Me to myself: Do not enter. DO. NOT. ENTER.
Finished reading: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler 📚. I wanted to love this book but I didn’t. It’s just too didactic. Like Richard Powers’s The Overstory, it has an inescapably clear extractable message and the story is always subordinated to that message. Alice Gribbin’s Tablet essay on the visual arts makes the point well: “Artworks are not to be experienced but to be understood: From all directions, across the visual art world’s many arenas, the relationship between art and the viewer has come to be framed in this way. An artwork communicates a message, and comprehending that message is the work of that audience.” When I read Nayler or Powers, I feel that I am being asked to extract a specific message and if I do that I will have done my readerly work. In each of these cases the message is wonderful, necessary, life-giving — but it is a message, and I prefer my messages presented straightforwardly and my stories to be considerably less straightforward. “Tell the truth but tell it slant” is what stories and poems are for; these books are quite upright in their telling.
Popular term for a beheaded person — disparaging, though, which I guess is why they won’t let me use it.
Currently reading: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler 📚
I wrote about Jean-Luc Godard, whose ideas I think simplistic and silly but whose boldness I admire, even when it leads to bad movies. But the piece is more generally about revolutionary thinkers and artists.
C. S. Lewis, from “Lilies that Fester” (1955):
The [student] will not get good marks (which means, in the long run, that he will not get into the Managerial Class) unless he produces the kind of responses, and the kind of analytic method, which commend themselves to his teacher. This means at best that he is trained to the precocious anticipation of responses, and of a method, inappropriate to his years. At worst it means that he is trained in the (not very difficult) art of simulating the orthodox responses….
Thus to say that, under the nascent régime, education alone will get you into the ruling class, may not mean simply that the failure to acquire certain knowledge and to reach a certain level of intellectual competence will exclude you. That would be reasonable enough. But it may come to mean, perhaps means already, something more. It means that you cannot get in without becoming, or without making your masters believe that you have become, a very specific kind of person, one who makes the right responses to the right authors.
I know from long experience that it’s the hope that kills you, but I’m gonna go way out on a limb here and say it: I don’t believe Arsenal will be relegated this season.
It’s Sunday morning in northeastern Alabama and there sure are a lot of guys around here wearing camo. (I’m having some pretty overwhelming Proustian memories of my grandfather taking me quail hunting, even though we didn’t wear camo.)
Sara Hendren: “But in rejecting the distorted and gendered version of small-s sacrifice, I threw out also the big-s Sacrifice that is one crucial way of becoming more than selfhood.”
Will be doing my thought-experimental Reading the New Testament class again next term.
Now that I’m taking a break from my big blog and posting many small things here at micro.blog, I am just so impressed by how well thought-out this service is. It’s a delight to use, so much more streamlined and less cumbersome than WordPress. Props to @manton & crew.
An extremely raucous murder of crows in the neighborhood this morning is reminding me of lines from a poem by E. B. White: “In their assemblies at the edge of town, / Crows introduce resolutions, then vote them down.”
What an image. Among the silent trees a Russian rocket finds its resting place. (Taken near a Ukranian village by Francisco Seco / AP.)
