Some Good News

Since it’s my birthday today, I thought I’d finally get around to distributing some good news, Hobbit style, to my loyal reader(s?). The family and I are in the process of packing up our earthly goods to leave Nebraska, as I recently accepted a position as Postdoctoral Researcher in the Roger Hadfield Ogden Honors College at Louisiana State University.

I had sworn for a long time that, given the relatively stability of my position here in Nebraska, I wouldn’t make the family uproot for anything less than a permanent position. However, when I saw the ad pop up for this LSU job, I knew I had to apply; and to my great surprise, I got the job! Everything about the position felt right to me: the balance of teaching and research, which I haven’t had here in Nebraska; the teaching, which will be primarily “Great Books” style interdisciplinary classes; the medium-term stability of an up to three-year position; and of course the chance to be part of a major institution. Add on top of that that everyone I’ve met during the interview and hiring process has been just lovely, and that makes for an exciting prospect.

Academia is a risky, unstable place, and I’m not blind to the fact that even a position like this carries no guarantees for the long term. I could very well reach the end of my time at LSU with no permanent offers (at which point I’ll know it’s time to try my hand at something else). But this felt like a risk worth taking. And sometimes we (I) forget amidst the churn to stop and take time to be grateful. That’s what I feel at the moment: an overwhelming sense of gratefulness for this opportunity.

Who knows, you all might even get a few extra blog posts out of this.

The Old Dog

Well lookey here, a piece on the elusive Charles Portis - one of the five best American authors of the twentieth century, and one of the one funniest - in Harper’s? Yes please. (H/T to the Prufrock newsletter). The piece comes as the Library of America releases his Collected Works (which includes all 5 of his novels, alongside some of his journalism), so now you know what to get me for my birthday.

The author of the article, Will Stephenson, does an excellent job capturing both the spirit of Portis’ works, and the strong allure they hold for those readers who drink the Kool-Aid. For Portis is, as Stephenson notes, very much a cult figure, his one brush with mainstream notoriety, True Grit, aside. Somewhat deliberately so, too: both his narrative voice and his eccentric characters come formed out of some deep subterranean spring of imagination, inaccessible to many readers. Hence Portis’ fascination with secret societies, a factor Stephenson does justice to by describing Portis’ bizarre, delightful mid-career Masters of Atlantis as the skeleton key for understanding his writing.

What I find most personally alluring about Portis (other than the sheer hilarity of his digressions), is the melancholic air that runs underneath the jokes, a sense of wry mourning for a world that has passed and is passing away. Stephenson perceives this tendency clearly:

“His is a temperamentally conservative vision, in which youth culture—hippies and beatniks, “kids gone feral,” kids who never fought in a war and lack respect for their elders—is an absurd and pathetic sort of menace. Where this could easily become curmudgeonly or censorious in a less imaginative writer, however, Portis always seems bemused; the disappointment is too vast to be taken all that seriously, it is foregone and always cut with an instinctual swerve toward the comic. ”

Temperamental conservatism married to bemusement — that just about encapsulates my stance toward the world. No wonder I’ve always found Portis such a congenial fellow traveler.

Do go read the piece, then run out and lay hands on one of the novels. True Grit is the most famous, but The Dog of the South is my personal favorite.

Good Thoughts on Tech

I appreciated many things in this essay on digital minimalism by Talia Barnes (via the always excellent Alan Jacobs). Regular readers of mine know my own proclivity for digital abstention; like Barnes, I have opted for a dumb phone rather than a smart phone. But the angle Barnes takes in the essay, focusing on how single use devices build focus into their use, is one I’m going to be chewing over for a while. It fits well into my general, Ellul-driven thoughts about the downsides of efficiency. Is a smartphone akin to a Swiss Army Knife, containing many tools in miniature, but not any one at the scale necessary to be truly useful? (Have you ever tried cutting something with a SAK pair of scissors? Pathetic). Here’s Barnes on the upsides of focused tech:

“While doing less, I think more, engaging deeply in the task at hand. This experience recalls a time when devices were tools used to accomplish specific objectives, and accomplish them well; to expand our attention, not demand it.

For many of us, this time—not long ago—feels far away.”

The most depressing section of the essay ironically records a success story: a small private school banned smart phones, giving its students “light phones” instead. The results were positive, both academically and personally, yet the students - who fully recognized how beneficial being without a smart phone was - seemed nearly unanimous in their desire to get back to smartphone life immediately after graduation. And so the fight continues ever on.

On Bad Vs. "Bad" Film

Hoping to have a real post for you in the near future. In the meantime, in the spirit of posting more links to good writing, here’s an excellent piece from my favorite working film critic, Nick Pinkerton. As with all Pinkerton’s pieces on his Substack, this one ranges widely. If your curiosity is less than piqued by an in-depth discussion of low budget 80s Japanese cinema, you can pause the essay halfway through after reading Pinkerton’s excoriation of the current state of American cinema, both Marvelicious and “artsy”. Vintage Pinkerton. Here’s a sample:

“In fact, there’s nothing surprising about the manner in which arthouse indies have become a game reserve for Disney, because the only crucial difference between them is the scale of their operations. The qualities that are awarded on the U.S. independent film festival circuit—sturdy three-act storytelling, no stylistic or formal intercessions that might get in the way of emotional involvement, a nice lacquer of social conscience to finish—are the same qualities that are valued in the modern tentpole. (As for the big-budget action bonanzas, they can be left to the second unit and the CGI galley slaves.) If this prim, professional, marvelously unproblematic generation of auteurs called up from the indie farm system can seem so interchangeable as to have been grown in a lab, well, that’s because most of them were: a Sundance Lab.”

Pinkerton’s thoughts here mesh quite well with my own in my previous post on masscult and midcult - and of course, even better with the thoughts of Dwight Macdonald, whose work I reference in that post. But do go read the whole piece from Pinkerton.

Happy Christmas(scult and Midcult)

A very Merry Christmas to you (yes, we’re still celebrating over here in Catholic world. You can pry it from my cold fingers at Candlemas). Because I’m congenitally incapable of celebrating publicly on this blog in a normal way, here’s what I have for you instead: a rambling panegyric in honor of Paul McCartney, over and against his erstwhile bandmate John Lennon, with some niche mid-century cultural criticism thrown in.

Let me begin in the middle. Those readers who know me well, or simply listen to the right episodes of The Readers Karamazov, know of my intense bias in favor of Sir Paul and against the dearly beloved John. All I can say is I come by this prejudice honestly; it began long before I had ever heard the worst song in pop history. For reasons unknown, the only Beatles album we had growing up was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which I listened to assiduously for a time. Though I loved the whole album, even at that underdeveloped stage I could sense a divide in the songwriting sensibilities. For my part I gravitated more to the nursing home swingtime vibes of “When I’m 64” than the psychedelia of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

Now that I’ve become a man, though, I’ve put away childish things. Many people, perhaps, think that means I’ve shifted allegiances and gone over to team John. Au contraire, my friends: rather, I’ve leaned even more heavily into Paulpartisanship. Conveniently enough for this seasonally themed post, both John and Paul produced solo Christmas songs (both of which have become radio staples) which serve as microcosmic examples of their relative infer-and-superiority.

But before diving into the relative merits of “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” and “Wonderful Christmastime”, first let’s jump back and pick up that promised niche midcentury cultural criticism you have all been salivating over. Dwight Macdonald, whose work deserves a much wider audience, was an American Marxist cultural critic in the middle years of the twentieth century. In his best known essay, “Masscult and Midcult,” Macdonald develops a theory of cultural production centered around these two neologisms. Masscult is relatively straightforward: the culture produced for consumption by the masses; generally, especially in an age of mass media, free of challenging content and requiring no effort to consume. Midcult, however, is harder to parse: a sort of halfway house between masscult and true high culture, midcult promises the sophistication of high culture but delivers instead the thoughtless pleasures of masscult. Because of the patina of intellectual respectability applied like an egg wash to its surface, midcult glistens with the promise of self-improvement, a false promise which only makes it that much more dangerous. Masscult and midcult are the wolf and the fox: at least with the wolf you know what you’re getting.

Macdonald’s favored midcult punching bag throughout his essay is Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, at the time a smash hit, one that, according to Macdonald, simultaneously made viewers feel good about their own intellectual standing while anesthetizing them to challenges. We can think of our own innumerable examples across multiple categories. Last Man Standing is masscult, prestige TV midcult. Nickelback? Decidedly masscult. Taylor Swift and the poptimists? Midcult all the way. We can even suss out examples in the realm of food: at least McDonald’s has the masscult decency to make you feel bad for indulging in its grease — midcult classic Chipotle allows 5,000 calories to slide effortlessly down your gullet while you pat yourself on the back for being a real cosmopolitan gourmand.

The favored defense of those fully indoctrinated into the midcult these days is that you must always let people like what they like. Aside from the patronizing implications dripping from that stance, as if taste were something innate and not developed, it allows the purveyors of midcult always to exonerate themselves. Not only that, it creates out of aesthetic materials a staging ground for smug self-righteousness. You don’t like She-Hulk merely because your brain has been microwaved by Marvel to the point that it resembles cream of wheat; no, dang it, you like the show because doing so is praxis. By watching the right shows or movies (let’s face it, almost always shows) or listening to the right acts, you can demonstrate your bona fides on the cultural battlegrounds.

So how do we get back to John and Paul? This is not exactly a subtle jump, people: I’m much too much of a midcult thinker for that. Paul, of all the Beatles, is the quintessential masscult figure. No matter the stage of his career, he just wants to tickle your ears with a good tune, more likely than not one tinged with associations of yesteryear. His music is pure warmth. John, especially as he evolved in the later Beatles and solo years, strove to make something “worthwhile” out of his music; hence the midcultiness of many of his later lyrics. There’s a gesturing toward sophistication without the ability to follow through and create something truly challenging.

You can see this divide clearly in the two Christmas songs — even at the level of title. John lumbers in with a portentous title, replete with parentheses. WAR IS OVER; this really matters, people! Meanwhile Paul can sum up his ethos in two words: wonderful Christmastime. And that’s really the extent of the song. I tortured my children this year by repeating ad nauseum, to whatever they might say, that as for me and my house, I’m SIMPLY HAVING A WONDERFUL CHRISTMASTIME.

Paul’s song is barely a song at all, to be honest, it’s more of (as the kids say) a vibe. It’s a simple, digestible confection, utterly disposable - and it knows it. That’s the key to Paul’s appeal, in general; he doesn’t conceive of himself as a pop music Stravinsky, shifting the ground underneath our feet, nor even a Mahler, perfecter of a form. He’s more like his fellow countryman Vaughan Williams, content to do what he does extremely well: remind you of good songs you’ve heard. He is masscult done right. When we listen to his music, “The mood is right/The spirit's up/We're here tonight/And that's enough.” And that’s enough.

Meanwhile John sets out to change the world through children’s choirs and sleigh bells. But while his intent is grandiose, perhaps even noble, the actual follow through is decidedly weak. Some mumbling about multiculturalism, some vague pacifist sentiments, and a pervasive spirit of the therapeutic (War is over… if you want it. Just believe in yourself!). It’s the classic midcult fake out: merely by listening to this song as flits across your radio dial, you’ve contributed in some non-specific, fuzzy way to the betterment of the world. It really is as easy as that.

Ultimately that false promise is what makes midcult damaging in a way that masscult can never be. John Lennon stopped exactly zero Vietnam Wars with his Christmas song, but he made a huge impact on his own bank account. That might sound cynical applied to someone who genuinely seemed to want to do the right thing, but sub in major corporation X (ahem, DisneyMarvelStarWars) and it makes much more sense. These companies know the levers to pull, both emotionally/narratively and politically, to keep you sucking at the teat of their vast cultural-industrial complex, all while feeling good about yourself. I can listen to “Wonderful Christmastime” and never once confuse it for an actually important Christmas song, but that’s just what “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” tempts me (well, not me) to do. In other words, it’s ok to like junk, so long as you can recognize that it’s junk, you don’t make it the foundation of your diet, and you don’t think that doing so bears any relevance on your moral life.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll stop ranting, and get back to SIMPLY, well, you know.

Poem Time: Seamus Heaney's "The Forge"

“All I know is a door into the dark…”

So goes the first line of “The Forge,” one of the great poems of Seamus Heaney’s early career, when he still worked mostly at the level of the individual poem; overwhelming poetic sequences like Station Island and Squarings would come later. Yet even in this early phase of his career Heaney’s poems have a certain unified feel to them. In particular, the poetry of the first few collections coalesces around the juxtaposition of natural/traditional imagery against the more abstract labors of writing. This juxtaposition lies at the center of “Digging,” the poem that launched Heaney onto the international stage and remains his best known poem to this day. But you can trace the contours of this collision in plenty of other poems - in “Personal Helicon’s” wonderful mantra “Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime/… Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme/ To see myself, to set the darkness echoing,” as well as in the mystic search for springs (of inspiration?) in “The Diviner".”

For my money, though, these two themes mesh best in the strange, difficult to unpack lines of “The Forge,” ostensibly a simple description of a blacksmith’s workshop, yet in the end Heaney’s most profound early meditation on the frustrations and rewards of writing. A sonnet — though, like a poem I discussed in a previous entry, Robinson Jeffers’ “Return,” an unusual sonnet — the poem survey’s the workman’s space and finds in it a fitting analog to the writer’s attempts to plumb the depths of human existence.

The juxtaposition begins in that very first line (so good that I have to quote it again): All I know is a door into the dark. As in the blacksmith’s workshop, so too in the writer’s mind — we squeeze ourselves through that narrow entry back into the impenetrable mysteries of human existence. Once in, we find evidence of the strenuous work at hand, “The unpredictable fantail of sparks” rising from the hammer’s blows on the heated iron. Lest we be too literal, Heaney guides us back: the anvil must be there somewhere, “An altar/Where he expends himself in shape and music.” This is the work of writing no less than of smithing, the desire and ability to spend oneself utterly in the effort to create “shape and music” — both correct form and the harmonic ring of a satisfying line.

What sends this poem over the top for me, though, is the recognition that such hard work requires breaks in order to come together. The smith leans against his door, observing the outside world, before returning “To beat real iron out, to work the bellows,” as the poem’s closing line puts it. In smithery of course, such rest periods are needed; not merely for the exhausted shoulder of the worker, but for the material itself to cool and take form before it gets reheated and beaten again. So too in writing, where the gaps between writing sessions matter as much as the times when words flow.

The poem is, of course, not simply a toying around with interesting ideas. It is first and foremost a poem, an example of that finished product that might emerge from the workshop still hissing with steam. And Heaney’s forgery (pardon the pun) is all over these lines, a craftsmanship evident in his proficient back and forth between convention and disruption. There’s the cheeky rhyme between lines 2 and 3, where the second rhymed word (ring) fits inside the first (rusting). There’s the clever enjambment near the end as the blacksmith “recalls a clatter/Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows.” Here the reader expects that the clatter the blacksmith will recall has to do with the hustle and bustle of his workplace, but instead he’s listening to the hoofbeats outside. Except, of course, that such a clatter does relate back to him; in a village setting, he’s almost certainly been the one to put those shoes on the horses’ feet. Finally, there’s the balance between power and precision which Heaney bakes into the poem in the image of the blacksmith working “with a slam and a flick,” two very distinct movements. Heaney himself, through language that oscillates between raw energy and more subtle movement, builds into his poem that hybridity of creative production he witnesses in the blacksmith. In doing so, he takes us through that door into the dark, into a place where true poetry is forged.

Failed Preservatives

Apologies for a distinct lack of posting here - I tend to wax in the break times of the academic year, and wane dramatically when school starts again. One thing I have long considered doing, but never actually done, is to put up small posts that are really just links to articles I find interesting, thought provoking, etc.

I’m finally getting around to this practice today, and with good reason: I think you should immediately drop everything and go read this essay by Jon Askonas in Compact titled “Why Conservatism Failed”. I have mixed feelings about Compact, but I think Askonas is one of the best writers working today on technology and society (see his recent powerhouse series over at The New Atlantis on the death of reality). So it’s no surprise that this new essay is one of the best I’ve read on the death of what I’d like to call real conservatism — that desire to preserve the best of the past — at the hands of technological innovation. Unlike many handwringers, Askonas cuts through the baloney to show that a conservatism with nothing to say about technology has a short life span indeed.

The Only Question

I’ve finally finished my read through of The Technological Society. I’m planning to post 3-4 more times about it as I continue to sort through some of the threads it’s left behind in my mind, but for now I want simply to pose a question that Ellul poses at the very end of the book. Some might go so far as to say that, when it comes to how we grapple with technology, technique, and the future, it’s the only question.

“Enclosed within his artificial creation, man finds that there is ‘no exit’’; that he cannot pierce the shell of technology to find again the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years.

The new milieu has its own specific laws which are not the laws of organic or inorganic matter. Man is still ignorant of these laws. It nevertheless begins to appear with crushing finality that a new necessity is taking over from the old. It is easy to boast of victory over ancient oppression, but what if victory has been gained at the price of an even greater subjection to the forces of the artificial necessity of the technical society which has come to dominate our lives?”

— The Technological Society, 428-9

I’ll have some thoughts on this quote in a subsequent post, but for now I want merely to suggest that if these words don’t send some semblance of a shiver of recognition and dread down your spine, you’ve already been captured by the spirit of the age.

Sports as Technique

Near the end of The Technological Society (which, yes, I’m finally almost finished with), Jacques Ellul indulges in something like a rapid fire round, where he jots down some thoughts about the effects of technique as applied to various sectors of society. Along with more obvious suspects like medicine and propaganda, Ellul includes sports as among those aspects of society subject to the ever tightening screws of technique.

In fact, Ellul views sport as inextricably tied to technique from its beginnings. And he does seem to be right about this assertion: aside from a few scattered religious/ceremonial exceptions in the ancient world, sport as an organized force in the world only emerges with industrial society, when humans’ interactions with the world became less spontaneous and more regimented. Work in industrial settings forecloses traditional means of exercise, which must then be replaced by something; and what better than a form of exercise that carries with it notions of regimentation?

What’s interesting to me as a sports fan (Ellul’s own distaste for sport is palpable throughout the section), is the extent to which the origin of sports as a technique in their own right has been mimicked in recent years by a push within most major sports toward technique as a way of life. I will speak here primarily of basketball, since that is the sport I follow most closely - and also, unrelatedly but conveniently, the sport that prides itself most vocally on its “forward thinking” stances both on and off the court.

Over the past 10 years this progressive push has manifested itself in a style of play that increasingly emphasizes efficiency as the end all be all. Certain players have become notorious for exploiting the quirks of the game in order to become scoring machines… emphasis on machines. James Harden is perhaps the most infamous example of this style of play, that stresses ball dominance and a healthy mix of 3 point shots and drives to the basket, drives designed more to elicit fouls than to score layups. Like a video game cheat code, this style of play “games the system” to create intense advantages.

The style also, according to some at least, robs the game of its fundamental beauty. There’s a numbing repetitiveness to watching a player like Harden or Luka Dončić at work, even when you recognize the extreme skill that goes into their method. Basketball by algorithm, if you will, where human judgement takes a backseat to a series of precalculated moves.

Maybe these quibbles are overblown, but I’m fascinated by the ways in which the search for competitive advantage has led teams down paths that produce basketball that viewers perceive and receive as aesthetically null and void. This same drive for technical efficiency seems to pervade basketball media as well. I’m not only thinking here of the sort of groupthink that will tend to pervade any cohort, and which manifests itself on NBA Twitter as a calcified set of propositions that cannot but be affirmed. I’m also thinking of the business itself, where figures like Adrian Wojnarowski and Shams Charania press on advantages to strengthen their iron grip on the newsbreaking game. (If you’re interested in sports, media, and high drama, I heartily recommend Ethan Sherwood Strauss’ Substack, where he writes about sports media with incisive insights). The results of this method — lots of “first in” reporting, but more heat than light — work to further pressurize the NBA environment.

We’ll see where all this goes. For a certain type of data head, it’s no doubt thrilling to trace the technique all the way down, from the NBA messaging apparatus at commissioner Adam Silver’s fingertips, through ESPN’s machination-filled maneuvering, down to the practice courts where players are training to shoot from only the exact right spots on the court. The only question: will anyone still be watching when “man himself becomes a machine”?

Ellul's Critique of Marx

One of the bigger secondary themes of The Technological Society is Jacques Ellul’s repeated insistence that, under the reign of technique, all sorts of historical ironies emerge, the most typical being “Someone sets out to remedy something bad; instead, they make it worse.” That’s an argument with instant appeal for me, of course.

Among the various historical examples of this phenomenon that Ellul provides, the one that sticks out most to me is that of Karl Marx. I’ve long maintained that Marx is one of the most misunderstood figures in history, as much by his supposed admirers as by his rabid detractors. Of course, I have a rather esoteric reading of Marx, due largely to the influence of my oddball undergraduate thesis advisor. On my reading Marx is, in the end, an agrarian dreamer. The life he imagines is one where workers man the factory in the morning, then spend the afternoon fishing, exploring nature, and other forms of rural lollygagging. It’s not unlike the future proposed by guild socialist William Morris in his utopian novel News from Nowhere.

Under this reading of Marx, Ellul’s critique of him gets shot through with tragic irony. The kernel of the critique is as follows: Marx sought the freedom of workers, but insisted that this freedom could come only through the vast productive powers of technique, the machine, etc. In the end, whatever economic gains might be made through this method of technique get overwhelmed by the sheer limiting logic of technique. In other words, Marx seeks freedom from a source that can only enslave.

Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Ellul sees this nascent strain of tech-submission in Marx’s original writings play out in the nations that followed in Marx’s footsteps. What I love about Ellul is his ability to penetrate beneath the easily-surveyed surface to the underbelly of society, and that ability shows itself here in his dismissal of the cursory differences between communist and capitalist regimes in the post-war period in favor of recognizing their fundamental point of unity: an ever growing dependence on, and willing subordination to, technique.

Pulling back a bit, it makes sense to think of Ellul’s general critiques as clustering around the idea that means matter as much as ends, sometimes. Think of it like a diet. Even if the goal of losing weight is important for a given individual, certain ways of getting there might not be worth it (who can forget the Atkins craze of the mid-aughts?). In the same way, certain noble goals, like freeing the workers from their exploitation, cannot be pursued in ways that ultimately lead to a further exploitation by technique itself. We see this dynamic still heartily at play today, unfortunately. Feel free to pick your favorite example. Regardless of what you have in mind, we should be humbled to remember that enacting real, just social change is always harder than it appears, and should remain on guard against solutions that will, in the end, be worse than the problems they remedy.

Poem Time: W.H. Auden's "Leap Before You Look"

It’s no secret that W.H. Auden is an important poet to me, both professionally (he stands in some ways at the center of my dissertation work on Kierkegaard and British literature) and personally (he’s a poet I return to again and again and always come away feeling like I’ve gained something). I suppose, then, that his poem “Leap Before You Look” [N.B. forgive the typos on this site; the real words should be clear] should be an especial favorite of mine, since it’s a poem explicitly about the Kierkegaardian concept of “the leap”. Wystan and Søren: two great tastes that taste great together.

Yet… the poem has always left me the teensiest bit cold, despite its embodiment of the wry, singsongy style typical of late Auden, and explores “the leap” in some interesting ways. Something about the poem has always felt distant, though, as if Auden were merely operating at the intellectual level, rather than the deeper level of true poetry. The poem’s meter is a bit [technical poetry term incoming] janky, and not in the fun way that Auden sometimes employs in his comic poems to create a feeling of overfulness; rather this is herky-jerky with little discernible purpose to the spasms. And there’s a vagueness, an abstractness, to the narration of the poem; perhaps it comes from the direct address of the voice to the reader, but the relationship between poet and reader feels underdeveloped. The second and third stanzas especially feel too unformed.

Coming back to the poem after a few years, though, and in the midst of some, shall we say, life fluctuation, when difficult decisions have been made first gradually, then all at once, I find myself appreciating Auden’s lines in a new way. Especially as the poem grinds toward the final two stanzas, there’s some payoff to his quasi-villanelle technique of alternating between the same two rhymes at the end of stanzas. This repetition creates a poetic claustrophobia for the reader, a sense of inescapability that Auden insists on: you will have to leap, no matter your will or disposition. To stay alive, some risk need be taken.

What I especially appreciate this time around is Auden’s creation of an inner space for the reader as you go along. It’s a neat trick to mimic Kierkegaard’s desire to speak to “that single individual,” his reader, and Auden creates this isolation through a gradual but relentless stripping away of the outer world. There’s a public expectation created in the first few stanza, but by stanza four we are moving inward as we examine clothes (those meeting points between the private and public selves), and then we go even more deeply inside: “to rejoice when no one else is there.” We’re digging beyond the mere performance of emotion to those private impulses we feel when alone.

Then, in the last stanza, Auden almost pulls back as he mentions the couple relationship: perhaps romantic love can create a bond strong enough to forestall the need for private choice. But, no: the lover’s bed is sustained by a solitude “ten thousand fathoms deep” - the poem’s other explicit nod to SK, who called the life of faith similar to “living out over 70,000 fathoms”. What Auden suggests, then, is that underneath the chumminess of romantic coupling lies an inner solitude. Not even your most intimate companion can make your choices for you: in the end, you have to leap. Auden believes this firmly (in 1940 at least), and he cannily crafts the effect into the form of the poem itself.

Be Not Machines

As I said in a previous post, I am making my way through Jacques Ellul’s dense The Technological Society, as a sort of starting place on my quest to understand our current moment. It’s been slow going — I’ve been chipping away at the book’s 400+ pages over the last few months — partly because of the book’s chewy ideas, but also in part because Ellul’s writing, translated from the French, tends toward the impenetrable. There are plenty of provocative and insightful ideas in the book, but not so many memorable phrases. That does mean, though, that the phrases that stand out really stand out. One example comes near the end of his chapter on technique’s effect on modern economic life and arrangements. Here’s what Ellul says (as translated by John Wilkinson):

“The stage in which the human being was a mere slave of the mechanical tyrant has been passed. When man himself becomes a machine, he attains to the marvelous freedom of unconsciousness, the freedom of the machine itself... Man feels himself to be responsible, but he is not. He does not feel himself to be an object, but he is. He has been so well assimilated to the economic world, so well adjusted to it by being reduced to the homo economicus, in short, so well conditioned, that the appearance of personal life becomes for him the reality of personal life.”

— The Technological Society, 226

What a striking formulation, especially that second sentence: when we become machines, we access the machine’s unthinking nature. We no longer even recognize our own unfreedom, because we’ve attained a (huge air quotes) “higher” freedom found through the mechanization of our labor and our lives.

This condition, I submit, is one we find ourselves in still today, to an even greater extent than during Ellul’s time. Throughout The Technological Society, Ellul is highly attuned to the way in which humans, ever flexible, adapt their lives to the situation in which they find themselves. As he suggests later in the book, we only have two choices, at least in the economic sphere: adapt to the demands of technique placed on us by society, or find ourselves in the rubbish bin of history. But to so submit ourselves to the machine’s demands means that we risk losing that which makes us human — our eccentricities and individuality, and above all our capacity for judgement. One reason I’m highly interested in a book like Nicholas Carr’s The Glass Cage, about our over-reliance on automation, is that automation, that highest achievement of technique, completely eliminates human judgement.

If in our economic lives we either adapt or die, there is at least a chance that, in our lives beyond work, we can resist the relentless tug of technique. This is not easy, however. The food we eat, the culture we consume, the politics we “adopt” (remember, Ellul was greatly interested in propaganda and its ties to technique): these all come to us ready made through the mediation of state-approved technique. Most people in American society have already attained that marvelous unfreedom of the machine. I feel its allure even in my own life.

In the end, though, we must resist, for our own sake. Ellul patiently demonstrates in the book how our supposed adaptation to the life of the machine is in fact illusory: in bending, we break something within ourselves. One of Ellul’s canniest observations near the end of the book is that our modern psychological apparatus is largely structured around tweaking our psyches such that we can better conform to the demands of technique. Therapists troubleshoot our anxiety — itself largely a result of mechanized society — so that we can return quickly to our places within the machine. We cannot, then, lead fully human lives until we figure out how to resist the dehumanizing tractor beam of that marvelous unfreedom of the machine.

How do we effectively resist? Well, that’s an answer I’m working toward, brick by brick. Stay tuned for more.

Poem Time: Robinson Jeffers' "Return"

Pico Blanco in Big Sur. Image by J Doll.

One of the things I want to do now that I’m writing more on this blog is to provide shorter posts. On the whole, like someone who calls Jeffrey Lebowski El Duderino, I’m not into the whole brevity thing. But in order to keeps the wheels of commerce turning here, I need to be realistic and write some shorter, more manageable posts. One good, pleasurable way to do that is to start writing little pieces about poems I like, as an exercise in close reading that will serve two purposes: first, to introduce you, the reader, to some new poems, and second, to catalog my own thoughts about these verses that I like.

My inaugural post in what I’m dubbing “Poem Time” (as in, “It’s poeming time,” said in Ben Grimm’s voice) is one that’s relatively new to me, Robinson Jeffers’ “Return.” You can find the full poem here.

Jeffers is a poet whose world I am taking baby steps into. I already find him fascinating: a recluse who built his own stone house on the Big Sur coast of California; a pacifist whose anti-WWII stance shriveled his audience after universal accolades in the 20s and 30s; and a man dedicated to stone and bird, practitioner of a style he dubbed “inhumanism.” Jeffers, for me, is one of those figures with whom I fundamentally disagree on major issues, but whose perspective I nevertheless find sharpening, bracing, and perhaps even oddly comforting. In the spareness of his writing and vision of the world, I find hope in the smallness of human beings, even as my Catholic belief in the fundamental dignity of the human being keeps me from following Jeffers all the way down the lonely path he trod. Though I’m new to Jeffers, he reminds me a bit of the craggy English poet Geoffrey Hill, who himself has a dim view of human history and a nearly mesozoic view of the workings of the world. To read Jeffers or Hill is to enter what academics sometimes label “deep time.” Usually that’s a phrase that’s deployed cavalierly and rather stupidly in an effort to sound, well, deep, but Jeffers earns the “more ancient than ancient” feeling that pervades his poetry.

When I picked up his collected poems from my library, I flipped at random, as I like to do. “Return” was the first poem I happened upon, and it stopped me in my tracks (literally: I was walking back to my car and just stopped). It’s a short poem, but from the beginning Jeffers crams his lines with meaning and effect:

A little too abstract, a little too wise,
It is time for us to kiss the earth again,
It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,
Let the rich life run to the roots again.

Jeffers writes in a free style (he apparently pushed back against meter in favor of “rolling stresses”) but here he channels an almost medieval sense of alliteration to push the momentum of the poem back and forth, the “l” words gliding the reader forward while the “r” words bring us back again. In this juxtaposition of sounds — the “l” slipping off the tongue, the “r” forming a barrier with the teeth against the escape of syllables — Jeffers brings us to the heart of the poem. We live in a frictionless existence — a little too abstract, a little too wise. We must arrest our inert movements, stop and bend down to kiss the earth. We must take time, as he notes in a later line, to plunge our hands into the river up to our shoulders.

“Return” is a Shakespearean sonnet, though a subtle one. Note the strange rhymes Jeffers gives us: the thudding repetition of “again” and “again” (again); the awkward near rhymes of thoughts/hawks and noble/marble. He’s playing with the form; not releasing us entirely but putting up barriers to our simple run to sonnet’s end. That’s noticeable too in the strange shift into the couplet. Shakespearean sonnets of course always have their volta, their “turning” of the poem’s meaning, between the last of the three quatrains and the couplet. But here the gap is especially noticeable. We move from the world of hawks (a constant image in Jeffers’ poems) to the image of the Pico Blanco mountaintop, heretofore unmentioned in the poem. Why this shift?

I think the key to understanding what Jeffers is getting at here lies in the first line of the final quatrain: “I will touch things and things and no more thoughts.” And what a strange line it is! So vague and yet beguiling in its vagueness. Poetry lovers will of course immediately think of a similar but more famous formulation by William Carlos Williams: no ideas but in things. But Jeffers takes this a step further: no ideas, only things. We live in a world moved effortlessly forward by ideas, by the abstract. But the particular punches us in the gut, breaks up our smooth motions with its unwillingness to conform to our categories. When Jeffers himself threatens to get too abstract, wrapped up in his metaphor of the human spirit as a hawk paralyzed by thought, the vision of Pico Blanco, that specific mountain that dominated his own horizons in Big Sur, emerges from the mist to stop the poet short.

If Jeffers’ vision of a world depopulated of ideas, where only things remain, is a little too cold and bleak for me, I can still appreciate what would lead him to embrace that coldness. Turned off by the clattering world around him, he sought refuge in the hard stone and lonely hawks of the California coast. He longed to return to the earth, in more senses than one. And if I find my accounting somewhere other than “where the alder leaf quivers/In the ocean wind over the river boulders,” well, I can at least sympathize with the mind that wrote those lines, and marvel at the noble words he produced, as if chiseled from marble.

Brick by Brick: A Personal Reading Syllabus

As implied in my previous post, I’m in the market for a bit of extra reading. Maybe it seems a bit ridiculous for an English professor to want to read more. After all, I read for my classes, I read for my scholarship, and, gulldarnit, I even read for fun. But what I’m talking about here is a different sort of reading: I want to read to challenge myself, to learn some new ideas, in a way detached from my usual research. In other words, it’s a style of reading motivated by curiosity — the good sort, I hope — and aimed at a truer understanding of the world.

In particular, I want to begin to understand the factors at play in what I intuitively sense as a going-wrong of the world, a fundamental loss of something human in the age of digital technology. If only this were a simple thread to pull at, where a single root could be identified and pulled up. Bam, instant answers. Unfortunately I don’t buy into monocausality very easily; our current situation is not a spool of thread but a tapestry, with many interwoven factors contributing to the big picture mess. This complexity creates a conceptual nightmare for a thinker, because the sheer scale and inter-connectivity of these problems makes it difficult to isolate each issue, to even know where to begin. But begin we must. So, to give you all some whiplash through a quickly deployed mixed metaphor, I find our conundrum one that can only be approached piecemeal: brick by brick, as it were.

To help me begin to unravel this wall (how’s that for a mixed metaphor?), I’m assigning myself a syllabus of reading drawn from thinkers I either already know and trust, or ones whose names I’ve heard bandied about by people who have good judgement. In setting myself this syllabus, I hope to keep myself honest as I chug away slowly at the ideas I’m churning through my mind. Because of that purpose, I aim also to blog through my thoughts about at least some, if not all, of these books as I read them. This is private thinking made public, in the hopes that it might do a few of you reading some good, but also because I need a place to write out my own thoughts so they become clearer (and also so they don’t disappear). Without further ado, then, here are some books I plan to read over the next few years. Most are new to me, but I’ve marked any rereads with a (RR). You’ll notice a chronological slant here, toward works of the mid twentieth century. That’s in part incidental, but in part intentional, since this was the moment when critics began, in greater numbers, to examine the intersection of technology and society in critical, rather than merely laudatory, ways. There are a few more recent authors on the list, but in general I find a lot of writing about tech today to be lacking in insight, and the best writing tends to cite many of the following figures as formative, so I’m heading back to the sources. I should also note that this is far from complete: I’m sure it will grow in the process of trying to shrink it. And it goes without saying that any suggestions you might have would be very welcome, so leave them in the comments.

Books About Technology

The Technological Society and Propaganda, by Jacques Ellul

I’m currently reading Ellul’s The Technological Society after eyeing it for many years, in large part thanks to the advocacy of L.M. Sacasas, who for my money is one of the best writers on technology we have today. I’m a little more than halfway through, but I can already tell that this dense, difficult midcentury work by an elusive Frenchman is going to be one of those books that rewires by brain in important ways. As the title suggests, the book is about technology, but really more than that it’s about what Ellul calls “technique,” the drive toward efficiency in all areas of life that spreads out from technological progress more narrowly. It’s a haunting book to read in our day and age. I’m including here another book by Ellul, Propaganda, which I’ll get to if I have time. The title says it all.

Understanding Media, by Marshall McLuhan (RR)

I won’t say too much about this locus classicus of media criticism, which I’ll be reading for the second or third time to more fully grasp McLuhan’s loopy, insightful ideas about the way that media shape us. I’ll just say that McLuhan was right about nearly everything - he predicted the Internet, the death of newspapers, working from home, and a lot more. But far from being a starry eyed advocate of technology, as he’s sometimes portrayed, McLuhan was a canny visionary of the troubling aspects of over-reliance on technology. (I might also reread his much shorter, but brilliant, The Gutenberg Galaxy).

“Contraception and Chastity,” by G.E.M. Anscombe

I’ve long wanted to read some pieces by Elizabeth Anscombe, one of the most intimidating and fascinating figures of 20th Century philosophy: friend of Wittgenstein, terror of C.S. Lewis, and Catholic mother of 8. I don’t have much stomach for analytic philosophy these days, so I’m most drawn to her arguments against contraception. This is maybe where I lose a lot of non-Catholics, but I’m pretty convinced that the widespread acceptance of contraception was one of the greatest technological/moral disasters of the last hundred years, and I want to see what Anscombe has to say on the matter as I continue to formulate my thoughts (which I also want to tie into Ellul: contraception as technique).

Tools for Conviviality and Medical Nemesis, by Ivan Illich

Illich is another author who has floated into my ken thanks to trusted writers such as L.M. Sacasas. I’m fascinated by his biography (an erstwhile Catholic priest and left-anarchist), but also by his ideas that suggest the need for a radical reconfiguring in the way we relate to technology. Tools seems to be his most wide-ranging book, so I’ll start there, but I’m also intrigued, because I like weird things, by Medical Nemesis, where he suggests that society has become, not merely over-medicated, but over-medicalized. I’m not sure I’ll agree with large chunks of that thesis, but it will be challenging to think through.

The Glass Cage, by Nicholas Carr

One of the few more recent authors on here, Carr earns his place because his book The Shallows is a useful warning shot (completely ignored, of course) about the dangers of Internet use; Carr’s good enough at the level of ideas that I’m willing to overlook the slight forays into “pop science” writing style. I’ve already read that book twice, so I want to move on to his follow up book, in which he thinks through issues related to automation. Since one of my major through lines here is how we’ve traded away humanity in the pursuit of convenience, this feels like a natural book to read.

Technics and Civilization, by Lewis Mumford

Sometimes I get a bit too wrapped up in my own head, I admit. That’s why it’s useful to read works that cut against the grain of my own thinking, and Mumford’s book appears to be a good candidate here, since from what I can tell he’s less of a technological determinist than I am. This book builds from the idea of the clock as a singularly important invention, and I’m down with that notion. Plus, Mumford is the kind of historical figure — huge in midcentury America, but now forgotten outside the most esoteric circles — that intuitively appeals to me.

Books about Non-Tech Subjects

As I said, there’s more than one thread to unravel here. As much as our current situation comes wrapped up in questions of technology, there are other factors to consider, factors that may be associated with tech, but perhaps only tangentially. Here are some works I want to pick up to make sure I’m hitting multiple angles.

A Guide for the Perplexed, by E.F. Schumacher

I’ve been interested in this book for a long time but have never gotten around to it. Schumacher’s most famous book, Small Is Beautiful, acted as a founding document for the rising “localist” movement in the late 20th Century. But I’m more interested in this knotty, strange book about the philosophical underpinnings of a “scientist” society and how those underpinnings have led us astray. Strange conceptual frameworks about “levels of being”? Sign me up.

The Triumph of the Therapeutic, by Philip Rieff (RR)

If I had to choose 25 or so pages that I would force everyone to read, it would likely be the Introduction to this book, where Rieff lays out, with devastating insight, the predicament we find ourselves in: having banished “sin” as a concept, we really on the idea of the “therapeutic” as a guiding principle for leading our lives, with disastrous results. Rieff called it back in the 60s: the therapeutic is in many ways the fons et origo of our modern moral confusion, where personal experience trumps any attempt to think about ideas at the communal and ethical levels.

The Culture of Narcissism (RR) and The Minimal Self, by Christopher Lasch

Lasch is another absolutely foundational thinker for me, but it’s been years since I’ve read The Culture of Narcissism, his breakthrough book about our, well, culture of narcissism. And I’ve never read that books quasi-sequel, The Minimal Self, so I’m eager to pick it up to learn what Lasch thinks about how we can navigate the dire straits in which we find ourselves. These books pair nicely with the Rieff, as an added bonus.

The Human Condition, by Hannah Arendt

Frankly I’m embarrassed that I’ve never read this seminal work of political philosophy. Where does the time go? But I’m eager to dive into what Arendt thinks about the structures of society and how we might best flourish. Despite being written by a survivor of the Nazi regime, this is perhaps one of the more optimistic books on this list, from what I can tell.

The Need for Roots, by Simone Weil

Weil is another writer I’ve long been fascinated by, but haven’t gotten around to actually reading. She was a huge influence on two writers I greatly admire, Iris Murdoch and W.H. Auden, so that’s a pretty strong recommendation. This book seems most relevant to my current project, as Weil offers explanations, again, for what’s gone wrong with society, tracing our dilemmas largely back to “uprootedness”. My hope is that by collecting enough of these various explanations of what’s gone wrong, I can “triangulate” them and detect sympathies between them in order to complete the picture.

These are my most pressing concerns at the moment. There are plenty more books to read, I’m sure — after all, “of making of many books there is no end.” But these give me a starting place (a chance at rootedness, if you will). I’m eager to hear any additional suggestions you have in the comments, of course. For now, I’m going to continue reading The Technological Society, with the hope of getting a blog post or two up on it as I make my way through. I’ll hopefully also be blogging about various other stray thoughts I have, so stay tuned on that front as well. And happy reading!

How to Disappear Completely...

That there, that’s not me… I go where I please…

I’ve always felt a kinship with Bilbo Baggins. I would not characterize myself as particularly brave, nor would I say I have a taste for adventure; those that I have I tend to get scooped up into by chance. I’m clever, but usually merely clever. I can write chance rhymes but could never pen the high poems of the elves. I like food. A lot.

So it seems fitting that, with my 35th birthday coming up, I’ve decided to mark the occasion in a particularly Bilbonic fashion by, as it were, disappearing completely. I have no ring of power to slip on such that I might completely escape my peers. Instead, I’ll be doing the next best thing: I have decided that, on my birthday (July 3) I will be permanently deactivating my remaining social media accounts and, barring some unforeseen apocalyptic reason, I will not return. This means, for me, no more Facebook and no more Twitter; also technically no more LinkedIn (lol).

I wanted, for my own sake as much as anything, to lay out in a relatively systematized way my reasons for taking this drastic step. I’m writing this post primarily as a means to order my own thoughts, but secondarily, I will freely admit, to publicly state my reasons for leaving in the hope that even one person (the one Kierkegaard loved to call “that single individual reader”) who reads this will reconsider their relationship to social media.

To be up front, and recognizing that there’s no way to say this without sounding a little unhinged: I believe that social media, whatever its minor incidental benefits might be, has shown itself to be utterly toxic as a force in society, to the extent that it cannot be meaningfully repurposed toward good ends absent a complete, top down overhauling of its basic mechanisms. I have tried and failed to navigate a middle path through the swap of social media — to regulate its uses in such a way that I reap its rewards without suffering its intense psychic costs — but I find that I cannot. Maybe that makes me weak; then let me rejoice in my weakness and recognize that I have to unplug. But I suspect that most people who feel like they are doing well on social media have been sold a bill of goods.

I’ll start with a noble sounding reason: social media impairs our ability to think well and deeply about issues of grave importance to human life and society. Frankly I’m tired of seeing people I care deeply about and/or respect deeply in a professional capacity make outlandish, insupportable, and sweeping claims about their supposed enemies online. The rewards structure and immediacy of social media prompts a constant stream of escalating rhetoric on every topic imaginable. For a very long time I’ve made a point not to post about current events, because such posts rarely amount to anything other than patting myself on the back for not being like those others. Yet I’m finding that abstaining is no longer enough for me. I can feel my ability to think carefully about issues being actively impaired every time I read some emotivist screed online.

Let me give one brief example of the diminishment of thought that occurs via social media. There’s a tendency, likely endemic to humans, to strain every single issue through a single preexisting filter, a tendency that sharpens on social media. So a certain type of person pushes everything through the filter of “capitalism” such that every issue gets resolved through a sarcastic, half thought out quip: that’s capitalism for you! Now in the interest of full disclosure I should say that I am far from being a fan of “capitalism” myself. But this lazy tendency to gesture toward a monocausal explanation erodes real thought in favor of signalling. It does very little good to ascribe all the ills of the world to a single factor like capitalism if you do not go through the effort to untangle the very real complications baked into various issues. So “capitalism” (or “liberals”, or whatever other term you might choose) becomes a shorthand way of showing others that you’re in on the game; you know how the rewards system of your allies works, and you’re more than ready to pull the lever in exchange for effusive praise, knowing winks, and the like.

But (I can hear my interlocutors object) how can you hope to improve the situation by leaving? To which I respond, how can I hope to improve it by staying? If in the very act of trying to resist the tides of thoughtlessness, I’m inflicting damage on my own ability to think, how can that be a sustainable situation? Again, perhaps others are stronger than I am, but I find I cannot have both my own intellectual integrity and a public platform on social media; so I will choose the smaller part and preserve myself. There are other ways to speak and work in the world, to try to do good, than by getting sucked into (even in a passive way) the toxic wasteland of social media discourse.

Ultimately what I desire is to be able to say, like Sy Ableman, that “I am a serious man.” And I’ve found it increasingly difficult to live that way with the tendrils of social media stuck into my brain. Thoughtfulness? Not possible. Contemplation? Please. Even at the level of basic task accomplishment I find myself constantly hindered by that still small voice telling me to go scroll through my homepage. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think I have thoughts to be thought that will radically upend the world. I’m not a genius of thought. But I’m a gardener who has been given a little plot to cultivate, and I believe that in the end I will be asked to give an account of my tending of that garden. I want to be able to say that I did the work before me with diligence and constancy. I find those virtues impossible to pursue in my current situation.

As I said above, this all sounds very noble. Duty to thought, great. As if I’m Immanuel Kant or something. Let me dispel this fantasy by telling you the second reason I’m leaving social media, a reason rooted in self interest: it makes me miserable. Every minute I spend scrolling, weighing myself against others and finding myself wanting, saps a little more of my life force from me. Like dogs to our vomit, we keep returning again and again to something we know won’t satisfy us. Maybe this time it will. So we vainly cling to our posts, our likes and retweets, in an effort to scratch out some meaning. I’ve met some lovely people online, I really have, some whom I will feel a genuine pang of regret for no longer being able to see posts from on a daily basis. But I have done the weighing, and those minor joys cannot counterbalance the time lost, the anxiety fostered. Giving genuine time and attention to my wife, to my children, to my church, to my real, substantiated friends, yes, even to my own poor attempts at thought: these are things both worth doing in and of themselves, and goals that center me. What if the very thing making me miserable was also the thing holding me back? Why would I not then lop off its head and doubly free myself from it?

So I’m choosing to renounce whatever pitifully small public platform I have in favor of solitary, but not lonely, work. I’m going to redouble my efforts to finish my academic book and work to refine my teaching so that it’s the best it can be. I have a novel 3/4 finished and two or three more in the planning stages. I have a podcast that is the nichiest of niche products, but I love putting it out into the world (we’re keeping our Twitter since one of my co-hosts graciously offered to run it, but our Facebook page is a goner). And I plan to do more writing here. In particular, I want to keep an ongoing “reading diary” of sorts as I read through books that help me make sense of this world technology has built — thinkers like Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, Christopher Dawson, and more. Feel free to follow along, though you’ll have to seek me out now. I’m also committing to reaching out to old friends more, to praying a daily rosary with as many intentions as I can squeeze in (yes, that means I am praying for you, probably), and to playing as much pickup basketball as my aging husk of a body will allow.

Don’t be a stranger. Drop me a line via this website, or seek me out in other ways. I don’t see this decision as a means of rejecting people, but of loving them better. I may be disappearing from social media, but I’m not out of reach. I’m just planning to be a little harder to find.

Coming Soon: The Readers Karamazov Season 3

Friends (and, why not, foes too): I am very pleased to announce the relatively imminent (April) arrival of The Readers Karamazov Season 3: The Name of the Rose.

In Season 1 we tackled the big book from which we take our name, Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. And we put a great season of other books around it, from Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head to Ursula K. Leguin’s The Dispossed to Shūsaku Endō’s Silence. It was a season full of great discussions and lots of experimentation, as we figured out how to run a podcast, make it sound reasonably good, and cram it all in to our busy lives.

Like a good sitcom, we took a season to get our legs under us and figure out what we were about. Season 2, then, was a period of refinement. Our big change was working to make a cohesive season, rather than just a collection of parts. So, while we kept a diverse array of literature, we worked to hone our focus so that every book chosen fit around our big book, Middlemarch. Sometimes that connection was quite obvious, as with our discussion of Madame Bovary. At times the discussion was at the level of ideas, like Candide. And sometimes the connections were diffuse but alluring, as in our discussion of Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain. Because of that laser focus, we pruned some things from Season 1, getting rid of premium film episodes to ease the editing burden on me a little.

What’s ahead for Season 3? At its core, this season will provide more of the same essence of The Readers Karamazov: lively discussions of great books (broadly defined) that consider both the formal elements of the words on the page, and the philosophical ideas underpinning them (or just flitting below the surface). For our big book this year, we’ve chosen an exciting one: Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. This is a much more contemporary pick than our previous two 19th Century door stoppers, though the book’s 40 years old at the point, but it’s a classic of philosophically-inclined literature. Eco’s story, set in a medieval monastery, combines mystery, religion, the burgeoning of modern epistemology, and… theories of comedy? It’s a wild ride, equal parts entertaining and thought provoking. For myself, I’m looking forward to revisiting the book after a gap of 15+ years.

Around Eco’s cornerstone, we’ve laid a 3 part foundation to the season that plays off of three major components of The Name of the Rose. The first is fairly obvious: monks, the main characters in Eco’s book, take center stage in our books of Part Two. Herman Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund (Friedrich’s first pick) offers a backwards glance at the Middle Ages that shares some DNA with Eco, but then things get weird. My first pick, Walter M. Miller Jr.’s classic sci fi novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, gives us a glimpse into a subgenre that Karl likes to call “cybermonk”: future monks doing monklike things. Then Karl gives us a completely other set of monks to consider, of the Buddhist variety, in his pick, Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion.

In Part 3 we move from characters to plot as we tackle Mysteries - but again in a diffuse manner. Friedrich starts us off right with a foundational work in the mystery genre, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four. Then I pick the first book in a contemporary classic series, Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress, which transports the detective novel into segregated, postwar Los Angeles. Finally, Karl brings us Dorothy B. Hughes’ In a Lonely Place, in which the mystery is as much inward as it is outward. To cap off this rousing section, we’re bringing back a very special double feature film pod where we discuss Nicholas Ray’s film of In a Lonely Place (starring that most careworn of gumshoes, Humphrey Bogart) alongside Carl Franklin’s 90s neo-noir film of Devil in a Blue Dress (starring Denzel Washington and Don Cheadle, who steals every scene he’s in).

We bring things home in Part 4 with a section on Mirth. Like the lost Aristotle treatise on comedy that plays a big role in The Name of the Rose, these books will beguile you with their humor. Friedrich takes us back to Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, a devastating satire of philosophical absurdities aimed largely at our disowned father, Hegel. Then I bring to the pod one of my all time favorite novels, Flann O’Brien’s mystery box (yeah, it could have gone in Part 3) The Third Policeman, one of the most blistering, mind bending dark comedies you’ll ever read. Karl wraps up the season with the perfect pick, John Kennedy O’Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, which blends grotesque humor with medieval philosophy - a fitting end to a season that began with Eco’s book (and oh yeah: through sheer coincidence, it was published the same year as The Name of the Rose).

I hope you’ll come along for the ride, whether or not you read the books as we work our way through them. And, if you’re so inclined, throw a bone our way by telling a friend or two (or ten). Like Kevin Costner, we do this for the love of the game, but it’s always extra motivating when we know that people are listening and following along. Watch for the first episode, on the first two sections of The Name of the Rose, during the first week of April. Until then: happy reading.

Tech Sabbath

When you type “Sabbath” into Wikimedia Commons to find non-copyrighted images, it’s surprisingly hard to find images NOT related to hit metal band Black Sabbath. Anyway, here’s some dastardly Scots spoiling both a good walk and the Lord’s Day.

Traditionally speaking, the time for New Year’s Resolutions is at the stroke of Midnight on January 1st, as the bubbles still overflow from your champagne flute and life spreads out before you in vistas of possibility. I made a few of those day one resolutions this year, but I also found myself, three weeks into the harsh new year of the Nebraska plains, wind scrubbing the skin off my nose, wanting to make a new one that has felt increasingly urgent in my life. So I did: I’ll be taking every Sunday, for the rest of this year at least, as a Tech Sabbath.

What exactly is a Tech Sabbath, and why commit to one? Pretty simply, a Tech Sabbath is a day off, once a week, from the demands of technology, which spread like Kudzu through your mind and life. The exact shape of this rest might look different for different people. Here’s what mine will entail: from the time I go to bed on Saturday night, until I wake up on Monday morning, I’m committing not to use my computer and all that entails: social media, websites, documents, etc. I don’t have a smart phone, so I’m not including that in my strictures. I’m not a traditional TV watcher either, so I’m reserving the right to watch an occasional basketball game or an episode of something fun with the wife, as these are activities that are, for me, genuinely restful.

So why am I doing this? I have a back and forth struggle to control the role of technology in my life. I think, humbly, that I’m doing better than a lot of people regarding tech addiction, thanks in large part to strictures I’ve put in place for myself: no smartphone, time parameters, etc. But it’s best to measure progress not against others, but against yourself, and I have felt myself, of late, being more beholden to the computer (especially social media) than I would like. The constant hum of tech’s lure throws sand in the gears of my brain, not to mention that it robs me of time better spent elsewhere.

I can tell that tech is messing with my rhythms, especially as I slowly round into form at the beginning of my semester, and adjust to a new schedule. Little chunks of time that I could still spend profitably doing work instead get sucked into useless Twitter binges, or endless checks to see how my Thunder are doing in their quest to tank their season (quite well, thank you). So, tech certainly affects my work productivity, which matters, but not nearly as much as the affects on my personal well being. The old joke about feeling yourself getting fatter when eating a rich meal applies, in a more sinister way: I can actively feel myself getting more anxious about the world, and my place in it, when I’m stuck on social media. It’s an entirely unproductive anxiety.

If I were truly devoted to the life of the mind, I suppose I would blow it all up, go full Luddite and unplug, keeping only the bare necessities for my job: email, and not much else. I’m not prepared to do that right now, because I do think there are goods I have gained from the online world: friendships, catalysts for new intellectual directions, and more. So, it stays, for now. But I’m (re)instituting a Tech Sabbath for myself, something I’ve done in the past, to allow for times of genuine rest and resetting. What previous experience has taught me is that this period of rest will not only benefit me on Sundays, but throughout the week. As a pretty wise dude once said: to those that have, more will be given; I’ve always found that to be true of a sense of rest and focus in my life. When I’m taking the time to set one day apart from the hubbub of virtual life, I suddenly have less need to constantly check in on that world during the rest of the week.

For me, Sunday is the natural day for this rest, as I am already celebrating the Christian Sabbath, where I abstain from work in order to worship, enjoy my family, and simply rest. If my main goal were productivity, I might instead choose a day where I could take the time saved and use it on work, but since I’m mostly after peace and rest, blocking out that time on a day that’s dedicated to rest makes more sense. What will I do instead of checking Twitter compulsively? Well, aside from the things I’m already doing on Sundays (attending Mass, playing with my kids, etc), I’m hoping to fill in the gaps with a little more reading — of a strictly pleasurable variety. Currently I’m making my way through Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit, which I’m greatly enjoying, and I’m also, with the wife, embarked on a year-long reading of War and Peace. But if I use my time well I should have space to squeeze in an extra book, maybe something light like the next Cork O’Connor mystery. And when The Readers Karamazov gears back up soon, I want to make sure I have time for pleasure reading alongside my reading for class and for the podcast.

So here’s my challenge to you, dear readers (all 3 of you): will you join me? It’s not an easy decision to make, for sure. This past year in my Composition classes I’ve themed the courses around technology, and for their personal essays the students can choose to go 24 hours without screens and write about the experience. I haven’t received this semester’s batch yet, but those bold enough to make the choice last semester found it both liberating and terrifying. Many told me they wished it were the sort of thing they could do more often, but they simply did not feel like they could. This is the power that tech exercises over us: the fear that what we will miss is greater than what we’ll gain. Counter this, I’d say: there remains a Sabbath rest, if we’re willing to take it, and it will hold rewards for us that, while not flashy, are deep and meaningful.

Stillness Is the Move

Wait for it, man. The image is, like, a metaphor. For something.

I wanted to write a small piece to accompany the release of Episode II of Season II of The Readers Karamazov — our second episode on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. If you’re not following along yet, I highly recommend you do so (and even more highly recommend that you read the book; no hyperbole attached, it truly is one of the great novels). In doing so I hope to tie together a few of the threads we talked about during the course of our conversation, thinking more about what it means to do meaningful work.

Yesterday was an exceptionally good day for me. I found out that my first academic journal article has officially been published. The article represents the fruit of many years of labor and waiting. I first submitted the article to Religion & Literature three and a half years ago, having spent a long time revising it from “seminar paper” shape to “submittable article” shape. I then waited for 6 months only to receive a “Revise & Resubmit” decision, meaning a significant amount more work for me. After resubmitting, I waited another 6 months to hear the final decision of acceptance. That’s over a year already; then another two waiting to go from accepted to published. I sketch this timeline not to complain, but rather to illustrate the long fallow stretches of academic life (which make the eventual success quite satisfying, to be sure). That excellent news was then topped off by seeing my recent review of a book on Muriel Spark get effusively praised on Twitter by a hero of mine.

So, it was a good day, as they say, made all the sweeter by the rarity of such confluences happening. For those of us further down the academic food chain, at least, hearing positive feedback about the work we do seems vanishingly rare. There are many days when I look around at the desolate academic job market that I’m entering for a third time this year, or think about how ill-fitting and unsexy my own brand of research is within the broad stream of current humanities trends, and wonder what I’m doing with my time. The same holds true with other areas of life. The podcast is growing, but is it growing fast enough? We haven’t dominated our own little niche yet — does that make what we do a waste of time? The doubts even creep into my parenting: am I preparing my children to CHANGE THE WORLD?

That’s why I take a lot of solace in the figure of Caleb Garth, whom we discuss in this week’s episode. By worldly lights Garth is a failure: too much a craftsman, not nearly enough of a salesman, he does his work as a builder well, but never sees the compensation he really deserves for his labor. But Eliot gives him, generally a soft spoken character, this wonderful speech in the middle of the novel:

”It’s a fine thing to come to a man when he’s seen into the nature of business: to have the chance of getting a bit of the country into good fettle, as they say, and putting men into the right way with their farming, and getting a bit of good contriving and solid building done—that those who are living and those who come after will be the better for. I’d sooner have it than a fortune. I hold it the most honorable work that is.”

Here Eliot lays out for us a vision of work that is not dependent on external validation but on internal quality. It’s an inspiring vision, but I also admit that it seems more immediately applicable to manual labor such as practiced by Garth than the life of the mind and the written word. Say my long-suffering novel eventually gets published, but it only sells 2,000 copies (even that’s generous given the current state of publishing). Laying aside money issues, would I be satisfied that so few people had read my words? Or, to scale things down further, let’s say I get my dissertation published as a monograph by a decent but not top-flight academic press, and only a few specialists ever bother to read it, it never gets reviewed, and makes virtually no impact on the state of my field. Could I be satisfied with that?

That’s why I really appreciated Friedrich taking us, later in the episode, to Eliot’s pathos-laden assessment of Casaubon’s scholarly work. Here she is laying it out:

”It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted. Becoming a dean or even a bishop would make little difference, I fear, to Mr. Casaubon’s uneasiness. Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control.”

In a section we ultimately cut from the episode, Karl, Friedrich and I discussed how we related to that description of Casaubon — ultimately agreeing that we did, far more than is comfortable. To be surrounded by the glories of knowledge, but to be cowed by timidity, our own little eyes peeping out fearfully from behind the scholarly mask; this is an uncomfortable truth experienced by many academics.

Which brings me to the third and final thread. In between talking about Garth and Casaubon, I brought us to the work of Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher and theologian whose Pensees form, I am increasingly convinced, an important backbone for the work Eliot does in Middlemarch. In particular I quoted some selections from Pascal on “diversion,” his word for the human experience of seeking after ephemeral pleasures in order to distract us from the hardships of reality. If only, he says, we could learn to sit quietly by ourselves in an empty room, we would have no need to chase after war, or hunting, or games.

So few of us achieve this stillness of mind. But it’s what I find myself yearning for increasingly in my vocation. To be able to do my work with a sense of satisfaction because I have measured it and found it true to the mark; to feel good in putting it out there even if few read it, because who can say that it won’t improve the fettle of the academic landscape even just a jot. Academia as a whole could use more Garths and fewer Casaubons. I can’t improve anyone else’s garden, but I can calmly, patiently till my own little patch of land.

The Subtle Art of Turning the Conversation

I hope, dear reader, that you were blessed in school days with at least one teacher who, as the trite saying goes, “changed your life.” For me, I’ve had about a half dozen, though they’ve been less in the “Just need someone to believe in me” mode and more in the way of challenging me intellectually and shifting the currents of my thought. Roughly half of these teachers came during my time as an undergraduate philosophy major (a good time to have the riverbeds of your intellect redirected). One in particular I owe a huge debt of gratitude. I walked into Jake Howland’s Honors class on Ancient Greece in my first semester of college unsure of what I wanted to do in life or major in, and totally unaware that his class would compel me to become a philosophy major.

We have a misguided notion in contemporary pedagogy that learning should be “fun,” a cavalcade of diversions. Jake was fun, and funny, in class, but he revealed a deeper truth: that it’s better to be compelling than fun. The gravitational force of the ideas he presented, and his own insights on those ideas, formed an intellectual black hole for me, an inescapable pull toward the “love of wisdom”. In my freshman year I had no notion of going on to become a professor or teacher myself, so it’s only in retrospect that I’ve come to appreciate how deeply Dr. Howland’s teaching has influenced my own style in the classroom.

One of the best classroom tools I learned from Dr. Howland is what I will call the subtle art of turning the conversation. During my junior year, I took a class from him that, like his Ancient Greece class, would change my life. Though trained in ancient philosophy, Dr. Howland had discovered mid-life a passion for the writings of Kierkegaard (you know where this is going). Anyway, I took his class on Kierkegaard, and beyond all the great exposure to that great Dane, I saw in that class Dr. Howland’s command of the art of turning conversation.

If you’ve ever been in a classroom, you’ll know the dynamic: there’s always a handful of people (usually somewhere between 2 and 5) who marry a talent for intellectual insipidity with an absolute confidence in sharing their opinions. Chances are you’ve even been that person on occasion (I have). Under the wrong guidance, these students can be conversation stoppers, rambling on to no effect while sucking the air out of the room. They talk and talk but never arrive at a destination.

It’s about to go down in Alberta. Image courtesy of “Mike.”

Dr. Howland, though, was very adept at subtly turning those awful digressions back to some worthwhile pursuit. My then girlfriend (full disclosure: now wife) and I would frequently marvel after class at how skillfully he had taken a dull, go nowhere comment from someone who had clearly not read the passage carefully enough, and pluck “garlic and sapphires from the mud,” as T.S. Eliot might say. This subtle art involved a double move: first, he had to make the speaker feel as if his or her contribution was, frankly, much more valuable than it actually was. Then he had to perform a 180 to move the comment in a direction that was actually productive.

I’ve worked to hone my own skill in this department. It’s not easy, faced with a comment from left field, or one that thuds well below the threshold of basic competence, to prevent this intrusion from sinking the momentum of discussions. How do you gently guide the erring student without making them feel the full weight of their failure? Fall on one side of the knife’s edge, and you have a discouraged student unwilling to share more. Fall on the other, and you’ve only fed the alligator of their own self-regard, and left their errors uncorrected. The basic trick, however you manage it, is to affirm their curiosity and willingness to share, while showing them better ways of thinking. Easy stuff, I know.

I’ve been working to sharpen this subtle art in another, very different context: that of podcast host. If you know my voice, or simply know me well enough to realize that I’d choose the nom de cast “Søren Rear-Guard,” you’ll quickly realize, listening to The Readers Karamazov, that I’m the spoon that stirs the pot. In FM rock radio morning show terms, I’m the guy with the normal name who gets the show named after him. I suppose that makes Friedrich the hot blonde woman and Karl the loose cannon with a wacky radio name like Boogerman. It’s a role I sort of fell into, since Karl and I started the cast without Friedrich, and Karl’s naturally a slightly more reactive type than I am. In this role I act as a sort of hub for conversation, making sure the others say what they need to say while keeping the conversation going.

The dynamic here is of course very different than in the classroom, since I’m working alongside two people whom I trust implicitly to have worthwhile things to say, and with whom I have a long, deep history and chemistry. Still, there are similarities. To give a peek under the hood, we don’t generally do much formal prep for each episode, outside of a hasty chat about big ideas right before we record. That is, we each do our own prep, but don’t work to overly coordinate our ideas. I know that some podcasts have an exhaustive road map, with every jot and tittle planned out, but that’s not what we do. Spontaneity is a key to real conversation, we think, so we work to come prepared individually, but do not try to force a top down approach on our talks.

This means that I have to act as ringmaster to move us through, to figure out when a particular vein of conversation has dried up, and to move us on. I can fix unproductive parts to an extent while editing, of course, but it’s much better for the flow of conversation if I lead us as we go, to keep up momentum. In this context, again, I’m not really “correcting” either of the other two — though we do sometimes have vigorous disagreements! — because no one is saddling the conversation with dead weight. But I do still redirect to make sure we connect our different thoughts together in ways that make sense. I love this part of recording, honestly, because it gives an edge of nervous energy to my thought processes. Not only am I thinking about what I want to say next, I’m also considering what nudges I should give to keep the ship floating in the right direction. It’s a way to connect what we do in the podcast with my classroom practices; I am, after all, working subtly to “teach” our listeners new ways of reading the books they love.

The Pleasures of Aimless Reading

This is what we like to call a “metaphor in a box”. Just add water and poof instant thematic resonance.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m spending a the biggest chunk of my summer “research time” working on a small chapter (or, to be fancy, an “interchapter”) on the Anglo-Irish Philosopher/Novelist Iris Murdoch, for inclusion in my dissertation-cum-book on Kierkegaard and British literature. Unlike a lot of the other work I have to do to get the manuscript ready to submit to presses, this interchapter is not revision or polishing, but a fresh start in largely unknown territory. While I have more familiarity with Iris Murdoch’s work than, say, 99% of the population of the world, I need to bump that up to a nice, round 99.99% before I actually sit down to write.

So far I have actually done the most important work for the chapter, which is reading the Murdoch novel that I knew would be most critical for making my case: The Black Prince, about which I’m absolutely ecstatic. It’s the sort of book that reminds me why I got into this crazy game in the first place (takes long drag on cigarette). Next comes the rather longer and, to be frank, less pleasurable process of trawling through critical apparati to find what other scholars have said about Murdoch, especially in regard to the things I want to talk about. There’s very little on Murdoch and Kierkegaard (which is good for me), but lots on her approach to art, the philosophical novel, her interest in other thinkers (especially Plato) and more that I have to wade through to make sure I’m making the best, most nuanced argument possible.

On occasion I like reading critical writing on authors I study — on very rare occasions I even find it revelatory — but there’s another task I have before me that will almost certainly prove more useful and personally rewarding: the task of making my way, in a mostly aimless way, through more of Murdoch’s novels. Now, I won’t read all of her novels. She wrote 26, after all, and unlike the other acerbic British woman novelist in my dissertation, Muriel Spark, whose books rarely clock in over 200 pages, Murdoch’s tend to be in the 300-400 page range (a quick brag: I have read all 22 of Spark’s novels, and you should too). If I had but world enough and time, I surely would, but for now I’ll have to make do with a sampling.

I call this stage aimless reading because I’ll do it largely at whim and at the mercy of my institution’s library and Interlibrary Loan. I knew heading into this process that The Black Prince was a must read for what I’m trying to say about Murdoch’s relation to Kierkegaard, but having done that bit of targeted, intentional close reading (I have 8 full pages in a Word document that’s filled solely with quotes I pulled from the book as potentially important), it’s time for me to be a bit more aimless. That means I likely won’t take notes from any of the novels I read, unless I stumble across something so critical that my chapter would be complete without it.

So what am I “aiming” to accomplish with this “aimless reading”? I’m not looking for fodder for the chapter, though as I said I’ll collect any Pearls of Great Price I stumble over along the way. I do aimless reading specifically to combat a great temptation that faces many scholars, and certainly me: the desire to hammer away at texts to make them yield what we want them to yield. This transactional approach to literature rubs me the wrong way, because it suggests that Murdoch’s value to me lies in how well her writing conforms to my preconceived notions about her work. Such an approach, which is sadly all too common, is, at the very least, an unethical way to approach reading, especially when the reading involves an author as vibrant and variegated in her thoughts and words as Murdoch. To read a great writer’s books is to come upon a vast breathing thing, or perhaps an underground fungal network spread across miles and miles.

So I’ll read these novels of Murdoch’s, whichever I pick up (I do have one or two asterisked as especially relevant for reasons of theme and composition date, but beyond these I just plan to graze widely), with an eye to gaining texture, nothing more. The more I read of an author, the better I understand where she comes from, what matters to her, and how she develops over the course of her career. Whether or not I find quotes to mine, ideas to probe, or characters to taxonomize for my actual research, I’ll approach that research, when I do, better equipped to give a fair, nuanced accounting of Murdoch.

A theme I’ve unintentionally developed as I’ve started blogging about thoughts and thinking is that of unintended consequences. When we set out to form and forge ideas, often the small incidentals we carry with us have an outsized impact on the final product. In research, sometimes phrases I pick up from one author, who has no explicit connection to the topic at hand, bounce around and give critical insight into what I am writing about. Sometimes it is those apparently fallow moments — showering, playing with my children, washing dishes — that yield the most vibrant thoughts. The impact of unintentional elements applies in a big way to aimless reading. When we approach a text simply to experience it, not to strip mine it, we have an openness that allows us to experience surprise.

I’ve focused on the research benefits of aimless reading here, naturally. But there are also personal benefits. Sometimes, when I’ve felt burned out on literature as a discipline, I’ve found myself revived not by some grand towering novel of flawless aesthetic merit, but by a breezed through detective novel, or even a work of history that illuminates some new-to-me period or experience (I’ll never forget the exhilarating feeling of reading The Farthest Shore, about the colonization of my homeland of Australia, or Parting the Waters, the first volume in Taylor Branch’s epic history of the Civil Rights struggle). Aimless reading, picked up on a whim and followed without prejudice wherever it leads, brings me back again and again to literature’s deep, abiding attractions.