Alan Jacobs

A couple of weeks ago I compared Sviatoslav Richter’s playing of Bach unfavorably to Glenn Gould’s. I need to revisit that comparison. I was basing my response to Richter solely on his recording of The Well-Tempered Clavier, but recently I have been listening to his massive Richter Plays Bach set and I am absolutely blown away. 

The problem with Richter’s Well-Tempered Clavier, I now realize, has nothing to do with Richter’s playing: it’s all about the recording. The performance sounds like it was recorded in a large room, maybe even on a stage in a concert hall. The reverberations of the environment give the recording a kind of … well, almost pompous quality, a kind of unwarranted drama, given the studious (even if often playfully studious) character of Bach’s exercises. Gould’s recording technique, with its famously close miking, is a much better fit for the music. 

Richter Plays Bach is not as closely-miked as Gould’s performances tend to be, but it was obviously recorded in a more intimate environment than The Well-Tempered Clavier was — and, it turns, out, that makes an enormous difference. The warmth and intelligence of Richer’s playing just sing out. His articulation, though not as absolutely precise as Gould’s — no one’s is, Gould is precise sometimes to a fault —, is flawless, but exhibits an absolute mastery of subtle dynamics as well. And I can hear all this because the recording is so well-engineered. What a masterpiece — I really do think this will become one of my favorite recordings. 

That it is at least as difficult to stay a moral infection as a physical one; that such a disease will spread with the malignity and rapidity of the Plague; that the contagion, when it has once made head, will spare no pursuit or condition, but will lay hold on people in the soundest health, and become developed in the most unlikely constitutions: is a fact as firmly established by experience as that we human creatures breathe an atmosphere. A blessing beyond appreciation would be conferred upon mankind, if the tainted, in whose weakness or wickedness these virulent disorders are bred, could be instantly seized and placed in close confinement (not to say summarily smothered) before the poison is communicable.

— Dickens, Little Dorrit

When the Pandemic’s End Means the Return of Anxiety - WSJ:

Taking an absolutist approach means assigning zero weight to all risks other than the medical one, points out Talya Miron-Shatz, a decision scientist and visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge. “This, in fact, is what every news outlet has been doing for almost a year now,” she says. “We see counts of dead, sick, hospitalized, but not of unemployed, lonely, anxious, or just losing it because so much has been taken from us — company, theaters, and mostly peace of mind. Then there are the health hazards, as people have been avoiding routine care because they feared catching Covid. These costs need to be calculated individually. There’s no easy way to quantify them, which means it’s no wonder that some people ignore them altogether, minimize cognitive effort, and just focus on Covid.”

This story, from last April, still seems relevant today. 

One year and one day ago, I wrote: “I declare 2021 The Year of Hypomone.” As you’ll see if you read that post, hypomone is a New Testament word meaning “patient endurance,” and I hope we have all learned a few things about endurance in the past … well, two years. But endurance is not enough.

Today I say: I declare 2022 The Year of Repair.

This is the year when we must turn our attention not to innovation or disruption or any of the other cool buzzwords, but to fixing the shit that needs fixing.

As Steven J. Jackson has shown in an absolutely seminal essay, our situation requires “broken world thinking,” and broken world thinking leads to an imperative of repair.

We will look unflinchingly at what is broken.

We will repent of and ask forgiveness for our role in the breaking.

We will scout the landscape for the tools of repair, and be especially attentive to what we have discarded, what we have labeled as refuse. We will therefore practice “filth therapy.”

I think of these words: “Don’t be afraid, says Yeshua. Far more can be mended than you know.”

We will therefore smile, if wryly, as we sing the song of this year:

A memorable moment from Dickens’s Little Dorrit:

‘May I inquire how I can obtain official information as to the real state of the case?’

‘It is competent,’ said Mr Barnacle, ‘to any member of the — Public,’ mentioning that obscure body with reluctance, as his natural enemy, ‘to memorialise the Circumlocution Department. Such formalities as are required to be observed in so doing, may be known on application to the proper branch of that Department.’

‘Which is the proper branch?’

‘I must refer you,’ returned Mr Barnacle, ringing the bell, ‘to the Department itself for a formal answer to that inquiry.’

‘Excuse my mentioning — ’

‘The Department is accessible to the — Public,’ Mr Barnacle was always checked a little by that word of impertinent signification, ‘if the — Public approaches it according to the official forms; if the — Public does not approach it according to the official forms, the — Public has itself to blame.’

One can discover the proper branch of the Circumlocution Department to address one’s inquiries if one goes to the Circumlocution Department and asks. Assuming, of course, that one addresses that inquiry to its proper branch.

Recently I had a medical problem that needed attention, and so — naturally enough, one might think — called the clinic that handles my primary care. I was (a) told by a robotic voice that I was caller 17, that is, that they would get to me only after they had handled the inquiries of sixteen other people, and (b) asked by a different voice whether I knew that I could make an appointment online.

I hung up and got online, where I requested an appointment. Several days of silence ensued, at the end of which I got a message telling me that if I wanted an appointment I needed to call the office. I did, and heard a robotic voice telling me that I was caller 23….

Two weeks later, I discovered that a member of my family, who has a serious medical condition, was told at the doctor’s office that she had no health insurance. I called the Benefits department of Baylor’s Human Resources — though later I discovered that I was not talking to another Baylor employee, but rather to a representative of a company to whom Baylor has farmed out such responsibilities — and was told that I could not be helped over the phone, no matter how urgent the situation, but had to submit a request for clarification (and, ultimately, coverage) to a particular email address.

I dutifully took down the email address and sent my inquiry. The email address did not exist.

I called back, got from a different person a different email address. That address too did not exist.

I went online to the company’s website and found a chatbot that gave me a third email address. This one worked. Indeed, within seconds I got a reply email telling me that if I had an urgent request I should call at a particular number — the number I had originally called.

It’s important to recognize that what I went through in both of the circumstances did not result from bugs in the systems, but from features — from purposeful design. The goal of all our contemporary Departments of Circumlocution is simply this: To make us give up. To bring us to the point of shrugging our shoulders and crossing our fingers in the hope that whatever illness we have will somehow get better; or to the point that we pay for medicine ourselves because we can’t figure out how to get our insurance to cover it, and don’t dare try to get by without it. The object of these systems is the generation of despair. Because if the systems make us despair then the companies that deploy them can boast of the money they have saved the organizations that purchase their services.

A number of trees here are convinced that it’s still autumn.

In an earlier post I mentioned Lauren Winner’s book The Dangers of Christian Practice. Let me try to summarize that book’s argument:

For a very long time it was characteristic of Protestants (pastors, theologians, ordinary laypeople) to see Christianity as a matter of the heart — or, perhaps, as an orientation of the will towards God. This was accompanied by a denigration of classic Christian practices — prayer, fasting, penance, silence — as merely external manifestations of religiosity. Then came a “repristination” of traditional Christian practices: “When a Christian theologian (or a ‘popular’ Christian devotional writer) writes about a ‘Christian practice,’ she is almost always commending something to you.” What’s missing from this commendation is the possibility — indeed, the inevitability — that even the most essential and time-honored practices will go awry. For instance, celebrations of fasting rarely if ever acknowledge the ways that for some people fasting can become entwined with eating disorders. What’s required now is a depristination of practice: an awareness of the ways that the cultivation of Christian practices does not escape our sinfulness and brokenness — that such cultivation will necessarily lead to “characteristic damage,” damage not incidental to such practices or occurring thanks to a deviation from them, but rather intrinsic to their embrace by sinners.

Now, Winner makes many important caveats along the way: that she is not making an argument against the cultivation of traditional Christian practices, that by the grace of God even “damaged gifts” can bring blessing. With the arguments and the caveats taken together, this is an important book, and clearly correct in its chief points.

So. Now what?

1. Among certain non-Catholic Christians, there is a kind of sentimentality about “Catholic” practices. Get over it. No practice, no church, no denomination, no communion, allows You to escape You.
2. Properly chastened — and properly aware of the particular dangers of the practices that allow you to do what you would want to do anyway — continue to cultivate them. They have arisen and been developed over many centuries for Reasons.
3. Long ago Stanley Hauerwas, in response to the frequently-heard insistence that “the Christian church needs a social strategy,” insisted that the Christian church is a social strategy. Christians who in good faith and with self-skepticism practice the traditional Christian disciplines are ipso facto pursuing a social strategy. Let’s not forget it.
4. In an email to me, Leah Libresco Sargeant mentioned the recent tendency among U. S. Catholic bishops — and maybe bishops elsewhere, I don’t know — to move Holy Days of Obligation that occur during the week to Sundays.  Leah commented, “I don't like shifting Holy Days of Obligation from Thursday to Sunday — it's good for sacred time to interrupt ordinary time. We need reminders of that hierarchy.” We need the practices that set us in tension with the practices of everyday life under technocratic capitalism. And we need them even if those tensions are, for us, near occasions of sin.

The Virtual Sir John Soane’s Museum is great. I love the Model Room.

Ameera Kawash: 

Web3 aims to seize on the communicative motives of social media and fuse them more directly with transactional ones, as every interaction can be recast as a transaction backed by the blockchain.

Moxie Marlinspike: 

I don’t share the same generational excitement for moving all aspects of life into an instrumented economy.