Alan Jacobs

It looks, said Srivastava, as if ‘what is happening in America is a loss of self-confidence. We don’t want America to lose self-confidence. Who else is there to take over America’s moral leadership? American’s leadership was never because you had more arms. It was because of ideas, imagination, and meritocracy.’ If America turns away from its core values, he added, 'there is nobody else to take that leadership. Do we want China as the world’s moral leader? No. We desperately want America to succeed.’

Ideology is one thing. But if the tea-partiers do well next week, especially if the Republicans capture the House, they need to move past ideology into the realm of practical policy. This means having something serious to say about how actually to bring spending under control. To date, they have preferred breezy slogans. Will they cut into pensions and Medicare, and if so how? Will they accept that taming the deficit will require hikes in taxes as well as cuts in spending? Will they continue to oppose reflexively every measure of a Democratic administration, or have the courage to share responsibility for the painful decisions the times demand? It has been all too easy from the outside to conjure up a mythic America of limited government, sing hymns to the constitution and denounce the federal bureaucracy in all its forms. Once they are in government themselves, that gig will be over.

oldhollywood:

“It was on purpose that I started looking miserable, humiliated, hounded, and haunted, bedeviled, bewildered, and at my wit’s end. Some other comedians can get away with laughing at their own gags. Not me. The public just will not stand for it. And that is all right with me. All of my life I have been happiest when the folks watching me said to each other, ‘Look at the poor dope, wilya?’

Because of the way I looked on the stage and screen the public naturally assumed that I felt hopeless and unloved in my personal life. Nothing could be farther from the fact. As long back as I can remember I have considered myself a fabulously lucky man. From the beginning I was surrounded by interesting people who loved fun and knew how to create it. I’ve had few dull moments and not too many sad and defeated ones.”

-Buster Keaton, in his autobiography My Wonderful World of Slapstick (1960)

The thing is, Harry Potter’s story is finished. He’s defeated Voldemort. Friends have died, lessons have been learned, Draco Malfoy is all grown up with a child of his own, and Mrs Weasley said the word ‘bitch’. It was beautiful. And now it’s over.

I understand the temptation to revisit old triumphs. It feels dangerous to step away from ground where you know you’ve been successful. Imagine if you wrote something that wasn’t quite as good! Or something that didn’t capture the imagination in quite the same way. Well, what then? Creators all know that the most dangerous thing isn’t to try and fail, it’s to stagnate. Maybe not every new world or new set of stories you make will enjoy the huge success of Harry Potter – but a worse fate would be to keep on ploughing the same old furrow, not able to try anything new.

I don’t say you even have to invent a whole new world. The world of Harry Potter is evidently vast and you’ve barely scratched the surface. What about – and I know this is a radical notion – a novel for adults in the same imaginary space? What’s going on in the Ministry of Magic? What’s up with those dragons in Romania?

landscapelifescape:

Dover, Kansas, USA

Country Road (by Marcos)

cutaway

The moral authority of Jon Stewart is a baffling phenomenon. ‘He’s Cronkite,’ proclaims New York magazine, 'the most trusted man in America.’ He is plainly a likeable man, and always good for intelligent laughter, though an air of genial sanctimony clings to his every joke. But it is not exciting that people glean their understanding of the world from 'The Daily Show,’ it is discouraging. Better Stewart than Beck, sure; but the Lincoln Memorial deserves a break from all this political vaudeville, as do we from the notion that amusement is a basis for commitment. I omit Bill Maher from my complaint, because no moral authority can plausibly be imputed to him. He has the look of a man who mainly wants to get laid.

The elegance of many of the engraved plates in Cartographies of Time and the chaste beauty of the instruments in Alpern’s collection suggest a mastery of experience. For some, all of this can be counted as a prehistory to the elegance of the iPhone, and they are not entirely wrong. What of course worries some of us about the wired world is that it may tend to alienate the imagination from artisanal experience—although the more deeply you understand the new hardware and the new software the less true that may be, I’m not sure. The eighteenth-century fellow with his drawing instruments in their spiffy shagreen case surely had something in common with the twenty-first century architect sketching on his iPad. And anybody as obsessed with diagrams as some of the seventeenth-century antiquarians featured in Cartographies of Time would have shouted for joy had they been able to time travel to the twenty-first century and take a crash course in the new technology. But if you want to imagine the past as prologue, you also have to entertain the thought of the present as epilogue. Can the artisanal imagination outlive artisanal practice? And without the artisanal imagination can the creative imagination survive? Such are the larger questions that are provoked by these voluptuous volumes in which—nifty thought—the nerds rule.

Dracula himself is a fabulous creation, not at all like the perfumed fop or melancholy poet of popular conception. Stoker’s vampire does not think like us; cunning, yes, but almost animalistic, relying more on instinct than rationality.

Maybe that’s why I enjoyed rereading it so much: it reminded me that this is how vampires and vampire stories are meant to be – terrifying, horrifying, violent. This beast is disgusting, amoral and predatory. He hunts, he feeds, he kills. That’s it.

Dracula is not cool, sexy or sensitive. He’ll never be a teenage girl’s ideal sweetheart. He’s not funny or kooky or ‘just different.’ He’s bad to the bone, and Dracula is a visceral, draining and overwhelming horror novel … which is the way it should be.

nature as information