Abandoned reading: The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World by Iain McGilchrist. What an infuriating endeavor. McGilchrist seems to think that he he makes a claim stronger by giving, not three, not five, but forty-seven supportive examples — and that he can’t say what he wants to say about the hemispheres of the brain without pausing to articulate a Theory of Truth. I began as an exceptionally sympathetic reader and now want to throw these volumes as far from me as possible. 📚
I've had a number of people ask me about this: A 12-Month Immersive Course in Humanities - by Ted Gioia. I’ll just say that my version would be, not 52 assignments in a year, but one assignment in a year. Pick one vital book and read it slowly. Pause to think. Re-read difficult passages. Take your time, and be willing to set it aside for a while. And remember what Auden said: “When one thinks of the attention that a great poem demands, there is something frivolous about the notion of spending every day with one. Masterpieces should be kept for High Holidays of the Spirit.”
And from six years ago, on my old Buttondown newsletter: Easter with Arcabas.
New from me: “Welcome to the party, Christmas and Easter Christians!”
Tech CEO asks
Chatbot why it is frozen.
Chatbot: “You’re frozen.”
The other day I wrote, “Chatbots’ brains don’t have a right hemisphere.” Several people — surprisingly many — have asked me to expand on that. But I dunno: expanding on it feels like a very left-hemisphere thing to do.
My advice for the new Archbishop of Canterbury | Rowan Williams:
It might sound odd to approach Easter thinking about fear. But it’s striking that the earliest gospel finishes by telling us that the women who came to the tomb of Jesus and found it empty initially ‘said nothing because they were afraid’. Nothing is going to be the same again: being afraid is the most natural reaction. We are all on the back foot: the ‘cultural Christian’, who likes to have a little bit of Christian decor in the house; the Christian nationalist, who wants non-Christians to know their place; the liberal Anglican, who wants everyone to feel comfortably at home. If what is said to Mary and what is done on Easter Day are indeed world-changing matters, we do well to be apprehensive. Only then can we begin to see just what we are to be thankful for. Release. Transformation.
The key point about all these “high agency” people is that they’re agentic in relation to existing institutions and human beings but mimetic in relation to money. They do whatever money wants. They want to be money. They put money where their mouth is. And it talks.
Today in the noon Good Friday service our parish choir sang quite beautifully two powerful anthems I hadn’t heard before:
- “Crux fidelis” — by Sarah Macdonald
- ”Were You There?” — as arranged by Bob Chilcott
(Of course I know “Were You There?” but not this arrangement of it)
