I wrote about how modern identity was effectively created by the Great War.

My dear friend Charles Marsh’s book God’s Long Summer has just been re-released as a Princeton Classic. Charles tells the fascinating story of its writing here.

Department of Putting the Best Possible Spin on a Situation: high-jumper Gianmarco Tamberi of Italy, who lost his wedding ring in the Seine during the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, says, “It will remain forever in the city of love.” 💯

A few years ago I published an essay called “Miss Marple and the Problem of Modern Identity,” in which I described the rise of certain technologies by which people have become “legible” to the state. At that point I had not read a classic, though a somewhat controversial classic, of history, A. J. P. Taylor’s English History, 1914-1945. I am reading it right now, and when I saw the book’s first two paragraphs I thought, Damn, I wish I had known this when I wrote that essay. Here they are:

Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 per cent. of the national income. The state intervened to prevent the citizen from eating adulterated food or contracting certain infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevented women, and adult males in some industries, from working excessive hours. The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13. Since I January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. This tendency towards more state action was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905. Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.

All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs. Five million men entered the armed forces, many of them (though a minority) under compulsion. The Englishman’s food was limited, and its quality changed, by government order. His freedom of movement was restricted; his conditions of work prescribed. Some industries were reduced or closed, others artificially fostered. The publication of news was fettered. Street lights were dimmed. The sacred freedom of drinking was tampered with: licensed hours were cut down, and the beer watered by order. The very time on the clocks was changed. From 1916 onwards, every Englishman got up an hour earlier in summer than he would otherwise have done, thanks to an act of parliament. The state established a hold over its citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the second World war was again to increase. The history of the English state and of the English people merged for the first time.

I’m just making notes for later reflection here, but: The creation of this identity system led to a complex and ever-shifting pattern of relation between the state and modern capitalism. James Burnham, in his landmark book The Managerial Revolution, argued that the comprehensive power of the state would lead to the rise of a managerial class that would take power away from the capitalists. But it hasn’t really worked out that way, has it?

When I come back to these issues — which I will do eventually — I expect to say a little more about Bourne and Burnham, about George Orwell’s reviews of Burnham, and about anarchism. And maybe even about the Church.

The other day I sang the praises of USWNT defender Naomi Girma, whom I’ve been watching with delight this whole tournament. Turns out Emma Hayes agrees with me: “Look, she’s the best defender I’ve ever seen.” ⚽️

Whenever they cut to the beach volleyball at the Paris Olympics, I shout, “Sous les Pavés, la Plage!” (Explanation.)

“Your friend, Wendell”

David French’s interview with Justice Neil Gorsuch is great.

St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Lindsay, Texas.

WSJ:

OpenAI has a method to reliably detect when someone uses ChatGPT to write an essay or research paper. The company hasn’t released it despite widespread concerns about students using artificial intelligence to cheat.

In trying to decide what to do, OpenAI employees have wavered between the startup’s stated commitment to transparency and their desire to attract and retain users. One survey the company conducted of loyal ChatGPT users found nearly a third would be turned off by the anticheating technology.

What a moral conundrum!

I wrote about styles of acting and styles of being.

One of my favorite YouTubers is Thomas Flight, who makes videos about movies. In a recent video, he contrasts the “theatrical” acting style of classic Hollywood movies with the “naturalistic” style of today’s movies. Flight’s treatment of this issue is better than most, but he overlooks a key point — one that almost everyone who discusses this issue overlooks.

The difference in acting styles is real enough, and obvious to all. And if you ask people who are bothered by older acting styles why they are bothered, they’ll almost always say something like this: “People just don’t talk that way.” To which the proper response should be: “Are you sure about that?”

After all, how do we know what ordinary people — unphotographed people, unrecorded people — talked like 80 or 90 years ago? That’s not information we have access to, because we weren’t there. Even if we know people who are very old, we can’t confirm that their speaking style now is identical to what it was when they were young. Everyone’s speech is, to some greater or lesser extent, shaped by their social context. We don’t learn our words from dictionaries, but from other people. Surely everyone notices the way that people pick up words, phrases, intonations, and gestures from friends. Our verbal acquisitiveness slows down as we get older but it never stops — and a lot of humor arises from this, as senior citizens have a tendency to appropriate language inaccurately.

(Among filmmakers, the Coen brothers are specially aware of how all this works. For instance, Maud Lebowski refers to a penis as a “Johnson,” which puzzles the Dude — “Johnson?” — but then later in the movie he’s using the term himself. I could cite several examples from other Coen movies. And among scholars the best writer on this subject is of course Bakhtin.)

Moreover, everyone code-switches to some extent — that is, employs different linguistic resources according to audience and context — and how they talk in any one situation is but a partial indication of “how they really talk.” So, when public figures get secretly recorded, listeners often feel that they’ve received some insight into “what they’re really like,” but that’s not true. We’re just finding out how they behave in one context among many. And public figures, like all of the rest of us, are constantly assessing what kind of language a given situation calls for and adjusting their talk (or writing) accordingly. The idea that there is one linguistic mode which is “authentic” or “natural” to us is a fantasy.

Which also means that the concept of “naturalistic acting” is pretty fuzzy. “Natural” in what context, and in comparison to what? The assumption most people (including Thomas Flight) make when discussing these matters is that, for any given situation across time, there’s a standard “way that people talk” in relation to which some styles of acting are more “theatrical” and others more “natural.” Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert talk to each other in one style, while Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson talk to each other in a different style, and the latter is more natural than the former — on the assumption that unphotographed and unrecorded couples, in privacy, spoke pretty much the same way in 1934 as they do in 2019.

But we don’t know that, do we?

What if the conventions of private speech between two lovers were more formal then than they are now — or anyway would strike us as more formal? And what if the dominant style of acting in 2019 isn’t quite as close to private speech as we assume? It could be that

Gable/Colbert : 1934 private speech :: Driver/ScarJo : 2019 private speech

We just don’t know for sure, and maybe (probably) can’t know.

I’ve had a version of this post in my drafts folder for some time, though it didn’t mention Thomas Flight, because he hadn’t made the relevant video then. One of the writers Flight quotes in his video is The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act, by Isaac Butler, and what originally prompted this post was Simon Callow’s review of that book. In it he writes,

The notion that there is some sort of immutable gold standard for truthful acting is deeply unreliable: cometh the hour, cometh the actor. When David Garrick, nimble and quick-witted, first leaped onto the scene with his dazzling realism and lightning changes of mood, the portly and impressively slow-moving James Quin, hitherto the darling of the pit, was heard to remark, “If the young fellow was right, he, and the rest of the players, had all been wrong.”

Garrick’s quicksilver transformations, so expressive of the Age of Enlightenment, were in turn supplanted by Edmund Kean’s dark and dangerous Romantic intensity. Each was initially admired for being more real than his predecessors; actors are never admired for being unnatural. In 1935 Laurence Olivier’s performances in Romeo and Juliet (he alternated the parts of Romeo and Mercutio) were regarded as ultrarealist; ten years later, in his Shakespeare films, it is clear that he was a somewhat stylized actor; on stage twenty years after that he was dismissed by many as monstrously mannered. His acting had not changed; the temper and taste of the times had. The shock of the new has a built-in decay, and it is in the nature of pioneers to believe that they have finally reached the promised land, the end of the rainbow.

Currently listening: Danish String Quartet, Last Leaf. One of my most-listened-to records of the past five years. ♫

I do not have the time to be as into these Olympics as I am.

My new favorite athlete is Australian high-jumper Nicola Olyslagers, who before every jump looks into the camera, smiles, and talks to someone (family? God?), and after every jump trots back to her corner to write in her journal. She ended up with another silver medal (which she also won in Tokyo). When her husband suggested that she shift to an iPad, she was adamant: “There’s nothing like pen to paper.”

UPDATE: Turns out I’m not the only one who was obsessed by this competition. “Nicola Olyslager’s notebook v Yaroslava Mahuchikh’s sleeping bag. That’s what it all comes down to now.”

I’ve been listening to Stephen Fry reading the Sherlock Holmes canon and it’s just irresistible. 🎧📚

L. M. Sacasas: “My contention, then, is that when we are confronted with the opportunity to outsource the labor of articulation, we will find that possibility more tempting to the degree that we experience a sense of incompetency and inadequacy, a sense which may have many sources, not least among which is the failure to stock our mind, heart, and imagination.”

For many years I’ve been writing posts for my big blog using the excellent Mac app MarsEdit, but three days ago, thanks to a change in security procedure at my service provider, it stopped working. Worse: trying to post from MarsEdit brought down my whole site. After some back and forth, it was made clear to me that there would be no fix.

So what do I do now? One thing I won’t do is write in the WordPress editor — that’s a nightmarish experience. For now I am writing my posts in BBEdit and then pasting them into the WordPress editor, which is awkward; I don’t think that’s a long-term solution. So my options are:

1. Get a new hosting provider and go through the long slog of transferring all my data there and hoping that nothing gets lost.
2. Just do all my blogging here at micro.blog (which, by the way, works perfectly with MarsEdit).

That second choice is appealing because (a) it’s easy to write in micro.blog on virtually any device, (b) there are multiple ways to post, and (c) it would enable me to consolidate my online presence in one place, since I am already using micro.blog for photos, links, reading management, etc.

But over at blog.ayjay.org I don’t just have fifteen years of posts, I have fifteen years of tagged posts. I would really miss being able to relate posts to one another by tag. Also, I like the theme I’m using there better than any available micro.blog theme.

So I’m torn. At the moment I’m leaning towards going all-in here at micro.blog. But I’d be interested to hear any thoughts from you, dear readers.

The final (I think) post of my series on the battle for Guadalcanal is up. Here are links to each:

• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Five
• Six

One of the lighter moments from the best and most important day of my life, forty-four years ago today. Happy anniversary, my beloved.

Around the rim of the shield Hephaestus made for Achilles is the Ocean River, the great water that (Homer believed) rings our world — Middle-earth, it’s sometimes called: the place where we live and, often enough, fight and kill and die. And, as I have noted, Guadalcanal Island is ringed by that very ocean. Guadalcanal is thus a kind of microcosm, but one in which the agonistic character of life, the struggle that reveals who we are, is accelerated and intensified. 

Hephaestus’s ocean is a kind of frame, and these stories of Guadalcanal I’ve been exploring are all necessarily framed by the passage across the waters to and from the place of struggle. But what Terrence Malick does in his film The Thin Red Line is add another layer of framing. His version of Guadalcanal does not begin with the crossing of the liminal sea, but rather with two additional contexts. 

The first shot of the film shows a crocodile slipping into water; the last shot of the film shows a small young leafy palm standing, somewhat unexpectedly, in shallow water on a beach.

That first shot is followed by a scene in which we see Jim Caviezel’s Private Witt enjoying the company of a seaside Melanesian community. (We later learn that he’s not taking a vacation, he’s gone AWOL.) Then we shift to the transport ship taking the soldiers to Guadalcanal. 

That last shot is accompanied by a sound: the sound of a Melanesian a cappella choir singing one of the songs we heard them singing in that early scene. This is immediately after we see a transport ship removing the soldiers from Guadalcanal. 

So The Thin Red Line gives us four … let’s call them existential layers. 

A key question for any one soldier — well, actually, any one human being — is: How many of these layers do you perceive? How much of what is is perceptually and epistemologically available to you? 

There’s something fundamentally disorienting about Malick’s movie. On the one hand, as I noted in an earlier post, the soldier who confronts another soldier in battle, in the agon, is confronting himself. And this is existentially harrowing. 

But notice that Private Witt has no interest in the agon. After he goes AWOL among the Melanesian islanders and is forcibly returned to his unit, Sergeant Welsh removes him from battle duty and makes him a stretcher-bearer. Later, he pleads to be returned to battle, not because he wants to fight, but simply because C-for-Charlie Company is, he says, “my people.” We see him tending to the sick and then, at the end, drawing Japanese soldiers away from the other members of his company — and by so doing sacrificing his life. He lifts his weapon in that last moment, but not to fire — rather, to draw fire from the soldiers who surround him. 

Private Witt undergoes his own agon, but it is not that of the warrior. Before that final confrontation, he has already faced himself — not as Hector faces Achilles but in a very different way. He had received a kind of revelation, and he is capable of receiving it, I think, just because, rather than immersing himself wholly in the war, he has already attended to those existential layers that his fellow soldiers never notice.

About two-thirds of the way into the movie, when C-for-Charlie company has just ventured well inland to destroy a small contingent of Japanese soldiers, some of them reflect on what they have done. Corporal Fife (Adrien Brody) remembers a conversation in which another soldier told him that dead people were just like dead dogs. And then we see Witt staring intently at something. After a few seconds we are allowed to see what he sees: the half-buried face of a dead Japanese soldier. 

And then the soldier (who is not a dead dog) speaks to him — speaks to the one person in this whole company who has been formed and equipped in such a way that he can hear. The Japanese soldier says: 

Are you righteous? Kind? Does your confidence lie in this? Are you loved by all? Know that I was, too. Do you imagine your suffering will be any less because you loved goodness … truth? 

And it is this revelation, I think, that enables Witt to do the great work of self-sacrifice that forms the climax of this film. 

In a pinch, I could live here.

Spotify and “corporation-centered design."

If you want a year’s worth of ideas to explore, just read the most recent issue of Sam Arbesman’s newsletter. My head is almost literally spinning!

Ah. The emails are coming.