Alan Jacobs

My friend Adam Roberts has written a witty and fascinating theological parable. Adam is of course a heretic, and I will feel bad when the Inquisition takes him. 

This post by the film scholar David Bordwell has me thinking about how I might apply lessons from the project of caring for old movies to the more general work of cultural invitation and repair. Imagine then a threefold labor: 

• Conservation 
• Preservation 
• Restoration 

Imagine something that you value — a trove of photographs, a house or farm, a notebook of poems, your local church; your family even. First, you have to make sure that what you value is not lost altogether. Then, having preserved it from destruction, you work to prevent its deterioration — you protect it from corrosive or destructive forces. And finally, you strive to restore it to its best possible condition. (I recently bought the Criterion Blu-Ray of Citizen Kane, and as I was watching it I wondered if this movie has ever looked so good. It’s staggeringly beautiful.) 

All this work paves the way for further development and extension of good things later on. This threefold labor, then, is not simply backward-looking, is not focused solely on the excellence of our inheritance. Maintaining our inheritance is what enables us to extend it, to add to what we pass down to the next generations. Because generations of scholars preserved the work of Homer, Vergil could write the Aeneid; because later generations of scholars preserved the work of Vergil, Milton could write Paradise Lost. And on it goes — or it should. 

John Gallagher:

The judges asked Thiess why he had become a werewolf – what benefits did it bring to a poor man like him? He explained that many decades ago he had accepted an enchanted drink offered to him in a tavern by a ‘scoundrel’ from Marienburg. The same man had taught him a blessing invoking the sun and the moon and how to cure sick people and animals. Thiess’s knowledge of herbs and charms had made him well known among his neighbours. He recalled that he took on his new identity calmly, but ‘hadn’t thought it would involve so much evil’.

I plan to write about the extraordinary 24 Frames soon. 

I decided not to read the article about the takes about the memes about the exhaustion about the memes about the takes about the Thing That Happened.

This WSJ article about people returning to landlines and ethernet cables — that’s my tribe, man. Now, I don’t have a landline (yet?) and I use ethernet only at my office — but my use of wireless technologies is gradually diminishing because … well, because they suck. They’re not reliable. Apple’s iCloud is terrible, so my primary backup strategy involves an external hard drive (supplemented by Backblaze, which as far as I can tell is flawless); Bluetooth is, I believe, the most unreliable technology in widespread use, so I have returned to wired headphones. I’m gradually restoring the status quo of twenty years ago, when my access to the internet was through one device that sat on a desk. And that sounds great.

Symmetry in nature. Wes Anderson’s gonna love this.

Todd Hido