Alan Jacobs

Any word in The Lord of the Rings is a word as far as I’m concerned.

Games, Mysteries, and the Lure of QAnon | WIRED:

There’s a parallel between the seemingly unmoderated theorists of r/findbostonbombers and the Citizen app and those in QAnon: None feel any responsibility for spreading unsupported speculation as fact. What they do feel is that anything should be solvable. As Laura Hall, immersive environment and narrative designer, describes: “There’s a general sense of, ‘This should be solveable/findable/etc’ that you see in lots of reddit communities for unsolved mysteries and so on. The feeling that all information is available online, that reality and truth must be captured/in evidence somewhere.” 

I would amend to “somewhere on the internet.” The assumption here is not simply that “the truth is out there” but “the truth is out there and I can find it without ever having to get off my ass.” 

After the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, C. S. Lewis wrote to an American friend, 

You know, over here people did not get that fairy-tale feeling about the coronation. What impressed most who saw it was the fact that the Queen herself appeared to be quite overwhelmed by the sacramental side of it. Hence, in the spectators, a feeling of (one hardly knows how to describe it) – awe – pity – pathos – mystery. The pressing of that huge, heavy crown on that small, young head becomes a sort of symbol of the situation of humanity itself: humanity called by God to be His vice-regent and high priest on earth, yet feeling so inadequate. As if He said ‘In my inexorable love I shall lay upon the dust that you are glories and dangers and responsibilities beyond your understanding.’ Do you see what I mean? One has missed the whole point unless one feels that we have all been crowned and that coronation is somehow, if splendid, a tragic splendour. 

You either feel this kind of thing or you don’t. It makes sense that Lewis would feel it, not so much because he was British — as a native Irishman he had somewhat complicated feelings about that — but because he had been steeped all his life in stories, in histories true and feigned, about a monarchical world. He didn’t just know about the King’s Two Bodies, he felt that doctrine in his bones. Thus his overwhelming “awe – pity – pathos – mystery” at the doubleness of the moment: an ordinary young woman, wife and mother, bearing in her own body and on her own head the astonishing idea that we are all meant to be kings and queens, and to rule on behalf of the One True King. As the hymn says, 

Finish, then, thy new creation; true and spotless let us be.  Let us see thy great salvation  perfectly restored in thee.  Changed from glory into glory, till in heav’n we take our place,  till we cast our crowns before thee, lost in wonder, love, and praise. 

That hymn is the secret text of Lewis’s most famous address, “The Weight of Glory,” which describes the burden we feel when we face this high calling: 

I read in a periodical the other day that the fundamental thing is how we think of God. By God Himself, it is not! How God thinks of us is not only more important, but infinitely more important. Indeed, how we think of Him is of no importance except insofar as it is related to how He thinks of us. It is written that we shall “stand before” Him, shall appear, shall be inspected. The promise of glory is the promise, almost incredible and only possible by the work of Christ, that some of us, that any of us who really chooses, shall actually survive that examination, shall find approval, shall please God. To please God … to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness … to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a son — it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is. 

The coronation of Elizabeth as Queen, seen in a certain way, the way Lewis saw it, is the coronation of one nation’s Queen but also a dramatic performing of this weight of glory — the glory and the weight in equal measure, poised in juxtaposition.  

One of the most-quoted sentences in the days since Elizabeth’s death has been the pledge she made on her twenty-first birthday in 1947: “I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.” And I don’t think anyone — friend or enemy of the British Crown — doubts that she meant it when she said it and that she tried to live up to it for the rest of her very long life. And thus many, in these recent days, have felt a rather different “awe – pity – pathos – mystery” than Lewis felt at the coronation: in this case this peculiar complex of emotions arises from seeing one who has borne a burden, a weight, for a very long time finally laying that burden down. 

As I say, either you feel this way or you don’t. It’s perhaps a little harder for us Americans to feel it, because we are not accustomed to the idea that the head of state can be someone altogether different (and fulfilling an altogether different function) than the head of government. On rare occasions something can happen to awaken the impulse even in us. JFK’s assassination was that for many, and gave birth to a kind of cult of Lost Hope — the Camelot myth. Perhaps a better example was provided to me by my mother-in-law, who is a year older than Elizabeth and is still with us: She said that when FDR passed “it was like everyone’s father had died.” Likewise, many Christians, and not just Roman Catholics, felt that the stooped, frail figure of Pope John Paul II in his final years was an image of what we all might be someday — what we all are, in a way, at least sometimes. 

But whether you feel it or not, I will say: Just as the coronation of the Queen was an image of something meant for all of humanity, so too her funeral. She has borne the weight faithfully, and she has laid down her burden. Her obsequies then are not just about “the King’s two bodies” but about all of us. If we allow it, Elizabeth can be our representative: made up of “the dust that we are,” but also one who has born the weight of glory for a very long time, and now can rest; now can cast her crown before the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, and then forever be lost in wonder, love, and praise. 

I’m not a huge fan of the music of Kelly Lee Owens, but I am a huge fan of this interview:

“I grew up in a working class village in Wales and choirs were part of everyday life,” explains Owens. “It’s almost like National Service; everybody has to join a choir. People talk about this idea of finding your voice and I think that’s what happened when I was listening to those choirs. Hard men, ex-miners in their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s, singing with so much passion. Music had never hit me like that before. It made me want to explore my own voice. How could I express my emotions with this sound?

“The next step was Kate Bush,” she says, laughing. 

Of course that’s how it works: you go from Welsh miners’ choirs to Kate Bush and then you become a successful musician. (Also: “My God, don’t you miss that? Don’t you miss hearing something that good in the Top 5?”) Later: 

Much as I love working on the laptop, there is something about a machine like Dark Time that I find truly inspiring. You can program whatever you want and it doesn’t matter if it’s correct or not. It’s as if analogue is designed to go wrong because you always make mistakes. You press this button or put the kick here instead of here. So much of my stuff has that. I wish you could get plugins to fuck up more than they do. I think we need more of that randomness in music! 

When the interviewer agrees and continues, “Obviously, you can do mouse clicks just as easily,” KLO replies, 

But is it as much fun? Can you still create chaos? Will that kick be ridiculously late? Are you interested in making perfect music? I’m not. What does that even mean? Perfect music. What is perfect? A lot of time in the studio seems to be spent reintroducing variation and accident. I suppose you might call it humanness. Nudging things forward, nudging them back, dipping the volumes, trying to keep the listener engaged…. Analogue keeps things interesting. It rebels against stability. 

Back to the rough ground! 

Look for my forthcoming novel The Queue Towers 

Sheila Fitzpatrick:

‘Man lives in the real world; but there’s also a parallel world: a paper one, a bureaucratic one. So the passport is the person’s double in this parallel world.’ The comment comes from a Russian woman in her thirties interviewed as part of a study in St Petersburg in 2008. She might have been channelling the philosopher Rom Harré, who called these bureaucratic doubles ‘file-selves’. It mattered a lot to Soviet citizens what their file-selves looked like: the wrong social class or nationality entered in an internal passport, or a notation restricting movement, could be a disaster. But file-selves matter elsewhere too. The Anglosphere – the UK, Canada, the US, Australia – may have eschewed the Russian/Soviet path of a compulsory internal passport, distinct from the passport required for foreign travel, but drivers’ licences and credit records often serve the same functions, and electronic identity cards may not be too far away. The British, while skittish about mandatory ID cards, have the largest number of surveillance cameras per capita of any country except China.

This is good … but maybe not as good as my essay on passports?

1. Read transcendentally stupid take online 
2. Grab laptop, start banging out devastating takedown 
3. Realize that ten thousand other people are doing the same and that many of their takedowns will be far more widely-read than mine 
4. Set laptop aside 
5. Pour myself another cup of coffee 
6. Heave a contented sigh  

Recently I was watching an MLS match and a familiar scene played out before me:

A player comes flying down the left wing with the ball at his feet, and a defender charges out to confront him. The attacker slows for a moment, which of course slows the defender, and then suddenly puts on a tremendous burst of speed that leaves the defender far behind. Now he’s all by himself out there near the touchline, with his teammates gathering in the box. He puts in a cross … and it sails far over everyone’s head and goes out for a throw-in — on one bounce. He overhits the cross by a good thirty yards. 

As I say, a pretty (sadly) typical scene for the viewer of what my son calls My Little Soccer: absolutely elite athleticism combined with shockingly poor technique. This is also what makes it so difficult to compare MLS sides to the rest of the world. The FiveThirtyEight club ranking currently gives the Philadelphia Union the highest ranking among MLS teams, at 95th in the world — but that seems way too high to me: I just can’t see them beating any of the next 25 or so clubs on the list. Though every MLS team has some skilled players, the Union don’t have enough players with the requisite level of skill. But the strength and speed and stamina of the players are tremendously impressive. 

Basically, when I watch MLS I feel that I’m watching world-class athletes from some other sport who just started playing soccer a year or so ago. I know that that’s not true, of course; I know that these guys have been playing soccer their whole lives. But it’s so rare — in comparison not just to the level of the European top five leagues, but to Championship and Bundesliga 2 sides — to see a delicate first touch, or an accurate cross, or close control of the ball in traffic, or several passes strung together, that that’s what it looks like. To me anyway. 

I’d really like to enjoy MLS more, because, as I have noted, VAR in the Premier League is so utterly broken that I’m taking a break from watching that league. VAR can be shambolic elsewhere too, and in my view should be completely abandoned everywhere in the world — but the Premier League’s implementation of review is consistently appalling. If I’m going to regularly watch another league, though, it’s probably not going to be MLS. 

Very much looking forward to Jamie's latest, which seems the natural — indeed the wonderfully inevitable — next step in his thoughtful and provocative Augustinian journey. I might want to read it in conjunction with a re-read of this. 

Hmm, a couple of Premier League games at 2 — I wonder how VAR will ruin them?