Alan Jacobs

Announcing a blogging hiatus – though I’ll probably be here at micro.blog more than in the past.

I won’t be blogging here for the foreseeable future, for reasons I explain here. 

I will continue, God willing, to produce my weekly newsletter, and I will post photos and links at my micro.blog page. 

Thanks to all for reading. 

UPDATE: See more recent thoughts here. 

The Nostalgic Turn in Music Writing - by Ted Gioia:

There are a hundred non-profit foundations in the arts that could solve this problem with a modest allocation of resources. If the Duke Foundation, for example, funded 50 people in 50 cities with $50K per year to cover their local music scene it would cost a grand total of $2.5 million. And, if they got ambitious, they could place 4 writers in each city, and still only spend around $10 million.

Did you get that? You could have in-depth arts coverage in every major city for less than the cost of a sneaker endorsement from a third-tier NBA star or the salary of the University of Alabama’s football coach. That’s chump change for those well-funded arts institutions, and it would have an immediate positive impact on culture and arts everywhere in this country.

But they don’t do it. They don’t even consider doing it, as far as I can tell. Who can say why. Maybe journalism isn’t glamorous enough for institutions that prefer to anoint geniuses. 

This is a brilliant idea by Ted, and I desperately hope some foundation leaders will read it. Throwing money at “geniuses” — the great majority of whom are already well-fixed — is like giving your money to Yale or Harvard, AKA hedge funds with universities loosely attached. It does nothing to nurture or generate a culture of creativity — and a culture is precisely what we need. 

It me.

Translation: “I’m not paying you to teach me organic chemistry, I’m paying you to tell medical schools that I know organic chemistry — and you’re not keeping your end of the bargain!” 

Robert Bresson’s films A Man Escaped (1956) and Pickpocket (1959) are book-matched movies, mirror images of each other. In the first an honest and humble man is imprisoned, but eventually escapes; in the second an arrogant and dishonest man freely commits crimes for a long time, but is eventually caught and imprisoned.

The films mirror one another technically as well – and in not just the sense that almost all Bresson movies are technically similar. Bresson relied exclusively on a 50mm lens, because, he believed, that focal length most closely approximates human vision. The great Yasojiru Ozu believed this also, as did that prince of photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson. (Were they correct? Well, it’s complicated.) 

Anyway: in both A Man Escaped and Pickpocket the protagonist narrates his story in voiceover. In both films, close attention is given to the details of certain manual actions repeated almost mechanically: A Man Escaped shows us the prisoner’s methodical work to make an opening in his cell door and then his weaving of long ropes, while Pickpocket shows us the thief’s equally methodical practice of the techniques of his art.

And in each film the protagonist is played by a non-professional (though François Leterrier later became a director and Martin LaSalle an actor). Bresson’s disdain for professional actors – whom he believed could only seem – and his alternative preference for using non-actors or what he called “models” – whom he believed could genuinely be – was, in my view, a catastrophic error of judgment. Almost all of Bresson’s “models” fail in their task, I think, and his movies are much the worse for it. This is very much a minority view, I know, but I really do believe that Bresson, for all his gifts, fails to reach the highest level of filmmaking precisely because of his refusal to use adequate actors. (To be sure, Bresson’s thinking in these matters is subtle and in a way profound; I just don’t think it works.)  

The chief exception to this rule is Leterrier in A Man Escaped: he’s excellent. (Claude Laydu, who is superb in Diary of a Country Priest, had never been in a movie before but had trained as an actor.) Martin LaSalle in Pickpocket is just terrible, at least when he speaks – he and Marika Green alike seem to be merely reciting their lines throughout – and that really compromises, for me, what otherwise could have been a remarkable achievement.

Pickpocket is a simplified retelling of Crime and Punishment, though with less serious crime (Michel, our thieving protagonist, is not a violent man). We get the idea of “l’homme superieur,” the verbal sparring with an apparently meek police officer, the undeserved love of an innocent woman. But there’s an interesting little twist that Bresson, who wrote the screenplay, adds. In Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov, after his two murders, falls helplessly into a bipolar oscillation, full of arrogance one hour, full of self-loathing the next, and his only anchor in these psychological storms is Sonia, who urges him to confess his crimes – which ultimately he does.

In Pickpocket the Sonia figure is Jeanne, whose kindness to the needy (including Michel’s own mother, whom he is too ashamed to visit) and ready forgiveness of sin eventually touch Michel’s heart: when she becomes a single mother and is in need, he pledges her his help. He promises to go straight, to make an honest living, to help her care for her child. Love changes him – as it changes Raskolnikov.

But this is where the twist comes in – and where we see why Bresson makes Michel a pickpocket rather than a murderer. For the sake of Jeanne and her child, Michel becomes an honest worker … but the work is so long, and the rewards so few. And look, here’s this man with a wallet full of banknotes: just an artful flick of my hand would be enough to liberate that money and to provide for dear Jeanne and her child for months … what would be the harm?

So here Bresson is reflecting on a point related to the themes of Crime and Punishment but bringing those themes home to those of us who are sinners but not murderers: the overwhelming power of habit. Michel had built up over a long time the habits of a thief, and while he had justified them by his belief that he is one of those superior men, after he abandons that belief the habits remain. He has, as it were, demolished the building but left standing the scaffolding he used to construct it. True love, it turns out, is powerful, but habit is even more powerful; and so Michel finds that he cannot make a new life quite so easily. First he must lose everything.

Esau McCaulley:

How do we order society in such a way that increases human flourishing and limits suffering? What is the good, the true and the beautiful? How do we make sense of the sins of the past and the way the legacies of those failures follow us to the present? What is justice? What is love and why does it hurt us so? What is the good life? Is there a God who orders the galaxies, or did we come from chaos, destined only to return to it?

The answers to those questions that I received from my teachers varied. I do not judge the worth of my former educators by whether I agreed with them. I value those who made me think and did not punish me when I diverged from them.

If there is a danger facing this generation of students, it is not the absence of information. The internet exists; politicians are fools if they think that they can hide the troubles of the world. If parents and politicians truly care about their children’s education, they should not only ask what a teacher said about a controversial issue, they should also ask how the teacher said it, and whether students were assessed based on the quality of their work rather than conformity to a particular ideological perspective.

This ability to hold fair and stirring conversation is the gift that all great teachers have. It is impossible to legislate. This is a gift that can either be honed or ground to rubble by unrelenting competing agendas. We must protect teachers who do it well and do not so overburden and underpay them that they despair of their vocation.

Stop Donating to Your Elite University - The Atlantic:

“Everything we do in academia is based on the assumption that merit can be assessed,” Son Hing said, citing Michèle Lamont’s How Professors Think, a remarkable behind-the-scenes look at the peer-review process. Virtually every evaluative mechanism in the academy—peer review of scholarly articles and grant applications, grading, and tenure evaluation—purports to be objective and are supremely hierarchical.

The process culminates with the types of careers that elite colleges steer students into. The majority of Harvard graduates take a job in technology, investment banking, or management consulting—occupations that make wealthy people wealthier and, research shows, increase their support for social hierarchy. In a survey of Harvard’s class of 2020, only 4 percent of seniors entering the workforce said they planned to go into public service or work for a nonprofit organization.

So elite colleges disproportionately let in affluent applicants who are predisposed to denying inequality, surround them with similar people, teach them in a system that confirms their belief in merit, and, finally, steer them into careers that cement this worldview.