Nothing a mob does is clean,
not at first, not when slowed to a media,
not when police.
WSJ on the Metaverse: “Among the persistent complaints from early adopters and testers, according to the documents, are that users have trouble adjusting to the technology, and that other users behave badly.” Human beings: the bug in every system.
♫ Currently listening: Hermanos Gutiérrez, El Bueno Y El Malo
♫ Waxahatchee’s Saint Cloud was my faithful companion on my recent road trip. What an outstanding record. And two of the bonus tracks, “Fruits of My Labor” and “Streets of Philadelphia,” are amazing.
Darwin Nuñez on for Liverpool. Bringing Darwin on is a … natural selection. #thankyouvurrymuch
Did I write this solely in order to use that title? You may well think so, but I couldn’t possibly comment.
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.
