Alan Jacobs vs. Que Sera Sera

Further to my fretting over the health of the North American Liberal Tradition:

“You ever ask yourself, 'Just what is the freakin' point"??”

Alan Jacobs is helpful.

“Critical Theory” is a dog-whistle that tends to get my fur up — as I was finishing up my undergrad I was made to understand this would increasingly be my focus were I to proceed any further. Buh-bye. I’ve subsequently blamed the academy’s failing health on its blind adherence to a po-mo hash of CT dogma.

Jacob’s consideration of CT and the problem with such generalizations dispels much of my long-held prejudice toward it.

Similarly the en vogue media concern with intersectionality. I could not articulate quite why I was uncomfortable with the model, aside from it placing me (as a SWM in his mid-50s) squarely in the locus of maximum culpability. Jacobs notes, “The doctrine of intersectionality tends ... to focus on intersections that intensify but to ignore intersections that cancel each other out.” That is hardly the last word on intersectionality, but again — it’s helpful.

And, of course, he’s got this thing for demons. Man, that’s not a dog-whistle — that’s catnip!

More anon, I am sure...

Post-script: Jacobs, being firmly in the “code or be coded” camp, constructed his very own blog template. Alas, it isn’t particularly great at archiving in sequential order. He’s got a lot on his plate, so with regards to his thoughts on critical theory I’ll go ahead and archive it myself over here: Post 1, Post 2, Post 3.

I read the news today. Oh, boy...

I read Ross Douthat on occasion, to give my liberalism a bit of a gut-check. I've never been much tempted to link to anything he's written. That changes today. The Tom Cotton Op-Ed & The Cultural Revolution: How Liberalism & The Liberal Media Are Changing Before Our Eyes is a cogent, even sensitive argument for the return of genuine liberalism to the newspaper page.

Matt Taibbi, on the other hand ... I have to reflexively check my impulse to link to just about everything he writes. Unlike Douthat, Taibbi isn't soft-shoeing around the issue. The American Press Is Destroying Itself, he says.

These two diverse voices seem to be in agreement. And I agree with them both.

The Great Emergence, Hiding In Plain Sight?

Like many other things we have noted, the tension toward changing things externally into new forms, as opposed to reworking them internally into what should be, has been a major characteristic of each of our previous hinge times and will continue to be part of our present one. The imperative for us in the twenty-first century, therefore, is not to fear either of the two coursings, but to fear with all our hearts and minds and souls the pattern of bloodiness that in the past has characterized the separation of innovators and re-traditioners from one another. 

Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why

‘People involved in Uzbek politics are accustomed to rumour and lies. It’s common practice to assume that all information is unreliable and all sources biased, which ensures that all rumours are taken seriously. Rumour is not automatically believed, of course, so much as it is shared, parsed, and discussed — sometimes far beyond what its dubious origins might merit. The result of ubiquitous paranoia is not disbelief. It is credulity. 

‘When all information is assumed fraudulent and all sources suspect, when your worst suspicions about your government are routinely confirmed and denied, when on-line communication — itself nebulous and malleable — is your only means of interaction, what do you do? You follow your principles . . . . But in Uzbekistan, following your principles often gets you nowhere. And there’s not much you can do about it.’ 

When I wrote this passage in 2011, I did not know that eight years later, I could substitute “America” for “Uzbekistan” and it would serve as an apt summary of Trump-era politics. 

Sarah Kendzior, Hiding In Plain Sight: The Invention Of Donald Trump & The Erosion Of America

It is a curious experience reading Phyllis Tickle’s charting of Christian response and re-formation in the 21st Century in concert with Sarah Kendzior’s charting of the US decline into gangster autocracy and civil dissolution.

Tickle is, as every person of faith is required to be, an optimist — albeit with an ability to acknowledge blunt realities. Kendzior is a flinty realist who cheerfully admits she’s lost all hope.

I’m midway through both, so commenting now is foolish of me. But you don't expect wisdom from me! So here I go.

I will admit I am more easily persuaded by Kendzior’s pessimism for the future of American democracy, or any possibility of democratic reform (forget about justice), than I am by Tickle’s sense of what shape the “emergent” Christianity might take.

What if this emergent Christianity simply . . .  doesn’t? Emerge, that is.

Repeat caveat — I am only halfway through Tickle’s book. But at this point she focuses almost exclusively on the corpus of Western Christianity. Maybe she delves deeper into other embodiments later, so bear with me.

Tickle says the Christian church holds a “garage sale” every 500 years or so to get rid of the arcana holding it back from properly addressing the concerns of the present. But what if the every-half-millennium “garage sale” — which jettisons modes and conceptual memes that no longer work in correlation with our species’ relation to its technologies and natural habitat — what if the current “garage sale” being organized sorts out the superfluousness of . . .

. . . Western Christianity?

Western Christianity has moved in lockstep with — and has largely aided and abetted, wittingly or no — the materialist mercantilism that has eroded our planet’s communities and ecosystem to the point of mutual ruination and collapse. Do we even have a coherent understanding of “community” or “stewardship” we could articulate at this point in our history?

My guess is (optimistic bastard that I am) there are other forms of Christianity more likely to emerge into something fungible for humanity at large. African and Chinese Christianity, to take just two examples, are, for starters, both more robust expressions of Christian community than anything you’ll find here — due in no small part to oppression and persecution that has occurred within living memory of these communities.

Anyhoo — thoughts that occur as we collectively chart the ever-widening gyre. More anon, I hope. Be well.

Meeting writers!

“You’re doing it anyway. Why not get a credit for it?”

This was my friend’s encouragement to go ahead and take the university’s sole Creative Writing class. The professor was Al Reimer.

1986, pretty much the way I remember him.

I had to submit an application. Our first meeting in his blue-carpeted office, Al quickly dispensed with how we were related (distantly, but definitively) then tucked into the pieces I’d dropped off. I was in.

The class took up an entire afternoon, one day a week — the longest class duration I’d experienced to that point. We needed the time, because that man was born to expound. If I approached him in his office for some between-class advice, the rest of the afternoon or morning disappeared. He’d ask a few questions about my larger family, then explain where they fit in with our village’s history. History was just a lofty name for gossip, he assured me. And boy, did he know history.

I recall the office visits with more clarity than I do his classes, to be honest. But he was adamant on one bit of instruction: introduce yourself to the Writer in Residence. Attend their readings, submit something you’re working on and book an appointment to discuss it. This wasn’t a course requirement, mind you. Just the best piece of advice we were likely to get that year.

The Writer in Res the first semester was poet Tom Wayman. My mates and I were in awe of the man before he even set foot on campus. Wayman — not merely a published poet, but an accessible one. With a sense of humour! How was this guy not a regular in the New Yorker?, etc etc.

I arrived early to Wayman’s first reading, and took a seat near the wings — close enough to observe him carefully, as if he were some exotic egret in its natural habitat, but also within range of the exit, should any need arise for either of us to flee the scene.

Al walked in a few minutes later. Before he could introduce himself to Wayman, the poet bounded over with outstretched hand, effusively praising Al’s newly published novel, My Harp Is Turned To Mourning. Al stammered a thank-you, then collected himself to return compliments for Wayman’s most recent collection. Exchange completed, Al surveyed the room, then sat beside me. “Well,” he murmured, “I was NOT expecting that!”

My eventual meeting with Wayman was a happy-enough occasion. As is the way with these things, the younger disciple approaches the master, and within a few minutes it becomes evident to both that this will not blossom into a lifelong epistolary friendship. When we settled to discuss the piece I’d dropped off, his opening statement stuck with me. “The first thing I want to say is, when I started this piece, I was in — I wanted to see where you were going, I wanted to finish it. You know what I’m saying? At no time did I ever NOT want to be reading it.”

That struck me then, and still does, as remarkably high praise. This was my second year of university, and I was just beginning to discover a boatload of stuff I did not want to be reading.

When the year was over I bought Al’s novel. And at no point did I ever not want to be reading it. But I puzzled over how a guy like Wayman, a hippie-type from (to my eyes at that time) indeterminate ethno-cultural origins, could muster any interest whatsoever in a patently Mennonite novel. I finally figured, Wayman’s a savvy guy. He’s not just interested in Writing The Thing Itself, he’s keen to keep as many potential publishing doors as wide open as possible.

You never know where the next paycheque might come from, so you read, you compliment, you insinuate yourself as closely as you can to what could potentially be the next paying gig.

I was beginning to get an idea of just how much work was involved in “Being a Writer.”

Next: acknowledging the call, six months later.

Sunday worship music

Rattling in my brain-pan

• Over at Sojourners Courtney Ariel lays down six things we can do to be stronger allies.
• “By all accounts, even revisionist ones, Ishi was a mensch: patient, friendly, curious, upright. He weathered the sort of radical and traumatic change that would destroy most of us, and he did so with an unflappable calm that, as his joking and frequent delight suggested, had nothing to do with stony-faced stereotypes of native imperturbability. There was a charm to the man that radiates throughout his story, throughout time even, which is partly why print-outs of his image are now stapled to that signboard at Grattan.” Erik Davis has a newsletter — even if you choose not to subscribe, do yourself a favour and read his latest.

Ishi Obscura

• Lefsetz interviews Kendzior — for two hours. I haven’t heard it yet, but Sarah Kendzior is a terrific interview with anyone. Her book is waiting for me at Blue Heron, so I will give this a listen there and back.
• Jonathan Haidt is trying to heal America’s divisions — I read Peter Wehner’s profile of his psychologist friend earlier this week. Hard to believe five days ago seems like a more hopeful time.
• “How did I meet Larry? He called me a murderer and an incompetent idiot on the front page of the San Francisco Examiner magazine” — Anthony Fauci reflects on his beloved friend and nemesis Larry Kramer.
• “I have to say that my better judgment does not get a lot of exercise these days” — surprisingly, shock-novelist and inveterate pot-stirrer Lionel Shriver proves capable of understatement.
• Finally, a little over a month ago I nervously linked to David Cayley’s contemplation of what Ivan Illich might have made of the pandemic response. A week went by and nobody commented on it. I breathed a sigh of relief. Alas, a week later Paul Bowman informed me that the wags at Solidarity Hall were gettin’ into it, big-time — enough so to coax Cayley out of the study and into the square to deliver further rumination on the matter. My thoughts, yet again: a hot-take on what has, possibly, been sacrificed from human community in our hasty embrace of the atomistic contemporary is maybe not the best way to determine, “What is to be done?” But, hey — for them what’s got to contemplate on it, keep on it contemplatin’.

Lesson 3: Maybe DON’T write what you want to read...

I don’t recall writing assignments from my early days in school — it is safe to assume they were a tortuous requirement. By sixth grade, however, I was enjoying writing and illustrating short adventures that riffed off the book descriptions I read in Scholastic Book Club flyers.

Actually, this one I still have a copy of. Somewhere.

The 'rents were cool toward this outfit — likely for the same reason they were cool toward television (worldly influence). Since I rarely set eyes on the advertised product, necessity dictated I conjure up these forbidden adventures on my own. I also did this in the family back yard, physically elaborating plot elements gleaned from the TV guide, energetically spilling rivers of villainous blood that would have made Conan the Barbarian recoil in horror.

Lotsa fun, lotsa fun...

English classes were dubbed “Language Arts” in those days of Trudeau-and-all-his-hippie-cronies-playing-the-pipe. Mr. H__, my grade 7 LA teacher, required a creative one-pager at the end of every month. On Friday he’d take the collection of foolscap pages home, and on Monday he’d read his favourites to the class. To my astonishment my pulpy descriptions of starships eliminating hideous alien threats, or MENSA teens exacting poorly-conceived revenge on their jock tormentors, were frequently read aloud to my less-than-ecstatic classmates.

This is a good time (for me, at least) to tip the hat to Alan Dean Foster — you were my Proust, sir.

By grade 8, coinciding with Joe Clark’s brief tenure as (Conservative) PM, “Language Arts” was bluntly reduced once again to ENGLISH. Mr. L__ — a man of very different temperament to Mr. H__ — announced in September there would be only one “Creative Writing” assignment, due in January. The rest of the year would be devoted to sober discussion of serious texts, and disciplined mastery of spelling and grammar.

Needless to say, Mr. L__ was nowhere near as moved as Mr. H__ might have been, had the latter been given opportunity to read my crackling story of an international team of space agents dispatched to assassinate an evil genius in his orbital station.

The winning story that year was an account of a girl who, against the wishes of her caring but religiously austere parents, gets her long, lustrous hair cut to a more fashionable length, then comes home to face the consequences. As Mr. L__ read it aloud to us, I was surprised to find myself actually quite moved by what I initially thought was a rather pedestrian struggle common to us all, really, in one form or another. I also couldn’t help but notice the author was in possession of a well-brushed, cared-for, and very lengthy mane of hair.

Lessons learned: 1) make it personal; 2) KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE.

Next: literary encounters of an unsettling kind.