Community, Consumption, and the Canon (Part 2)

In my first post, I discussed Augustine’s idea that a community is bound by common “objects of love,” by real things which people experience in common. I hope here to use that definition to get a better handle on why the canon—the art and ideas that are foundational to our culture—needs to be central to any academic community.

Community, Consumption, and the Canon (Part 1)

What makes a community? And what sustains it? Important questions in any age, and certainly in ours, for whatever glue it is that holds us together has never seemed more brittle.

Drinking and Storytelling

Last year for a Christmas present I received a copy of Olivia Laing’s The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking. Now that this year’s Christmas vacation is here, I’ve finally found time to read it (aren’t gifted books like wedding thank-you notes? One year to get around to them?). It’s quite good—Laing, a British writer, travels the US on a route that traces the haunts and tortured careers of six American writers of the last century: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway (pictured above), John Cheever, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, and Raymond Carver. All of these writers also happened to be professional alcoholics, and Laing digs deep to find the roots of their drinking in their pasts, as well as its manifestations in their art. I’m more than halfway through, and so far it’s excellent. Laing's gaze is unflinching, neither glamorizing their drinking nor celebrity status, and in its ability to connect the dots among the six protagonists, the book reminds me of another of my favorite multi-person biographies: Paul Elie’s The Life You Save May Be Your Own, which presented the interconnected lives of the last century’s most influential American Catholic writers: Walker Percy, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Flannery O’Connor.

Technocrat or Storyteller? On Hillbilly Elegy, Public Schools, and Trump

During weeks leading up to and after the presidential election, I read J.D. Vance’s much-talked-about memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. The book had shot to the top of the bestseller lists before the election, and in the wake of Trump’s victory, Vance has been a go-to commentator for an East Coast media desperately searching for someone who understands what makes the rest of the country tick.

Andrew Sullivan on the Distracted Life in New York Magazine

I apologize for the sparse blogging as of late. I've started teaching at a new school, and the start of the school year, combined with learning the ins-and-outs of my new community, has filled up my mental space. I hope to have more time to think and write as all of these new things settle into a routine, which is already starting to happen.

While I have a minute, though, I wanted to draw attention to Andrew Sullivan's article in the most recent issue of New York Magazine. Sullivan, you might know, is among the most prominent cultural writers of our time. He was one of the first public figures to push for same-sex marriage. His blog was at the forefront of the push of the 24/7 cycle of news-and-commentary, and his influence is enormous.

Sullivan stopped blogging last year, and in his article he writes about his recovery from addiction to the information cloud. I won't recap the article here, but a few things struck me:

First, we can add Sullivan to the list of prominent writers who are leading the discussion about the harms of 24/7 access to information, along with Sherry Turkle, Nicholas Carr, Matthew Crawford, etc. These are folks who are arguing that personal technology is not only changing how we understand the world but how we understand ourselves as human beings. I tend to agree with them, of course, and think that our future depends on figures of their generation (30-and-older) speaking out now about what is happening. We have the privilege of remembering what I've heard called "an analog past"--a time when our thoughts were not directed towards the digital stream, when there was no alternative to being present where you were, when peace and rest and leisure seemed to come a little easier than it does now. My current students do not have this memory--as they grow older, smartphones and wifi will be to them what television is to most of us living now: something always there, as fixed in the universe as rock ledge.

It is easier for those with a memory of an analog existence to fall prey to technological cynicism and visions of the apocalypse, for sure. But those who have experienced life without the cloud are the only ones who are able to remember what the cloud obscures, what was lost. We are living on what we could call a "seam" of history, where the direction of society takes a drastic shift, and while we are on that seam we can see that direction as a direction, and not as the background scenery. To know something for what it really is, as Eliot said, is to know it "for the first time." We are there now, and writers like Sullivan, who do the work of preserving that vision of technological havoc while it is still fresh, are not unlike Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, and the other Romantics, who witnessed what kind of transcendent vision was being lost in industrialization, and tried to preserve it in their art.

My second observation is that Sullivan's article is more proof that the current state of affairs moves intellectuals into two camps: those who follow the god of information and those who admit that there is a soul. Is human experience ultimately material or transcendent? There is no in-between, and one benefit of the rapid acceleration of personal technology is that it forces the hand of thinkers who otherwise wouldn't be caught talking positively about things like religion to admit that the world does have meaning. Consider Sullivan, a fallen-away Catholic who is publicly at odds with the Church, who in his article writes about the importance of monasteries and of creating a space in our routines, such as "weekly Mass...that lets your life breathe." Religion, Catholicism especially, might be the only cultural institution left that has a chance of surviving the information age with its identity intact, because its practices cultivate stillness rather than restlessness, silence rather than noise, being consumed by rather than consuming.

Sullivan, who should know better than anyone else the effects of 24/7 connection to the information stream, writes at the end of his essay that "the threat is to our souls." Strong words from a man who has chosen them carefully. I urge you to read his essay.

Maclean on Teaching

As I mentioned in my previous post, Norman Maclean, for most of his career, was not a fiction writer but a professor at the University of Chicago. He was a good one, too, winning the university's Quantrell Award for Teaching Excellence twice, once in the beginning of his career (1941), and once toward the end (1973).

On Norman Maclean

In spent the better part the 2000s in Western Montana, first working at a summer camp in the Seeley-Swan Valley, and then at graduate school in Missoula. I wasn't long in the area before people started urging me to read Norman Maclean. I had never heard of him before, but soon realized that he was a laureate of sorts for Montanans in general, and thanks to A River Runs Through It, for Montana fly fishermen in particular.

Why Silicon Valley and Literature are Opposites: Kingsnorth, Birkerts, and the "Technium"

Some nuggets on technology and literature as school starts up again:

Crawford Article at Aleteia

Yesterday Aleteia ran an article I wrote on Matthew Crawford. I've written about Crawford at greater length on this blog, here and here. In the article I try to make the case that Crawford's emphasis on getting outside of our heads in order to be genuinely human is really a Catholic one too. Thanks to Aleteia for publishing it, and Merry Christmas to all!

Ozick, O'Connor, and What Literature is For

I loved my time in graduate school, but eventually grew weary, as many have, with the political, deconstructionist theory that dominates the academy. As fascinating as Derrida and Foucault and company are at first encounter, they didn't satisfy me in the end because they failed at tending my literary flame, so to speak.

Crawford, Consumerism, and Catholicism: On The World Beyond Your Head



After much anticipation I finally got through Matthew Crawford’s most recent book, The World Beyond Your Head. Earlier this year I posted about an extract I had read from the book in the form of an article in The New Atlantis.

Thoughts on Matthew Crawford's Latest in The New Atlantis

Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, published in 2009 to wide acclaim, made the case for the value of manual labor, for work done by the likes of repairmen, builders, and mechanics. Crawford wrote from a unique position: he holds a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago, and also is a working motorcycle mechanic. In other words, his own experience bridged two distinct worlds, worlds that usually have nothing to say to each other—that of abstract thought and physical work.

St. Midas' Prep: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Catholic Schools, and the Culture of Achievement

Commencement season is upon us, and as students from Catholic high schools file across auditorium stages and out into the world, can we say that they view the world in a different way than if they had not attended a Catholic school? And if we can, in what way is their viewpoint unique? In going about the business of preparing our students to enter a world where success is measured by dollars earned and accolades garnered, how do we prepare them differently than our public or private counterparts?

Proper English Empowers: A Response to Oliver Kamm

In his recent Wall Street Journal article “There is No Proper English,” British writer Oliver Kamm calls out grammar sticklers everywhere who would forbid poor souls from splitting their infinitives or using phrases like “between you and I.” He rails against “pedants” who believe that grammatical rules are like life rafts in the shipwreck of the English language, and that ending a sentence with a preposition is all that is needed to send the mother tongue to her watery grave. Language is what we make of it, Kamm argues: “If it is in general use, then that is what the language is.”

The Self as Marketplace

The money changers have come to the temple. The very places where we should be able to encounter our true selves, and, if you're Christian, Christ—our desires, longings, sorrows, joys, hopes—are subjected to the market of free enterprise like never before.

The Realm of Mystery

     

Richard Rodriguez is one of the few contemporary American writers whose Catholicism seems to reside at the forefront of his identity. To give you an idea of his clout in the academic world, he was selected, along with the likes of Frank Kermode, Burton Raffel, and Seamus Heaney, to introduce a unit in the mass-market literature textbook that our high school uses. He is canonical reading for most university writing courses. Perhaps no other writer so accepted by the secular elite openly addresses the Catholic faith and how it has shaped his vision of the world.