Alan Jacobs

Yesterday afternoon I was listening to Fresh Air with Terry Gross, an episode featuring a replay of part of a 1988 interview with Otis Williams of the Temptations. Williams described in fascinating detail what it was like to work for — definitely for, not with — Berry Gordy, Jr., the brilliant and obsessively disciplined mastermind of Motown Records. Gordy developed an incredibly complex system for coaxing great pop songs from his stable of songwriters, matching those songs with the right artists, and then arranging and producing the performances in ways that would — in theory and usually in practice — produce hits.

One element of Williams’s story really stood out to me. He explained that Gordy would instruct his musicians to record songs in keys that made the singers uncomfortable — that made them sing right at the limit of their range. Gordy believed that this gave a special urgency to vocal performances. Williams remembered with particular vividness the day the Temptations recorded “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” because, he said, it was one miserable day for David Ruffin. Williams described Ruffin going through take after take, pouring with sweat, his famous glasses sliding down his nose. Eventually he had to have some time to rest between takes. But eventually, this is what that frustration produced. One of Ruffin’s best vocals — maybe his very best, though if I had to pick just one I’d probably go with “I Wish It Would Rain”.

I’m not a singer, or an artist of any kind, but in my own little realm of work I’ve tried to follow this principle: work at the edge of your range. A couple of times in my career I’ve tried to make myself write books based on what I already knew, and I just couldn’t do it. I have to be discovering something, trying something I haven’t tried before — finding out where my range as a thinker and writer stops. The down side of this habit is that sometimes I have written (and even published) things I didn’t know enough about. That has been embarrassing. But I really can’t seem to do things any other way, and in general I think it’s a good principle. I mean, after all, isn’t that how you extend your range? Unless, of course, you ruin your voice … but let’s not think about that possibility.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1128”] Ashmolean Museum, Oxford[/caption]

Well, for starters, I am (we are) still very much dealing with the local fallout. I’m referring to the incredibly kind teaching aide at my son’s elementary school who was jumped and beaten because of his skin color, and wondering if he’s going to be able to make it to the first day of class next week.

I’m thinking of my friend’s daughter who is still in the hospital down the road after being hit by that car and is waiting for a bed to free up at the facility closer to where she lives before she can be transferred. I’m thinking about her hospital bills.

I’m thinking of my Jewish bartender friend who never in a million years dreamed he’d be waking up to shouts of “First stop Charlottesville, last stop Auschwitz”. I’m hoping he doesn’t move away.

I’m thinking about the battering ram-barricade device that the antifa so kindly left on our church property for us to dispose of. You know, the one with the graffiti of the bloodied, beheaded frog.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that we had to inform the police chief that placing snipers on the church roof might not send the right message.

And I’m wondering how on Earth I’m going to preach a sermon this Sunday — and how much more impossible that would be were the lectionary readings not so miraculously pertinent.

— David Zahl

Given that I’ve written a book about reading, and a book about thinking, maybe I should write a book about writing? I don’t think so. Writing has always seemed to me such a strange act, and one that can be pursued in so many different ways, that it’s extremely difficult to make useful generalizations about it. If you were to read all the Paris Review interviews with writers, I bet the primary lesson to take away from the whole experience would be: Writers are different — different from one another.

But insofar as I do have any general advice for writers, it boils down to this:

1. Find the time of day when you do your best thinking — when your intellectual energy is at its highest — and set that time aside for writing. (If that's impossible because of work or other responsibilities, then find the best time that's available to you.) Then preserve that time. Be flexible and generous all the other hours of the day, but be rigid and ruthless about your writing time.
2. Write to think. Don't try to know where you're going before you start writing, but write to find out what you think, or find the story you need to tell. Never expect that a particular time-unit of writing will produce a given number of publishable words. You must learn to think of your writing time as a period of discovery, in which you find out what you think, or what images and rhythms tend to emerge from your mind, or where a story seems to want to go. If you focus on discovery, then something worth sharing with others will emerge, in its own way and on its own schedule. But that's not the kind of thing that can be forced. Allow yourself the freedom to explore.

Of course, these rules can be, and by some should be, broken. Anthony Trollope's time for writing was determined by his work day at the Post Office — he had to get the writing in before heading off for work — and in order to get the most out of the limited time he had, he always thought out, in the hours after work, what he would write the next morning. But I think most people who want to write will benefit from following the two suggestions I make above.

Reflecting on all the social and political chaos of the past week, journalists are asking — I see many of them asking — what effect the anger about his comments on Charlottesville, his alienation from the GOP congressional leadership, the departure from his employ of Steve Bannon, have on Trump’s agenda. Will he be able to carry out his agenda? — the assumption being that such trivialities as repealing Obamacare and building a wall along the Mexican border are somehow intrinsic to the President’s agenda. Donald Trump’s actual agenda is to own our mindspace, so the answer to the question is Yes. Trump wants to be the face before all eyes, the name on all lips. That is all. There is nothing else, there has never been anything else, there never will be anything else. His agenda is going wonderfully, thank you so much for asking.

Mermaid Avenue is a curious and delightful musical collaboration featuring Billy Bragg, Wilco, Natalie Merchant, and others playing the music of Woody Guthrie — well, actually, playing the lyrics of Woody Guthrie, to which they had to write the music. It started out as a single album, then became a documentary film, then added two more albums — you can get a nice overview of the whole project here. I mention it because it has held up extremely well over the years and still bears repeated listening. Wilco used Guthrie’s lyrics basically to write Wilco songs, and some damned fine Wilco songs, for instance “California Stars”:

Bragg made more of an effort to channel Guthrie — his belief that they all ought to be doing that was a point of tension during the sessions — but sometimes he writes Billy Bragg songs, as in the luminous “Birds and Ships,” sung hauntingly by Natalie Merchant:

One of the songs that knocked me out when the record first came out was “Aginst th’ Law,” sung by the young bluesman Corey Harris:

Harris is a major, major talent, and sadly little-known. I love all his stuff, but am especially fond of his early record Fish Ain't Bitin', with its delightfully weird instrumentation. Check the title tune, featuring acoustic guitar, two trumpets, and a bass line played on a tuba: Damn, that's good stuff. I have a real weakness for oddball combinations of instruments. Here's one more example — unrelated to the Mermaid Avenue sessions — from my longtime guitar hero Martin Simpson, here playing the banjo, accompanied by slide guitar and bass:

As a new school year is about to begin, I’m going over the things I want to say to my first-year students — the ones I’m welcoming not just to Baylor’s Honors College but also to collegiate life. Here are my standard recommendations:

(1) Be religious … about washing your hands. (And not with hand sanitizers: use soap. Soap is much better at killing the critters that need to be killed.)

(2) Buy some earplugs, minimum NRR 32, and get used to wearing them. You might need to try several different brands before you find a variety that’s comfortable for you. But none of them will be comfortable at first, if you’re not a regular earplug-user, so try any given pair for at least a week before you move along to another. And then put the dang earplugs in your ears when it’s a good time to go to sleep.

If you don’t do anything else on this list, do these two things. In November, when all the other people in your dorm are exhausted, sick, and full of hatred for one another, you’ll be smooth-skinned, energetic, and cheerful.

(3) Find community outside the university. For those of us here at Baylor, a church community makes the most sense — and not just for “practical” reasons — but even if you’re not planning to be a regular church-goer, find ways to connect with people who are not your age. Old people, middle-aged people, children, it doesn’t matter — though if you can help those who are poor or in other ways needy that would be ideal. It is vital for you to be reminded regularly that there’s a whole world out there of people who are not in college and who, consequently, have very different troubles than yours.

(4) Spend time outdoors. In the Texas summer, that might need to be first thing in the morning, but stroll around under the live-oaks on campus, or walk up the Brazos and Bosque in Cameron Park, or drive a few miles west to see the really remarkable Lake Waco Wetlands. And when the cooler weather comes you’ll be able to be outdoors all the time, if you so desire.

(5) During the school day, keep your smartphone in your bag. Seriously: don’t take it out. Look around you, talk to friends, practice your breathing, pray. Just ignore the phone.

(6) Find a system of organization and stick with it. You need to be always aware of what your responsibilities and what the key due dates are. If you keep careful track of such matters, then when other people are “pulling all-nighters” you’ll be restoring your bodily strength in sleep (protected by your earplugs). There are many wonderful digital tools, but don’t overlook the amazing power and flexibility of pen and paper.

(7) If you’re not one of the extremely fortunate students taking my first-year seminar, read the syllabus and follow some of the links on it. You could learn a lot.

(8) School won’t kill you — least of all through putting challenges in your path you can’t surmount. Nobody’s perfect; nobody’s invariably excellent. Remember Pascal’s warning against the error of Stoicism, which is to believe that you can do always what you can really only do sometimes. Don’t be afraid.

More Covers from Henning M. Lederer on Vimeo.

In the preface to his great — and I do mean great — book Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, Richard Hays comments on the peculiar and difficult circumstance of the book’s completion: the immediate aftermath of his being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Mindful of the speed with which that particular form of cancer tends to do its evil work, Hays and the staff of Baylor University Press worked very quickly to get the book ready for publication. Hays:

If it had been possible for me to devote a year, rather than just a few weeks, to completing the writing of this book, I would have developed a much fuller theoretical account of my methodology. I would have engaged in more extended critical discussions with other studies of intertextuality and figural exegesis. But perhaps it is a mercy to the reader not to be subjected to too many pages of secondary theoretical discourse. The thing that matters in the end is the actual reading and interpretation of the primary texts. That is where my interpretation will stand or fall.

(By the way, or not at all by the way, I’m pleased to report that two years after his diagnosis Hays is still with us. Long may he thrive.) Speaking as a layperson, someone wholly outside Hays’s scholarly guild, I am inclined to accept the “mercy” hypothesis.

Last year I read John Barclay’s Paul and the Gift — a book I had eagerly anticipated. But Barclay’s meticulous accounts and assessments of (it often seemed) everyone who has ever written about Paul simply wore me out. In all the discussion of whether the work of Scholar C did or did not amount to a successful resolution of the conflict between Scholar A and Scholar B, I could not keep track of the main line of ther book’s argument, and I longed to return to the text of the Apostle’s writing. I hope I need not say that I would wish illness on nobody, but I do wonder what Barclay’s book would have been like if he had had to work under conditions of great urgency, so that it had to be written quickly or not at all. What if we scholars couldn’t elaborate, couldn’t pay our guild dues, couldn’t carefully situate our argument within the context of all the other arguments that have been made on our subject? What kinds of books might we then produce?

In that preface Hays (perhaps inevitably) cites Samuel Johnson’s famous remark about the power of the prospect of being hanged in two weeks to concentrate the mind. Well, you can’t do much in two weeks. But what if the hanging were scheduled for a year from now? I’d like to spend the rest of my career writing as though whatever I had to say had to be said by a year from … NOW.

This Vulture profile of Michiko Kakutani is a little too inside-baseball for me — perhaps because Kakutani was never going to review one of my books — but there’s one thing I want to call attention to:

You won’t find the word I in a Kakutani review, just an omniscient “reader.” “She became the official voice of the Times,” says a book editor. “She stopped writing what felt to me like criticism and started making pronunciamentos.”

The implication here is that the tendency towards pronunciamento is a personal trait of Kakutani’s, and I’m sure it is, but it is also a function of the self-image of the Times as the official arbiter of all that is good and right — which means that the paper is happy to allow that tone to manifest itself in all sorts of ways throughout the paper.

Take for instance this review by Beverly Gage of Mark Lilla’s new book on liberalism. At one point Gage writes, “He disparages Black Lives Matter as ‘a textbook example of how not to build solidarity,’ … This is a shame, because he identifies some truly important questions that liberals and leftists of all stripes will have to face together.” Note that Gage does not ask whether the political strategy of Black Lives Matter is flawed, or even inform us why Lilla thinks it is. Such things simply are not said: to note that he said it is sufficient for refutation.

This is the classic voice of the NYT, its serene rhetoric of unquestioned, unquestioning, and unquestionable authority. And if you hold the right views, as Gage appears to, then the making of pronunciamentos (even pronunciamentos by implication or suggestion) is actually preferred to the making of arguments.