Alan Jacobs

For the time present, in case I should be prevented by death to propound and reveal this new light as I purpose, yet I may at the least give some awaking note, both of the wants in man’s present condition, and the nature of the supplies to be wished; though for mine own part neither do I much build upon my present anticipations, neither do I think ourselves yet learned or wise enough to wish reasonably; for as it asks some knowledge to demand a question not impertinent; so it asketh some sense, to make a wish not absurd.

There is enormous cross-cultural variation in the way people behave when they drink alcohol. There are some societies (such as the UK, the US, Australia and parts of Scandinavia) that anthropologists call “ambivalent” drinking-cultures, where drinking is associated with disinhibition, aggression, promiscuity, violence and anti-social behaviour.

There are other societies (such as Latin and Mediterranean cultures in particular, but in fact the vast majority of cultures), where drinking is not associated with these undesirable behaviours - cultures where alcohol is just a morally neutral, normal, integral part of ordinary, everyday life - about on a par with, say, coffee or tea. These are known as “integrated” drinking cultures. This variation cannot be attributed to different levels of consumption - most integrated drinking cultures have significantly higher per-capita alcohol consumption than the ambivalent drinking cultures.

Instead the variation is clearly related to different cultural beliefs about alcohol, different expectations about the effects of alcohol, and different social rules about drunken comportment.

Besides, no argument could ever possibly sway the Oxfordian crowd. They are the prophets of truthiness. “It couldn’t have been Shakespeare,” they say. “How could a semiliterate country boy have composed works of such power?” Their snobbery is the surest sign of their ignorance. Many of the greatest English writers emerged from the middle or lower classes. Dickens worked in a shoe-polish factory as a child. Keats was attacked for belonging to the “cockney school.” Snobbery mingles with paranoia, particularly about the supposedly nefarious intrigues of Shakespeare professors to keep the identity secret. Let me assure everybody that Shakespeare professors are absolutely incapable of operating a conspiracy of any size whatsoever. They can’t agree on who gets which parking spot. That’s what they spend most of their time intriguing about.

The original Oxfordian, the aptly named J. Thomas Looney, who proposed the theory in 1920, believed that Shakespeare’s true identity remained a secret because, he said, “it has been left mainly in the hands of literary men.” In his rejection of expertise, at least, Looney was far ahead of his time. This same antielitism is haunting every large intellectual question today. We hear politicians opine on their theories about climate change and evolution as a way of displaying how little they know. When Rick Perry compared climate-change skeptics like himself to Galileo in a Republican debate, I dearly wished that the next question had been “Can you explain Galileo’s theory of falling bodies?” Of all the candidates with their various rejections of the scientific establishment, how many could name the fundamental laws of thermodynamics that students learn in high school? Healthy skepticism about elites has devolved into an absence of basic literacy.

Mr Gumpy’s Outing is one of my favorite books ever. Here’s a slideshow/interview with the great John Burningham.

So. The love of God teaches us to see; it teaches us to see God in the face of Jesus Christ. It teaches us to see ourselves in the light of that love; it teaches us to see our neighbour as the object of that same love and that is when the whole face of the earth is transfigured and enlightened by the love of God. And that brings me to the first reading that we had this morning; God has saved Noah and his family from the flood and, as they go back to cover the face of the earth afresh, a new light appears in the sky; God sets in heaven the promise that his love will endure. The rainbow in the sky tells us that God has promised not to destroy the earth, tells us that God has promised to be faithful to his own nature.

And so we Christians who seek to make the love of God, let the love of God be real in our lives; we look for signs that remind us; signs of the covenant. We are here this morning to celebrate Holy Communion and through the history of the church, Holy Communion has been seen among many other things, as a sign of God’s promise. When the bread and the wine are lifted up at this table this morning, it is as if there is a rainbow in the sky. Here as the bread and the wine of Christ’s body and blood are shared, here is the promise of God’s faithfulness. Here the face of Jesus is turned towards us once again. Jesus tells us to do this in memory of him. We are to remember who he is and remember what his love is, and if we can speak like this it is as if God, seeing the face of Jesus, remembers who he is. As the Bible sometimes puts it, he remembers, he brings to mind his promises. And so we learn yet again what is the love that has opened our eyes, what is the love that has set us free.

All I can say for sure is that in all my days, I have never seen a more fitting living metaphor for the state of American culture at the present moment than an overgrown California blubberbutt who infantilizes himself, publicly celebrates his bizarro fetish as just another lifestyle option, and threatens to kill himself if his government check stops coming. Baby Stanley, I salute you: you are America!

vimeo.com/30704658

You can divide all soccer players — maybe all athletes — into two groups: the rational and the irrational. Rational players do what they look like they do. They look athletic, and they are athletic. They look balanced, and they are balanced. Ronaldo is a rational player; you could spot him on the beach and think, “Wow, dude looks like he was built to play soccer.” Irrational players come out of nowhere. They don’t instantly look like they’d excel at the sports they excel at, but somehow when they get out on the field/pitch/court, something weird clicks into place and it works. There’s nothing about Messi that says “athlete,” but put him on the pitch and magic just breaks out.

For whatever reason, the best soccer dichotomies usually involve a rational player alongside an irrational player. Pele, who was supremely rational, was always contrasted with Garrincha, who was supremely irrational, and then Maradona, who was 5-foot-5 and cobbled together like a bulldog. Cruyff was a skinny ballerina compared to the powerfully built Beckenbauer. Rational players are easy to admire, but irrational players are easy to love. They seem to need us more, somehow, and their games bring us closer to the miraculous. Not surprisingly, they tend to strike deeper connections with fans. By every measure, Pele was more important to soccer than Maradona, but ask hardcore soccer fans which star they prefer and Maradona wins every time.

Dubai fog

The question that haunts every Dickens biography, Tomalin’s included, is this one: was Dickens an asshole? It’s to Tomalin’s credit that her book only complicates the question, rather than answering it.