Alan Jacobs

from Caught by the River

Edward Mendelson: 

Many academics are far too sophisticated to take seriously the thought that literature is a special form of intimacy. Academic discourse tends to think of literature in impersonal, collective terms, typically as something that almost everyone, it seems, calls ‘cultural production’. It is of course true that works of literature are artefacts of cultural production, but true in the same trivial way that persons are artefacts of genetic production. It omits everything that makes a work interesting in itself, everything that makes it matter. The whole idea of literature as impersonal production rather than as a form of intimacy seems intellectually self-defeating. 

Well, my abandonment of this blog lasted less than a month. Here’s why, in a word: tags. When I decided to move quotes and links, as well as photos, to my micro.blog page, I forgot that I have been tagging my posts here for a long time, and that anything I post to micro.blog, where that tagging system doesn’t exist, will certainly be forgotten and will probably become effectively irretrievable. And anything worth posting is worth finding. So I am going to be posting quotes and links here where I can read and use them later. I’ll continue to use micro.blog for photos. 

I still plan to take an extended break from blogging as such, that is, from using this site to develop my own thoughts. But I now think that someday I will return to real blogging here. That’s largely because of all the kind messages I got after I announced my hiatus. It turns out that people read what I write here and profit from it. Who knew? (Certainly not me! I estimate that 95% of the messages I have received about the site over the years have been significantly or harshly critical. I really didn’t think that more than a dozen people read this site and liked it.) 

I have reposted here on this site a number of my essays and reviews, originally published elsewhere, that I’d like to preserve:

• “Reverting to Type” (a long autobiographical essay)
• “Choose Life” (about what church might be)
• “Raising Kael” (on Pauline Kael and Citizen Kane)
• “From the Abundance of the Heart”
• “The Devil’s Bargain” (a groping-my-way-forward essay I still think about)
• “On Loren Eiseley”
• A review of Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road 
• “Against Stupidity”
• Reviews of the sixth and seventh Harry Potter books
• “The Re-invention of Love” (on Anne Carson and Sappho)
• A review of Michel Houellebecq’s Submission
• An assessment of evolutionary accounts of literary art
• An essay on the greatness of Les Murray
• An outline of an anthology I wasn’t allowed to edit
• A review of a delightful book on maps of imaginary worlds 
• An essay-review on dictionaries 
• An essay-review on Auden’s prose
• “Giving Up on Baseball”
• An essay on literary executors
• The introduction to a collection of my essays, in which I think about what the essay is and does
• “The Thrilla In Manila And The End Of Boxing”
• “London Letters” — written by Brett Foster and me
• “Beyond the Wild Wood” — an essay-review on two editions of The Wind in the Willows 

I’ll update this post whenever I add more essays, which I expect to do from time to time.

Here’s a terrific conversation at The New Atlantis about whether it’s possible to write good fiction about climate change.

A Christmas edition of the newsletter.

Renovations to our parish church continue apace, including a lovely new rose window.

Joan Didion, “Holy Water” (1977):

Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. The water I will draw tomorrow from my tap in Malibu is today crossing the Mojave Desert from the Colorado River, and I like to think about exactly where that water is. The water I will drink tonight in a restaurant in Hollywood is by now well down the Los Angeles Aqueduct from the Owens River, and I also think about exactly where that water is: I particularly like to imagine it as it cascades down the 45-degree stone steps that aerate Owens water after its airless passage through the mountain pipes and siphons. As it happens my own reverence for water has always taken the form of this constant meditation upon where the water is, of an obsessive interest not in the politics of water but in the waterworks themselves, in the movement of water through aqueducts and siphons and pumps and forebays and afterbays and weirs and drains, in plumbing on the grand scale. I know the data on water projects I will never see. I know the difficulty Kaiser had closing the last two sluiceway gates on the Guri Dam in Venezuela. I keep watch on evaporation behind the Aswan in Egypt. I can put myself to sleep imagining the water dropping a thousand feet into the turbines at Churchill Falls in Labrador. If the Churchill Falls Project fails to materialize, I fall back on waterworks closer at hand — the tailrace at Hoover on the Colorado, the surge tank in the Tehachapi Mountains that receives California Aqueduct water pumped higher than water has ever been pumped before — and finally I replay a morning when I was seventeen years old and caught, in a military-surplus life raft, in the construction of the Nimbus Afterbay Dam on the American River near Sacramento. I remember that at the moment it happened I was trying to open a tin of anchovies with capers. I recall the raft spinning into the narrow chute through which the river had been temporarily diverted. I recall being deliriously happy.