Alan Jacobs

A remarkable visual reconstruction of Tenochtitlan.

I recently read Thomas Mann’s tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers — one of the more extraordinary reading experiences of my recent years. I had started it once, decades ago, and then again a few years later, but it’s probably been 25 years since I’ve even tried to read it.

I have a kind of instinct for reading, or at least I think I do. I always have plans for what to read; sometimes I follow those plans and sometimes I don’t. But every now and then I’ll be planning a series of books to read, or articles and essays — or maybe I’ll actually be in the middle of reading something — when I’ll suddenly think, You need to drop what you’re doing and read this other thing instead. That doesn’t happen often; two or three times a year, maybe. But it is an inner prompting (like Socrates’s δαιμόνιον) that I have learned to obey. I don’t know where it comes from, but I do know that when the impulse comes I find it irresistible. I have learned to accept the prompt and to be grateful for it.

So: a few weeks ago, I was in the middle of planning some reading, and I looked up from whatever I had on my lap, my computer or my notebook, and my eyes fell on my copy of Joseph and His Brothers, and I thought: It’s time to read that. I did, and I couldn’t possibly be happier that I did; it’s an outrageously brilliant work of art. While reading I had thought that I might write a long essay about the experience of reading this book, but on further consideration I doubt that my responses to it would fit into an essay. They’re too complicated and digressive. (In that sense, they’re much like the book itself.) So I’ll be writing about it here, on themes and topics and events that interest me, in no particular order. It’s not the sort of book that you comprehend on one reading – it’s not the sort of book that you can even confidently navigate in in one reading – so my attempt to write about it will require me to re-navigate it, to return and reread and rethink and reconsider. Stay tuned. I mean, if you’re into this kind of thing. 

Was Gollum a philologist?

I’m sure others have said this before — I doubt I have many thoughts about Tolkien that others have not had before me — but I am reflecting on this passage from Gandalf’s account of Gollum in the chapter of The Lord of the Rings called “The Shadow of the Past”: 

The most inquisitive and curious-minded of that family was called Sméagol. He was interested in roots and beginnings; he dived into deep pools; he burrowed under trees and growing plants; he tunnelled into green mounds; and he ceased to look up at the hill-tops, or the leaves on trees, or the flowers opening in the air: his head and his eyes were downward. 

Is this not a Portrait of the Philologist as a Young Man? (Or as a young proto-hobbit.) Isn’t Tolkien here describing the déformation professionnelle of the historian of language, the characteristic danger faced by the scholar who always burrows deeper and deeper into the history of words, thinking — Gabriel Josipovici in his wonderful The Book of God says this is the characteristic illusion of 19th-century scholarship — that truth is always archaeological, always to be found at the Source or Origin. Gollum would eventually learn that “All the ‘great secrets’ under the mountains had turned out to be just empty night: there was nothing more to find out, nothing worth doing, only nasty furtive eating and resentful remembering.” 

Perhaps, then, writing a book like The Lord of the Rings is, for the philologist, a spiritual discipline, a healthy re-ordering of priorities; and a reminder that genealogy — the long living history of a language, with unexpected detours and adventures and late flowerings — is more important, more alive, than archaeology? 

This person with so many open browser tabs – how monstrous! Here’s what I do:

1. See something interesting online
2. Save to Instapaper and close tab
3. Later, look at Instapaper and ask “Why did I save that?”
4. Delete.

Ezra Klein: “One reason I left Twitter long ago is that I noticed that it was a kind of machine for destroying trust. It binds you to the like-minded but cuts you from those with whom you have even modest disagreements. There is a reason that Twitter’s rise was conducive to politics of revolution and reaction rather than of liberalism and conservatism. If you are there too often, seeing the side of humanity it serves up, it is easy to come to think that everything must be burned down.”

Tove Jansson

One thing we’ve learned over the past few years is that lawyers who are good on social media and television aren’t necessarily good in the courtroom. In fact, the very traits that make a good media lawyer — bold assertiveness, hardass rhetoric, creativity with insults — not only don’t work in the courtroom, they are often forbidden in the courtroom. People watch a lawyer perform on TV and think “Wow, I wish I could get that guy to represent me” — well, be careful what you wish for. Hire a lawyer in haste, repent at leisure — in an orange jumpsuit. 

But there’s another side to this distinction, one that works in favor of defendants, not against them: People are convicted all the time in the court of social media opinion who would never be convicted in a courtroom. In jury trials, the defense attorney only has to get one holdout. Another way to think about that, in relation to a very famous defendant: around 35% of Americans strongly support Donald Trump, while a single juror is only 8% of a jury. If you’re Donald Trump’s defense attorney and the prosecutor has an iron-clad case against your client, you only need to have gotten one diehard Trump supporter — probably someone smart enough or devious enough to disguise his or her passion — onto the jury, and your guy walks. 

And that’s if the prosecution has an ironclad case. What if the case isn’t ironclad? What if there’s room for doubt? Then you don’t even need a Trump supporter: you just need one person to take seriously what the judge tells the jury about our legal system’s presumption of innocence. Moreover, as Ken White has explained, prosecutors have to prove, not just suggest, that Trump explicitly intended to overthrow a legal election, not that he ranted and raved, or that he had a reckless disregard for truth. Everyone, including his strongest supporters, knows that he has a reckless disregard for truth, but that’s not a crime. And, given his long history of refusing to allow any significant duscussions to be put in writing, he may well be able to make a strong case that he was only acting on advice of counsel. (A defendant who makes such a plea gives up attorney-client privilege, but if nothing is in writing, then that may not hurt him. We’d just end up with conflicting bald assertions. Former attorney says X, former client says not-X.) 

This is why prosecutors offer plea deals: Jury trials are a kind of judicial Russian roulette. They will not want to offer any plea deals to Donald Trump, but in the end I suspect that that’s what they’ll do. And I also suspect that Trump will refuse to accept the deal, preferring take his chances in court. 

So, to people who read the news and see all these co-conspirators copping pleas and think that justice is finally coming for Orange Man: maybe you should adjust your expectations? Like you, there’s nothing (aside from peace in the Middle East) that I’d more like to see than Donald Trump cleaning toilets in prison. But unlike you, I don’t believe it will happen. Based on my understanding of the actual law, not how things are discussed on social media, I figure that there’s less than a 15% chance of his ever being convicted of anything, and a near-zero chance that he’ll ever serve time. Alas. 

Damon Krukowski: “Bandcamp may be a small fraction of the music industry as a whole – digital downloads currently account for only 3% of recorded music revenues, according to the RIAA – but for independent artists like us and those we share bills with on tour, Bandcamp is not only a meaningful source of income, but one of the last online channels we have to communicate directly with our audience. Unmediated by algorithms, unencumbered by ads, untainted by data mining, the site is a throwback to an earlier paradigm.”