A brief and unfortunate venture back into computer gaming

Via Cookie Clicker. At first it seemed like an ideal type of game: exponential functions, arbitrage, and absolutely no point to any of it. Then I learned there were eventually going to be aliens, gods, monsters, and a revolt by the producers of the cookies. I don't need or want themes, larger points, or involved gameplay.

A reminder, in its way, that Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow worked as well as it did because it merely described the games that were being played; the one chapter in which a game was actually played in the text was not very good.

A realization on horror and Weimar

Watching Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler yesterday, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari today, it struck me that a lot of horror's aesthetic is set during the Weimar period because those were, coincidentally, the people making movies that endured on these topics. Mutatis mutandis neo-gothic. But the association is kind of accidental--Weimar didn't strive to make scary things, there was just a lot of stuff that looked like that for entirely separate reasons, and they happened to use stuff that looked like that in the movies because that's the stuff there was. Some of it's stylized, to be sure, but that manner of stylization was also elsewhere.

Toward a general theory on reading poetry

When I was young, I read The Waste Land and knew none of the references, or almost none (the supper at Emmaus only). To understand any of it, I had to go and do research.

Some decades later, I read Ulysses. By then I had read enough English literature to recognize when a parody of style or content was happening, and to know the source being parodied without needing to look it up ("Hey, wait a minute, this sounds just like..."). Being able to do this enhanced my appreciation of the novel, even if I ultimately did not love it.

I find poetry to be a richer field now than I did when I was younger simply because there is more material in my head: formally in the sense that I've read more and can catch more detail I would have missed, informally in the sense that the store of memories and feelings increases and allusions and reminiscences the author could not have intended come more thickly now.

From Morning-Glory to Petersburg

 

Untitled Good Samaritan Thought

It's Bonhoeffer in The Cost of Discipleship who brings up that to use "and who is my neighbor?" as a dodge requires the following things:

1. Knowing what the answer to this question is supposed to be (i.e., "everyone, and anyone who needs you")
2. Finding this answer unacceptable because of other commitments, either moral ("I would like to not have to love people from group x") or practical ("helping other people when they need it is a lot of work, I'd prefer not to")
3. Trying to obfuscate the question intentionally to produce an incoherence (e.g., "shouldn't I love my family more than strangers I'll never meet?")
4. Not trying to come to an actual answer (ordo amoris still requires you to love the people at the bottom, after all, and can imagine circumstances in which you're obligated to help them) but literally beg the question, by assuming your intuitive moral order is unimpeachable, or at least serviceable.

...and Jesus' response to that question is a story where it is perfectly clear who did the right thing and who did not; the clearness of it is self-evident, requiring no detailed explanation; and it is meant to shame the person for thinking there could be any other answer. But only if that person is capable of shame.

Reading in Progress: I have a lot to say about Uwe Johnson, apparently

Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries: Now about 600 pages in. There's been narrative time enough to accept that it's going to end badly for all of the 1930s German characters, regardless of what you're meant to think of them. No one is really spared, in the end: the Nazi true believers, the Jewish people run out of town, the collaborationists who just want to go along to get along, the principled resisters. The best outcome you can hope for is keeping your head down and trying to make it through, and it only costs your soul and ability to think of yourself as a good person, if you care to think of it.

I remember teaching a class of college freshman Viktor Frankl's Memories of a Concentration Camp and pointing out to them that Frankl remarks several times that the best people did not make it because they were too concerned for others, and that this remark implies that Frankl excludes himself from the good people in Auschwitz. How could this wise, avuncular narrative presence, so filled with insight and compassion, have possibly been a bad person? Well, he glosses over his own bad parts in the retelling--that's simple enough to do when you're writing the story.

And so it is in a difficult time. You can always lie about what you did or felt later, should you live that long. I know the compromises I am making; do you know yours?

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace: set myself a pace to finish it in three months and, sure enough, I am well past a third of the way in. And every time a character is on stage perhaps too long for my taste--old Bolkonsky, Pierre (when he gets in one of his moods), the Rostovs and their money troubles--the narrative focus shifts and there's something new and better.

Wallace Stevens, Selected Poems: About to chuck this one out, canonicity notwithstanding. Harmonium reads of a stern, New Englandly paternal authority, with interwar sexism and racism generously sewn in. We'll give the later stuff a try, but move on shortly.

Adrienne Rich, Collected Poems: Now this is more like it, the polyphony of the permanent observer who can recreate a number of different voices because of observation (one assumes). Some midcentury rich lady nonsense, but then here comes "Sunday Evening" and even that redeems itself.

My One and Only Thought on Social Media of All Kinds

A very large portion of complaining about social media is of this type: 

"everybody complains about the weather, but no one does anything about it"

i.e., you're aware that it's bad, but there's not really an alternative. But it works the other way, too: just because it's raining doesn't mean you have to stand outside.

...back to my books.