Alan Jacobs

From David Copperfield, Chapter XV:

Mr. Dick and I soon became the best of friends, and very often, when his day’s work was done, went out together to fly the great kite. Every day of his life he had a long sitting at the Memorial, which never made the least progress, however hard he laboured, for King Charles the First always strayed into it, sooner or later, and then it was thrown aside, and another one begun. The patience and hope with which he bore these perpetual disappointments, the mild perception he had that there was something wrong about King Charles the First, the feeble efforts he made to keep him out, and the certainty with which he came in, and tumbled the Memorial out of all shape, made a deep impression on me. What Mr. Dick supposed would come of the Memorial, if it were completed; where he thought it was to go, or what he thought it was to do; he knew no more than anybody else, I believe. Nor was it at all necessary that he should trouble himself with such questions, for if anything were certain under the sun, it was certain that the Memorial never would be finished. It was quite an affecting sight, I used to think, to see him with the kite when it was up a great height in the air. What he had told me, in his room, about his belief in its disseminating the statements pasted on it, which were nothing but old leaves of abortive Memorials, might have been a fancy with him sometimes; but not when he was out, looking up at the kite in the sky, and feeling it pull and tug at his hand. He never looked so serene as he did then. I used to fancy, as I sat by him of an evening, on a green slope, and saw him watch the kite high in the quiet air, that it lifted his mind out of its confusion, and bore it (such was my boyish thought) into the skies. As he wound the string in and it came lower and lower down out of the beautiful light, until it fluttered to the ground, and lay there like a dead thing, he seemed to wake gradually out of a dream; and I remember to have seen him take it up, and look about him in a lost way, as if they had both come down together, so that I pitied him with all my heart. 

I identify with Mr. Dick. I think if I could take all this stuff I write and make a kite from it, I’d be happier … as long as I could keep the kite aloft. 

In a recent post that links back to an earlier post, my friend Adam Roberts talks about his lasting affection for Robert Graves’s book The White Goddess. When I was about eighteen, an older friend who loved that book pressed it on me, and because I trusted his judgment, I bought a copy of the book and sat down quite eagerly to read it. But it wholly defeated me. I found it almost literally unreadable. What I mean by that is that my eyes passed over all the words but I simply couldn’t figure out how they were related to one another. I made a strenuous effort but eventually set it aside.

I’ve tried several times over the years but have yet to get through The White Goddess. My most recent attempt was about six months ago, and I still find the book unreadable – though in a different way than I did forty years ago. Then I just couldn’t comprehend Graves at all; now I read a paragraph and think: “I believe there are a dozen demonstrably false statements in that one paragraph.” And even though I know that, as Adam says, the value of Graves’s book doesn’t depend on his being historically accurate, the sheer number of erroneous statements – some of them ludicrously wrong – just overwhelms me.

Another friend, Austin Kleon, wrote a post a few years ago on the virtues of saying “It wasn’t for me.” Not a judgment on the book; not a judgment on me; just a mismatch. The White Goddess and I are mismatched. Might that ever change? Austin knows that it’s possible: 

But in this case I have serious doubts. I’ve given this book forty years to connect with me; I think that’s enough.

There are men who always confound the praise of goodness with the practice, and who believe themselves mild and moderate, charitable and faithful, because they have exerted their eloquence in commendation of mildness, fidelity, and other virtues.

– Samuel Johnson, Rambler 28 

I feel seen. 

The Woes of Being Addicted to Streaming Services | Pitchfork:

I feel unsettled when I stream music on Spotify. Maybe you feel that way, too. Even though it has all the music I’ve ever wanted, none of it feels necessarily rewarding, emotional, or personal. I pay a nominal fee for this privilege, knowing that essentially none of it will reach the artists I am listening to. I have unfettered access to an abundance of songs I genuinely love, along with an abundance of great songs I’ve never heard before, but I can’t shake the eerie feeling that the options before me are almost too perfect. I have personalized my experience enough to feel like this is my music, but I know that’s not really true — it’s simply a fabricated reality meant to replace the random contours of life outside the app. 

Jeremy Larson here covers some familiar territory in his descriptions of the distressing things that the streaming services do to musicians’ careers, but I’m more interested in the parts (like the above quote) that describe how streaming services mess with the experience of listeners. 

For what it’s worth, as I have, over the past year, spent less and less time on my digital devices, I have almost completely stopped streaming music. I listen to LPs and CDs, and reconnecting with those older technologies has had a wonderfully enlivening effect on my experience of music. I regularly do something now I haven’t done for years: listen to al album all the way through for several days in a row. I love it. It’s highly unlikely that I’ll ever go back to streaming. 

“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” — Samuel Johnson

I love it when former students of mine do cool things, and with this book Nate Anderson has done a cool thing. I’ve just started the book but I am very much looking forward to the rest. 

”The Sermon of the Wolf,” by Eleanor Parker: 

For Wulfstan [preaching in the year 1014] diagnosing his society’s ills as breaches of law was not a source of despair, but an opportunity. It meant he could offer a plan of action. In this sermon his purpose is not just to denounce and lament, to criticize without providing solutions. His aim is to preach repentance and amendment – to convince people that things can get better, even in the shadow of the end times. The end will come; he has no doubt of that, and right now things are almost as bad as they can be. But there are measures we can take in the meantime, he suggests, things that will help. They won’t stave off the apocalypse or keep the Antichrist away. Yet they’re still worth doing – both morally right in themselves and a remedy for present evils.

His message is simple: repent, repair, do better. There’s no pretense that it’ll be easy. “A great wound needs a great remedy,” he says, “and a great fire needs a great amount of water if the blaze is to be quenched.” The worse the situation, the more work and collective effort it will take to mend it. But the promise that it can be mended is, nonetheless, a remarkably hopeful takeaway from such a fierce and angry sermon. 

Is Wulfstan the unofficial patron of this blog? 

A continuation of this post 

Hugh Trevor-Roper doesn’t use the term normie, of course – his key term of disparagement is “philistine.” Paul Fussell: “A Modernist is a late-nineteenth- or twentieth-century artist or artistic theorist who has decided to declare war on the received, the philistine, the bourgeois, the sentimental, and the democratic,” and I think it’s fair to say that the philistine in this sense simply is someone whose affections gravitate towards the received, the bourgeois, the sentimental, and the democratic. (One could say that those are the four cardinal points of the culture of the Shire.)

We owe this use of the word “philistine” to Matthew Arnold, who in turn borrowed it from a town-and-gown dispute in the German city of Jena. In his great book Culture and Anarchy Arnold sets the Philistine on the side of money over against culture:

The people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich, are just the people whom we call the Philistines. Culture says: “Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voices; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?”

The condescension drips and drips. But like Trevor-Roper, Arnold did not confuse philistinism with stupidity: in a later essay he picks up a category he had briefly mentioned in Culture and Anarchy: the “Philistine of genius.” This category is dominated by three giants: “So we have the Philistine of genius in religion — Luther; the Philistine of genius in politics — Cromwell; the Philistine of genius in literature — Bunyan.” Though appalled by these figures, he has to concede their greatness. The whole project of Culture and Anarchy might be described as a thought experiment for creating a world in which such people could never be recognized as great; but in our real, existing world, such recognition is unavoidable to the honest. 

However, did any of these figures desire money? If so, they went about the pursuit of it in very odd ways. I think the love of money is, for Arnold, just one of the ways a person can live in opposition to true Culture. One also opposes culture by a leveling impulse: Luther against the papacy; Cromwell against the aristocracy; and Bunyan against the state church and its confinement of the ability to preach to the formally educated. And over the course of his career I think Arnold much more consistently focuses on the Philistinism of Leveling rather than the Philistinism of Lucre.  

Many artists and writers – and, I think it’s fair to say, most academics in the humanities – have inherited from Arnold a settled contempt for philistines — which is to say, for normies. This is a bit ironic, because Arnold’s famous dedication to cultivating “the best that has been thought and said in the world” – also from Culture and Anarchy – is now thought a normie ideal to uphold. But Arnold believed that such dedication to high and unphilistine culture was the best means of “turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits.” That is – and it is important to remember that Arnold’s day job was as an inspector of schools – the cultivation of “the best that has been thought and said” will not reinforce existing prejudices and assumptions but rather will bring about necessary social change. And indeed this is how things worked out: as Jonathan Rose shows in his masterful book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes,

Even literature that appeared to be safely conservative was potentially explosive in the minds of readers. This may seem counterintuitive: in the recent “canon wars,” the Left and Right agreed that a traditional canon of books would reinforce conservative values (the Right arguing that this was a good thing). But both sides in this debate made the mistake of believing each other’s propaganda. Contrary to all the intentions of the authors, classic conservative texts could make plebeian readers militant and articulate.

Militant, articulate normies.