Alan Jacobs

Harry R. Lewis: “Today’s AI-giddy techno-optimists and techno-pessimists might heed Henri Poincaré’s caution: ‘The question is not, “What is the answer?” The question is, “What is the question?"‘The humanities have pressed the great questions on every new generation. That is how they differ from the sciences, a literary scholar once explained to me; humanists don’t solve problems, they cherish and nurture them, preparing us and our children and grandchildren to confront them as people will for as long as the human condition persists. Our hope for the beneficial development of AI rests on the survival of humanistic learning.” (Harry Lewis is a computer scientist.)

Rachel Haywire: “The fediverse is boring! The trade-off for the freedom that the fediverse offers comes at the cost of excitement and engagement. Its decentralized nature has resulted in fragmented and disjointed communities, lacking the cohesion necessary for meaningful connections. The promise of escaping the echo chambers of centralized platforms has led to a barren environment plagued by inactivity and disinterest.” This, though perhaps overstated, points to a genuine problem.

A fantastic post by Sara Hendren — AKA @ablerism — on how universities ought to, but do not, signal their various social obligations and purposes through architectural diversity. The build world as a guide and frame for the complex experiences of young people.

This meditation by Ryan Burge on the closing of the church where he has been a pastor for many years is deeply sad. The poem for such moments is Frost’s “The Oven Bird.”

A while back I noted that some enthusiastic recent writing about the great Guy Davenport doesn’t really give you a sense of how uniquely strange it is to read him. Well, that deficiency is remedied by Mark Clemens in this exceptionally acute essay.

Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier:

The [CrowdStrike] catastrophe is yet another reminder of how brittle global internet infrastructure is. […] This brittleness is a result of market incentives. In enterprise computing — as opposed to personal computing — a company that provides computing infrastructure to enterprise networks is incentivized to be as integral as possible, to have as deep access into their customers’ networks as possible, and to run as leanly as possible.

Redundancies are unprofitable. Being slow and careful is unprofitable. Being less embedded in and less essential and having less access to the customers’ networks and machines is unprofitable — at least in the short term, by which these companies are measured. This is true for companies like CrowdStrike. It’s also true for CrowdStrike’s customers, who also didn’t have resilience, redundancy, or backup systems in place for failures such as this because they are also an expense that affects short-term profitability. 

A reminder that presentism is perhaps an even bigger threat to our economic infrastructure than it is to our common culture. 

Guadalcanal, part 3.

pre-dawn

The above is a drawing by Howard Brodie, an artist James Jones much admired. 

The distinctive way the Allied commanders organized the campaign for Guadalcanal, coupled with certain features intrinsic to island warfare, shaped the structure of Jones’s The Thin Red Line. Here’s how the novel begins:

The two transports had sneaked up from the south in the first graying flush of dawn, their cumbersome mass cutting smoothly through the water whose still greater mass bore them silently, themselves as gray as the dawn which camouflaged them. Now, in the fresh early morning of a lovely tropic day they lay quietly at anchor in the channel, nearer to the one island than to the other which was only a cloud on the horizon. To their crews, this was a routine mission and one they knew well: that of delivering fresh reinforcement troops. But to the men who comprised the cargo of infantry this trip was neither routine nor known and was composed of a mixture of dense anxiety and tense excitement. 

In this respect the story of these soldiers resembles the Normandy invasion: it begins with a sea crossing. You must get on a ship and traverse the ocean to get to the place where you will fight. 

But the attackers on D-Day in Normandy didn’t finish their war that way, not collectively anyway. Of course, some of them returned the way they came; but many others pushed deeper and deeper into Europe, and when they were done, made their way back home by airplane, or in transport ships with highly miscellaneous passengers. 

What’s distinctive about The Thin Red Line is that C-for-Charlie Company travels to the island on a ship and then step onto the beach from landing craft — and then when it is relieved it returns in precisely the way it came. (“Ahead of them the LCIs waited to take them aboard, and slowly they began to file into them to be taken out to climb the cargo nets up into the big ships.”) It’s like entering and leaving a gladiatorial arena, except that there are these long sea journeys, crossings of empty liminal space, a space that radically separates what happens on the island from everything else in life, before and after. It’s more like Purgatory, then, than an arena — except for those who die. For them, I suppose, it’s Hell. 

That some of them die while others survive means that C-for-Charlie Company is not precisely the same on its arrival and its departure. But the way Jones tells his story, the deaths are not presented as the deaths of individual whole persons but rather as the loss of appendages. Jones repeatedly speaks of the Company as a single entity: “But before that happened the whole of C-for-Charlie had gotten blind, crazy drunk in a wild mass bacchanalian orgy which lasted twenty-eight hours and used up all the available whiskey….” “Meanwhile back at the bivouac C-for-Charlie was still trying desperately to solve its liquor shortage.” When the Company comes across a dead soldier: “D Company had found him while pursuing the Japanese patrol and had placed him on the ledge behind C-for-Charlie for safekeeping at a time when C-for-Charlie was too engrossed in its firing to notice….” When stretcher-bearers take the dead man away: “C-for-Charlie had watched all this action wide-eyed and with sheepish faces.” One entity that happens to have many faces. 

All of this is deeply relevant to the film Terrence Malick would make from James Jones’s novel. 

Google’s search deal with Reddit is yet another of the thousand ways in which the open web is closing.

I’m reading Robert Richardson’s biography of William James and I’m struggling: almost every male person in it is named either William or Henry.

Here is the second in a series of posts about the battle for Guadalcanal and some artistic responses to it.

How vividly did the Guadalcanal campaign impress itself on the American imagination? Well, this movie was released around nine months after the last Japanese soldiers were driven from the island.

But all the media were moving at fast pace in those days. In propaganda, as in so many other things — internment of undesirables, terror-bombing of civilians —, the Nazis established the standard that their enemies emulated. The Wehrmacht invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 and by November the official documentary film, Sieg in Polen, was being shown in New York City, where it was seen by, among many others, W. H. Auden and Thomas Merton. (This was the subject of one of my first scholarly articles.) Likewise, in June of 1942 John Ford carried a camera with him to record what would become known as the Battle of Midway, and the edited footage appeared as a short film in September, with a score by Alfred Newman and narration by Henry Fonda.

And when the Guadalcanal campaign began shortly afterward, a young journalist for Life magazine named John Hersey accompanied the American troops, as did Richard Tregaskis, a reporter for the International News Service. Both of them sent dispatches from the front which were published immediately, and then quickly turned them into books: Hersey’s Into the Valley and Tregaskis’s Guadalcanal Diary were both published on the first day of 1943. The latter was, in a vague sort of way, the basis for the movie. 

Tregaskis’s book — and this is a point to which I will return in later installments of this series — is bookended, as any account of an island battle is likely to be, by sea journeys: an arrival and a departure. Landing craft deliver soldiers to the island; the soldiers enter the hell of battle; eventually those who survive, relieved by new soldiers, return to the landing craft and are conveyed to a place of rest. (The First Marine Division, who had begun the invasion in August, were relieved in early December and taken to Melbourne, where they were greeted, quite properly, as great heroes.) There’s something intrinsically ritualistic, almost mythic, about this pattern. 

But there’s also, in the context, something consoling about it.

The movie of Guadalcanal Diary maintains this structure: the first twenty minutes show the Marines on ship headed towards battle, demonstrating camaraderie among regions and races: a very young black soldier has a speaking part! One of the chief characters is a Mexican-American! (One of the few times in his career that Anthony Quinn played his own ethnicity.) They grow slightly more anxious, though, before landing on … an undefended beach. (This is one of the better effects of the movie — the anticlimax of arriving for battle and finding no one to fight.)

Eventually they encounter the enemy first in small numbers — the initial battle set-piece enacts an event Tregaskis made famous, the Goettge patrol — and then in larger numbers, until we approach a final battle, preceded by prayers, confessions of dis-ease, and letters home to families. In that battle one of the leading characters — it had to be Alvarez, didn’t it? — is killed, and then the Marines are relieved. At the end they’re marching towards the ships that will take them away, and the narrator — a version of Tregaskis — is pleased to say that they’ll receive “a well-earned rest, the job superbly done. The Army is coming in to take over. Into their hands we commit the job, with full confidence in their ability to perform it.” 

And that’s the consoling message, for soldiers but perhaps especially for the families of soldiers: the fighting will be tough, but it won’t last too long, and almost everyone will survive. No need to get too anxious. 

When the movie came out, James Agee wrote that it “is unusually serious, simple, and honest, as far as it goes; but it would be a shame and worse if those who made or will see it got the idea that it is a remotely adequate image of the first months on that island.… I think it is to be rather respected, and recommended, but with very qualified enthusiasm.” In that note Agee said that he hoped to write at greater length about the move, but, alas, it appears that he did not. I would very much have enjoyed hearing what his reservations were. Mine, as the above summary suggests, are significant. I thought it clichéd and profoundly unrealistic in every respect; though perhaps in comparison to still-more-jingoistic endeavors it was not. 

(Also: the movie has quite a number of Asian or Asian-American actors playing Japanese soldiers — not one of whom is named. I would give quite a lot to know who those men were, how they were cast, and what they thought about the whole business.) 

Now, back to real life: one of those Army men who relieved the Marines on Guadalcanal was James Jones, and he wrote about his experience in the novel The Thin Red Line (1962). Soon after that book’s publication, Jones wrote an essay for the Saturday Evening Post called “Phony War Films.” He explains how, after his return from the war — he was discharged from the Army in 1944 because of a bad ankle, an experience that he gives to Corporal Fife in The Thin Red Line — he found himself laughing incredulously at war movies. Sometimes he even walked out on them. Then, almost two decades later and in preparation for writing his article, he watched a bunch of more recent films about the war he had fought in. His verdict: 

When I finished, I was not only almost cross-eyed from watching film, near death from explosive sound effects, I was more depressed with the essential adolescence of America (maybe I should say of the race) then I have perhaps ever been. If our war films are indication of our social maturity in an age when we have the capacity of destroying ourselves, there is little hope for us….

Now, why is this? Why, after so much soul-searching by Americans, so many advances in so many other fields during the past twenty years, have war films remained at the same, essentially adolescent level as the war films of 1943?

Jones's basic answer is that the film studios are giving people what they want. 

By the way, that essay — which as far as I can discover is not available online — is reprinted in the booklet that accompanies the magnificent Criterion Collection edition of Terrence Malick’s film The Thin Red Line. And yes, that’s where this series is headed … but we still have business with James Jones and his novel. 

rainy morning in the canyon