Alan Jacobs

Part of finding your own voice as a writer is finding your own grammar. Don’t spend your career lost in a sea of copycats when you can establish your own set of rules. If everyone’s putting periods at the end of their sentences, put yours in the middle of words. Will it be incredibly difficult to read? Yes it will. Will it set you on the path to becoming a literary pioneer? Tough to say, but you’re kind of out of options at this point.

There’s always an evil person. But that doesn’t mean everyone’s evil. Most governments, even autocratic governments, can be embarrassed.

So, then. Is literature the serious stuff you have to read in college, and after that you read for pleasure, which is guilty?

Mr Krystal doesn’t say this directly. But he says nothing about the non-guilty pleasure that both literary and genre novels can afford. And what he says about genre fiction all fits into the familiar modernist mishmash of Puritanism and reverse snobbery.

I don’t want to join the group still huddled together in a corner of a twentieth-century lunchroom smirking over a copy of Amazing Wonder Tales because it’s “bad,” and flipping off the stuffy teacher who wants us to read A Tale of Two Cities because it’s “good.” I don’t want to be there any more.

First, I’m disappointed that “The Art of Video Games” seems to focus on video games as a phenomenon of the home console or PC to the exclusion of public play. This ignores both the fact that home consoles have historically often served to run low-powered imitations of games designed for public arcades, and the current proliferation of online play. This is especially frustrating when the failure to include some version or acknowledgement of the arcade in the exhibit’s play room seems like such a missed opportunity.

Second, I can’t help coming away with the feeling that an art museum is the wrong venue for an exhibition on video games. Video games have always been so much more than the sum of their hardware and code, and putting them in a museum devoted to the visual arts must necessarily nudge games into occupying the position of being a thing to look at. While, say, a book or a chess set could well merit inclusion in an art museum as an object of physical beauty and artistic design, putting either on a wall or behind glass excludes some fundamental aspect of their artfulness. A book that cannot be read is not literature, and a chess board that is not in use cannot convey the history or beauty of the game of chess at play.

Books have libraries. Chess has clubs, tournaments, and tables set up in parks and other public places all over the world. If we want to get games to be taken more seriously as an art, maybe we need to make our play more visible and accessible, and create spaces where that can happen.

Few students are as frustrating to a teacher as those who are bright, literate, and interested—but who don’t utter a word in class. I was such a student myself.

There are undoubtedly many reasons for muteness. For me, the major factor was background. I grew up in a semiheated trailer in rural southwest Virginia, not benefiting from niceties like dentistry. I was accepted into the University of Virginia no doubt as a gesture toward the rural poor, but I was wildly out of place. I couldn’t dress the way my classmates did, and my cracker accent was embarrassing. I put myself through college, helped by small scholarships but mostly by working construction jobs and (for one year) the 4 a.m. shift in an auto-parts factory.

I felt out of place. I was out of place. I hated people looking at me, and I was sensitive to ridicule. I don’t think fast on my feet, and I was determined not to make a fool of myself. So I didn’t talk in class.

My more conscientious teachers realized from papers and exams that I was in fact not a clueless dolt, and they dragged me into their offices. Some tried to reason with me; some berated me; some issued threats. “If you don’t talk in class, I’ll give you a B, no matter what you get on papers and exams” was the standard line. (Several made good on that threat.) Even the more sympathetic among them urged me to face the facts: Speaking up wasn’t optional.

Individuals don’t transfer values from one generation to the next. Individuals are biologically incapable of producing a next generation except in the crudest possible sense of the term. Socialization—the process through which a person internalizes what is good and bad, meaningful and meaningless—is shaped by one’s relatives, the friends and associates who surround a person, and typically a canon of texts that is revered and consulted for guidance. The values of expressive individualism guarantee that the values of future generations will be more or less up for grabs for the simple reason that expressive individualists have a difficult time replicating (the demographic data don’t lie) and an even more difficult time socializing a child.

It’s true that expressive individualists do connect with one another for varying periods of time and do at least fairly often have children. But the deliberately atomistic quality of their value system makes it difficult for these children to understand, let alone continue, whatever moral traditions their parents may affirm and display. In this respect, today’s expressive individualists bear some comparison to a 19th-century millennial sect called the Harmony Society. Founded in Germany in 1785, the Harmonists were a Protestant community that flourished in Indiana between 1825 and 1850. At the time, its members were known for their social conscience and economic success. Yet these virtues weren’t enough to ensure the sect’s survival for one simple reason: It promoted celibacy. The Harmonists, like today’s expressive individualists, were ethical, hardworking, productive people, but their way of life proved unsustainable because their values failed to foster successor generations.

Kay Ryan’s poetry, and her public – if you can call it that – persona defy almost every stereotype that a reader outside the United States might bring to an American poem. Ryan’s poems are witty, reserved, unprepossessing, impersonal, small-scale, as well as short-lined, practical rather than spiritual, never boastful. Most fit inside the left half of a single page. First-person pronouns are rare, rhymes are dense, puns abound – “A bestiary catalogs / bests” – and each joke opens up to reveal something worrisome about our shared lot: in Bestiary, for example: “The mediocres / both higher and lower / are suppressed in favor / of the singularly savage / or clever”. A chapter of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, entitled Why Americans Writers and Orators are so often Bombastic, is devoted to Americans’ individualism, bordering on self-centredness, and to their religious fervour. By these standards Ryan does not seem very American at all.

paleofuture:

CCTV of the retrofuture

Negative theology is not dressed up Buddhism. It is the necessary anesthesia of Christian theological work - quieting the mind so that God can get on with the surgery of the soul. What theologically inclined folk need most is not the next great book, but someone to tell them that compared to the spiritual life, mastering the most advanced theological concepts, including their Greek, Latin, Syriac or German nuances, is a piece of cake. “Those who have been most enlightened by the Holy Spirit,” writes Thomas Dubay, “are the least inclined to consider this enlightenment easy to come by.”

So let’s just suppose that Alan Turing is just the same personally: he’s a mathematician, an early computer scientist, a metaphysician, a war hero — but he’s German. He’s not British. Instead of being the Bletchley Park code breaker, he’s the German code maker. He’s Alan Turingstein, and he realizes the Enigma Machine has a flaw. So, he imagines, designs and builds a digital communication code system for the Nazis. He defeats the British code breakers. In fact, he’s so brilliant that he breaks some of the British codes instead. Therefore, the second World War lasts until the Americans drop their nuclear bomb on Europe.

I think you’ll agree this counter-history is plausible, because so many of Turing’s science problems were German — the famous “ending problem” of computability was German. The Goedel incompleteness theorem was German, or at least Austrian. The world’s first functional Turing-complete computer, the Konrad Zuse Z3, was operational in May 1941 and was supported by the Nazi government.

So then imagine Alan Turingstein, mathematics genius, computer pioneer, and Nazi code expert. After the war, he messes around in the German electronics industry in some inconclusive way, and then he commits suicide in some obscure morals scandal. What would we think of Alan Turingstein today, on his centenary? I doubt we’d be celebrating him, and secretly telling ourselves that we’re just like him.

On the contrary, we’d consider him a sinister figure, somebody to be whispered about. He’d be a spooky, creepy villain, a weird eccentric with ragged fingernails and pants held up with twine. He would show up in World War II historical novels as a scary fringe character. As for the famous Turingstein Test, which I’m about to discuss at length, we wouldn’t see that as a fun metaphysical thought experiment. Those interesting ideas would also bear the taint of Nazi culture, and we’d probably consider the Turing Test some kind of torture chamber for intelligent machines.