. There they are – there we are – to be enjoyed, in a way that overlaps with the way you can enjoy the people in a novel, whether or not they fall comfortably within what you thought, before you started reading, were the natural bounds of your sympathies, your preferences, your interests. Grace makes us better readers of each other. We don’t know, each of us, what the others needed forgiving for, and we never will, but we know they were forgiven, as we were, and for whole moments we manage to see with calm, kind ease. Though we are many, we say, we are one body, because we all share in one bread.
This summer I learned how to get into, well, everything. With two minutes and $4 to spend at a sketchy foreign website, I could report back with your credit card, phone, and Social Security numbers and your home address. Allow me five minutes more and I could be inside your accounts for, say, Amazon, Best Buy, Hulu, Microsoft, and Netflix. With yet 10 more, I could take over your AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon. Give me 20—total—and I own your PayPal. Some of those security holes are plugged now. But not all, and new ones are discovered every day.The common weakness in these hacks is the password. It’s an artifact from a time when our computers were not hyper-connected. Today, nothing you do, no precaution you take, no long or random string of characters can stop a truly dedicated and devious individual from cracking your account. The age of the password has come to an end; we just haven’t realized it yet.