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UMaster

In a recent edition of my newsletter, I mentioned that I am something of a fanatic about sound recording, from the instruments used to the recording equipment itself to mixing and mastering. The loudness war in recording has brought me a great deal of misery, and I am always looking for beautifully recorded music that maintains dynamic range and has a feel of spaciousness and openness.

I read somewhere that Paul McCartney’s new home-made album is really good, so I gave it a listen, and it’s … okay, I guess. None of the songs especially stood out to me — but what did stand out is the quality of the recording. It’s fantastic — something evident from the opening song, the mostly-instrumental “Long-Tailed Winter Bird.” So I was especially pleased to discover this interview with Paul’s sound engineers describing the recording process. Fascinating stuff, though rather geeky at times.

By contrast, while I love the songs on new Fleet Foxes record, Shore, I absolutely despise its sound — an opinion shared by other Fleet Foxes fans, though in that thread Robin Pecknold himself says that they did two different masters and released the less compressed, more dynamic one. If so, I do not want to hear the one they rejected.

All this makes me think that we are overdue for a music service — probably an expensive one — that has a built-in mixing desk. I would love to be able to take a song that I like and reshape the sound — maybe even, ideally, strip out unwanted instrumentation. Call it ReMIXD. Or UMaster. Whatever. (Yes, I know those names are used for other things.) I want it. Technically it would be extremely difficult, of course — the size of the necessary audio files alone would make it a daunting prospect. Nevertheless: I want it. I want to be like George Martin sitting down with Brian Wilson and remixing “God Only Knows” right on the spot.

By the way, I do not have an audiophile-grade sound system. You can get exceptional sound quality these days at reasonable prices, especially if you look for deals. My system:

I got all those items for well below retail (the headphones at half price). Nothing too fancy, and a true audiophile would sneer in contempt, but it’s a great setup for me.
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Malcolm wishes you a Happy New Year.

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a reflection

Þere parfit treuthe and pouere herte is and pacience of tonge, Þere is charitee.

— Piers Plowman

“Patience” is the title of the essay about Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life that I published earlier this year, just as everything was beginning to go all lopsided.

Patience (patientia) is related to passion (passio). Both connote suffering and the endurance of suffering; the acceptance with dignity of what cannot, and sometimes should not, be avoided; the willingness to wait until this present darkness passes. Jesus bore his passion with patience; those who endure to the end, who are likewise patient in their suffering, will be saved.

I try to cultivate patience because I am commanded to do so. “Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer” (Romans 12:12), says St. Paul, who also begs me “to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:1–2). And does not the book of Proverbs (15:18) teach me that “Those who are hot-tempered stir up strife, but those who are slow to anger calm contention”?

I try to cultivate patience because I am by nature — as my family will quickly and perhaps eagerly tell you — extremely impatient. In public life I am easily frustrated by what I believe to be intellectual error, especially if I think that error stems from a lack of charity. Uncharity makes us all stupid, and my tendency to be uncharitable to the uncharitable is one of my worst faults. Reflecting on that sober fact led me, some years ago, to make a case for the canonization of Jonathan Swift.

I try to cultivate patience especially along three intersecting axes: the ecclesial, the political, and the technological. I am especially interested in the ways that our dominant communications technologies mediate both political life and religious life, and entangle those with each other. (Anyone who has lived through the Trump Era will not need me to explain what I mean.) Especially our social media tend to make us madly impatient with disagreement and difference and to try to quash dissent through words and actions alike. We might demand that everyone be with us wholly or against us wholly; we might long for a King who will rout our enemies and bring about perfect unity.

But anyone pursuing such practices has succumbed to the temptation to immanentize the eschaton. And the only remedy for that particular temptation is to practice patience. And you will only do that if you understand the real import — which is political as well as spiritual — of the parable of the wheat and the weeds, about which I wrote, some years ago, here. In the end, we are told, “every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,” but to live now, to live in “the time being,” is to live, with as much patience as we can manage, in the plural world. That is why I have written a good deal recently about plurality:

But any attempt to live patiently in plurality meets with profound resistance from the gods of our age, who want us to live wholly and reactively in the present, who teach us fear and loathing of the past, what I call palaiphobia. We can begin to overcome that, begin to escape the direhose, first by understanding that our current social hatreds are driven by fundamentally religious impulses.

And then, equipped with that understanding, we can practice listening to the voices of the past; attending to the apparently irrelevant; cultivating handmind; learning to be idiots. And on basis of all that, we can then, perhaps, make a bet on mutuality.

A last word: For the past couple of years I have become more and more convinced that there are vital resources for those of us who want to cultivate patience, who want to be peaceable towards others, who are drawn towards technologies that help us to be more peaceable and patient, in the philosophical tradition of Daoism. (As opposed to Daoism as a religion, in which I am not interested. I follow Jesus.) That’s why I published this essay, the writing of which, as I recently said to a friend, felt like “opening a door for myself — but I still don’t know what lies on the other side of that door.”

Because I want to pursue this new direction, I expect 2021 to be a quieter year for me. I want to write as much as ever, but I think patience now requires me to consider and reflect more while posting and publishing less. Of course, there’s a part of me that hopes that a time of silence will in the long run yield essays and books. But one of my goals for the next year is to make that part of me less vocal, less dominant.

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samizdat

My take on this is simple: It is better for a good book not to be taught at all than be taught by the people quoted in that article. Yes! — do, please, refuse to teach Shakespeare, Homer, Hawthorne, whoever. Wag your admonitory finger at them. Let them be cast aside, let them be scorned and mocked. Let them be samizdat. Let them be forbidden fruit.

They will find their readers. They always have — long, long before anyone thought to teach them in schools — and they always will.

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guilt

Freddie deBoer: “That you should never feel guilty is a commonplace in this world; guilt is never an appropriate response to something wrong that you’ve done but always a dysfunction, a failure to see the hidden righteousness in everything you’ve done. But please take a look at the last entry on the first line, ‘Saying No to Others,’ and the second on the second line, ‘Asking For Your Needs to Be Met.’ The immediate question is, what if what one person is saying no to is the other person asking for their needs to be met? What resolves the tie?” (The whole post is excellent.)

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gruel

Francis Fukuyama:

Liberalism deliberately lowered the horizon of politics: A liberal state will not tell you how to live your life, or what a good life entails; how you pursue happiness is up to you. This produces a vacuum at the core of liberal societies, one that often gets filled by consumerism or pop culture or other random activities that do not necessarily lead to human flourishing. This has been the critique of a group of (mostly) Catholic intellectuals including Patrick Deneen, Sohrab Ahmari, Adrian Vermeule, and others, who feel that liberalism offers “thin gruel” for anyone with deeper moral commitments.
It is indeed “thin gruel” — it is meant to be, on the understanding that the real banquet is being prepared and served by other elements and institutions of our social order. If those other institutions are not doing their jobs, then liberalism will not do it for them. To recognize that the Church has manifestly failed to be the Church and in response to decree that therefore it should be the State instead — that’s the logic of integralism.
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CRT

Three hundred years ago Daniel Defoe wrote, “I believe there are a hundred thousand plain country fellows in England, who would spend their blood against Popery, that do not know whether it be a man or a horse.” That is precisely the condition of a group of Southern Baptist seminary presidents with regard to what they call Critical Race Theory. 

The phrase is the primary problem: the syllables "Critical Race Theory," uttered in that order, sound in the ears of conservative white Christians like a forbidding malediction. My advice to them is: Pretend the phrase doesn’t exist. Instead of issuing upon it a vague, wooly anathema, try to articulate what specific views, what specific positions, about race and racism you think incompatible with the Christian faith. 

Then take one more step. Ask someone you believe to be a proponent of that view whether they in fact hold it. You might be surprised by what you learn. 

 

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unlived

This essay by Joshua Rothman has a lot to say about “unlived lives,” lives we think we might have, or could have, lived.

We have unlived lives for all sorts of reasons: because we make choices; because society constrains us; because events force our hand; most of all, because we are singular individuals, becoming more so with time. “While growth realizes, it narrows,” [Andrew H.] Miller writes. “Plural possibilities simmer down.” This is painful, but it’s an odd kind of pain—hypothetical, paradoxical. Even as we regret who we haven’t become, we value who we are. We seem to find meaning in what’s never happened. Our self-portraits use a lot of negative space.
Miller’s point has been made more vividly by Robert Nozick in his book Philosophical Explanations:
The problem of meaning is created by limits, by being just this, by being merely this. The young feel this less strongly. Although they would agree, if they thought about it, that they will realize only some of the (feasible) possibilities before them, none of these various possibilities is yet excluded in their minds. The young live in each of the futures open to them. The poignancy of growing older does not lie in one’s particular path being less satisfying or good than it promised earlier to be — the path may turn out to be all one thought. It lies in traveling only one (or two, or three) of those paths. Economists speak of the opportunity cost of something as the value of the best alternative foregone for it. For adults, strangely, the opportunity cost of our lives appears to us to be the value of all the foregone alternatives summed together, not merely the best other one. When all the possibilities were yet still before us, it felt as if we would do them all.
But what Rothman’s essay doesn’t mention is how we might, after reflecting on lives we didn’t get, live the one that has actually been given to us.

Because I think that matters, when I have, over the years, shared Nozick’s brilliant paragraph with my students, I have always juxtaposed it to this one from Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue:

We live out our lives, both individually and in our relationships with each other, in the light of certain conceptions of a possible shared future, a future in which certain possibilities beckon us forward and others repel us, some seem already foreclosed and others perhaps inevitable. There is no present which is not informed by some image of some future and an image of the future which always presents itself in the form of a telos — or of a variety of ends or goals — towards which we are either moving or failing to move in the present. Unpredictability and teleology therefore coexist as part of our lives; like characters in a fictional narrative we do not know what will happen next, but nonetheless our lives have a certain form which projects itself towards our future. Thus the narratives which we live out have both an unpredictable and a partially teleological character. If the narrative of our individual and social lives is to continue intelligibly — and either type of narrative may lapse into unintelligibility — it is always both the case that there are constraints on how the story may continue and that within those constraints there are indefinitely many ways that it can continue.
Emphasis mine. There is considerably more interest, and infinitely more value, in considering how out story might best continue than in speculating about what might have been.
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