Alan Jacobs

But the truth is, his experiment with Google Glass made me realize how comparably social mobile phones are. As much as there’s a brief against phones as a zombie drug that causes us all to ignore the world, in reality, they are something people frequently share with others. When you take a photo, you can hand it over for inspection. When you Google a Wikipedia page, the person you’re with can peer over your shoulder to read it with you. People gather around phones to watch YouTube videos or look at a funny tweet together or jointly analyze a text from a friend. With Glass, there was no such sharing — and as Clive points out, because you often can’t tell whether someone is using it at all, it becomes your own private Panopticon. Even when it’s not on, you assume it is, and then it snubs you. When he was out, he kept sending me pictures of the kids, but to see them, I had to log in to Google Plus. Look, I’ve been spoiled by digital convenience. Just take a photo on your phone and text me the darn thing.

Writers on the brain and the mind tend to divide into Spocks and Kirks, either embracing the idea that consciousness can be located in a web of brain tissue or debunking it. For the past decade, at least, the Spocks have been running the Enterprise: there are books on your brain and music, books on your brain and storytelling, books that tell you why your brain makes you want to join the Army, and books that explain why you wish that Bar Refaeli were in the barracks with you. The neurological turn has become what the “cultural” turn was a few decades ago: the all-purpose non-explanation explanation of everything. Thirty years ago, you could feel loftily significant by attaching the word “culture” to anything you wanted to inspect: we didn’t live in a violent country, we lived in a “culture of violence”; we didn’t have sharp political differences, we lived in a “culture of complaint”; and so on. In those days, Time, taking up the American pursuit of pleasure, praised Christopher Lasch’s “The Culture of Narcissism”; now Time has a cover story on happiness and asks whether we are “hardwired” to pursue it.

Every meeting I’ve ever had since I began full-time advocacy, I have brought with me a book of Seamus Heaney’s poems. I always think if you’re asking somebody for something it’s a good idea to give them something first. So I always gave them Seamus Heaney’s poems. This is from the pope to every president I have ever met. In this past week I gave Seamus’s book Electric Light to President Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia. She’s currently obsessed with the efforts to bring electricity to her people so she could not believe it.

Seamus has been with me on every journey I have taken, and there have been many times when a retreat into his words has kept me afloat. Most of our life in this kind of work is very concrete, full of facts, but we all have to seek redress from time to time in poetry. Seamus was where I went for that. He was the quietest storm that ever blew into town. As an activist, From the Republic of Conscience has been like a bible for me, something I return to and have returned to for as long as I can remember. Some of those phrases are like tattoos for me, worn very close to the heart.

I keep telling my students this. From Slate Vault.

oldbookillustrations:

Take my bait, O king of fishes!

Maria Louise Kirk, from The story of Hiawatha, adapted from H. W. Longfellow by Winston Stokes, New York, 1910.

(Source: archive.org)

At Burns’s birthplace they now have something called the Tam o’ Shanter Experience. There’s a café, a shop, a performance space and a place for exhibitions, the kind of venue friendly to schoolchildren and bus runs. We stood outside and Karl smiled at Seamus and sort of winked, turning his attention to Seamus’s woollen suit.

MILLER: Is that an Irish suit?

HEANEY: It’s like that. I can’t be seen without my Confirmation suit.

MILLER: Soon there’ll be The Seamus Heaney Experience.

HEANEY: That’s right. It’ll be a few churns and a confessional box.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“800”] David Jones by Mark Gerson (1965), in the National Portrait Gallery[/caption]

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1088”] David Jones, Sanctus Christus de Capel-y-ffin (1925)[/caption]

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1240”] “Exiit Edictum” (1949), by the great poet-painter-calligrapher David Jones[/caption]

From a wonderful Bibliodyssey post about maps with sea-monsters on them