Our idea was to write blogs and book recommendations every few weeks. It has now been, let me check (click, click, click), 3 months since the last installment, where we wrote, “It seems that all too often we let busyness distract us from the real business of life.” Indeed. We’ll work towards regular installments in 2023.
I typically ignore, sometimes even insult in my weaker moments, public meteorology. I’ll quote Dylan, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”, as if that were actual weather advice, and continue on in my happy ignorance, whistling protest songs into sunny skies. I’ll soon need to eat every word in Subterranean Homesick Blues because this week…National Weather Service, congratulations, you were spot-on. I apologize for publicly maligning you, and submit to endure every cheery chirp of my weather app alerting me to blizzard-like conditions. Fortunately we have warm coals in the fire, hot water on the stove, good bourbon in the cabinet, and old friends on the shelves.
Sinking into a thick and absorbing story is often the best way to pass the seemingly endless winter hours, and I have recently completed, or am near to completing, a few longer non-fiction works that I’ll recommend in passing. John Barry’s Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul and Ted Gioia’s Music: A Subversive History are both thoroughly enjoyable. The Barry book has been on the shelf for a few years and I’m kicking myself for having not picked it up sooner. His tour of late 16th and early 17th century British and American politics, religion, and culture is about as delightful as anything I’ve ever read about the period, and Roger Williams is a fascinating and culturally out-of-time figure in western history that I’m glad to know more about. I’m looking forward to reading more of Barry’s work in the future. I’ve been reading Ted Gioia, and his brother the poet Dana Gioia, for years. Ted’s jazz and blues writing, much of it available on his website, is tremendous. This volume does not disappoint. The central thesis, that true musical innovation is often happening among the marginalized and dispossessed, is a truly fun alternate history of the past few millennia. The chapters could easily be read as stand-alone essays, or front to back as one long historical narrative, and can be put down and picked back up without losing the thread. I recommend both.
Today's weather has provided me with a good excuse to avoid chores and instead indulge in a favorite pastime of mine, a day of discursive reading with no particular goal or end. It started, oddly enough, with an article about the implications of ChatBot AI. ChatBot programs, and other AI services, are for better or worse becoming a part of our everyday lives, and much is being said about it. Some laud these as labor saving technological improvements that will relieve us of many of the menial tasks we frequently encounter, while also improving decision making and cutting labor and consumption costs; others worry about job displacement, skills loss, deep fake technologies, and even machine sentience. As is often the case, sincere and persuasive arguments lie on either side, and moderation will likely be the demonstration of virtue here. For ChatBots specifically, one consideration I found particularly compelling was what AI services might do to our understanding of the power of language. If ChatBot creators have a consequentialist understanding of language, and words and ideas are reduced to mere tools, with bland utility being their highest use, might we be in danger of losing something of their creative and psychic power in our lives and culture? We’ll have to wait and see.
Thinking about the power of language led me to revisit a couple familiar books this morning. I first dug out Standing by Words, by Wendell Berry (of course he’s already thought about it), to reread his essay of the same name. I imagine some will find Berry’s literary examples somewhat idiosyncratic, at least among contemporary essay writing. He often references the Bible, Milton, Shakespeare, or Dante in his analysis of current issues, but his writing is always logical, witty, and artful. This essay is particularly interesting in light of some of our current arguments about the reliability and potential dangers of chat AI. Something of an intellectual relative to Orwell’s classic Politics and the English Language, Standing by Words argues that the disintegration of language, its careless use and unreliability, is related to a disintegration in our discourse, relationships, and communities, and that reclaiming language, the ideas it produces, and standing by them faithfully, is our surest way to health and wholeness. Perhaps I make Berry sound more alarmist and critical than he is. While he is a critic of much of contemporary society and the industrial consumer lifestyle it promotes, he always has a way of building arguments that are logically coherent and penetrating, while also being humane, careful, and concerned about the well-being of the reader. I recommend both this essay and the collection it’s found in.
In both fiction and non-fiction Berry often relates scenes of multiple generations, sitting evenings together, sharing stories. In Berry’s view, this form of communication is vital to healthy persons and communities, for it not only passes along practical knowledge, but it also forms intergenerational communal bonds. This older form of storytelling has been traded in many ways for the easier, yet more isolated and less accountable comforts of technological storytelling that we engage with today. Reflecting on this loss, and literally reading a Walter Benjamin essay in a Dairy Queen, served as a catalyst for Larry McMurtry’s aptly titled Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at 60 and Beyond. McMurtry is always an incredibly readable writer, and this memoir of growing up in a small Texas town, becoming a writer, and a bookseller, is tremendous. With typically biting wit McMurtry observes and analyzes the American project, that conflicting vision with all of its ironies, as it passes through the 20th century. The frontier and the myth of the cowboy, rural communities and suburban growth, personal memory and historical fact, and the exchange of older forms of communication and entertainment with newer and more immediate models. McMurtry is master of this older form of communication, storytelling is an art for him, and his weaving of memoir and critical evaluation is masterful.
Recently, reading another online essay project that we might recommend next month, we came across the following Ivan Illich quote that we’d like to leave you with, “If I had to choose one word to which hope can be tied it is hospitality. A practice of hospitality,” he added, “recovering threshold, table, patience, listening, and from there generating seedbeds for virtue and friendship…radiating out for rebirth of community.” There is something of this hope in opening our home, our care, and our interests to you, and you, in turn, returning home and doing the same, and on and on. This is human level care and concern, that ties us to the past, present, and future. It’s what we can all do.
Take care, enjoy your reading.
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