Alan Jacobs's Blog

For quite some time now I’ve been frustrated by the experience of writing here at the ol’ Homebound Symphony. The problems are three in number.

First, my preferred app for blogging, MarsEdit, has always been treated as a suspicious interloper by my hosting service, Reclaim Hosting, and that suspicion has only increased over the years as hosting providers everywhere have been afflicted by more fraudsters (and more kinds of fraudsters). It’s basically the same problem that afflicts banks: there are so many crooks out there that the number of attempted purchases blocked by my bank has increased tenfold over the past few years. But I haven’t changed banks because I have learned from talking with friends that all banks are in this permanent panic mode. You have to price in the blocks, and the time taken to get the blocks lifted, as part of the cost of doing business. And I’m pretty sure that if I changed hosting providers I would find that the new provider is as paranoid (or rationally fearful, if you prefer) as Reclaim is.

So what this means, in practical terms, is that if I want to keep writing here, I will have to spend some time in the WordPress editing environment. Yes, I can do the three-step of writing my posts in BBEdit using Markdown, having the Markdown text converted to HTML, and then pasting that into the WordPress editor — but there are always problems with the formatting that I must painstakingly correct before posting. And I must do that correcting in an interface that seems to have been designed by demons for my torment. So the writing of posts, which in MarsEdit is fun, becomes an ordeal. That’s my second problem.

Should I think of this as (by analogy to the banking situation) part of the cost of doing business? I am not willing to do that. I am just not willing to put up with that crap.

Which leads me to the third problem, which is a minor one in comparison to the first two, but still: while I love tags, when I am engaged in a long-term project I find that tags are not sufficient to make such projects accessible and comprehensible to readers. That’s why I have ended up writing summaries of certain projects or combining a series of posts into one long one. Such hacks are useful to readers, perhaps, but they are still hacks. That’s why, when I started writing at length about the films of Terrence Malick, I decided not to write here and tag the posts but rather to start a new blog. That’s where micro.blog comes to the rescue: my Premium account allows me to create multiple blogs — and features podcasting too, something I have dabbled in but plan to pursue more seriously starting sometime in 2027. My plan going forward is to have dedicated blogs on particular topics. (How I wish now I had started a blog just to write about the City of God and the City of Man.) Indeed, I have already created one of those blogs and primed the pump by re-posting some pieces that originally appeared here.

I’ll say more about that, soonish, over at my micro.blog page, which will continue to be the source of news for all things ayjay. Remember that you can subscribe to a weekly digest of those posts. Many of my readers do, and if that’s your starting point then you’ll never have to worry about where the links go.

I’ll keep writing, and writing about many of the same things I’ve been writing about but also some new things, there and elsewhere — but this is the last post at The Homebound Symphony. I will, however, keep the blog accessible, so anyone who wants to can still read it.

I’ll miss the old place in some ways … but I won’t miss the WordPress editor, which, if God’s blessing holds, I’ll never have to look at again.

The house my father grew up in is also the house that I grew up in, through age 12. For a while after they married my father and mother lived in their own (rented) house, but soon after I was born they moved back in with his parents. I don’t know the reason, but I assume that, since both my parents worked full-time (when Daddy wasn’t in prison), they could rely on my grandmother to care for me and then, later, my sister. This she did, faithfully and lovingly, and her memory remains a blessing to me and to my sister.

My grandfather was an engineer for the Frisco railroad, and in many respects the railroad dominated my childhood. The freight yard from which he departed on his long runs across the country — the East Thomas Yard — was less than a mile from our house, and Grandma would always take me in her station wagon to drop him off and pick him up. Sometimes, for reasons unknown to me, we would have to drive to Carbon Hill, Alabama to pick him up. (I think crew changes happened there.) On rare occasions his train would rumble slowly into the yard, or depart slowly from it, along a track that ran just a few dozen yards from our house, and when that happened he played a special pattern on his whistle so I would know it was him. When he was disabled by a stroke and forced to retire from the Frisco, a good deal of magic disappeared from my life.

Our house was an old, beat-up, ramshackle thing with peeling wallpaper inside and watermarks on the ceilings, but when I was very young the yard featured a small fishpond and banks of flowers, especially zinnias, which my grandfather loved. He was the one who cared for the place, and after his stroke everything quickly went to pot. The flowers disappeared, and the fishpond was filled with dirt; the pecan trees, though, kept producing nuts, and it was always my job in the fall to scoop the fallen nuts into grocery bags and offer them to our neighbors. (As an adult I was shocked to learn than people paid for pecans.)

We moved out of that house in the summer of 1971, and not long afterward it burned down. My memory is shaky on this point, and there’s no one left to ask, but I believe the house was left empty and someone burned it down for fun.

When I was in Alabama for my mother’s funeral I went back to the site of that old house, and here’s what I saw:

A jungle. That old neighborhood is gone now; most of the lots look like ours, while a few feature small warehouses and machine shops. No houses remain. The only thing that looks just the same is the sand and gravel business on the other side of the railroad tracks:

On weekends we used to climb that fence and play king of the hill — preferably on the sand piles, because when we tumbled down the mountains of gravel we ended up with a good many bruises and cuts and holes in our jeans. (Our parents tolerated the bruises and cuts but not the holes: jeans were hardy with ordinary use, but were expensive.)

Those great piles of sand and gravel lie just to the north of our neighborhood; just to the south is College Hill, where the lovely tree-filled campus of Birmingham-Southern College (BSC) still stands — though the college, alas, has closed. When I was quite small, before I-65 separated East Thomas from College Hill, one could walk up the hill to BSC and then look down on our house, just visible between the pecan trees.

When we left that house we moved to the East Lake neighborhood of Birmingham; my parents lived in their house there until 1992, when the city of Birmingham declared that the area right next to the lake was flood-prone and ordered the removal of the residents and the demolition of the houses. The affected streets had never experienced any flooding, so everyone was mystified by the decision, though at least some residents, including my parents, were happy to get paid for leaving what they believed to be a declining part of town.

Here’s where our house was:

And if you were to turn 180º to view the rest of the neighborhood, this is what you would see:

All those old trees, still providing shade for houses and people who aren’t there any more. (You can just see the outline of sidewalks.) I hope the trees don’t miss us; I fear that the ones at BSC are lonely now, though that may change.

These stories are in many ways characteristic of Birmingham. When I was born the city had nearly 400,000 people; now it has fewer than 200,000. Most of those who have departed (like my parents) were white: in 1960 the population of Birmingham was 60% white, while now the figure is closer to 25%. The departed were not replaced, thus the empty or demolished houses — and schools also: the first school I attended, Gorgas Elementary, was demolished decades ago; the next, Elyton School has been abandoned; and Banks High School was first abandoned and then demolished. I don’t know about Gorgas or Elyton, but the explicit reason for the closing of Banks High School was declining enrollments: the neighborhoods around the school were slowly depopulating.

It’s a familiar story, quite a bit like that of a larger industrial city, Detroit. Birmingham’s central downtown, where many people still work, features high-level restaurants and bars and nice hotels, but outside the downtown area is a large Ring of Abandonment, and beyond that you find bustling, prosperous suburbs. (The actual city of Birmingham may hold 190,000 people, but the metropolitan area holds a million and a quarter.) A few days ago I was enjoying the best pizza I have ever had in my life — and I’ve eaten a lot of great pizza, in Italy and elsewhere — at Pizza Grace and reflecting that probably none of the other patrons in this wonderful downtown restaurant live in Birmingham: they almost certainly live in Mountain Brook and Vestavia and Hoover and maybe Trussville, though they may well work in the city.

So, a familiar story, the way of the world; but it’s odd and somewhat disorienting, especially in this season of my life, in which I have just buried my mother, to realize that I can revisit none of the foundational places of my life. They’re all gone.

Yesterday we buried my mother in Hopewell Cemetery, Hanceville, Alabama. She lies next to her husband, Carl Edwin Jacobs, who died in 2009 on their fifty-fifth wedding anniversary. Next to them are the graves of my father’s parents, Elisha Creel Jacobs (1902-1971) and Margaret Doran Jacobs (1909-1997).

But why are they all here? Not one of them ever lived a day in Hanceville, and each of them died in Birmingham, where they spent most of their lives.

The answer may be found on a small stone on the opposite side of my grandparents’ graves from my parents’ graves:

Bobby Jacobs — more formally Robert Alan Jacobs — was the second son of Elisha and Margaret, born nineteen months after Carl. I am named for this uncle I never knew, but with the first and middle names reversed. Bobby was born with a club foot and could never walk properly; my father, who early on assumed the role of Bobby’s chief caregiver, used to pull him around the neighborhood in a wagon. But the club foot was only the first of Bobby’s misfortunes; later he contracted polio and died, a few weeks shy of his sixth birthday.

Immediately after Bobby took his last breath, Carl, then seven years old, did a peculiar thing: he ran straight to the tallest pecan tree in his yard and climbed to the highest branch that would bear him, where he clung, weeping. He remained perched there for hours and hours; no one could talk him down, until, as night fell, someone finally fetched the local Baptist minister, whose authority, maybe, was sufficient to compel Carl to return to the land of the living — and the dead. Or maybe the boy was just worn out.

At the time of Bobby’s death, my grandmother was pregnant with her third child, to be born the following year: Elisha Creel Jacobs, Jr. My father occasionally reminded me that “After Bobby died, your grandmother took to her bed for two years and didn’t lift a goddamn finger.” He despised his mother and, probably because I loved her so intensely, wanted me to despise her too, so when he said this he never mentioned that during those two years, after having lost one child, she had to bear another. Though they didn’t use the word “depression” in those days, much less “postpartum depression,” she must have been profoundly depressed, and that shouldn’t have been difficult for anyone to understand.

(Also worth remembering, perhaps: she was 19 when she gave birth to Bobby, and 25 when he died.)

There’s much I could say about my father, not all of it bad, and I will acknowledge some of the better things on another occasion, but at the moment I am compelled to state that for much of his life he was a shockingly cruel man. When his younger brother E.C. died, in 2000, and E.C.’s ex-wife called my father to give him the news, my father replied “I don’t give a shit” and hung up the phone. I don’t know where this cruelty came from, but I have a strange but persistent intuition that it originated with Bobby’s death — or, rather, emerged in that moment, immediately after Bobby’s death, when instead of grieving with his mother and father he chose to climb that tree and grieve alone, holding his misery as fiercely as he gripped the swaying branch that kept him aloft, high above the human world. This is, I suspect, why even as an old man he was intolerant of his mother’s sorrow at the loss of that same child, the child that she had borne in her own body. It’s my grief, he seemed to say, not ours — and certainly not yours.

My grandfather had many siblings, but the one to whom he was closest, both emotionally and geographically, was the woman we called Aunt B: Bethelee Jacobs Basenberg. She was sixteen years older than my grandfather and I think she must have been a kind of mother to him. (His own mother, when Bobby died, was living in Mississippi, at a time when such distances were harder to bridge. For instance, no one in my family then had telephones, and the roads were often poor. Many of my rural and small-town relatives may not have had electricity in 1934.) I knew her much later, of course, but I remember her vividly: a grand old matriarch who, long after the passing of her husband Mart, still ran their farm. She grew corn mostly, but also had a kitchen garden where she nurtured strawberries and sugar cane, and when we visited she would send me away with grocery bags full of both. One of the vividest memories of my childhood involves sitting at our kitchen table at home and squeezing syrup from her canes over a bowl of her strawberries.

Aunt B’s farm was just outside Hanceville, where she was for many decades a devoted member of Hopewell Baptist Church. Indeed, she is buried in the same cemetery, a few yards from her younger brother, who outlived her by a mere two months.

And now I think we can, with some confidence, piece the story together. When Bobby died, Elisha and Margaret must have turned to Bethelee, that sheet anchor and faithful Christian — they themselves were never more than intermittent churchgoers, nor were their children later — and she must have taken charge of the situation, bringing her nephew’s body to the graveyard next to the church where she worshipped every week. That tiny rectangle with its awkwardly formed epitaph was all that they could afford then, in the depths of the Great Depression, but at least she could watch over the boy’s grave and make sure it was graced with flowers, probably flowers from her own garden.

And then, in time, the rest of the family came to their repose at the same spot — all except poor E.C., the favorite uncle of my youth, whose place of burial, thanks to my father’s mean indifference, remains unknown to me, though I have searched for it. E.C. was a man of many sins and many sorrows, and perhaps some day I will be able to give him, too, a proper tribute.

At the moment, though, I am thinking of the raw red dirt that now marks my mother’s grave, a grave soon to be covered with grass, like the others, all but one of which feature dignified upright tombstones. The larger picture: In the middle, my grandmother and grandfather; to one side of them their eldest son Carl and his wife Dolores; to the other side the child whose death initiated this story, a little boy, misshapen in body and then racked by a vile disease, whose brief life is now marked by a chunk of rock invisible except to the attentive — a little boy who was greatly, greatly cherished, and whose death brought lasting misery to his family.

My father used to say, sneeringly, “Oh, when you were born, Mama thought she had Bobby back, had Bobby all over again.” But Daddy, if you didn’t want her to feel that way, why did you give me his name? You couldn’t have “Bobby all over again” only for yourself.

As I say, we buried my mother yesterday, and to my family I read the beautiful and consoling words of the Book of Common Prayer: “O God, who by the glorious resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ destroyed death, and brought life and immortality to light: Grant that your servant Dolores, being raised with him, may know the strength of his presence, and rejoice in his eternal glory … In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our mother Dolores, and we commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Lord bless her and keep her; the Lord make his face to shine upon her and be gracious to her; the Lord lift up his countenance upon her and give her peace. Amen.”

But for some reason — perhaps because I have been grieving my mother’s death for some time already — it’s Bobby I am thinking of today. My father lived eighty-two years, my mother ninety-four; Bobby never made it to age six. Now, of course, those gathered in that little country churchyard “accept the constitution of silence / And are folded in a single party.” May light perpetual shine upon them all.

This is Dolores Jeanette Harrison, who was the smartest girl at Cleveland High School in Cleveland, Alabama. She probably would have been the smartest girl at your high school also, but being the daughter of a failing farmer in Blount County, Alabama isn’t a recipe for success, so I can’t point you to an online biography of her — though I will say that she worked full-time, with two breaks to bear children, from age 15 to age 80. She was a bookkeeper and accountant; always a math whiz … at least until recently.

Her name is unusual. She was the eighth child in her family and by then her mother was tired of coming up with names, so she delegated the task to her older daughters. They named their new sister after two favorite actresses, Dolores Del Río and Jeanette MacDonald.

Dolores married young. I don’t know much about that marriage except that it didn’t last long. She moved to Birmingham and got a job in a bank, where one of her co-workers introduced her to a nephew, Carl Jacobs. Carl and Dolores married in 1955; they had two children, one of whom is me.

After my father’s death she continued to live in their home in rural northern Alabama, a dozen or so miles, across Blount Mountain and Sand Mountain, from where she grew up. A family friend bought her a puppy named Ansel, who became her best friend and major comfort. She was terribly lonely after my father’s death, and tended to mope. My sister once suggested that maybe she could try to move on, at least to some extent: “It’s been fifteen years since he died.” “Fifteen long years,” Mama quietly replied.

In the spring of this year she took a bad fall in her bedroom, and it soon became obvious that she could no longer live in her home; it was also evident that Ansel, now quite elderly too, was failing badly. In short: she lost everything that gave her life order and comfort at once, and since then has been rapidly declining.

About a month ago my wife Teri spent an afternoon with Mama and, during their talk, encouraged her to trust in the love and mercy of Jesus. This Mama said she did, which is a comfort to me, especially since she and my father were only intermittent churchgoers at best, and never spoke one word to me about their beliefs or lack thereof.

(I must take that back: My father once said to me that his time in Japan and China in the years following the Second World War, when he was in the U.S. Navy, made him ask why we believed that our religion was truer than theirs. Only because it’s ours, he thought. Thus was completed my religious education at home.)

Mama has dementia of some variety, probably Alzheimer’s, though it’s impossible to know for sure. It has been developing for some time, but her recent loss of coherence has been precipitous and dramatic. When I saw her ten days ago she seemed aware that I was someone she knew, but did not recognize me. She spoke of my brother — I don’t have a brother — and later that day told her nurse that she has two daughters (she has but one). Of greater concern and pain to me is the utter transformation of her personality: she has always been calm and quiet — I have quite literally never heard her so much as raise her voice — but now she is chatteringly manic. She also is often paranoid: she told me that there are nurses in her care center who try to drown her. (They try to bathe her.)

Before I saw her I had been grieving that I’m hundreds of miles away; now that doesn’t bother me so much — what would be the point of being closer? — but I am grieving in a different way.

But there is one more thing to say. The day before I arrived she was relatively serene and coherent, and had an affectionate talk with my sister. My mother and my sister have never gotten along, and open affection has never been part of my mother’s emotional repertoire. But on that day she held my sister’s hand and told her how much she loved her. She said that she has had a good life.

My sister asked her whether she remembered being married. She thought about that for a moment and then said “Yes.”

“Do you remember who you married?”

“Well … who am I?”

“You’re Dolores.”

“Oh! Then I married Carl! I loved him very, very much. And he loved me.”

Many of you know how much I love The Walter Martin Radio Hour. I’ve been listening (and subscribing) to it almost since the beginning, and it’s been a constant source of pleasure and indeed joy for me. His enthusiasm is certainly contagious, but the greatest value here is the depth of his musical knowledge and the sheer number of tracks he has hipped me to that I would not have known about otherwise. (Here I think especially of his recent three-hour playlist of Jamaican pop music from the Fifties to the Seventies.) But his constant ragging on Paul McCartney in this remarkably long Beatles season has annoyed me. I must mouth off.

My first annoyance came when Walter did his series on Paul: he said almost nothing about Paul’s work after 1978 or so, and for his playlist of that period picked outtakes, oddities, and stuff Linda did. (Walter likes Linda.) Paul has produced a buttload of mediocre music, to be sure, but there are also some really good things — for instance Flowers in the Dirt (1989), and especially the fantastic demos of those songs that he did with Elvis Costello. There are a number of terrific pop songs on Flaming Pie (1997) and Chaos and Creation in the Backyard (2005).

Why didn’t Walter mention any of this stuff? My assumption is that he has never heard it and dislikes Paul intensely enough that he was unwilling to give it a listen. But what that means is that his Paul-after-Beatles playlist yields a profoundly distorted view of what Paul has accomplished. I’m not saying that Walter needed to have a serious encounter with the McCartney discography; but if he didn’t want to, he should have just said that he didn’t want to and therefore would not make a solo-Paul playlist. What he did instead is a just a gratuitous insult to Paul, it seems to me.

Now, do I regularly listen to Paul’s post-Beatles music? With the exception of those demos with Elvis, no. But then, I don’t listen to John Lennon’s post-Beatles music either. I don’t think either man is one-tenth as interesting alone as the two were with each other and the other Beatles. But if you’re gonna treat George’s post-Beatles career with respect (which Walter did) and you’re gonna treat John’s post-Beatles career with respect (which I certainly expect Walter to do when the time comes), then Paul deserves the same treatment.

But Walter can’t get over his distaste. In the currently ongoing John Lennon series, he interprets everything John does in the best possible light and everything Paul does in the worst possible light. If John wants to experiment in the studio and do weird things with mics and introduce delays and promote other sort of imaginative engineering — and he was constantly pressing the EMI engineers in this way — then wow, the dude is so cool, he’s so creative. When Paul wants to do it, he may well be attempting to “sabotage” John’s music.

The facts are: Each of them could sometimes care about the success of the group and could sometimes be selfish. Each could have a great insight at one moment and come up with a stupid idea the next. The stupid ideas weren’t usually malicious or manipulative or controlling, they were just stupid. (Everyone in that studio from 1965 on was coming up with stuff, all the time. Paul has talked over the years about telling the engineers “Just try it, if it doesn’t work we can erase it and do something else. Just try it.” Often they did erase it after all … but not always.) Neither John nor Paul was a saint or a faultless genius, and picking suspiciously at everything Paul did while celebrating everything John did is just partisan cheerleading. It’s not true to the actual situation.

N.B. Ian Leslie does the best job of capturing the real dynamic.

One of the other things Walter complains about is Paul’s “hot-dogging,” as he calls it, on the bass in some songs. Also on backing vocals. Now, before we get to that, we need to distinguish this point from what might be thought a related one. Paul, who has a plausible claim to being a better guitarist than George (see the P.S. below) and was obviously a far superior guitarist to John, didn’t get that many chances to play guitar for the Beatles. Especially in the first half of the Beatles’ career, he was largely confined to the bass at a time when pop-music bass playing was expected to be very simple and placed very low in the mix. So Paul was always fighting with the EMI engineers, who were afraid that if you increased the volume of the bass, when the vinyl record was played the needle of a phonograph could jump out of its groove. For safety’s sake they always kept the bass levels low, and you can barely hear Paul’s playing on many of those early songs (unless you’re listening to a modern remaster).

Do you think any of the other Beatles would have been happy with having their contribution to the song virtually inaudible? (Even Ringo wouldn’t have liked it.) So Paul was always getting the engineers to listen to songs recorded in the USA, especially Motown songs, and saying, “Listen to the bass here. If they can do it, why can’t we?” And as far as I can tell, all the other Beatles backed Paul on this point. I don’t think there’s a controversy about this; I don’t think even Walter would believe that Paul was out of line in wanting his bass to be more prominent in the mix.

But distinct from the question of how audible his instrument was is the question of what, exactly, he was playing. Among rock and pop bassists Paul was a virtuoso, and so he naturally wanted to explore the possibilities of the instrument, wanted to see what it and he could do. For Walter, this is a bad thing … when Paul does it. (Some other artist trying to explore the possibilities of his or her instrument, that would probably be awesome. But with Paul, it’s hot-dogging.)

Now: Does Paul overdo it sometimes? Goodness gracious yes. For instance, I think — and George Harrison strongly agrees with me here — that his playing is way too busy on “Something.” But the song that precedes “Something” on Abbey Road is “Come Together,” which also has an elaborate bass line — and it’s brilliant. Almost universally revered, though probably Walter dislikes it. But a great musician trying to extend the possibilities of his for-too-long-marginalized instrument isn’t going to nail it every time; and it’s not an unforgivable crime for him to go overboard occasionally. Heck, Paul and Ringo both go nuts on “Rain” and it’s the best rhythm track in the whole Beatles catalogue.

One reason for Paul’s over-elaboration, I think, involves the way the Beatles recorded their songs in the latter stages of their career. Once the band, working with George Martin and the engineers, got a basic track established — drums and rhythm guitar usually — then the various Beatles would add any further contributions later, on their own. Often Paul’s bass would be the last element recorded: he sat in a studio by himself and listened to the rest of the song on headphones as he worked out his part. It’s the kind of situation that invites too-muchness, a problem that Paul was aware of, as can be seen by his enthusiasm for getting the band to record as a band again: thus the Get Back sessions. But being aware of the problem was not the same as overcoming it. The temptation to overdo was always right in his face.

Paul’s leadership of the band in the studio is another thing that Walter can’t really forgive him for, but here’s the thing: as John, in the mid-Sixties, got more and more drug-addled, he wrote fewer and fewer songs. (The ones he wrote tended to be bangers, though.) It’s vital to understand that if Paul had not stepped up and taken a more dominant role — if he had not become a kind of organizer and the cheerleader for the group as well as its primary songwriter — the Beatles might very well have fallen apart as early as 1965. And even if they had managed to hold together in some form, they could not possibly have produced anything remotely like Rubber Soul, Revolver, and Sgt. Pepper. It was Paul’s leadership that made those records possible, even if John wrote some — most, I would say — of the coolest music for them.

Is that what anybody would want? A world in which Paul stays politely in the background and just plays his one-two-three-four (I-V-vi-IV) walking basslines, doesn’t write too many songs, and waits for John to come out of his most recent drug coma? It sure as hell isn’t what I would want. Paul could be over-elaborate in his playing, and he certainly could be bossy and OCD — Ian MacDonald is right to say that the most correct brief answer to the question of why the Beatles broke up is: “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” — but cast your mind back to 1965 and 1966 and look at the results.

I have mouthed off.

(All that said, you should absolutely subscribe to the Walter Martin Radio Hour. It’s amazing.)

P.S. Re: Paul and George as guitarists, I think Paul was technically superior in that he could play sequences of notes that George couldn’t manage, at least not at Paul’s desired tempo. But George played many beautiful riffs and solos that Paul could have played if he had thought of them; but he never would have thought of them. George had a feel for the kind of sparely elegant melodic or harmonic line that Paul would have disdained; as a guitarist, George simply had better taste.

I’d suggest listening to this song while reading this post — it’ll help you understand the point of my use of italics.

Most of my work is about literature and the arts, and I like it that way. I plan to keep it that way. In fact, I plan to go even further in that direction than I have. But I also have a long history here on this blog of thinking out loud about political and social issues, and I have been, over the course of the last fifteen years or so, elaborating an argument that I would like to summarize right now, with links to the key posts. I’ve written some interlocking series that collectively constitute the extended form of this argument, but here I will try to summarize my case as concisely and pointedly as I can.

What most Christians — on the theological right, the theological left, and in the middle — fail to understand is the fundamental distinction between the city of God and the city of man. We (by which I mean “those total losers among my fellow Christians, and certainly not me”) are always trying to transform the city of man into the city of God, or else pretend that the city of man can be tuned, as it were, to divine purposes. These tendencies keep us enmeshed in the workings of the city of man, and cause us to neglect our citizenship in the city of God.

This, by the way, is not an argument against voting. It’s not an argument against political activity. It’s an argument against confusing the city of God and the city of man. You can work for the good of the city of man without making the mistake of believing that you are a citizen of it.

The biblical image of the city of man, and therefore the permanently relevant symbolization of this, is: Babylon. We live in Babylon. We do not live in a Christian America, we do not live in a fundamentally Judeo-Christian framework. We live in Babylon. And Babylon is owned and operated by transnational powers, which can be conceptualized in one of two ways. You can say that Babylon is run by a kind of collaboration between (in theory) democratically elected governments and multinational corporations. Or you can say that the city of man, Babylon, is run by what the Apostle Paul calls the Principalities and Powers. Both of these descriptions are correct as far as they go, but the former is more useful when it is seen as but a practical outworking of the latter.

In this sense, the briefest and best name for the regime under which we live was given to us by Bob Marley: it’s Babylon system. It is a far-reaching, multi-tentacled network of forces that enlists us in its own projects. So when we’re fighting it out on social media — whether Christians are fighting against non-Christians, or Christians of the left are fighting Christians of the right — what we’re all doing is treading the wine press. We are doing the work of Babylon system.

It’s slightly comical that the people who most intensely despise one another are performing the same labor for the same boss. What left and right are really trying to do is get management to take their side in some particular dispute, but in so doing they ensure that management remains management. Babylon system remains sovereign, building church and university … deceiving the people continually. The Prince of this world remains the Prince of this world. He will promise you victory over your enemies and he may even deliver it: but when you sell yourself to him in order to gain such a triumph, there’s no option for manumission.

So what is required in order to offer meaningful resistance is to stop treading the wine press — to decentralize, to disaggregate, to localize, to refuse and disobey. This is why I recommend anarchistic practices. James Scott, in Two Cheers for Anarchism, talks about strategies of resistance that begin with simple non-cooperation:

Quiet, unassuming, quotidian insubordination, because it usually flies below the archival radar, waves no banners, has no officeholders, writes no manifestos, and has no permanent organization, escapes notice. And that’s just what the practitioners of these forms of subaltern politics have in mind: to escape notice. You could say that, historically, the goal of peasants and subaltern classes has been to stay out of the archives.

You can start with non-cooperation. Your employer may insist that you have a presence on LinkedIn, let’s say — so have one, but don’t post. And when you do post, do in the spirit that Wendell Berry has recommended: Every day do something that does not compute.

We don’t have to retreat into the literal wilderness, but we do need to retreat into local and material lives that are not at the command of Babylon system. When you buy a paperback book and scrawl your thoughts in the margins rather than scroll through your social media feed, or when you buy a CD or a vinyl record rather than subscribe to a music service and listen to whatever the algorithm feeds you, you’re doing what will not compute — quite literally. Ditto when you trade herbs and vegetables with your neighbors, or even when you pay for the coffee of the person behind you in line. (You thereby make yourself more legible to the Powers in order to make them less so.) You can repair rather than buy new, and that goes for ideas as well as manufactured products. You can practice handmind.

These are very small refusals, tiny ways to act in the city of man as a citizen of the City of God. But very small refusals make a path for bigger ones, and in the very long run can make Babylon system a falling empire. It’s important to remember, as James Scott says, that “A great deal of the symbolic work of official power is precisely to obscure the confusion, disorder, spontaneity, error, and improvisation of political power as it is in fact exercised, beneath a billiard-ball-smooth surface of order, deliberation, rationality, and control.” The Principalities and Powers are not as mighty as they contrive to appear; and resistance to them is never futile.

Oh, and one more thing: about all this, Tell the children the truth.

I am indifferent to the debate about what LLMs can or cannot do. I only know what interests me: writing good English and reading the well-considered words of other human beings. (Human beings have certain shared experiences on which I place great value. YMMV.) But the increased power of LLMs has had the, to me unexpected, effect of showing me how much of the contemporary writing that I’ve been reading, especially online, over the past few years may as well have been written by LLMs.

To take just one example among thousands, when I look at the online journal Aeon — something I stopped doing a couple of years ago — I see essay after essay after essay that looks like it’s been run through Language Optimizer 3.5: Okay, now let’s put the Provocation Slider at just the point where the argument is slightly unexpected but could not possibly offend. Every essay seems to have been written by the same person (or bot) under a variety of names. The Style options are always set to

21st Century Standard

American Standard

Longform journalism

Science Bias: Mostly affirmative, occasional mild skepticism

Political Bias: Technocratic centrism, occasional mild skepticism

Nothing could be easier than to ask Claude to read Aeon and then write an essay in the Aeon style on any given topic. And so (inevitably) I suspect that every essay published in Aeon has been run through an LLM during the editorial process, even if it wasn’t actually written by one. Every edge, every rough spot, has been sanded down to a featureless and characterless smoothness.

When I read, I want to be instructed, enlightened, pleased — but these days especially I want to be surprised, puzzled, even offended. I’ve been reading (and writing about) Ezra Pound lately not in spite of but explicitly because of his extreme eccentricity and crankiness. Here’s a guy who writes a book called Jefferson and/or Mussolini and, if that’s not weird enough, at one point (seemingly chosen at random) he throws in a chapter on Confucius.

I am on the verge of making a vow to read only eccentrics and weirdos for the rest of my life.

There’s not a strict correlation between the presence of a figure in my writing and his or her presence in my mind. Among the thinkers thus underrepresented in my writing are Mikhail Bakhtin, Ivan Illich, Iris Murdoch, Lesslie Newbigin, and, above all, John Ruskin. But Ruskin is the only one of those figures who, in my considered opinion, ought to have been horsewhipped — at least once and possibly twice.

In Trollope’s Doctor Thorne, a certain Mr Moffat gains the love of one Miss Augusta Gresham and the promise of her hand in marriage … but then ends the engagement when he thinks he has the chance to marry a much richer woman, leaving Augusta hurt and humiliated. Consequently, Miss Gresham’s brother Frank acquires a whip, goes to London, finds Mr Moffat on Pall Mall, and gives him a thorough thrashing.

It is my contention that a member of the family of Euphemia Gray Ruskin should have done the same to John Ruskin. He deserved it, and in the long run it might have been good for him.

The story is a famous one and endlessly debated. Ruskin and Effie Gray married in 1848 when she was nineteen and he twenty-eight. In the six years of their marriage they never had sex, and while Ruskin gave various reasons for his disinclination to bed his own wife — the primary ones being that he disliked babies and did not want to be distracted from his work — the real reason came out after, in their sixth year of marriage, Effie told John that it was time for them to have children. To this John replied that her angry insistence on the point proved that she was insane, and if she had children she would therefore be unfit to raise them. (Apparently in Ruskin’s view the only fit mothers are reluctant ones. I mean that seriously.) At this point Effie sought an annulment of their marriage — something she should have done years earlier; her forbearance towards her strange unhusband was remarkable — and in order for that to happen some uncomfortable enquiries had to be made.

Faced with demands from legal authorities, the Ruskins told the true story. In Effie’s words, Ruskin “had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening.” Ruskin effectively admitted this: “It may be thought strange that I could abstain from a woman who to most people was so attractive. But though her face was beautiful, her person was not formed to excite passion. On the contrary, there were certain circumstances in her person which completely checked it.” Neither of them ever made a more specific statement — this was the Victorian era after all — but we do know that the doctors who examined Effie to prove that she was virgo intacta (a requirement for an annulment) said that she was perfectly normal in every respect; and that after her marriage to the painter John Everett Millais, who found her greatly desirable in every way, she bore eight children.

Many have wondered what Ruskin found so objectionable about Effie’s body, and we will never know the truth, but of all the explanations suggested the one that seems likeliest to me is that until he saw her naked he did not know that women had pubic hair. (His understanding of the nude female body would have been derived largely from sculptures.) Some have scoffed at this explanation, saying that banter with other boys would have long since informed him of this point, but Ruskin grew up in a narrowly pious and morally rigid home and had few friends of his own age; yukking it up with the lads was never his style. Others have speculated that he was horrified by menstruation, but if that had been the problem, it would have gone away after a few days; and in any case that does not seem to fit the language they use, e.g. “had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was.” 

Whatever the cause of his disgust, Ruskin knew that Effie very much wanted children, and if he was unprepared to give them to her he should have ended their non-marriage immediately. But he did not. He strung her along for half-a-decade, and for this he deserved a Frank Gray (on the model of Frank Gresham) to whip him up one side of Pall Mall and down the other.

But it never occurred to him that Effie’s desires should play any part in his decision-making. It’s essential to note here that Ruskin’s parents both infantilized and idealized him, their only child: they believed him to be a genius and felt it their absolute duty to nurture that genius. He lived chiefly with his parents until their death, making most of his European journeys with them, and even when he was married to Effie the couple lived near the elder Ruskins and John spent most of his time not with his wife but with his parents. From his earliest days they gave him this sense that his gifts was exceptional (about which they were correct) and that the greatness of those gifts meant that everything and everyone should be sacrificed to their cultivation (about which they were not correct). Ruskin seems to have chafed, occasionally, at being treated always as a gifted child, but he was so used to it that it seemed totally normal to him to instruct Effie that they would abstain from sex for five years so that he could focus on what he always called “my work.”

Effie’s unhappiness at this travesty of a marriage was utterly bewildering to Ruskin. Once Ruskin wrote to his father with what his great biographer Tim Hilton calls “the honesty of the totally self-engrossed,”

Even when poor Effie was crying last night, I felt it by no means as a husband should, but rather a bore. However, I comforted her in a very dutiful way — but it may be, perhaps, on the other hand, that I am not easily worked on by these things.

He cannot even think of her unhappiness as real but rather only as a means of “working on” him. His complete neglect of her in the presence of other people — he often seemed not even to know that she was there — was what led her to enjoy the attentive company of Millais, something that happened so often that a number of people thought that Ruskin was actively encouraging Effie to take the painter as her lover. In fact he was merely oblivious; oblivious through a combination of indifference and self-absorption. And then of course when she finally left him he complained ceaselessly about being unjustly and inexplicably “abandoned.” I find no evidence that he ever saw things in any other way, that he ever understood that he had wronged Effie.

A score or so of lashes from a thick cutting whip in the hands of someone who loved Effie was just the thing, in my view, to teach Ruskin that he was not the only person in the world with feelings and interests. I’m not sure he could have learned the lesson in a less harsh way.

I said at the outset that he deserved whipping once for sure and possibly twice. What might have been the second occasion?

It is my belief that Ruskin learned one thing only from his miserable experience with Effie: that he was a pedophile. Hilton frankly uses this term to describe Ruskin in middle-age, and he is right to do so; but it is highly unlikely (Hilton and I agree on this) that Ruskin would ever have had sexual intercourse, or anything remotely approximating it, with a prepubescent girl. The very idea of sexual intimacy seems to have terrified Ruskin, and I am not even sure that he would have wanted to see a girl naked. He found delight in the mere presence of young girls, and enjoyed bantering with them, singing with them, writing letters to them and receiving affectionate replies; I am not convinced that he ever wanted more than that, even from Rose La Touche, whom he met when she was ten and fell in love with soon thereafter, though he was slow to recognize and name his own feelings. Eventually, on her eighteenth birthday, he proposed marriage to her. He was forty-six.

Rose’s attitudes towards Ruskin oscillated between affection and fierce anger — the latter prompted at least in part by letters from Effie Millais, who had been asked by Rose’s parents to tell them what kind of person Ruskin was and who, it appears, minced no words. (Only small portions of the correspondence among all the people discussed here have survived, which is a story for another day.) But it seems to me that the complexity of Rose’s attitudes towards Ruskin arose from something more fundamental to her character than her assessment of his: an obsession with purity that was central to her (and her father’s) understanding of the demands of the Christian life. Rose was constantly ill and extremely thin from her teen years to her death at age twenty-seven, and while doctors never figured out what the problem was, it has often since been speculated that hers was a case of holy anorexia. As with Ruskin’s repulsion from Effie’s body, we’ll never know with certainty. 

I mention all this because, at his age and with his experience, Ruskin should have known that his attentions and importunings were not healthy for Rose; a more attentive and charitable man would have withdrawn, thinking her health more important than his own desires. But Ruskin continued, in matters of love anyway, to be driven by the same absolute self-regard that had made Effie’s life so miserable. Aside from his discovery of his pedophilia, he learned absolutely nothing from that travesty. The only thing that might rescue him from a second thrashing is the fact that Rose was a very troubled young woman through and through, and it is not clear how much Ruskin had to do with that. My reading (for what that’s worth) suggests to me that the course of Rose’s life would have run much the same if she had never met Ruskin, and that he never occupied the central place in her imagination that she occupied in his.

In the last months of her life, Rose and Ruskin got to spend a good deal of time together; her parents had withdrawn their objections to the relationship, knowing that their daughter was dying and willing to make one last throw of the dice, in case the presence of Ruskin might give Rose a reason to live. But it did not work. And what passed between them in those final meetings no one will ever know.

•

The indulgence of Ruskin’s parents, and the catechism with which they instructed him — You are a great genius, and it is our duty to nurture that genius —, ought to be interesting to anyone compelled by Ruskin’s writings, because they have everything to do with what is great in his work, and, equally, with what is frustrating about it. For Ruskin learned at an early age to trust his instincts implicitly, to believe that his every flight of imagination winged its way unerringly to some previously unseen truth. This made him a disastrous husband; in his work the results were mixed. In situations in which almost every other writer would wonder whether he was going too far, or making a claim too bold to be defended, Ruskin never had second thoughts. Indeed, “First thought, best thought” could have been his motto.

Because he really was a genius, all of Ruskin’s writings have at least moments and sometimes extended passages of great brilliance; because he wasn’t as intellectually perfect as he thought he was, none of his writings is wholly satisfying. Probably his most successful book from beginning to end is The Seven Lamps of Architecture, but the more characteristic Ruskin excellences come in single magnificent chapters studded like diamonds in intermittently interesting works. “The Nature of Gothic” from The Stones of Venice and “The Two Boyhoods” from the fifth volume of Modern Painters are the most famous examples, but there are many others. Like his friend George MacDonald, he is a very excerptable writer. Ruskin is a far greater figure than his contemporary George Meredith, but Oscar Wilde’s famous line about Meredith — “His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning” — could be used about Ruskin also, especially in the wild farrago that is the Fors Clavigera.

When Ruskin says something outrageous — as when he insists in Unto This Last that the inept workman should be paid just as much as the excellent one — my experience of his work makes me stop and think: Wait, could this be true? You can’t safely assume that what Ruskin says is true — or that it is false. You have to think about it. And that makes an encounter with Ruskin immensely valuable, more useful, in an important sense, than a consistently wise or consistently foolish writer would be. When reading Ruskin I often find myself thinking that a particular idea or example he offers would have occurred to no one else in the world; what a friend of Samuel Johnson said about him — “No man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson” — is equally true of Ruskin, at least most of the time. I find his writings on political economy and social malformation the least interesting of his works because they so often remind me of Carlyle, whom Ruskin virtually worshipped, and I would rather read Carlyle than an imitator of Carlyle, even when that imitator is himself a thinker of great stature. But on every other topic Ruskin was sui generis. 

If thinkers other than Ruskin had come up with some of his most distinctive ideas, they would surely have dismissed them as eccentric, impossible, outré. Ruskin, by contrast, believed his ideas to be touched by genius simply because they were his. The very traits that made him an abominable husband and lover helped to make him an irreplaceable writer. I’ll keep reading him and learning from him and being inspired by him as long as I live; but I will also think quite regularly that he should have been horsewhipped, at least once.

John Crowley has died, one of the finest and most distinctive American writers of our time and the author of Little, Big, the best fantasy novel this side of Tolkien. In fact, if I were not a Christian I would probably think that Little, Big is even greater than The Lord of the Rings, because there is no more beautiful and powerful book about the poignancy of mortality. I have read it many times and have never navigated the final pages, which go through me like a knife, without weeping. I used to teach the book sometimes but couldn’t maintain my composure while doing so, so I stopped. 

The best American novels of the last half-century are Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, DeLillo’s Underworld, and Little, Big. Some years ago my friend Francis Spufford  commented, in an email to me, that Little, Big is “the Middlemarch of the fantastic,” and that is an exceptionally acute comment.  

Adam Roberts has a tribute here, Henry Farrell here. They’re both good, but if any essay has ever captured what’s so special about Crowley, I haven’t seen it. This piece by James Hynes, primarily on the Aegypt tetralogy, is … no, it’s fine, but it’s not quite right. And I don’t have the words myself. 

“We’re going,” she said, when near dawn she stood on the point of rock that jutted out over a pool in the woods into which a waterfall fell with a constant song. 

Spears of moonlight were broken by the pool’s surface; new leaves and blossoms floated there, gathering in the eddies. A great white trout, pink-eyed, without speckle or belt, rose slowly at her words. “Going?” he said.

“You can come or stay,” said Mrs. Underhill. “You’ve been so long on this side of the story that it’s up to you by now.”

The trout said nothing, alarmed beyond words. At last Mrs. Underhill, growing impatient with his sad goggling, said sharply, “Well?”

“I’ll stay,” he said quickly.

“Very well,” Mrs. Underhill said, who would have been very surprised indeed if he had answered differently. “Soon,” she said, “soon there will come to this place a young girl (well, an old, old lady now, but no matter, a girl you knew) and she will look down into this pool; she will be the one you’ve so long waited for, and she won’t be fooled by your shape, she’ll look down and speak the words that will free you.” 

“She will?” said Grandfather Trout.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“For love’s sake, you old fool,” Mrs. Underhill said; she struck the rock beneath her stick so hard it cracked; a dust of granite drifted onto the stirred surface of the pool. “Because the story’s over.”

Now, I do not know whether Auden is to be considered as an English or as an American poet: his career has been useful to me in providing me with an answer to the same question when asked about myself, for I can say: “whichever Auden is, I suppose I must be the other.” 

— T. S. Eliot in 1953

One was born in St. Louis but became a British subject; the other was born in York and became an American citizen. One was straight, the other was gay. One was born into a Unitarian family but later became an Anglican; the other was born into an Anglican family, was for many years an unbeliever, and eventually returned to a very different kind of Anglicanism. One was famously precise and fastidious, and lived in monastically spare accommodations; the other was (equally famously) slovenly and lived in utter squalor. One lived most of his adult life in London, a city that he loved; the other despised London and visited only when he had to. One came to fame by writing free verse; the other made a fetish of poetic form.

Both were unquestionably great poets. Both wrote pornographic poems not for publication but for the entertainment of friends. Both loved cats. Both adored detective stories. Both could be very funny, though in different ways. Both were editors and critics as well as poets, and shaped the thought of many.

Tom and Wystan. At first one was the mentor, the guide — a Virgil to the other’s Dante. Then they were friends. Then the friendship was broken, and never returned to what it had been. But they came to be at peace with each other; each knew and appreciated the other’s stature. The character of poetry in English even today owes a great deal to the two of them.

My next book — to be published by my old friends at Princeton University Press — will be the story of their long and complex relationship, a story that has not yet been told in book form. When it’s done, I think you’ll all enjoy it.