I’ve been reading the story of David in 1 and 2 Samuel, and in this history there is a character called Doeg the Edomite, but every single time I read his name I read it as Doug. Doug the Edomite.
Scott Alexander: “So the question — which I don’t see anyone on either side asking in a really curious way — is: which works better? Telling patients to think of their mental problems as misfiring brain circuits, then reprogramming/medicating those circuits? Or telling patients to think of their mental problems as demons, then exorcising those demons?”
Here’s Adam Roberts critiquing my annotations of Auden’s “Winds” – and offering a very thoughtful reading of that poem. I don’t agree that I’m wrong in every case, but I definitely missed Pausanias’s reference to Athena as goddess of winds. Grrrrr. (That’s the problem with publishing anything — you get to grind your teeth for all eternity over what you mess up.)
Journeys
Early in Terrence Malick’s masterpiece A Hidden Life (2019), Franz Jägerstätter and his wife Franziska (Fani) sit at the kitchen table in their Austrian farmhouse and reminisce about their first meeting. Fani thinks back to Franz’s arrival in the village, and as she does we cut to a shot, seen from behind and slightly above, of Franz on his motorcycle riding on a dirt path that weaves through the fields. The shot lasts five seconds.
Two-and-a-half hours of screen time later, as the story draws to its agonizing end, Franz sits in on a bench in the courtyard of a prison, awaiting his call into the room of execution. We see a closeup of his grieving face; his eyes fill with tears; his jaw works almost imperceptibly. And then: we suddenly return to Franz on his motorcycle, riding towards the village. Quietly celestial music shimmers. Through the fields he goes and goes; trees rise up alongside the road to obscure the sun. The motorcycle continues its silent voyage, to a beginning or an ending. This time, the shot lasts a full forty seconds.
The moment is, for this viewer anyway and for several other people I have talked to, deeply moving — but indescribably so. I have hinted at what it calls to my mind by saying that what had been, at the outset, a voyage to a new beginning becomes a voyage to an ending — but I also must say that for the faithful Christian death is to be understood as a new beginning also, one as definitive as our birth. I find myself thinking about the journey home, the nostos, about those paths we must take alone, about Eliot’s “In my end is my beginning,” about anticipation, about how this delaying of the inevitable feels not like a tease but an offer of grace, an opportunity to take a breath and process what is about to happen. A thousand resonant things, really, go through my mind.
I can describe all these sequentially, and I suppose that’s not a wholly worthless thing to do, but I do not have any words to capture what it feels like to sit in the movie theater and watch those forty seconds of a man on a motorcycle riding through mountain meadows. The simultaneity of it all, the instantaneous and complex interactions of mind and heart and sensorium.
And this is the problem I am confronting as I try to write about Malick’s movies: Everything I write seems, to me anyway, to diminish those great works of art. Perhaps I should feel this way when I write about music or fiction or poetry, but I don’t. I don’t even feel this way when I write about other movies. But every sentence I write about Malick seems false to me. I keep wanting to say, Forget all this crap I’m writing, just go see the damned movie!
Preview of a possible (but not certain) coming attraction….
If it keeps raining our live oaks may end up festooned with Spanish moss, like the ones in Louisiana.
Google’s new ad campaign: “Sure, our search results have been getting worse and worse, but they haven’t been getting worse fast enough – until now!“
a petty resentment
My paternal grandfather, Elisha Creel Jacobs, was for many years an engineer on the Frisco railroad. His standard route ran from our city, Birmingham, to Memphis and Kansas City — and then back home. Our house was about a mile from the big freight yard on the west side of Birmingham, so that commute was easy, but things got a little more complicated when he took the route that ran between Amory, Mississippi and Pensacola, Florida. Grandma needed the car while he was away, so she would drive him to Amory (or pick him up there at the end of a run) and I would go along for the ride. That was also an opportunity for us to visit his sister Lillie, who lived in Amory. She was a very sweet old lady who lived in an ancient rambling tree-shadowed house that smelled like her. I liked Aunt Lillie and her house.
When I was around ten, Gran was forced to retire after a horrifying accident: he had a stroke while driving to work and smashed up his car and his body, both beyond repair. Soon thereafter he was diagnosed with lung cancer, and I tried my best to help Grandma care for him. He was always very loving towards me, and as he lay dying, was oddly insistent that I be given the beautiful pocket watch he had received from the railroad on his retirement. I desperately wanted that watch, but my mother said that she’d keep it safe and give it to me when I got older.
Some years later, when my father got out of prison, he wanted to get drunk but had no money. So he fished out that watch, pawned it, and used the proceeds to go on a bender. Afterwards he couldn’t have redeemed it, even if he had had the money, because he didn’t remember where he had pawned it. And of all the bad things my father did to me, to all of us, many of them objectively worse than his stealing and pawning that watch, that’s the one I have had the hardest time forgiving him for.
My old friend Matt Milliner interviews my former student Amanda Iglesias about church architecture. Many remarkably provocative, generative thoughts from Amanda — and some stunning images too. I really hope she does make all this into a book!
Filling out some marketing questions for my biography of Paradise Lost. They want some potential “hooks” and I got ‘em. “We put a super-hot naked couple in a garden — you’ll never guess what happened next!” “This one weird trick will DESTROY the serpent in your garden – guaranteed!”
If Tuchel ends up at Man Utd — the drama queen of managers at the drama queen of clubs — I will be grabbing a big bowl of popcorn and enjoying the fireworks. ⚽️
I wrote about editing and the lack thereof.
editing
A couple of years ago, I decided that I wanted to re-read Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, which I hadn’t read since high school. I picked it up and saw the first sentence: “From the outset, let us bring you news of your protagonist.”
He means “At the outset.” “At the outset” represents a single point in time, while “from the outset” refers to an ongoing sequence of events. If you say “At the outset of our trip the weather was miserable” you say something only about that moment. Maybe later on the weather got better, and indeed that’s what the phrase suggests. But if you say “From the outset of our trip the weather was miserable,” you’re indicating that the weather started bad and stayed that way. Mailer is using an ongoing-sequence phrase to refer to a point-in-time experience.
So Mailer has messed up the first sentence, indeed the very first word, of his book.
One page later:
On a day somewhat early in September, the year of the first March on the Pentagon, 1967, the phone rang one morning and Norman Mailer, operating on his own principle of war games and random play, picked it up. That was not characteristic of Mailer.
So this phone rang on one morning of a day? What happened on the other mornings of that day, I wonder. Also: Hi, I’m Norman Mailer, and my own principle is war games and random play. – What the hell does that mean? I don’t even know if I could turn these sentences into comprehensible and coherent English, but here’s my best effort:
One morning in early September 1967, the year of the first March on the Pentagon, the phone rang and Norman Mailer picked it up. That was uncharacteristic, but on principle Mailer sought out random events and war games.
That’s better, but still doesn’t make much sense. For one thing, if Mailer really did, on “principle,” seek out random events and war games, then wouldn’t he regularly pick up the phone when it rang, in those days when you couldn’t tell who was calling? Wouldn’t picking up the phone in fact be characteristic of him?
After a few more pages of this, I put the book down. But I left my mark in it, a mark I’ve been using for several years to annotate books: EP. EP is short for “editor, please.”
There are four levels of editing:
- Structural
- Stylistic
- Mechanical (grammar/syntax/spelling)
- Factual
That first sentence of The Armies of the Night needed mechanical editing; the second stylistic editing. (Whether it received any structural editing I can’t say, though I suspect that at this stage in his career Mailer wouldn’t have allowed that — hell, he might have considered himself above any kind of editing.) In book publishing, the mechanical editing and at least some of the stylistic editing is usually done by a person called the copy editor – perhaps an employee of the publisher but more often, in my experience, a freelance. The person called simply the editor will rarely comment on mechanical matters, and may or may not get into the weeds of style, but will certainly have things to say about structure: how the book is organized, whether some matters deserve more or less treatment than you’ve given them, whether a given passage needs to be excised, etc. The great Robert Gottlieb was a fastidious, not to say compulsive, line editor, but this kind of attentiveness is by no means universal.
As for factual editing, that would have happened to Mailer when he wrote an earlier version of his experiences for Harper’s, but not when he submitted it to his book publisher. Sometimes people reading a book will ask “Didn’t anyone fact-check this thing?” — not realizing that the answer, typically, is No. In special cases (for instance, books whose claims might result in legal action) lawyers can get involved to demand justification of certain claims. When I wrote The Narnian the HarperCollins lawyers went over the manuscript with the finest-toothed of combs, and asked me, for instance, whether Charles Williams might take offense at some of the things I said about him. Since he had died in 1945, on balance I though it not likely.
So most books aren’t fact-checked, though many magazine pieces are. The fact-checking at Harper’s, at least since I’ve been writing for them, is relentless, and the experience of justifying your claims and statements arduous.
But there’s a fuzzy line between the editing of mechanics and fact-checking: the spelling of names, for instance. Right now I’m reading the first volume of Clinton Heylin’s biography of Bob Dylan, and while I sympathize with a writer who has to deal with as many names as Heylin does, he gets too many of them wrong: It’s Samuel R. Delany (not “Delaney”), Jackie DeShannon (not “Deshannon”), Kenneth Rexroth (not ”Roxreth“), etc. Each of these is faithfully recorded in the index (”Roxreth, Kenneth”) but didn’t get checked by the copy editor.
Heylin is not the most careful of stylists, either. He writes sentences like this, when describing what a guy named Steve Wilson thought about a friend named Paul Clayton, who had become obsessed by Dylan:
In Wilson’s view, ‘Bob was everything [Paul] wanted to be’, save heterosexual.
What Heylin means is that Clayton, who was gay, wanted to be like Dylan in every respect except sexual orientation; what he says is that Dylan is homosexual. Me in margin: “EP.”
Writing about Dylan’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” Heylin is critical of Dylan’s condemnation of William Zantzinger as a murderer — Heylin thinks the facts don’t bear out that charge.
What he was, to Dylan’s closed mind, was guilty. And guilty he would remain, the songwriter insisting to Bob Hilburn forty years later, ‘Who wouldn’t be offended by some guy beating an old woman to death?’ Answer: any halfway decent investigative journalist.
What Heylin means is that any halfway decent investigative journalist would be sure to have the facts right before condemning anyone; what he says is that such a journalist wouldn’t be offended by the murder of an old woman, as though sociopathy were a prerequisite for journalistic competence. Me in margin: “EP.”
As I have often lamented, almost every book contains errors on the last three of the levels I’ve identified; it is the blight we writers were born for, to paraphrase Hopkins. (Some books, The Great Gatsby or Gilead for instance, are structurally perfect.) But the more times I have to write “EP” in the margin of a book the more likely it becomes that I will abandon the book. Not in high dudgeon, but because it’s just tiring to have my concentration interrupted by error after error after error, most of which could have been avoided if the responsible parties had taken proper care. I want to keep reading Heylin’s biography of Dylan, because the subject is extremely interesting to me and because Heylin is by far the best-informed biographer of Dylan I have come across, and in many respects — especially the difficult matters of chronology, made more difficult by Dylan’s compulsive lying — the most scrupulous. But I don’t know whether I’m gonna make it through.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the new part-owner running the show at Manchester United, is ending remote work for the employees there. Why? Because he thinks people in the office are more productive? Why? Because they send more emails. Yep, that’s the argument: more emails = more productivity.
