A follow-up to my recent post on Adam Roberts’s new novel Lake of Darkness. I said in that post that Adam is a metaphysical writer, and that’s something that fascinates me about his fiction. But metaphysics is not my native tongue; I am able to grasp most prominent metaphysical c … | Continue reading
Adam Roberts is a metaphysical novelist, in two senses of the word. First, like the so-called metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, he delights in fabulous conceits, extreme metaphors, analogies pushed to and beyond their apparent limits — “knight’s moves,” he has said i … | Continue reading
By the time he wrote “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter,” Conan Doyle was growing tired of Sherlock Holmes, and the tiredness shows in the messiness of the story. This was the eighth of ten Holmes stories published in 1893, after seven in 1892 and six in 1891; and the novels … | Continue reading
J. M. W. Turner, Scarbrough (a drawing owned by Ruskin) | Continue reading
This is a fascinating report: “Very soon, the federal government may authorize the killing of nearly a half-million barred owls in the Pacific Northwest in a desperate bid to save the northern spotted owl.” The argument appended to the report is that this proposal is unwise. The … | Continue reading
A few years ago I published an essay called “Miss Marple and the Problem of Modern Identity,” in which I described the rise of certain technologies by which people have become “legible” to the state. At that point I had not read a classic, though a somewhat controversial classic, … | Continue reading
One of my favorite YouTubers is Thomas Flight, who makes videos about movies. In a recent video, he contrasts the “theatrical” acting style of classic Hollywood movies with the “naturalistic” style of today’s movies. Flight’s treatment of this issue is better than most, but he ov … | Continue reading
Around the rim of the shield Hephaestus made for Achilles is the Ocean River, the great water that (Homer believed) rings our world — Middle-earth, it’s sometimes called: the place where we live and, often enough, fight and kill and die. And, as I have noted, Guadalcanal Island i … | Continue reading
If, as I said in my previous post, to confront another soldier in war is to confront yourself, then … isn’t that other soldier … you? Yes. Necessarily. It is this necessity that produces a constant hum of meditation in Malick’s The Thin Red Line: “Maybe all men got one big soul,” … | Continue reading
The story of the Nisei linguists — who served in the Second World War as translators, interpreters, and intelligence officers, while their parents were imprisoned in internment camps — is a remarkable one. James C. McNaughton’s book about them is available as a PDF here. | Continue reading
As I noted in my previous post, the peculiar nature of the Guadalcanal campaign creates a kind of narrative frame — the arrival by sea, the fighting, the departure by sea — that any account of the campaign is bound by. This traversing of emptiness surrounding a tragic agon. I thi … | Continue reading
Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier: The [CrowdStrike] catastrophe is yet another reminder of how brittle global internet infrastructure is. […] This brittleness is a result of market incentives. In enterprise computing — as opposed to personal computing — a company that provides … | Continue reading
The above is a drawing by Howard Brodie, an artist James Jones much admired. The distinctive way the Allied commanders organized the campaign for Guadalcanal, coupled with certain features intrinsic to island warfare, shaped the structure of Jones’s The Thin Red Line. Here’s how … | Continue reading
How vividly did the Guadalcanal campaign impress itself on the American imagination? Well, this movie was released around nine months after the last Japanese soldiers were driven from the island. But all the media were moving at fast pace in those days. In propaganda, as in so ma … | Continue reading
From December of 1941 through the middle of the next year, the Japanese Army and Navy enjoyed an unbroken series of victories that carried them to the doorstep of Australia. The conquest of Australia was indeed their next major endeavor. They planned to begin it by taking Port Mo … | Continue reading
I’ve been meaning for some time to write a brief post about Freddie deBoer’s case for forcing mentally ill people into treatment — or rather, about one element of the story. And then today I see a new post by Freddie on this review of this book by Jonathan Rosen, and that got the … | Continue reading
In The Long Week-End, their entertaining, sardonic, and often insightful social history of England between the two world wars, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge assert that in the years immediately following the Great War, “Detective-novel writing was not yet an industry; Sherlock Hol … | Continue reading
Mark Bristol’s storyboards for Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line. | Continue reading
In the Oxford English Dictionary, definition II.12.a. of “character” is: “A description, delineation, or detailed report of a person’s qualities. Now chiefly historical.” As an example, one R. Lucas wrote: “He undertook to write characters of Pitt and Bonaparte.” The originator o … | Continue reading
I mentioned in an earlier post Hume’s purpose in writing this history — or what anyway I believe to have been his purpose: To account for and celebrate (a) the diminishment of the rule of superstition and enthusiasm and (b) the corresponding rise of “civility and sciences.” This … | Continue reading
As previously indicated, I will eventually return to Moonbound, but I need to think some things through first. For now, let’s go back twelve thousand years or so and revisit David Hume’s History of England. When Hume was writing his History of England, the word “literature” only … | Continue reading
Nothing good ever comes from indulging the egos of old men. Nothing good comes from indulging the ego of any politician, but the you-can’t-tell-me-I’ve-seen-it-all arrogance of old men is especially dangerous. If you want political success, it’s better to be fortunate in your ene … | Continue reading
Barney Ronay: Even England, this England’s version of hole-in-the-head football will give you dramatic interventions, trapped energy, last-minute overhead kicks. Somehow France entered this game as the only team at the Euros not to have registered an assist. Before this semi-fina … | Continue reading
A while back I said that I had read Robin Sloan’s new novel Moonbound and hoped to read it again. Wrong! I had not genuinely read it. Now I have, and I love this book. Several decades ago, the semiotician A. J. Greimas claimed that all stories are comprised of six actants, in thr … | Continue reading
I’ve been reading David Hume’s massive and magnificent History of England, and it’s generally fascinating — though there are, it must be said, extended passages in which he’s just dutifully relating what his researches have been able to discover about events which are not as well … | Continue reading
My friend Rick Gibson makes a fascinating argument here. You need to read the whole thing, but a brief summary would go like this: No matter how vast the corpus of text on which chatbots currently draw, in order to be successful in the future they will need to have an ever-expand … | Continue reading
Will Baude: The court is motivated by statesmanship, which the country sorely needs today. The problem is that this statesmanship is a form of the kind of outcome-oriented policymaking that the court disparages in other contexts. It trusts states to handle the homelessness crisis … | Continue reading
A couple of years ago I wrote about a shift in my writerly focus from a decade-long inquiry into the enemies of attention to an inquiry into how we might live a human life at a human scale. Those are related themes, of course: identifying and critiquing what Tim Wu calls “the att … | Continue reading
John Gregory Dunne, from The Studio: The Studio was simplicity itself to write. It was mainly a matter of transcribing and rearranging my notes. That there were no surprises—I knew exactly what I was going to do—was for me the problem. Writing is essentially donkey work, manual l … | Continue reading
In theory, Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt faced the same problem that many other Hollywood films of the same era (Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, for instance) faced: How to be anti-Nazi while maintaining a fig leaf of objectivity — a necessary fig leaf, given the supposed neutrality o … | Continue reading
Raymond Williams, in his great The Country and the City, shows how ancient this contrast is, and how standardized its terms are. The contrast is almost always between (a) the innocence and simplicity of the countryside and (b) the noisy corruption of the city. Juvenal begins his … | Continue reading
It’s called the “good cop, bad cop” routine, but in practice the bad cop always comes first. Softens you up, makes you want it to stop. Then comes the good cop with a kindly smile and a quiet voice. Or: You were right to think of social media as rage-bait, but you were mistaken a … | Continue reading
If the defining axes of Genesis 1–11 were making/naming and commanding/disobeying, those of the Patriarchal narratives are fertility/barrenness and pastoral/urban. Over and over again the LORD promises fertility to the barren, and to the childless a multitude of descendants. The … | Continue reading
The story begins with creation, and creation is largely a matter of dividing: dividing the region of order from the region of chaos (tohu wabohu), then light from darkness, then the waters above from the waters below, then the waters below from the dry land, then “the lights in t … | Continue reading
I was disappointed by Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis, though that may have less to do with the quality of Robinson’s book than with my way of thinking about the Bible. Robinson proceeds by a kind of Lockean association of ideas: on one (typical) page a thought about Joseph … | Continue reading
Amanda Montell: Since the moment I learned about the concept of the “thought-terminating cliche” I’ve been seeing them everywhere I look: in televised political debates, in flouncily stencilled motivational posters, in the hashtag wisdom that clogs my social media feeds. Coined i … | Continue reading
Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out is a brilliant movie about … well, that’s the question. Some people say it’s a movie about the IRA, but that’s certainly wrong, and not because the name of the organization and the name of the city in which the action is set are never mentioned. This is o … | Continue reading
What follows is a kind of sequel to the introduction to Ruskin I published several years ago. Ruskin begins The Stones of Venice by identifying what he believes to have been the essential characteristics of Venetian society in its heyday – which is to say, the twelfth century thr … | Continue reading
Early in Terrence Malick’s masterpiece A Hidden Life (2019), Franz Jägerstätter and his wife Franziska (Fani) sit at the kitchen table in their Austrian farmhouse and reminisce about their first meeting. Fani thinks back to Franz’s arrival in the village, and as she does we cut t … | Continue reading
My paternal grandfather, Elisha Creel Jacobs, was for many years an engineer on the Frisco railroad. His standard route ran from our city, Birmingham, to Memphis and then Kansas City — and then back home. Our house was about a mile from the big freight yard on the west side of Bi … | Continue reading
A couple of years ago, I decided that I wanted to re-read Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, which I hadn’t read since high school. I picked it up and saw the first sentence: “From the outset, let us bring you news of your protagonist.” He means “At the outset.” “At the out … | Continue reading
In the last few days I have come across, or had sent to me, anguished cries from people who have recently been dragged on social media and cannot fathom the injustice of it, and I find myself thinking: You haven’t figured this out yet? You complain about your words being taken ou … | Continue reading
Two of the best things I’ve read in response to the horrific “Crush” commercial Apple recently put out and half-heartedly apologized for: Mark Hurst and (especially) Mike Sacasas. I have to say that I’m finding it difficult to get over this: the ad has, I feel, given me a peek in … | Continue reading
So here’s yet another story on how students today can’t or won’t read: Theresa MacPhail is a pragmatist. In her 15 years of teaching, as the number of students who complete their reading assignments has steadily declined, she has adapted. She began assigning fewer readings, then … | Continue reading
From John Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera, Letter 7: You are to do good work, whether you live or die. It may be you will have to die; — well, men have died for their country often, yet doing her no good; be ready to die for her in doing her assured good: her, and all other […] | Continue reading
From Evelyn Waugh’s biography of Ronald Knox: For three days he lay in a coma, but once Lady Eldon saw a stir of consciousness and asked whether he would like her to read to him from his own New Testament. He answered very faintly, but distinctly: ‘No’; and then after a long paus … | Continue reading
The perception of colour is a gift just as definitely granted to one person, and denied to another, as an ear for music; and the very first requisite for true judgment of Saint Mark’s, is the perfection of that colour-faculty which few people ever set themselves seriously to find … | Continue reading
I believe every man in a Christian kingdom ought to be equally well educated. But I would have it education to purpose; stern, practical, irresistible, in moral habits, in bodily strength and beauty, in all faculties of mind capable of being developed under the circumstances of t … | Continue reading