Alan Jacobs

I think American conservatism today very much needs to be pulled towards compassion; I think American liberalism today very much needs to pulled towards tolerance. I write as a conservative because I think there’s much more hope for the former than the latter.

A ton of people have been linking to this, which is meet and right, because it’s excellent. (There were even a couple of things I, Past Master of Tweets, didn’t know.) However, I need to make a few small edits:

• Due to the nature of Twitter, it’s common for a tweet to end up on many people’s timelines simultaneously and attract many similar replies within a short span of time. It’s polite to check the existing replies to a popular tweet, or a tweet from a popular person, before giving your two cents.

After "polite," add "but almost unheard-of."

• It’s generally considered rude to barge into the middle of a conversation between two other people, especially if they seem to know each other much better than you know them, and especially if you’re being antagonistic. There are myriad cases where this may be more or less appropriate, and no hard and fast rules. You’re a passerby overhearing two people talking on the street; act accordingly.

In the first sentence of that quote, delete "It's generally considered." Such behavior is of course rude, but nothing on Twitter is "generally considered" rude. Alas.

One other etiquette matter I would mention: some people have figured out that I have a locked account and tweet at it, hoping I will notice and (I guess) respond. To me, this is the equivalent of walking up to a hotel-room door that says “DO NOT DISTURB” and pounding on it. This annoyance could easily be eliminated if Twitter had a setting for not showing me @-messages from anyone I don’t follow* — a setting that surely many people who suffer actual harassment on Twitter would want to take advantage of, at least at times, and which ought to be the default for locked accounts. Locked accounts aren’t very private if you regularly have to deal with noise from strangers.

• My bad, Twitter-for-web does have that setting — it’s just, I believe, not part of the API and therefore not available to any Twitter clients, including Tweetdeck. But I have found that even if I use Twitter-on-web, which I never want to do because of its annoying eccentricities, that choice is not sticky: I set the tab to “show replies only from people you follow,” and if I leave that tab and return to it the setting has gone back to “show replies from everyone.” Thanks to Gabriel Rossman for reminding me of the setting on the home page.

 

Chris Ware is sort of the anti-Hergé.

He follows Hergé in two major respects. First, there’s the the clear-line style of drawing, which Ware seems to become closer to as his career develops — early on (in Jimmy Corrigan, e.g.) his lines are far thicker than Hergé’s. Second, the use of flat, smooth, often muted colors (Ware’s general palette seems to be close to Hergé’s nighttime and darkened-room scenes, though The Last Saturday is really bright, except for the gray hair of its precocious-child protagonist).

But in other respects he seems to be Hergé’s opposite:

Hergé	Ware
action	inaction
variety	repetition
buoyancy	depression
strong narrative arc	non-linear scenes
visual flow	geometrical rigidity

The chief interest of Ware’s art lies in the contrast between the obsessively neat, relentlessly balanced character of his drawing — it’s noteworthy that so many people assume that his work is drawn on computers, when in fact it’s done by hand (meticulously, and with frequent use of rulers and protractors) — and the chaotic, painful lives of his characters. Taken on their own, the words and thoughts of his characters would be monotonous, tedious — unreadable, I think; certainly of limited interest at best. Yet the placement of these stunted emotional lives into such an orderly, rational visual world creates an eerie, almost jarring dissonance that itself, perceived as a whole, is a kind of spiritual environment. That many of Ware’s characters are children, or appear to be children, and that so many of his artistic models are commercial art for children, adds to this eeriness.

I started making these notes because I thought I was going to write a long essay about Ware, but I’ve gotten stuck. And what I’ve gotten stuck on is this: I don’t know whether Chris Ware’s work has any substantial value.

So here we have Nathan Jurgenson, who works for Snapchat, arguing, quite sincerely, with a vocabulary drawn from new media studies, social theory, and posthumanist theory, that instead of being more mindful about our use of the internet-connected devices that enable devotion to services like … well … Snapchat, “we may need something more mindless.” Herewith the cutting edge of late capitalism! (It’s rather blunter than it ought to be, I think.)

 

P.S.  Title reference here

A couple of people have written to point out a flaw in the proposal I made the other day — and yeah, they have a point. That point is that in a conversational environment like the one I imagined the floor would be dominated, especially in an academic setting, by pompous bores: people who think that — since, after all, they really should be the Distinguished Guest and Center of Attention — a Q&A session is the right venue for them to pontificate, and in a way that might eventuate in a question but only after many, many words are said. 

I can’t deny that this is not only likely but inevitable, if the Q&A session is unscripted and uncontrolled. So we need an adjustment or two. One possibility would be written questions submitted in advance; another, better, one would be to have a moderator give people one minute in which to formulate their question. I say that model would be better, but it requires a moderator willing to be ruthless — and so few academics are willing to be ruthless. Except in private, of course. 

Despite the mountain of profanity that most of these accounts offer — admittedly a pretty big part of @MayorEmanuel’s playbook as well — none of them capture what really worked with the account: the fact that the story existed in the same time and space that the reader was in. If it snowed in Chicago, @MayorEmanuel was complaining about it; if it was early and you were dying for coffee, chances were @MayorEmanuel was too. For an account that had multiple hallucination sequences, had its characters live in a

—Dan Sinker. If you weren't following @MayorEmanuel as it unfolded, it will be hard for you to understand just how cool it was; how much joy it brought. I have a remarkably vivid memory of following those last few installments of the story — someone (Tim Carmody, if memory serves) tweeted that we had all better get over to @MayorEmanuel if it wasn't in our timeline because something amazing was happening — and then we understood that the tale was coming to an end, and doing so perfectly, even as we tried to convince ourselves that it wasn't necessarily over. A widely shared moment of what the poet Cesar Vallejo called trilce: triste + dulce, sadsweet.

Yes, trilce: I have a particularly vivid memory of sitting in the Duke of Perth on Clark Street with my dear and now so-lamented friend Brett Foster, eating fish-and-chips and drinking ale from Scotland, while I tried to explain @MayorEmanuel to him. It didn’t work, so I pulled out my phone and showed him the account, and even as we were scrolling through it a new tweet arrived! How miraculous it seemed! For a few minutes we giggled our way through the timeline, and when our server brought us more beer she commented that that whatever we were looking at it had to be pretty darn funny. We briefly described to her what it was, but she gave us a blank look; I don’t think she had heard of Twitter. Never such innocence again.

My friend Andy Crouch is a writer and editor who does a lot of public speaking, and he commented on Twitter the other day that he doesn’t enjoy the actual speaking nearly as much as the conversations he has before and after the formal sessions. This has been true for me too. I don’t like being the “sage on the stage”; and even though I am a fairly pronounced introvert and am never altogether comfortable meeting new people, the various activities that tend to surround a public lecture are almost always more rewarding and interesting for me — and I think that may be true for the audiences as well.

I can think of many times over the years when I’ve wished I could ask a question or two of a speaker — sometimes a question that seemed not directly relevant to the particular topic at hand, which tends to hold me back — and I have gotten countless emails from people who didn’t get a chance to ask a question at my talk but were wondering about something…. Though such lecture-based events might promise interactivity, they’re basically performative, and, I should add — this is not incidental — they happen in a society which overemphasizes the performative and offers few opportunities for the truly convivial.

So why not ditch the lecture and make those “surrounding activities” the main event? I’m not thinking of eliminating poetry readings or fiction readings, where some element of performance is intrinsic to the genre, but I think academics like me and idea people like Andy could be used in ways that would be more beneficial to the audiences and more fun to us.

Here’s my proposal. Instead of asking me to give a lecture, a university or school or church might make this pitch: We would like for you to visit us on date X and spend two days in our community talking with our people. You don’t need to do any preparation in advance — you don’t need to write up a lecture or prepare slides — you just need to come ready to converse. We will set up a series of encounters interspersed with rest times for you. This will be helpful for us and, we hope, not painful for you.

Ideally, people would be asked to prepare for the visit by reading or viewing or listening to something the visitor has already produced — something that brings his or her interests together with theirs — which could serve to generate questions and conversation topics.

We hear a lot these days about the flipped classroom; what I’m asking for is the flipped lecture. Such an environment might — might — reach fewer people than a standard lecture, but the experience would be significantly richer and deeper for everyone concerned.

Okay, so, what if, by the time of the Republican Convention, the GOP decides it cannot possibly have Trump as the Republican candidate, and games the floor so that Rubio is made the nominee, and therefore Trump decides he must run as an independent, thereby hoovering up enough funding that he does not actually have to spend his own money to run for President, and Clinton limps to the nomination after having been gummed half to death by the hoary jaws of Sanders in every state, thereby cutting so weakened a figure that Bloomberg now calculates that he can run as a spoiler for Clinton and a counter to Trump, resulting in the most demented Presidential race in my lifetime and creating my new favourite television show?

—Warren Ellis, who sure knows how to imagine FUN.

I wrote this some years ago in a post that has now been taken down — reposted here — but with Umberto Eco’s death the topic is fresh again. Thus this excerpt: 

Have you heard the one about computer operating systems and the Reformation? You probably have. Most people got the story from the Italian semiotician and academic superstar Umberto Eco. In his telling, from an article he published in 1994, it goes like this:

The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach — if not the kingdom of Heaven — the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.

DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: Far away from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.

More on this interpretation in a moment, but I can’t go any further without commenting that my friend Edward Mendelson — professor at Columbia, literary executor of W.H. Auden, and occasional character in the novels of Alexander McCall Smith — made the point six years before Eco did, and just as wittily and incisively:

In the 16th century the printed book helped make possible the split between Catholics and Protestants. In the 20th century this history of tragedy and triumph is repeating itself as farce. Those who worship the Apple computer and those who put their faith in the IBM PC are equally convinced that the other camp is damned or deluded. Each cult holds in contempt the rituals and the laws of the other. Each thinks that it is itself the one hope for salvation.

Each of these cults corresponds to one of the two antagonists in the age of Reformation. In the realm of the Apple Macintosh, as in Catholic Europe, worshipers peer devoutly into screens filled with “icons.” All is sound and imagery in Appledom. . . . A central corporate headquarters decrees the form of all rites and practices. Infallible doctrine issues from one executive officer whose selection occurs in a sealed boardroom. . . .

As in Protestant Europe, by contrast, where sects divided endlessly into smaller competing sects and no church dominated any other, all is different in the fragmented world of IBM. That realm is now a chaos of conflicting norms and standards that not even IBM can hope to control. . . . When IBM recently abandoned some of its original standards and decreed new ones, many of its rivals declared a puritan allegiance to IBM’s original faith, and denounced the company as a divisive innovator. Still, the IBM world is united by its distrust of icons and imagery. IBM’s screens are designed for language, not pictures. Graven images may be tolerated by the more luxurious cults, but the true IBM faith relies on the austerity of the word.

My first thought on re-reading Mendelson’s extended metaphor, which I went around quoting for several years after it first appeared, is: How much has changed! It is growing increasingly difficult to remember that IBM was once a colossus striding the earth, and that people spoke of almost any non-Apple computer as an “IBM machine.” In 1988, the major players were hardware manufacturers.

Six years later, when Eco develops the same conceit, there is one subtle but important shift: he doesn’t speak of “IBM” but rather “MS-DOS” — not a maker of computers but an operating system. And this is the path the conflicts would take: not Apple versus IBM, but Mac (conceived more as an operating system, as a way of organizing and presenting data, than as a physical machine) versus Windows.

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Starring James Earl Jones as GOP Establishment and Malcolm McDowell as Trump Supporters