Miscellaneous

Weekend Reading, 1/7/12

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Hope the new year finds all of you well. As you may have noticed, Weekend Reading posts have been on hiatus due to holiday busyness. Things will only be getting busier as the new semester ramps up, but I’ll try to keep these coming. For the sake of time, however, introductory/explanatory comments may be minimal as they are this week. Enjoy. All of these are quite interesting, the pieces by Havel and Lightman are particularly good.

“The Intellectual and Politics” by Vaclav Havel at Project Syndicate. By the late Czech poet, dissident, and president.

“Always the Optimist: Václav Havel’s transcendence of politics” by Stefany Anne Golberg at Smart Set.  On Havel.

“War No More?” by Timothy Snyder at Foreign Affairs. In conversation with Pinker’s recent book on the decline of violence.

“Their Noonday Demons, and Ours” by John Plotz in the NY Times. On distraction, past and present.

“The Accidental Universe: Science’s Crisis of Faith” by Alan Lightman in Harper’s. This article has gotten a lot of attention over the last couple of weeks. Very interesting.

“Christianity and the Future of the Book” by Alan Jacobs at The New Atlantis. Explores relationship between Christianity and the book form in light of the emergence of electronic forms of reading.

Interrogative Intonation …

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

A little over a year ago I wrote a post on the popularity of the ellipse ( . . . ) in online communication after I began to notice how frequently I had been employing the mark myself. After laying out a rough and ready taxonomy of uses, I wrapped up with the following conclusion:

“It was the mark of a thought that refused to assert itself …. The ellipsis gives expression to a habit of ironic detachment and preemptive indifference.  And here is where I found the point of contact with larger cultural trends.  The mood of ironic detachment that has settled over so many of us was manifesting itself in three simple dots.  With those dots we were evading conviction, giving off an apathetic vibe, and guarding ourselves from seeming unfashionably earnest.”

Today, via Peter Leithart, I came across the following from John Milbank:

“People who fondly imagine themselves the subjects of their ‘own’ choices entirely will, in reality, be the most manipulated subjects, and the most incapable of being influenced by goodness and beauty. This is why, in the affluent Anglo-Saxon West today, there is so much pervasively monotonous ugliness and tawdriness that belies its wealth, as well as why there are so many people adopting (literally) the sing-song accent of self-righteous complacency and vacuous uniformity, with its rising lilt of a feigned questioning at the end of every phrase. This intonation implies that any overassertion is a polite infringement of the freedom of the other, and yet at the same time its merely rhetorical interrogation suggests that the personal preference it conveys is unchallengeable, since it belongs within the total set of formally correct exchange transactions. Pure liberty is pure power – whose other name is evil.”

I thought at the time I had perhaps overanalyzed. I now feel better about that.

Death and Material Culture

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Christopher Hitchens passed away on Thursday evening from complications related to the cancer he had been fighting for many months. I received this news with a certain startled sadness, even though it was, of course, expected. I hope to post some reflections on Mr. Hitchens with regards to the quality of public discourse in the coming days. For now, I only want to draw attention to a portion of his brother Peter’s reflections published yesterday in the Daily Mail.

Peter Hitchens wrote of one of his last conversations with his brother in which Christopher hoped to return home from the hospital:

“There, he suggested, we could go through his bookshelves, as there were some books and other possessions he wanted me to have. I couldn’t have cared less about these things, but I had greatly hoped to have that conversation, which would have been a particularly good way of saying farewell.”

Admittedly, as Peter Hitchens notes, the objects are nothing compared to the person. But I would think, personally, that they are not therefore entirely insignificant. They are something. And the books especially, for what they meant to the giver, might be a particularly meaningful token.

All of this to say that no one will ever want to go through an e-reader in quite the same way. Only the particularity of the book as object can carry the fullness of meaning and significance that is entailed in passing a thing on to another in this way. It is an aspect of the culture of the book that takes shape around the older form.

This is, in itself, no argument against the utility of e-readers. It is only to note a subtle loss that attends this particular shift in our material culture. And I, for better or for worse, have a temperamental proclivity to register such losses.

Of course, it takes no particular predisposition to register and regret the loss of Mr. Hitchens.

Weekend Reading, 12/10/11

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Short and to the point this week.

“Solitude and Political Friendship” by Anthony Esolen in Public Discourse: On the difference between solitude and isolation. Wise reflections.

“Out of Body Experience: Master of Illusion” by Ed Yong in Nature: On experiments exploring body image, perception, sense of self, etc.

“Beardless in Barnesville” by Joshua Glenn in HiLobrow: Lovely essay, first published in 1996, on the Second Luddite Congress.

“Dear Amazon: You Really, Really Suck” at Advent Book Blog: Very short post on a disconcerting Amazon sales tactic and what to do instead.

“You Say You Want a Devolution” by Kurt Anderson in Vanity Fair: “Or maybe, I worry some days, this is the way that Western civilization declines, not with a bang but with a long, nostalgic whimper.” Not as dramatic as all that, but an interesting look at the stagnation culture over the last twenty years.

“Hugo Addendum: The Film in Context” by Adam Batty at Hope Lies at 24 Frames per Second: Excellent post on the film history that forms the context of Hugo. H/T Mr. Gladding.

Opaque Surfaces and the Worlds They Hide

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 6 Comments

Thinking about the opacity of life.

All around us our devices present us with surfaces below which lie complexities few understand. Our technologies are increasingly opaque to us. But this is, from a certain perspective, not very different from much of the rest of our experience.

As I look up at the sky, it presents me with a surface which, during the day, hides from my view the vastness of the space that lies beyond it. Even at night, the starlit sky discloses only a glimmer of the magnitude of the universe.

As I look at the blade of grass and my hand that holds it, a surface presents itself beyond which lies another, atomic and sub-amtomic, universe whose infinitesimal scale is entirely concealed to my unaided senses.

How much of reality lies beyond these surfaces that present themselves to us as the perceived limits of lived experience? And yet there is one other surface that veils a world from view.

As I look into the eyes of the persons I encounter day in and day out, a surface once again presents itself in seemingly uncomplicated fashion. But beyond this surface too lies a complex and unfathomable universe. The mind, dare I say soul of every person is another world — vast, complex, mysterious, wondrous, and beyond the reach of my ordinary perception.

In the end, I suspect that of all these, it is my own consciousness that is most opaque to my perception and the most challenging to penetrate.

All our learning is finally an effort to see beyond these surfaces.