Alan Jacobs

Also, here’s Robin explaining in a video the language/script/typeface he developed for his fabulous new novel Moonbound. I love the fact that Robin’s one previous video was posted fourteen years ago. I can’t wait to see what he posts in 2038.

Surprising moment from this interview with Robin Sloan:

[Gibson-Faulkner] Theory is, of course, the great policy planning framework of the Anth, which is what I call human civilization at its apex—our near future. The idea is that it’s a system for imagining and executing big projects that actually works. The theory emerges from the intersection of two maxims. First, there’s William Gibson: “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.” Then, there’s William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Mashing those together, we get an interesting view of the present, not as a point on a continuum, but rather a smear, a bleed, a diffusion of events and possibilities. (It’s well-known that early Gibson-Faulkner theorists were also influenced by Alan Jacobs and his concept of “temporal bandwidth”.)

To which I 🤯 and ☺️. (It’s really Thomas Pynchon’s concept more than mine, but I’ll take credit.)

George Lois’s library — in his apartment in the West Village — is my kind of workspace. And the apartment, at $5,600,000, is a bargain!

An outstanding post by Mike Sacasas about technology and work — the kinds of work we value and the kinds of work we ought to value.

I wrote about character in the Pentateuch.

Damascening

The book of Genesis features a large number of distinct and memorable characters: Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Esau and Jacob, Joseph. Our attention is captured for the longest periods by Abraham and Jacob, but often we see them in relation to their children and other family members. They rarely occupy the stage alone. But the rest of the Pentateuch really only has one character: Moses. A few others hover around the margins, but they are mere sketches of persons. Only Moses is fully a character. 

After the Pentateuch, with Joshua, Judges, and Ruth, the narrative resumes its proliferation of personages — only to narrow its focus again with David. We stay with David for a very long time before the story pulls back out to describe the wide range of kings and prophets who follow him.  

So in the Hebrew Bible we see this regular alternation of (a) sweeping narrative that emphasizes ongoing familial or cultural patterns and (b) intensely focused stories that trace the development of individual lives. Sweep is the default, but you never know when the story will zoom in for an extended close-up. 

One way to think about this: Certain patterns of behavior — most of them involving waxing and waning devotion to YHWH and obedience to His commandments — characterize the children of Israel; but some people seem to embody these patterns in powerful, profoundly exemplary ways. You could say that someone like David is, to adapt a concept from the anthropologist Mary Douglas, a human condensed symbol. (Cf. p. 10: “For Christian examples of condensed symbols, consider the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist and the Chrisms. They condense an immensely wide range of reference summarized in a series of statements loosely articulated to one another.”) The complicated and inconstant history of Israel is condensed and made visible and comprehensible in a handful of key figures. This is how Abraham functions in Paul’s letters: a condensed symbol of faith in action. 

And I wonder if a character can only serve as this kind of symbol if he or she is complex, with hidden depths. Here I am thinking of Erich Auerbach’s famous contrast between the Homeric poems and the Hebrew Bible. The “basic impulse of the Homeric style” is

to represent phenomena in a fully extemalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts, and completely fixed in their spatial and temporal relations. Nor do psychological processes receive any other treatment: here too nothing must remain hidden and unexpressed. With the utmost fullness, with an orderliness which even passion does not disturb, Homer's personages vent their inmost hearts in speech; what they do not say to others, they speak in their own minds, so that the reader is informed of it. 

By contrast, the narration of Genesis features 

the externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and “fraught with background.” 

Perhaps only the character “fraught with background” can become a condensed symbol. 

Portishead’s Dummy is equidistant in time from (a) now and (b) A Hard Day’s Night.

My pledge: I will never ever read an article about “How AI will change X” — no matter what X is.

What a great post by Sara Hendren AKA @ablerism : “When my teenagers play patiently and attentively with someone’s much younger children at a party, people will compliment me warmly: They were so kind! I thank them but also tell them plainly that my kids were instructed to do so — they are no more naturally and authentically generous hosts as adolescents than anyone else. We just don’t make it optional at our house. And they’re old enough now to see the fruits of constraining their natural impulses. When you behave in prosocial ways, the prosocial feeling will often follow, not lead.”

A friend sent me this extraordinary music video by RAYE — please do watch the whole thing. It’s a parable, a warning, a word of exhortation. It moves from the emptiness of lonely self-loathing, to the emptiness of celebrity and success, to … well, just watch to see where it ends up.

I wrote a June update for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters. I’m very grateful for those supporters because they enable me to keep blogging, which I love to do.

I made a little outline of the Pentateuch — and explained why it matters that such an outline is so easily made.

Early Anglo-Saxon shoulder clasp

• Prologue to the whole: The Creation (Genesis 1) 
• The history of humanity (Genesis 2–11) 
• Making and naming 
• Commanding and disobeying
• Zooming in: Abraham and his descendants (Genesis 12–36) 
• Hospitable and inhospitable 
• Abraham and the three visitors 
• Lot in Sodom 
• Abimelech
• Dinah and the family of Hamor   
• Barrenness and fertility
• Sarai/Sarah
• Rebekah
• Rachel
• Elder and younger 
• Ishmael and Isaac 
• Esau and Jacob 
• The children of Leah and the sons of Rachel 
• The children of Israel in Egypt (Genesis 37-Exodus 12) 
• Beneficiaries: Genesis 37–50 
• Slaves: Exodus 1–12 
• The children of Israel in the wilderness (Exodus 13-Deuteronomy 34)
• Wandering begun (Exodus 13–18) 
• Ascent to Sinai (Exodus 19-Leviticus 27)
• Response to Sinai (Numbers 1–8) 
• Ordering
• Cleansing
• Dedicating 
• Remembering 
• Wandering resumed (Numbers 9-Deuteronomy 33)
• Ascent to Nebo/Pisgah (Deuteronomy 34) 

This kind of thing can seem reductive, and if you rely on it overmuch it certainly will be, but note how it calls attention to the relentless patterning of the narrative. As Robert Alter has pointed out, the long-time obsession with sources among scholars of the Hebrew Bible — their slightly mad-eyed teasing out of the contributions of their posited authors J, E, D, and P — led them to the assumption that “the redactors were in the grip of a kind of manic tribal compulsion, driven again and again to include units of traditional material … for reasons they themselves could not have explained.” Yet if that were true, why does an outline of the Pentateuch look so orderly — indeed, almost excessively so? 

Gabriel Josipovici has argued in his wonderful and lamentably neglected The Book of God that “the inventors of the documentary hypothesis” — the leading biblical scholars of a century to a century-and-a-half ago — 

believed that by trying to distinguish the various strands they were getting closer to the truth, which, in good nineteenth-century fashion, they assumed to be connected with origins. But in practice the contrary seems to have taken place. For their methodology was necessarily self-fulfilling: deciding in advance what the Jahwist or the Deuteronomist should have written, they then called whatever did not fit this view an interpolation. But this leads, as all good readers know, to the death of reading; for a book will never draw me out of myself if I only accept as belonging to it what I have already decreed should be there. 

What my little outline shows is what anyone can see if they read the text — that however many authors and redactors worked on the Pentateuch, it’s anything but a chaotic assemblage of contradictory traditions; rather, it is almost obsessively built upon readily identifiable patterns, patterns that work like musical themes or Wagnerian leitmotifs. 

I’ll conclude with a more general point. You should not be able to get a doctorate in the humanities without having this declaration tattooed on the back of your hand: “A book will never draw me out of myself if I only accept as belonging to it what I have already decreed should be there.”

Urgent insistence that I stop reading and play.

After watching that shameful display by the USMNT today, I would like to remind everyone that Jürgen Klopp is unemployed. Just saying. ⚽️

Live oak.

I want to write a post about why my "Cosmotechnics" essay ended up being a dead end for me. Though I need to think harder about just why I believe that's the case. I was looking for a way to think about technology that did not involve critique or enthusiasm but rather a kind of ironic detachment. But having made that point I think I exhausted the relevance of Daoism to me. Daoism could teach me ironic detachment from Technopoly but it could not teach me how to get from such detachment to the love of God and my neighbor. 

N. B. I’m posting this excerpt instead of writing that post. 

Rose.