Lillian Fishman on Sally Rooney on the Relative Value of Experience

“This was the first time it crossed my mind that a young woman like us — a knowledge worker, a writer, a leftist — might regret her independent youth and wish she had married a loving person at a young age. I’d associated this idea with a type of womanhood we considered totally outside of our zone of interest: anti-intellectualism, a belief in the primacy of motherhood. I was blindsided by the suggestion that we might be better people if we were recused from formative independence and struggle. I looked around at my friends and acquaintances, especially the married ones, and wondered if there was any truth in the idea that the years they spent as poor captains of their own ships, unmoored and often lonely, were in fact not remotely necessary or enlightening.

Why did no one else find this proposition shocking? It was such a clear transgression against the entire prevailing ethos of young womanhood (at least in liberal contexts). Critics were concerned with whether Eileen’s happy ending with Simon constituted a more regressive romantic ending than we’d seen in Rooney’s prior novels, but there was no preoccupation with this regret on Eileen’s part. Is that because one is liable, in extreme love, to suddenly wish all kinds of self-negating and previously inconceivable things? Did we read this and think we knew better: that when Eileen grows accustomed to her marriage, she’ll be glad that she had the chance to grow up among her friends before she and Simon came together? Or maybe this is the essential quality which separates a romance from a novel: in a romance a woman must be rescued from circumstances which are sad, inadequate, grief-filled, wasteful. Perhaps a romance is less powerful if it acknowledges all those other little placeholders and consolation prizes (friends, work, art) which we pretend can make us balanced and happy.”

https://substack.com/home/post/p-157673192?source=queue

Barbara McClay on Eliot’s Ash Wednesday

“In addition to reading these online poems over and over—as if they were some sort of texts from a lost civilization about which nothing more could be known, instead of (again) poems that were in books that were probably in my very own home—I would carefully copy and paste anything that struck me as a good epigraph for a chapter of a novel into a WordPerfect document that I’m almost positive was called something like “good quotes.” I probably copied, conservatively, at least two thirds of “Ash Wednesday,” because its language thrilled me.

At the time, I’m not sure I even slightly understood what it meant to say “I do not hope to know / the infirm glory of the positive hour” or what it meant to hope to turn again or any of the rest of it.3 I certainly had already accumulated regrets at that point in my life, some of which could eat into me very deeply and even keep me awake at night. But I did not associate them at all with the poem.4 Reading it now, listening to Eliot read it, I understand it better.”

https://substack.com/home/post/p-158401105?source=queue

James Dickey, author of Deliverance, a Character

“JOHN LOGUE: Dickey was mischievous from the first day I ever knew him. We went to eat at a Japanese restaurant, the kind where they chop everything up. The chef chopped-chopped-chopped right near Dickey and, all of a sudden, it looked like the end of Dickey’s finger popped into his vodka, bleeding. Dickey screamed and the chef almost fainted. Well, Dickey had taken a shrimp and dipped it in ketchup and just as the guy chopped near him, Dickey flipped it in his drink. That was typical Dickey.”

Delivering ‘Deliverance’

Alan Jacobs on his Writing Methods

“Now, to be sure, I always have at least one and usually two writing projects going on, and I’m working on something almost every day — but the working doesn’t always mean writing words. I can’t write words until the words are ready to be written, and sometimes they might not be ready until I’ve read and re-read books, until I’ve made and then deleted and re-made outlines, until I’ve re-ordered my index cards in half-a-dozen ways, or — this is most common — until I’ve just sat in my chair and thought for a long time about what I need to say. Then I write.

So it’s not uncommon for me to go ten days or even two weeks without writing a single word that ends up in the book or essay I’m working on, and then write 6000 words in a morning. I’ve learned not to force it, I’ve learned to recognize the symptoms of readiness — and maybe more important, learned to note and heed the absence of such symptoms. Whenever I have tried to do the 500-words-per-day thing I’ve just ended up with more stuff to delete. My job, as I understand it, is to wait patiently and be ready when the words are ready.”

From Alan’s blog.

Brian Phillips on Gene Hackman

“Hollywood is full of little guys who act big; Gene Hackman was a big guy who knew how to be small. When the moment called for it, when he was playing a bullying cop or a football player turned private eye, he could bludgeon you with physicality every bit as much as Sean Connery could, but Connery was always larger-than-life, and Hackman was a genius at playing life-sized. With Connery, the essence of his charisma was that he always seemed two inches taller than anyone else on the screen. When he played a hapless professor, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the effect was giddily comic, because you sensed deep down that Henry Jones could take Indiana, and probably all the Nazis, in a fight. When Hackman played a timid egghead—say, the surveillance expert in The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola’s classic paranoid thriller from 1974—there was nothing funny about it unless Hackman wanted it to be. He knew how to pull back the boundaries of his own presence, like someone turning the dimmer on a light.”

https://www.theringer.com/2025/02/27/movies/gene-hackman-dead-obituary-movies-characters-legacy

Trollope’s Narrator on Bad Preaching

“There is, perhaps, no greater hardship at present inflicted on mankind in civilised and free countries, than the necessity of listening to sermons. No one but a preaching clergyman has, in these realms, the power of compelling an audience to sit silent, and be tormented. No one but a preaching clergyman can revel in platitudes, truisms, and untruisms, and yet receive, as his undisputed privilege, the same respectful demeanour as though words of impassioned eloquence, or persuasive logic, fell from his lips. Let a professor of law or physic find his place in a lecture-room, and there pour forth jejune words and useless empty phrases, and he will pour them forth to empty benches. Let a barrister attempt to talk without talking well, and he will talk but seldom. A judge’s charge need be listened to per force by none but the jury, prisoner, and gaoler. A member of Parliament can be coughed down or counted out. Town-councillors can be tabooed. But no one can rid himself of the preaching clergyman. He is the bore of the age, the old man whom we Sindbads cannot shake off, the nightmare that disturbs our Sunday’s rest, the incubus that overloads our religion and make God’s service distasteful. We desire not to be forced to stay away. We desire, nay, we are resolute, to enjoy the comfort of public worship; but we desire also that we may do so without an amount of tedium which ordinary human nature cannot endure with patience; that we may be able to leave the house of God, without that anxious longing for escape, which is the common consequence of common sermons.

With what complacency will a young parson deduce false conclusions from misunderstood texts, and then threaten us with all the penalties of Hades if we neglect to comply with the injunctions he has given us!”

Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: OUP, 2014), 43.

P.S. I note here that I have never attended a church where the “common sermons” Trollope decries were actually common. An occasional clanger? Yes, of course, but not common.

Trollopian Biographical Hijinks

From John Sutherland’s review article in the LRB 30+ years ago:

“One of the clinching confirmations of Anthony’s account of his wretched schooldays came from Sir William Gregory, who was at Harrow with him. On reading An Autobiography, Gregory recalled that Trollope was

‘a big boy, older than the rest of the form, and without exception the most slovenly and dirty boy I ever met. He was not only slovenly in person and in dress, but his work was equally dirty. His exercises were a mass of blots and smudges. These peculiarities created a great prejudice against him, and the poor fellow was generally avoided … I had plenty of opportunities of judging Anthony, and I am bound to say, though my heart smites me sorely for my unkindness, that I did not like him. I avoided him, for he was rude and uncouth, but I thought him an honest brave fellow. He was no sneak. His faults were external; all the rest of him was right enough. But the faults were of that character for which school boys would never make allowances, and so poor Trollope was tabooed, and had not … a single friend … He gave no sign of promise whatsoever, was always in the lowest part of the form, and was regarded by masters and by boys as an incorrigible dunce.’

Mullen and Hall quote this in full as clear corroboration that Trollope’s time at Harrow was ‘torture’. Super quotes Gregory selectively, so as to give a quite different impression:

‘Living as he did with only one parent and that a negligent one, Anthony was ‘the most slovenly and dirty boy I ever met’, not only in person and dress, but also in his work: ‘His exercises were a mass of blots and smudges,’ as William Gregory of Coole Park, near Gort in Galway, recalled; yet Gregory rather liked him. Though rude and uncouth, ‘I thought him an honest, brave fellow. His faults were external; all the rest of him was right enough.’ (Many years later, Gregory’s widow was to befriend William Butler Yeats at Coole Park.)’

In the section that Super suppresses, Gregory declares quite unequivocally: ‘I did not like him.’ There is no doubt as to what this means. Yet, by judicious quotation, Super can turn this upside down and assert, ‘Gregory rather liked him,’ sketch a Richmal Cromptonish picture of schoolboy Anthony, and then change the subject by dragging the Yeats red herring across the reader’s path.”

Happy Trails

I was a relatively early adopter of social media—Facebook (2007), Twitter, (2009), and Instagram (2011). I wanted to be a proficient user before my children. I was, but that wasn’t sufficient. It turns out the young men and middle-aged men are not the same—particularly, when the old guy grew up in an analog world and developed analog virtues that are foreign to digital natives. I’ve been able to help my boys and other young people understand and mitigate some risks and endure a lot of disappointments of online life. But I’ve come to the conclusion that I can do that without further participation in two platforms. So, I’m letting my friends/acquaintances know that I’ll be deleting Facebook and Instagram this month, though I’ll continue on Twitter for now.

One factor has to do with my use of the platforms themselves. Since Twitter still allows a feed that is not algorithmically generated and I can easily control what I see there (I get notifications only from those whom I follow, and I can block and mute easily), I am able to use that platform as a news aggregator. (I’ve never really considered leaving Twitter, because I don’t use it in a way that amplifies its downsides). The algorithmically-governed Facebook and Instagram, by contrast, make it more difficult for me to see the range of things I want to see on those platforms.

The greater issue, though, is these digital environments themselves. In short, they are too context deficient to serve friendship. (This is not really a problem for my news-focused use of Twitter). Facebook and Instagram give us many impressions of our friends and acquaintances, but these impressions cannot replace a hug, or a smile, or a conversation over a meal. And often, without the context of time together, the impressions we get are skewed or simply false. So, I’m leaving Facebook and Instagram, in the end, because I don’t want just to know about my friends. I want to know my friends in truth. And the former is getting in the way of the latter.

I’m still figuring out what I might do instead. Some people I respect have their own websites, blogs, micro-blogs, etc. I have a website that I’ve started posting bits from reading to—the sort of thing I’ve used Facebook for the most over the last few years. I might add a micro-blog to post pictures. I’ve never been the best blogger, but I’m hoping to write more both formally and informally in the years to come. We’ll see how that goes. In any case, I trust that my friends know how and where to find me in real life. In the meantime, happy trails.

P.S. If you want more context for all this, I began seriously thinking about taking this step over the course of research for some lectures I gave on digitally mediated relationships a little over a year ago. See those here: https://resources.covenantseminary.edu/programs/the-changing-self-and-the-challenge-of-ministry

In Which Trollope Skewers Dickens

“Of all such reformers Mr Sentiment is the most powerful. It is incredible the number of evil practices he has put down. It is to be feared he will soon lack subjects, and that when he has made the working classes comfortable, and got bitter beer put into proper-sized pint bottles, there will be nothing left for him to do. Mr Sentiment is certainly a very powerful man, and perhaps not the less so that his good poor people are so very good; his hard rich people so very hard; and the genuinely honest so very honest. Namby-pamby in these days is not thrown away if it be introduced in the proper quarters.”

Anthony Trollope, The Warden, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: OUP, 2014), 124.

Trollope on Reform in the Age of Mass Media

“In former times great objects were attained by great work. When evils were to be reformed, reformers set about their heavy task with grave decorum and laborious argument. An age was occupied in proving a grievance, and philosophical researches were printed in folio pages, which it took a life to write, and an eternity to read. We get on now with a lighter step, and quicker. ‘Ridiculum acri Fortius et melius magnas plerumque secat res.’ Ridicule is found to be more convincing than argument, imaginary agonies touch more than true sorrows, and monthly novels convince, when learned quartos fail to do so. If the world is to be set right, the work will be done by shilling numbers.”