Alan Jacobs

Robert Hutton:

Had the Queen died earlier in the year, it’s not difficult to imagine Johnson harnessing the event to his great survival project. So we should be grateful she lived long enough to save us the prospect of Johnson in Westminster Abbey, mugging his way through Ecclesiastes and hinting that, in a way, she had been the Boris of people’s hearts. Think of it as her final service to the nation. 

This is a very good point. 

The rain did a lot for this fella.

What the iPhone software does with very low light (don’t be deceived by the sky in the background, this was taken in a pitch-black night) sometimes looks like rotoscope animation.

Maya Jasanoff's idea that “The new king now has an opportunity to make a real historical impact by scaling back royal pomp and updating Britain’s monarchy to be more like those of Scandinavia” — because Colonialism! — is (a) the platonic ideal of an NYT opinion piece and (b) a perfect illustration of Clement Atlee’s comment that "the intelligentsia … can be trusted to take the wrong view on any subject.” The pomp of the British monarchy is the point; the ceremony is the substance — for good reasons and bad. When the ceremony is discarded the monarchy will be too. And rightly so. 

I told them a while back that this is a word, but they obviously didn’t listen. Anti-liturgical bias at the NYT!

September update for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters.

Elizabeth II: a constant queen whose failings were rare: “She possessed, apparently, the unique skill of being able to position a tiara on her head perfectly without a mirror.” No, not unique — I too have this skill, though I have had fewer opportunities to exercise it than the late Queen did. Sad. 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if we do not suffer from our ancestors’ sins, then we have no need of their virtues. This truth has about as much validity as the one I’m riffing on, but it is if anything more firmly believed. To our great loss.

The late Queen Elizabeth II played the hand she was dealt about as well as it could possibly have been played, and this required her to exercise virtues that few of our public figures today even know exist: dutifulness; reliability; silence; dignity; fidelity; devotion to God, family, and nation. We shall not look upon her like again; her death marks the end of a certain world. Its excellences, as well as its shortcomings, are worthy of our remembrance. 

This may perhaps be a good time to listen to the small but sumptuous motet that Ralph Vaughan Williams composed for the Queen’s coronation: 

I know this kind of thing is totally normal now — one of the most characteristic ways for journalists to use Twitter — but let’s be clear what it’s saying: I already know what the thesis of my story will be, so please write if you can confirm my thesis. He doesn’t want to hear from anyone who might offer an alternative account to the one he has already settled on. 

The Woman Who Became a Company:

Since corporations can claim trade secrets, [Jennifer Lyn] Morone decided to resist pervasive data capture by incorporating herself, so that the company, JLM Inc., contains the intellectual property and activities of the human Morone. If a corporation can be a person, perhaps a person could be a corporation and so protect their data! The articles of incorporation enable Morone’s data to qualify as intellectual property and thus purport to offer protections from the data marketplace. The human Morone’s privacy is possible because it is the product and trade secret of the company, JLM Inc., which is incorporated in the state of Delaware. With its own Court of Chancery that hears cases involving corporate law, Delaware’s legal structure is favorable to business. The state also does not collect corporate taxes from those that do business outside the state or tax “intangible assets” — like data. […] 

As JLM Inc., Morone has an obligation to refuse the terms and agreements that permit apps and websites to share data with their parent tech companies, alongside third and fourth parties. She must protect the secret formula of who she is so that she can sell it, making it a challenge for her to participate in many of the interactive information streams common to the 21st century. She can’t use apps, websites with cookies, or most search engines. They track her and collect data about her. That data is the property of JLM Inc. and so she must not engage these services. The problem with maintaining the marketplace as the point of reference for data governance is how it reinforces exploitative practices that don’t have clear, long-term safeguards for participants. Morone’s experience shows that the corporation doesn’t provide a solution to the extractive practices of these apps, platforms, and sites for a human who wants to live, work, or socialize today. 

Everything about this story is deeply sad. 

Ivan Illich, from In the Mirror of the Past: 

Rather than life in a shadow economy, I propose, on top of the z-axis, the idea of vernacular work: unpaid activities which provide and improve livelihood, but which are totally refractory to any analysis utilizing concepts developed in formal economics. I apply the term ‘vernacular’ to these activities, since there is no other current concept that allows me to make the same distinction within the domain covered by such terms as ‘informal sector, ‘use value,’ ‘social reproduction.’ Vernacular is a Latin term that we use in English only for the language that we have acquired without paid teachers. In Rome, it was used from 500 B.C. to 600 A.D. to designate any value that was homebred, homemade, derived from the commons, and that a person could protect and defend though he neither bought nor sold it in the market. I suggest that we restore this simple term, vernacular, to oppose commodities and their shadow. It allows me to distinguish between the expansion of the shadow economy and its inverse the expansion of the vernacular domain. 

One of Les Murray’s collections of poems is called The Vernacular Republic, and while that title is usually thought to refer to Australia simpliciter, I don’t think that’s right. The Vernacular Republic is more an ideal image of Australia, what it might have been and perhaps (with repentance) still could be. 

I think if we take Illich’s understanding of the vernacular domain, and add to it the image of an alternative but “more comprehensive” economy that Wendell Berry writes of, then we have a rough outline of what a genuine Vernacular Republic would be. The Vernacular Republic is an “informal sector” that opposes the logic of commodity and gradually but steadily practices the Kingdom of God. 

Mary Harrington:

We can also kiss goodbye to the “marketplace of ideas”. This might have seemed plausible when everyone aspired to long-form, deliberative, rationalism and a broadly shared moral framework. When these are things of the past, we all absorb disaggregated, de-contextualised snippets of information at speed, our reading material rewards us for not concentrating long enough to think something through, and we can see everyone else thinking in real time on our screens? 

Ah yes, I remember it well: that halcyon era when everyone sat around reading Hobbes’s Leviathan and earnestly buttonholing passersby in impassioned search for a shared moral framework.

Harrington relies heavily on a melancholy essay by Adam Garfinkle on the subject of Literacy Lost, and for people like Harrington and Garfinkle I have some questions: 

Do you know anything — anything at all — about the history of literacy? About what people in any society, any society in the whole world, at any point in history, could read and did read? For instance: what percentage of people in France in 1900, or England in 1850, or China in 1800, or the U.S.A. in 1950, had ever in their lives read a single book? If they had read books, how intellectually demanding and substantive were those books? If they were assigned those books in school, did they actually do the reading? How were the books taught to them? That is, were the best qualities of those books explored in ways that were comprehensible and meaningful to the students? How common, or how rare, was the education in “deep reading” that you commend? 

I ask because if you don’t have this information, then you have no business making comparative judgments between our own moment and any moment in the past. And this information is hard to find. What we do know mainly makes us want to know more. You may wish that more people read, and read good books — I certainly do — but without actual data you can’t compare us to our ancestors. 

I will just say this: I think the hidden assumption in essays like Harrington’s and Garfinkle’s is that if people weren’t on social media and staring at their iPhones they’d be reading books instead. And I don’t believe for one second that that’s a safe assumption. 

James Agee, the best writer ever to review movies for a living, was never better than in his review for The Nation of William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) — for which, FYI, there will be many spoilers below. The movie concerns three returning servicemen — each struggling in his own way to find his way back into the civilian world — and the people who love them. “At its worst,” Agee writes, “this story is very annoying in its patness, its timidity, its slithering attempts to pretend to face and by that pretense to dodge in the most shameful way possible its own fullest meanings and possibilities.” He goes on in this vein for some time, and sums up his critique thus:

In fact, it would be possible, I don’t doubt, to call the whole picture just one long pious piece of deceit and self-deceit, embarrassed by hot flashes of talent, conscience, truthfulness, and dignity. And it is anyhow more than possible, it is unhappily obligatory, to observe that a good deal which might have been very fine, even great, and which is handled mainly by people who could have done, and done perfectly, all the best that could have been developed out of the idea, is here either murdered in its cradle or reduced to manageable good citizenship in the early stages of grade school.

Thus ended his review — or, rather, the first half of his review, for in the next week’s issue he returned to explain why he absolutely loved the movie. And that, friends, is Exhibit A in my case for James Agee as Top Movie Reviewer.

In that second half of his review he singles out the photography of Gregg Toland — indeed, though Agee did not know it, The Best Years would be one of Toland’s last films: he died in 1948 at the age of forty-four, and thus the film world lost its greatest cinematographer. “I can’t remember a more thoroughly satisfying job of photography, in an American movie, since Greed. Aesthetically and in its emotional feeling for people and their surroundings, Toland’s work in this film makes me think of the photographs of Walker Evans.” (Agee had, famously, collaborated with Evans on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.)

Let’s take one scene, a celebrated one, as an example of Toland’s skill — and of Wyler’s imaginative direction. Al Stephenson has a problem: his daughter Peggy is in love with another returning serviceman, Fred Derry; but Fred is married. Al asks Fred to meet him at a restaurant/bar called Butch’s, and he tells Fred not to see Peggy again. Fred is grieved, but he agrees; he’ll call her to cut all ties. As he enters the telephone booth next to the bar, Homer — the third serviceman in this story, a sailor who has lost his hands in a fire on his ship, comes in. (See the story of the actor, Harold Russell.) Butch, the owner, is his uncle, and Homer wants Al to watch him and Butch play a song on the piano — they’ve been practicing, Homer tapping the keys with his hooks and Butch filling in. Al’s mind is elsewhere, but he agrees.

The above shot appears to be a still from an alternate take, because in the movie Homer plays the melody while Butch provides bassline harmony. And in that scene Al can’t keep his eyes on the piano: he keeps looking back at Fred on the phone. But you can see here the famous Toland depth of field and a real compositional genius: Fred is a tiny figure in the back left, and yet he’s as present and vivid to the viewer as the jolly musicians in the foreground. It’s storytelling by photography, and it’s brilliant. Here’s a good clip.

There’s a scene later in the movie when Homer — who has been avoiding his fiancée Wilma because, he believes, she doesn’t understand how hard it would be to live with his disability — invites her to his room in his family’s house to see how helpless he is when he removes his prosthetic harness. (This is the one time we see Homer consciously acknowledging his limitations.) And when, instead of fleeing in horror, Wilma with infinite tenderness buttons up his pajama top, well, I let fall a manly tear. 

Anyway, that clears the way for Homer and Wilma: the movie concludes with their wedding. And here the genius of Toland and Wyler comes to our aid again:

Foreground right: Homer and Wilma. Background center: Al and his wife Milly, and then, on the left, their daughter Peggy — who only has eyes for the now-divorced Fred, Homer’s best man, foreground left. (Al and Milly, like everyone else, look at the marrying couple.) And, as the scene unfolds, we discover that Fred only has eyes for her. It’s brilliant: the words of the service of Holy Matrimony unfold, and as happy as we are for Homer and Wilma, our attentions and our emotions are divided.

Teresa Wright plays Peggy, and Agee, in the second half of his review, singled her out for particular praise:

Almost without exception, down through such virtually noiseless bit roles as that of the mother of the sailor’s fiancé, this film is so well cast and acted that there was no possible room to speak of all the people I wish I might. I cannot, however, resist speaking, briefly anyhow, of Teresa Wright.… She has always been one of the very few women in movies who really had a face.… She has also always used this translucent face with a delicate and exciting talent as an actress, and with something of a novelist’s perceptiveness behind the talent. And … she has never been around nearly enough. This new performance of hers, entirely lacking in big scenes, tricks, or obstreperousness – one can hardly think of it as acting – seems to me one of the wisest and most beautiful pieces of work I have seen in years. If the picture had none of the hundreds of other things that it has to recommend it, I could watch it a dozen times over for that personality and its mastery alone.

The story of how Teresa Wright ran afoul of the studio system, and more particularly of Sam Goldwyn, and lost what could have been an extraordinary career, has been told in several different ways, most of which blame Goldwyn and the system. David Thomson, whose judgment is typically acute, seems to think that her decline was inevitable because she was “not glamorous enough to be a star,” was “relatively plain-faced.” Wright may not have been a classic beauty, but plain is not the word to describe that emotionally “translucent” face, and not much in all of movies is lovelier than her expression in the final frames of The Best Years of Our Lives, when Fred declares his love: 

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Abbas Kiorastami (1940–2016) was an Iranian film director (also a screenwriter, painter, photographer, poet) who made curious films — often seemingly simple, featuring quasi-documentary techniques, but hiding a shrewd complexity. His last film, which he had not quite completed at his death, was 24 Frames, which begins by gently, subtly animating Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow and then goes on to animate — always subtly, usually gently, sometimes disturbingly — a series of photographs taken by Kiorastami himself. It’s a kind of extended meditation on the very idea of a frame —  a demarcated space within the confines of which we see, and see differently. See, perhaps, more vividly.

But Frame 24 is rather different. Like several of the others, it features a window. Through that window you see a night sky, and trees waving in the wind of a winter storm; in addition to the wind and rain pinging the glass, you hear, of all things, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Love Never Dies.” (Most the movie’s sounds are natural, though music is occasional.) In the foreground is a desk, at which a young woman is slumped over in sleep. Just above her drowsing head there’s a computer screen, and on that screen we see, in a very slow frame-by-frame advance, the last shot of The Best Years of Our Lives.

Gradually the light increases — dawn is coming — and (inch by inch) Peggy raises her gloved hand to embrace Fred, and Fred leans forward to kiss her, and down (inch by inch) goes her hat, and then: THE END.

Thus Abbas Kiorastami makes his last bow. And I find it really quite touching that his final message to us, or a big part of it anyway, is simply this: What could be more wonderful than the movies?

An Open Letter Responding to the NatCon "Statement of Principles" – The European Conservative:

In the end the National Conservative statement is neither conservative nor Christian. As critics of liberalism from both Left and Right, we must reject it. We acknowledge the importance of national cultures. We recognise the rightful place of the nation acting in defence of the common good on behalf of its citizens. But we cannot accept the idea that to fight globalisation we must uncritically embrace the nation-state as the one true political form, or the most complete community; or that the best good we can aim for is nation-states re-armed against each other, seeking their own interests in perpetual implied conflict. 

Agreed wholly. 

Ben Domenech:

Too much of a good thing is a real problem — and in its final years, Prestige TV ran into that hard. The final season of Game of Thrones cost $15 million an episode — something fans could only dream of in terms of production value — but it couldn’t buy a plot fix. Getting back to telling stories that are well-written, around characters who are fully fleshed out, is more powerful than the biggest budget in the room. Let’s hope the next era of television understands this. 

From your lips to the TV gods’ ears. 

I’m going to be taking a little time away from watching the Premier League, because VAR is simply ruining the experience for me. Even if it were well-implemented, VAR would be a mistake because it interferes so badly with the flow of the game and the game’s emotions — no one can celebrate anything any more without waiting to see if VAR flips the script. But it is not well-implemented. Especially in the Premier League it is more likely to result in a wrong decision than a correct one. 

Of course, this is simply one element of the shockingly low level of officiating quality in the Premier League, but it greatly magnifies incompetence. I would rather live with ordinary human error than have to deal with technologically-enhanced human error. When people are already bad at their job, it’s unwise to give them even more opportunities to be bad. 

I only watch footy because it’s fun, and VAR — plus other elements in the catastrophic mismanagement of English football in general and the Premier League in particular — takes away a lot of that fun. So why should I keep watching?