Alan Jacobs

I had to suspend my regular newsletter – interrupted by Life – but I’m still sending out occasional brief missives. I dropped one this morning.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1200”] I am as I am. 1999 © Dayanita Singh[/caption]

“The Love Feast“ -- me in the new issue of Harper’s (paywalled, I think?) on the immediately forthcoming two volumes of Auden’s complete poems:

In almost every reading of Auden, the familiar hinge of his career remains visible — and indeed is emphasized in the division of these two volumes, the first of which ends in 1939 and the second of which begins in 1940. But thanks to [Edward] Mendelson, it is now generally seen to mark a transition, not from excellence to incompetence, but from one kind of excellence to another. And this way of viewing the transition is now typically accepted even by those, such as Heaney, who prefer the earlier verse and lament what was lost.

All the themes of Auden’s later verse converge on a rejection of the heroic and triumphal modes, and the substitution of a different register, that of the repeated and the mundane. In the second half of his career, Auden patiently worked out, in both prose and masterful verse, the implications of his homemade anthropology — his own account of what his friend Hannah Arendt would later call, in a 1958 book, The Human Condition. That anthropology ultimately centers on two core propositions: that we are prone to trust and love what breaks our hearts, and that we are creatures alongside the birds and the social insects, albeit creatures who, as he says in one poem, have “assumed responsibility for time.” We must live simultaneously in nature and history, though we forever are tempted by those prophets who tell us we can only take full refuge in one or the other. 

Photograph of Auden by Irving Penn, 1947 © The Irving Penn Foundation 

The 9 Biggest Myths About Nonfiction Trade Publishing, Debunked. These are all spot-on. I would only add that even when you get a larger advance, it’s typically divided into either three or four installments. So, for instance, I’ve had some divided this way:

• First part on signing the contract
• Second part on delivering a complete manuscript
• Third part on publication of the hardcover
• Fourth part on publication of the paperback

You can't "live off your big advance" when you only have a quarter of that advance — or maybe a third (the divisions aren't always equal) — during the period of writing.

Austin Kleon

From the Preface to the first volume of Simon Callow’s biography of Orson Welles: 

He publicly constructed himself, from the earliest age — my first press clipping is headed ACTOR, POET, CARTOONIST AND ONLY TEN — in a medium that he courted and denounced in equal measure; and the press returned the compliment. Together they concluded a sort of Faustian pact wherein Welles was meteorically advanced by sensation-hungry newspapers, to whom he pandered shamelessly, until at the height of his fame he fell foul of them; saddled with a preposterous reputation and a personality drawn by him and coloured by them, he found himself unemployable, his work overshadowed by his ever-expanding Self. Even his body became legendary, out of control; whatever his soul consisted of protected from the world by wadding. Locked in a personal relationship as complex and curious as that of Lear and his fool, Welles and the newspapers needed and abominated each other in a co-dependency that only his death dissolved. It is no coincidence that his most famous work is the apotheosis of the newspaper film. 

An interesting addendum to my argument that one can profitably see Citizen Kane as a comedy about newspapers. 

In 1957 Vance Packard published The Hidden Persuaders, his famous book about advertising techniques, in which he claimed that the products advertised, taken together, promised to fulfill eight “compelling needs”:

• Emotional Security
• Reassurance of worth
• Ego gratification
• Creative outlets
• Love objects
• Sense of power
• Roots
• Immortality

How much has changed? To what degree is the world of social media the inheritor of 1950s advertising as the means by which these needs are fulfilled? 

Michael L. Budde: 

This book is not an attempt to convince people that Jesus would prefer his followers not to use lethal force, even for a good cause. Instead, in many of the chapters that follow, I aim to give Christians a taste of what they’re buying when they affirm the legitimacy of even a little bit of lethal force, even in the most reasonable of cases. They want a Christ that allows them to kill, so I’m giving them especially that, especially when they think they’re affirming something else. 

Damn. 

Freddie deBoer:

The simplest argument against a cultural fixation on the individual getting whatever they want is that it’s entirely unachievable. But the deeper and more important problem is that several thousand years of human progress has advanced in the direction of the common good rather than of the selfish individual. We owe each other things, and sometimes this means sacrificing our own wants and desires to support others. Like bending a little to satisfy the expectations of the woman who gave you life. If a dogged insistence that the individual’s wants are ultimately of less importance than the greater good of the whole is actually a part of Chinese culture, as suggested by this movie [Turning Red], I think that’s something worth defending, not treating like a cartoon villain.

Paul Farmer:

I love WL’s [White Liberals], love 'em to death. They're on our side. But WL's think all the world's problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves. We don't believe that. There's a lot to be said for sacrifice, remorse, even pity. It's what separates us from roaches.