Some enterprising publisher needs to commission me to write a book about The Band.
Robert Christgau in the Village Voice, December 1969, on two albums released four days apart: “Abbey Road captivates me as might be expected, but The Band is even better, an A-plus record if I’ve ever rated one.” He’s right. Dammit, he’s right.
When we’re out for a walk, Angus frequently looks up at me as if to say, “Are you enjoying this as much as I am??” When I’m tired, I want to reply, “By the sound of it, no.” But he’s so adorable I just agree with his enthusiasm as best I can.
From a couple of years back, two quotations on slow reading.
Take fact checking out of that intimate, human setting, turn it into an industrial program of outsourcing, crowdsourcing, or automation, and it falls apart. It becomes a parody of itself. The desire to “scale” fact checking, to mechanize the arbitration of truth, is just another example of the tragic misunderstanding that lies at the core of Silicon Valley’s entire, grandiose attempt to remake society in its own image: that human relations get better as they get more efficient. A community, we seem fated to learn over and over again, is not a network.
UPDATE: A typically thoughtful note from Leah Libresco Sargeant prompts me to add that I think Carr’s general point here about scale is absolutely correct, but Community Notes just may be a step towards the re-humanizing of fact-checking. I’m writing an essay on some of these themes and in it will develop my thinking at greater length.
Charlie Stross, who before becoming a novelist was a pharmacist, has written part 1 of a guide to poisons and poisoning — but for novelists, not would-be murderers!
My friend and former colleague Ralph Wood has written a lovely tribute to his old teacher Norman Maclean — author of A River Runs Through It.
Seba Jun: one of one.
Currently listening: Nujabes, Spiritual State ♫
Two quotations on what exists. The twoquotes tag is a favorite one of mine.
That experience, of meeting the audience on the dreaming plane, is what Lynch excelled at above any other director I can name. More than Luis Buñuel, or Ken Russell, or David Cronenberg, or Hayao Miyazaki, when I watch Lynch, I feel like I have been invited into his private dreams. Sometimes, as with Eraserhead or Blue Velvet, the result is an extraordinary feeling of communion. Other times, as with Inland Empire, I feel unable to meet him there; the world is too hermetic, and these are not my dreams.
My former colleague Beth Felker Jones: Christopher Hays “writes of a God who does bad things and has to learn better. He writes of a God who needs correction from humans, a God to whom we 21st century folk are morally superior…. Why would we worship a God who is so much less than us that he needs, according to CH, us (or Abraham, or Moses) to be his conscience? Why would we worship a God who is not fundamentally good?”
Every few days I read another piece about 😱The Tragedy of Literature In Our Post-Literate Society 😳, and when I do I always want to ask the authors just one question: When Milton wrote Paradise Lost, what percentage of the English population were literate enough to read it?
A terrific post by Damon Krukowski about the brilliancies and inconsistencies of the Whole Earth Catalog and its offshoots. I remember poring over The Last Whole Earth Catalog when I was taking breaks in the back room of the bookstore where I worked in 1975.
I wanted to read a post from a Substack I’m not subscribed to, and I could read it for free if I downloaded the Substack app. So I did. After working my way through six screens of Substack either suggesting (Subscribe to these newsletters!) or demanding (Tell us your interests!) that I do something, I quit and deleted the app.
WALKIES???
