053 Checking In
Miscellaneous items
I can’t say I’ve been a prolific writer the past several months. I’ve gotten a number of new followers in recent weeks, many of them seemingly from the great Filipe Furtado, so welcome (and bem-vindo) and I hope that whatever writing comes out here, moving forward, can inform or delight you, or simply pass your time on a phone pleasantly while you wait in a line somewhere. I also have to admit that I don’t really use substack as a social media platform—it’s just a place where I write posts or essays or public letters (and read the entries that other people publish).
A few updates! In my day job life, I’ve started a new gig, which is very good; it also involves a commute downtown, and so with the hours I devote to that commute each week, I’m having to adapt to even less flexible time to do things like read, write, watch films, or attempt any kind of visual art. To say nothing of errands, domestic chores, exercise, cooking, and spending quality time with my better half and with my friends. This has been a recurring theme in my posts here, so it’s really just a new variation. What does this mean for Attendance Optional? Probably nothing, except that time between installments may stretch a little further. I’ll still write about things that interest me, as the inclinations and opportunities come up, and before long may also offer a few other projects.
Some odds and ends …
It’s worth reading Jared Marcel Pollen on David Jones’ In Parenthesis. I’ve had Jones idling on my to-read list for a little while and I think this is sufficient inspiration to get to him this autumn, finally. (Also, from 2018, David Bentley Hart’s review essay on David Jones in First Things is quite good. NB: Hart and that publication fell out with one another several years back due, I believe, to fundamental political disagreement, with FT cozying up to Trump, and DBH wanting absolutely no part of it. I doubt Hart himself would direct readers to that site, but instead to his book collection Theological Territories, where that essay—or some version of it—is included.)
At one point Pollen writes, “One can go through an entire undergraduate program and never encounter Jones.” But I think this kind of a statement, today, is less helpful about assessing the place of this-or-that cultural figure, and more about the state of undergraduate (and graduate) programs. You can get advanced humanities degrees and more or less skip past major figures, entire relevant geographies, and so on. I’d bet money there are quite a few English PhDs out there who’ve never even heard of David Jones, let alone read his work—not because he’s so incredibly obscure, but because the means of measurement (academic programs and credentials) are ineffective ways of assessing depth and breadth of knowledge. Some of this is no doubt due to weakening standards in institutions and disciplines and decaying interest in actual humanist scholarship, sure, but some of it is also a consequence of a highly globalized academic ecosystem with more information and research than anyone can be fairly expected to digest. People are coming from such a wide variety of epistemic backgrounds. The centre cannot hold, reads a mug in some lit professor’s kitchen cabinet.
Ben Landau-Taylor, in “The Academic Culture of Fraud,” argues that contemporary academia incentivizes different fraudulent behaviors as well as useless studies that cannot be replicated. Perhaps a different organization of knowledge and knowledge-seekers will emerge to pick up the slack. But things don’t look pretty these days.
If bureaucratized peer reviewers or even a paper’s own coauthors aren’t expected to pay enough attention to notice blatant fraud, if fraud is only revealed by third-party investigators when they choose to make a years-long personal crusade in the face of institutional headwinds, if those frauds which are uncovered don’t come to light until decades after the fact, then we can be confident that almost all of the frauds have gotten away with it. Why wouldn’t you report the splashy result that you promised the grantmakers? Why wouldn’t you accept the prestige and promotions and money? Would you be deterred by the fear that, in twenty years, there will maybe be some bad articles online but you keep your job while your colleagues rally around you?
There are so many films I’d love to watch, even a number of recent and upcoming releases, but, as I’ve mentioned, time to see them is relatively scarce. I’m also finding that I’m at the point in my life where I want to rewatch a lot of things I saw, initially, in my teens and twenties. The differences between my memory and the new experience can sometimes be striking. Sometimes I forget I’d seen something at all: for a while I had had the impression that I’d seen every movie directed by James B. Harris (perhaps better known as a producer) except for his 1988 film Cop. But I kept thinking, as I watched Cop last week on the Criterion Channel, that it seemed very familiar. This is where keeping a viewing log comes in handy—I confirmed I had already seen it, in 2004, and rather than the last Harris title to scratch off the list, it was one of my first.
Speaking of looking back on youth, one good film I finally caught up with for the first time was The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Marielle Heller’s 2015 directorial debut, which I’d been intending to see for a while—especially since I adored Can You Ever Forgive Me? and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. This unfussy movie likes to get into the crevices of human interactions (I mean people’s layers of motivation, and the messy effects that any action might have on someone’s psyche), and tonally it never gets too fixated on a particular “vibe” but allows a number of them—quirk and whimsy, counterculture nostalgic haze, anti-nostalgic acid—to wax and wane as the movie requires. I gather Heller’s newest film Nightbitch has not received the most positive notices, but I’ll be very curious to see what it’s all about.