Alan Jacobs

I wrote about building an attention cottage, literal or metaphorical.

In the last few days I have come across, or had sent to me, anguished cries from people who have recently been dragged on social media and cannot fathom the injustice of it, and I find myself thinking: You haven’t figured this out yet? You complain about your words being taken out of context when you post them in an environment whose entire structure — as we have all known for fifteen years now — demands context collapse? How many more times do you plan to smack your head against that unyielding wall? 

I wrote recently about some things that everyone knows, and here are two more things that everyone knows:

1. Our attentional commons is borked, it’s FUBAR; it’s not stunned or pining for the fjords, it has ceased to be, it is bereft of life, it is an ex-commons.
2. The death of the attentional commons has had dramatic and sometimes tragic consequences for every individual’s store of attentiveness.

What I want to argue today is that the attentional commons cannot be rebuilt unless and until we rebuild private and local/communal spaces of attentiveness. Consider this my response to this call for ideas about building from TNA.

What might this look like?

A handful of interesting examples come from this recent Ted Gioia post: There we see directors, actors, and other Hollywood figures buying and restoring old theaters to make shared attentional spaces that offer refuge from the ex-commons. Surely every community has something of this kind, and not necessarily theaters; old libraries, for instance, are ideal candidates for restoration as such spaces.

But maybe people won’t be willing to contribute to such restoration until they better see the value of it; and maybe they won’t see that value until they begin repairing their own personal attentional world. So maybe the place to start is not with the commons but with me — to go inside-out, as it were.

What I need, what I am trying to build, is — I coin this phrase by analogy to a memory palace — an attention cottage. This could be an actual place, like the boathouse in which E. B. White wrote:

But few of us will be so lucky. Most of us will have to build our cottage from scraps, and a good bit of it will need to be virtual. When I sit down in a chair with a book in my lap, a notebook at my side, and no screens within reach or sight, I am dwelling in my attention cottage. Sometimes even these resources can be hard to come by: In The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction I wrote about scholarly children from big noisy families who developed the skill of surrounding themselves with a “cone of silence.” You do what ya gotta do.

For the past few years my writerly attention has been focused on three artists: John Milton, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Terrence Malick. All three of them in one way or another have a lot to say about the social concerns of their own era — though while Milton wrote extravagantly confrontational political pamphlets and Sayers wrote (rather less polemically) about highly contentious social questions, Malick has approached our current common life wholly through filmmaking, and especially his three movies with contemporary settings: To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, and Song to Song. (There are contemporary scenes in The Tree of Life, but the movie ie effectively set in the past.) The key point, though, is this: Each of these artists regularly steps back from the immediate to consider permanent questions, the questions that arise from — here’s a phrase that we need to recover — the human condition.

In the Book of Common Prayer, the Collect for the fourth Sunday of Trinity runs thus:

O God, the protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal. Grant this, O heavenly Father, for Jesus Christ’s sake our Lord. Amen.

To care only for things temporal is to lose the things eternal; but to attend rightly to things eternal is the royal road to constructive thought and action in the temporal realm. The great artists and thinkers cultivate a systolic/diastolic rhythm, tension and release, an increase and then decrease of pressure. In the latter phase they withdraw, by whatever means available to them, to their attentional cottage for refreshment and clarification — and then they can return to the pressures of the moment more effectively, and in ways non-destructive to them and to others.

But most of us, I think, get the rhythm wrong: we spend the great majority of our time in systolic mode — contracted, tensed — and only rarely enter the relaxed diastolic phase. Or, to change the metaphor: We think we should be living in the chaotic, cacophanous megalopolis and retreat to our cottage only in desperate circumstances. But the reverse is true: our attention cottage should be our home, our secure base, the place from which we set out on our adventures in contemporaneity and to which we always make our nostos.

I often think how much easier, how much more naturally healthy, life was even just a couple of decades ago, when the internet was in one room of the house, when the whole family had one computer connected to a modem that was connected to a landline, and movies arrived in the mailbox in red envelopes.

I’m trying to build my way back to that balance, through how I organize the space in which I live and how I apportion my attention. Systolic, diastolic; inhale, exhale. Balance. Almost everything I write, including my newsletter, is meant to help people rebalance their attention — to give them another piece of furniture for their attention cottage.

Angus is very content after playing in the garden hose.

Peer review in academic publishing can be frustrating, especially when frivolous scholars take the task of reviewing a manuscript as an opportunity to nurse grudges, grind axes, or police boundaries. But … I got a peer review of my Paradise Lost manuscript that was strongly critical of my treatment of one major point, and you know what? The reviewer was absolutely correct. Today I am revising in light of that criticism and the book will in the end be much better for it.

A post on why I’m not going to ditch Apple although part of me really wants to.

Two of the best things I’ve read in response to the horrific “Crush” commercial Apple recently put out and half-heartedly apologized for: Mark Hurst and (especially) Mike Sacasas. I have to say that I’m finding it difficult to get over this: the ad has, I feel, given me a peek into the company’s soul, and what I see is a company that despises and mocks many of the things I most love. It’s scarcely more subtle than Mark Zuckerberg shouting “DOMINATION” to conclude Facebook meetings. 

Honestly, I just want to stop using Apple products altogether. But if I did, (a) that would complicate the lives of family and friends who rely on Apple; (b) since I never have managed to get on the Linux train, my practical alternatives would involve relying on companies (Google, Microsoft) that are ethically no better than Apple; and (c) I would be unable to support the work of independent Apple developers (Bare Bones, Panic, Omni, Rogue Amoeba, etc.) whose software has been enormously beneficial to me over the years. 

As I’ve thought about it, I’ve realized that that third consideration is a big one for me. David Smith (known to many as Underscore) is a longtime iOS developer who wrote recently about traveling to Cupertino for the upcoming WWDC — something he’s been doing for sixteen years. When he started attending the conference, he was excited about Apple, but now … not so much: 

It isn’t necessarily that Apple itself is the root of this community, but moreover (especially in those early days) they provided a focal point for like-minded developers and designers to coalesce around, which became this community. Apple aspires toward many of this community’s values, but as they have expanded their reach and scope, they feel more like the multi-trillion dollar company they in fact are. There are still countless folks within Apple who are absolutely my people, but over time, I’ve noticed that there is a growing separation between the corporation and the community.

I’ve heard a version of this sentiment from a number of Apple developers, bloggers, and power users: They used to love the things Apple made, they used to love what they could see of the company culture, but now they just enjoy the community of people who work on the same things they do. Apple has become almost incidental to that community — and indeed, it often seems that one of the strongest forces holding that community is a shared frustration with Apple’s indifference or even hostility to its developers, its increasingly problematic software, its bizarre neglect of some of its central products. For instance, no one has been a bigger booster, or more creative user, of the iPad than Federico Viticci, but just look at how frustrated he has become with iPadOS. 

Does Apple really want to create a community of developers and users bound to one another largely by anger at them? Probably not. But do they care to address anyone’s concerns? Certainly not. They think they’re invulnerable. Time will tell whether they’re right about that. But for the time being I will continue to use my Apple devices, in large part because I so admire the ongoing work of those developers whom Apple seems determined to discourage. 

This photograph faithfully represents the moment when I haven’t had my coffee yet but Angus is already running laps around the house.

I wrote something about the students-can’t-read-any-more discourse.

So here’s yet another story on how students today can’t or won’t read: 

Theresa MacPhail is a pragmatist. In her 15 years of teaching, as the number of students who complete their reading assignments has steadily declined, she has adapted. She began assigning fewer readings, then fewer still. Less is more, she reasoned. She would focus on the readings that mattered most and were interesting to them.

For a while, that seemed to work. But then things started to take a turn for the worse. Most students still weren’t doing the reading. And when they were, more and more struggled to understand it. Some simply gave up. 

I’ve already written on this topic, here. But this gives me a chance to add something I thought I had written about already … but maybe not? If I have, my apologies.

(N.B. That Chronicle article also discusses pedagogical problems faced by professors in the sciences, but I don’t know anything about what they face, so my comments here are only about my own neck of the woods, the humanities.)  

What I would like to ask Theresa MacPhail is: Do you do anything to ensure that your students do the assigned reading? Or do you just give them the assignments and hope for the best? 

Here’s what I do, and have done for my entire teaching career: I give pop reading quizzes. I tell my students why I give such quizzes: I do it, I say, because y’all are Self-Deceived Rational Utility Maximizers.

Students have many demands on their time, and they would also like to spend at least some of that time enjoying themselves, so when they look at what they’re supposed to do in any given week, they triage: What has to be done first? That is, what will I pay a price for not doing? Whatever would cost them the most to skip is what they do first, and then they work their way down the line. If you have assigned your students some reading but they pay no price for neglecting that reading, then students will neglect that reading. It’s as simple as that. When I was in college I thought in precisely the same way. I rationally maximized my utility, according to what was utile by my lights. (That is to say, I never underestimated the utility of smoking pot and going bowling, or smoking pot and listening to music, or … just smoking pot.)  

Now, the students rarely tell themselves that they won’t do the reading at all. They declare that they’ll get caught up next week, when things are a little less harried. But here’s where the “self-deceived” part of Self-Deceived Rational Utility Maximizer comes in: next week will of course not be less harried. And if there’s still no cost to neglecting the reading … well, we all know how things will work out, don’t we? 

This is why I give reading quizzes: to move my assignments up in the queue, to force the practitioner of triage to reckon with me. And there’s another reason: We go over each quiz in class — I make them grade their own quizzes — and in the process I discover what they noticed and what they missed. That’s useful information for me, and not just when I’m making up future quizzes: I’m able in our discussion to zero in on those overlooked passages. “Why did I ask about this? Why is this passage important?” I also encourage them to tell me when they think a question is too picky — sometimes I even agree that it is, though whether I do or not it’s helpful to explain why I asked it. 

This whole process is an education in attentive reading, or that’s what I try to turn it into anyway. And one of the major reasons I think it works is that my students’ quiz grades tend to rise over the course of the term. They get better at noticing; they get better at recognizing what really matters in the texts we read. Not all of them, of course; but most of them.

(Yes, of course I know that some of them are reading SparkNotes and Wikipedia summaries and the like; but I try to take that into account when making up the quizzes, and even if they can get a few questions right based on reading such summaries, well, that’s better than not reading at all. At the very least they get a good deal more out of the classroom discussion than they would have if they had come in knowing nothing.) 

You can assign reading to students; but if you don’t develop strategies for holding them accountable, then it doesn’t really matter what you assign. They’re Self-Deceived Rational Utility Maximizers after all, and if there’s one thing you can never change about them it’s that. 

So when people say “My students can’t read any more,” I want to ask what they’re doing to hold them accountable — and what they’re doing to help them become more intelligently attentive readers. That Chronicle of Higher Education article didn’t focus on those questions, but they’re essential. (We do hear something that Adam Kotsko, whose essay in Slate kicked off this season of conversation, does to make sure his students are reading and assess how they read. It’s very different from what I do, but it’s interesting.) 

If teachers do have strategies for making their students accountable and are consciously working to teach better reading skills and the students are still not doing the necessary work, then we definitely have a big social problem. And we very well might. But some vital information is missing from these exercises in lamentation. 

Looks like I convinced at least one person to try micro.blog: Brad East – AKA @bradeast.org. He has good reasons for joining.

What an amazing post by Adam Roberts, on Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as illuminated by a dozen other things, from Homer to C. S. Lewis to a Superman comic.

Staffage.

From John Ruskin's Fors Clavigera, Letter 7:

You are to do good work, whether you live or die. It may be you will have to die; — well, men have died for their country often, yet doing her no good; be ready to die for her in doing her assured good: her, and all other countries with her. Mind your own business with your absolute heart and soul; but see that it is a good business first. That it is corn and sweet peas you are producing, — not gunpowder and arsenic. And be sure of this, literally: — you must simply rather die than make any destroying mechanism or compound. You are to be literally employed in cultivating the ground, or making useful things, and carrying them where they are wanted. Stand in the streets, and say to all who pass by: Have you any vineyard we can work in, — not Naboth's? In your powder and petroleum manufactory, we work no more.

From Evelyn Waugh’s biography of Ronald Knox:

For three days he lay in a coma, but once Lady Eldon saw a stir of consciousness and asked whether he would like her to read to him from his own New Testament. He answered very faintly, but distinctly: ‘No’; and then after a long pause in which he seemed to have lapsed again into unconsciousness, there came from the death-bed, just audibly, in the idiom of his youth: ‘Awfully jolly of you to suggest it, though.’

They were his last words.

My favorite story about Knox, about whom there are many many stories, is that when he had a private audience with Pope Pius XII the chief thing that the Holy Father wanted to talk about was the Loch Ness monster. (I guess that’s more of a Pope story than a Knox story, but anyway.) 

Yousuf Karsh’s portraits deserve their great fame, and one of my favorites is this one, of Helen Taussig, who basically invented pediatric cardiology. Taussig was a remarkable person. After becoming fully deaf in adulthood, she developed ingenious ways to communicate with her patients; and at the end of her long life she was studying congenital heart defects in birds.

Phil Foden shouldn’t have gotten the Player of the Year trophy because he’s neither the best nor the most important player on his own team. Luis Miguel Echegaray is right: the Premier League player of the year is Rodri. I despise Man City, but Rodri is titanic. ⚽️

Every year I re-read at least one of John Ruskin’s books, and I’ve just gone through The Stones of Venice again. No other writer lights up my brain quite the way Ruskin does. See posts tagged ruskin on my blog. I often wish I could go back in time and tell my 22-year-old self, “Let Ruskin be your guide.” I would’ve had a very different and more useful career.

The perception of colour is a gift just as definitely granted to one person, and denied to another, as an ear for music; and the very first requisite for true judgment of Saint Mark’s, is the perfection of that colour-faculty which few people ever set themselves seriously to find out whether they possess or not. […]

The fact is, that, of all God’s gifts to the sight of man, colour is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn. We speak rashly of gay color and sad color, for color cannot at once be good and gay. All good color is in some degree pensive, the loveliest is melancholy, and the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most. 

– John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice 

Ruskin thought about color all the time, and wrote about it often. See for instance this post. He seems to have thought color itself a mystical and revelatory thing, something he was surprised and delighted that God took the trouble to create.