Angels, Academic Dullards, Our Lack Of Imagination

Entertaining Angels: Nolan’s Odyssey and What We Owe the Stranger (Marginalia Review of Books) is the subject of this post. This post treads on Why the dilettante is the anti-hero of our over-optimised age (Aeon Essays) that I noted in Research, Amusements & Place I've Stuck My Nose Into The Past Few Days. That is the death of curiosity, of a retreat into intellectual rigidity.

The point about curiosity is made here: 

The film is precisely this movement into a new moral key that we have failed to hear in much of the criticism that has generated around it. Writing in the London Review of Books, Emily Wilson, the celebrated translator of Homer, readily acknowledges that adaptations may acquire their greatest power through radical transformation. Nevertheless, her review takes shape as a ledger of Homeric losses. Nolan’s characters are flatter, his psychology thinner, his treatment of war, memory, time, and homecoming impoverished beside the poem’s extraordinary amplitude. Many of these observations are entirely fair: no three-hour commercial film could preserve Homer’s narrative breadth or psychological density. As an exposition of what Homer possesses and Nolan omits, Wilson’s critique is formidable. As an encounter with Nolan’s retelling, I think it is curiously incurious. The expertise that enables her to identify everything that has fallen away leaves surprisingly little space for what the film has brought into view.

Paul Losensky’s account of the Persian term taqlīd offers a striking image for understanding this relationship between the so-called original and an adaptation. Loosely translated as “imitation,” taqlīd derives from the act of fastening a collar, rope, ornament, or sword belt around another’s neck. The image gradually acquired the sense of unthinking submission: the receiver is bound to the giver and led where the giver chooses. Approached through the logic of taqlīd, the original becomes master and the adaptation its obedient dependent, valuable chiefly insofar as it follows the path prescribed for it. But retelling begins where obedience ends.

 I have a favorite Persian word now. Its meaning is grotesque and terrible and a little frightening. Photocopying beyond the point that the image disappears comes to mind. What does that do to the culture? Anemia can kill. It seems to me that cultural anemia would do the same to society. In turn, it would render its members dullards, useless to one another. 

When I was 23, I worked in a bar with bands. I heard many of our customers complain about the disco on the other side of twon and disparage bands that did not play the cover songs just like the records. This is how rock and roll died.

Being now an Orthodox Christian, the reciprocity mentioned below has importance. There is a reciprocal relationship between God and a person, and between individuals.  

The film also retrieves from the archaic world a law capable of judging such power. At the center of Nolan’s Odyssey stands the law of Zeus, the ancient code of xenia that bound host to stranger and made hospitality a measure of civilization. Nolan expands this inherited obligation into what Klein identifies as the film’s “central trick”: a Jewish and Christian ethic of reciprocity enters the Homeric world. Zeus’s protection of the wanderer begins to echo Leviticus’s injunction to love the foreigner, Hillel’s refusal to inflict upon another what one finds hateful, and the Gospel’s command to treat others as one wishes to be treated. The stranger’s claim no longer depends upon kinship, usefulness, or likeness. It interrupts the moral enclosure by which a person or a nation makes its own suffering absolute.

This is a morality that has been missing from our politics. The dehumanizing of wide swathes of people by those in power - here and elsewhere - has come easily when the powerful instill fear in their electorates. I put this in here because such a politics demeans all of us.

Returning to ciriticism and the rigidity of critical imaginations, I leave you with this: 

Why, then, has criticism around the movie proved so much more adept at cataloguing Nolan’s departures than at describing this crucial intervention? Rita Felski has observed that the affective range of academic criticism remains remarkably narrow: exquisitely articulate in its adversarial modes and excruciatingly tongue-tied before the work that art performs upon its audiences. Wilson’s review exemplifies this limitation. Its erudition illuminates Homer, yet it leaves little room for the possibility that the film has perceived something urgent in the epic and made it newly visible. Criticism adequate to retelling needs two forms of attention: precision about what transformation leaves behind, and receptivity to what it releases. The first preserves the density of the old work. The second recognizes why an old story has returned now.

To borrow a phrase from Jerry Lee Lews: think about it. 

The full essay reflects the movie that I saw. 

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The CIA,Why Write #1033, Characters, Podcasts And Colson Whitehead

 A Table for Fortune by William T Vollmann review – a hugely ambitious 3,000-page portrait of America’s decline (The Guardian) tells America's recent history through the CIA.

Why Do We Sing? by Lauren Elkin (Literary Hub).

In the years since I left the theatre, I have often thought that I chose writing instead of music because among trained singers, everyone sounds good, and one good voice is not often much different from another; rare are performers who are so unique that they are irreplaceable. Increasingly so: it seems that most of the women you hear on Broadway today have, with few exceptions, interchangeable voices. Some time during college I discovered the joy of the blank page, where I could say whatever I wanted, however I wanted to say it, and where there was such freedom that in the end there was no competition, writing took me as I was and didn’t ask for there to be any less of me. I could be judged not only on sound or on form, but on content. Whereas in music, I could only ever be as good as everyone else. I went quiet.  

Here's the Secret to Believable Character Arcs: Change Is an Awakening (Helping Writers Become Authors).

This one has me thinking the most: 

We all know about beginning our stories with a Characteristic Moment that introduces our character to readers. This moment is supposed to illustrate our characters’ starting point within the story. As such, we often want to create a Characteristic Moment that illustrates characters’ initial enslavement to the Lie.

But that’s not quite enough. We also have to make sure we’re illustrating characters’ latent understanding of and desire for the Truth. Sometimes we can do this simultaneously in the same Characteristic Moment; sometimes we need two separate scenes to illustrate both sides of this character.

Other points made: Reveal the Truth Gradually Through the Plot, Give Characters Convincing Reasons to Resist the Truth, Give Characters Strong Reasons to Pursue the Truth, and Make Character Transformation an Awakening. I hope to finish the novella that has been occupying my time these past two weeks on Thursday and to start revising this weekend. I want to keep these in mind as they have application. I am sure they apply to “Love Stinks”, if ever I get back to that.

I have not had time yet to explore this but I still offer to whoever reads these posts: Podcasts Archives - PodCastle.

 

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Life These Few Days Previosuly Not Mentioned.

Thursday was the dentist, the bank, and back to the apartment for a nap and some writing.

Fall in Muncie: 

Friday was the group session, grocery shopping, and back to do some reading of emails. I did some work on the novella. When I got home, the belt buckle broke. 

Saturday, I got out the Gorilla glue and tried to fix the belt. Not that I went very far even when I thought it was fixed. So, I used my time writing.

Sunday was Liturgy, an over-long nap, and a walk down to the laundromat with a bag of laundry. Someone had all the washers tied up. I went over to the convenience store and found out my debit card had been left at my apartment. I walked back to the apartment, back to the convenience store and returned to the laundromat. The same person still monopolized the washers. I had been gone for maybe 20 minutes, and the person had not returned to remove their laundry to dryers. I went outside, read a little about J.M. Synge, and smoked two cigarettes. Then I spotted an open washer. I had put in my laundry and dropped $1.25 into the machine when I saw it was a $6.50 machine. I budget five dollars for my laundry. Out came my laundry and I waited a bit longer. It all worked out after about another 30 minutes. I went back out to my book and smokes. Only when I sat down, my belt buckle broke again. Not being able to be fully mobile, I called J and KH. It was a long walk home with my laundry in one hand and the other hand keeping up pants. This is what my luck looks like.

I started Black Doves on Netflix. I find it a rather good spy story. 

Monday, I meant to do some running. All I did was get to Walmart for a new belt. I bought a couple of items from the grocery, too.

I went to Vespers. An idea came to me that led to a piece I want to put into my novella. So, I did a bit of writing last night, just some dialog. 

I woke up on Tuesday and what am I thinking about? My novella. Some parts of Tuesday I have already written about today.

I calculated I could have the thing done by the end of the week. That I could get started this afternoon. Then I looked at the calendar. Instead of seeing the eye doctor was for this morning, it was this afternoon. Okay, I can start after I get back from the doctor. And I have to readjust my schedule. Off to the insurance agent and the grocery this morning before the appointment rather than after. Oh, well. 

Instead of the novella and the insurance agent, I worked on a few blog posts. I still need to get at my Friday session notes. 

I submitted “The First Day of Feeling Free” to Split Lip Magazine. 

The eye doctor gave me good news about my glaucoma; it seems to have abated. I may celebrate tomorrow. 

Going through a few other items in my tabs: 

Parker Posey Talks with Michael Schulman (The New Yorker)! I think Parker Posey is an amazing actress - never quite what she will do with a character, so you have to keep your eye on her. The video does a grand job of showing what makes her special. How much do I like her? We watched the Netflix Lost in Space while I was in prison. I kept hoping the Robinson family would die and she take center stage in the show.

Wondering at Philosophy With Kafka’s Dog (The MIT Press Reader) left me thinking I have nto read enough Kafka.

In your book “How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science,” the connection between you as a philosopher and Kafka as a storyteller-philosopher is significant. You highlight the deep intersection between your philosophical outlook and Kafka’s narrative world. Because Kafka chose fiction to express his ideas, have you ever wondered what his philosophy would look like if liberated from storytelling? Have you ever wished he had written formal philosophical treatises instead?

No. Kafka comes closest to such pure philosophical writing in his Zürau aphorisms. There you can find propositions that are akin to the conceptual abstraction usually associated with philosophical thought. But my point in writing my book on Kafka’s philosopher dog was not to lament that Kafka is a failed philosopher, or that he should have written a philosophical treatise instead of a story. Instead, I wanted to appreciate what he did produce, and to extend it in a new way.

The story “Investigations of a Dog” is a wonderful parable of philosophy, and reading it can shake up our ideas about philosophy and help us appreciate the strangeness of its practice — especially given its current state of academicization. Philosophy begins in wonder, as the often-repeated line goes; what Kafka’s story allows us to do is to wonder at philosophy. Philosophy becomes an object of wonder for itself.

Now, the problem of the relationship between philosophy and literature is in fact an ancient one. It goes back to Plato, who had a real literary flair, composing not straightforward treatises but playful dialogues, and employing myths at crucial points. Maybe more than anything else, it’s these myths that have had a profound and enduring impact. In the book, I invite us to read Kafka’s myths like the Platonic myths, but for the Freudian age. Instead of the allegory of the cave, Kafka gives us the burrow (as Mladen Dolar has argued in his great essay on “The Burrow”); instead of the myth of the origins of the human being and the cosmos, Kafka gives us Odradek (Jean-Claude Milner writes brilliantly about this). And, instead of the myth of Er, the myth about the transmigration of souls choosing their next lives, we have Kafka’s prenatal hesitancy, expressed in his stunning line: “My life is a hesitation before birth.” That’s how I read Kafka, as a creator of new philosophical myths, or a new mythology of reason.

 ***

First, about nihilism: it’s clear that, for the characters themselves, this is not a problem. None of them thinks that “nothing matters.” On the contrary, they are totally obsessed with their different quests and pursuits! They follow them to the bitter end. When things go badly for him, does the hunger artist complain that fasting is stupid and meaningless? Just the opposite: he dreams of a fast breaking all records, and in a way, he disappears into this dream. Nothing is more foreign to a Kafkian protagonist than giving up in despair. On the other hand, this is a running joke throughout the fictions: why not “give it up” (the title of one of Kafka’s stories)? Sometimes there are friends or onlookers that marvel at the main character’s incapacity to just walk away from his troubles. Although it might look like they are being oppressed by external forces and inscrutable systems of power, on a certain level, they do it to themselves. Kafka’s characters “freely” encage themselves.

***

Let me raise a more general question: Where do individuals meet society? I would say, it’s not simply in their formation, education, or socialization, their Bildung. Becoming a subject is not only a process of internalizing rules, customs, ideologies, and habits — what’s called the social construction of the self, or the process of ideological interpellation. Rather, where this meeting really takes place is at those points where socialization fails, as it inevitably does. Not only because the individual is unruly and rebellious (which is true), but also, and above all, because the rules, norms, and teachings of society are contradictory, ambiguous, and riddled with gaps. A crisis in the life of the individual meets a hole in the symbolic order of society: It’s at these neuralgic points that the real encounter between self and community takes place. You could conceive of it as a kind of borderland, the “borderland between loneliness and community” (Kafka’s phrase). Here the individual is forced to be inventive, to create its own ad hoc solutions to its problems, in the margins of history, culture, language, and the normative solutions that society prescribes. You could also call this the borderland between psychology and sociology, their failed intersection. That is where the unconscious lies. 

Good night and good luck. 

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Tuesday - Trending Up?

I did not make it to the insurance agent today. I did  get to Payless in the morning for a few things I wanted to fix for lunch and items I had not bought at Walmart. Then was a stop at Ball State's Daily News. The big thing was the eye doctor. The glaucoma has abated.

The front room's reorganization started today.

A trip down to the convenience store after dinner.

I have been listening to The Pretty Things over the past few days. They are famous for being one of the British invasion bands who never made it here. I am a little surprised. No more than a little. They are what The Yardbirds might have been with a better singer and definitely what they might have been with better songs. In the line of The Rolling Stones, but not so macrabre. Speaking of The Stones, this is playing right now:

 

Interesting take, far less poppy than the original (which is one of my favorite Stones songs.)

Yesterday another rejection for “First Day of Feeling Free”:

Thank you for sharing this work with The Adroit Journal, and thank you for your patience as we consider and discuss submissions. We hope this note finds you well.

After a review of your submission, the staff has unfortunately decided that this submission is not right for us. Best of luck placing this work elsewhere, and thanks again!

Sincerely,

The Editors

The Adroit Journal

www.theadroitjournal.org

Some amusements;

The 100 Best Indie Rock Albums of All Time (Pitchfork) (because I actually know a few of them!)

It's a Wonderful Life - Muncie Civic Theatre 

I plan on doing the mail, a couple of more posts and then call it a night.

Tomorrow, back to my fiction. 

 

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Today, So Far (Plus Pieces on Writing)

 If the weekend was one debacle after another, today has been a whimpering, lamed progress towards not much.

I went to Walmart first thing this morning to buy a new belt. When I got back here, I lost all energy and fell asleep until almost 11 AM.

I got through some of my emal. There were two other posts finished. The bedroom and kitchen tidied. Then I wrapped up this one. I want to get  to Vespers, so that is all for now.

Storytelling: Writing Chapters and Scenes (Writing Forward)

Each scene is a miniature story within the story and has a beginning, middle, and end. A scene opens, there’s conflict, and then the scene closes. At the scene level, conflict is usually minor; the larger story conflict is spread throughout the entire story.

Some storytellers say that each scene should contain an emotional transition, which can help build tension into a scene and gives the story emotional flow. If a scene starts on a positive note (the protagonist is happy), then it can end on a negative note (the protagonist is sad). These emotional or tonal shifts don’t need to be intense or dramatic. Something as simple as showing a clumsy character spilling wine all over his white shirt can give a scene a downward emotional shift.

However, these emotional shifts are not required—and in fact, they’re not always possible. Some stories require a series of scenes that maintain a constant tone without significant emotional shifts.

The core function of any scene is to move the story forward with plot and character development. The more development a scene contains, the richer it becomes. One scene can move the plot forward while another scene develops the protagonist, but if the plot and character development can be contained within a single scene (rather than two separate scenes), then that scene will be more powerful.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s notebooks reveal the strange workings of his imagination

Hawthorne’s notebook fragments are wide-ranging, but certain themes repeatedly crop up: the psychology of divided selves, tensions between men and women and even possibilities for a better world. As he hopefully imagines in a stand-alone fragment: “Cannon transformed to church-bells.”

Who was Hawthorne the writer? A neo-Puritan moralist? A social realist? A modernist? A romancer? The fragments complicate rather than answer such questions. In his preface to “The Scarlet Letter,” Hawthorne remarks on his desire to “keep the inmost Me behind its veil.”

But with the help of the fragments, we get behind the veil, at least a bit – and glimpse something like what Sophia believed was the spirit informing Hawthorne’s writing.

Weekly Readings #247 (11/03/26-11/08/26) - by John Pistelli

... There is no one book you can read to make you a great writer if you don’t otherwise have it in you to be one and no one book whose omission will doom you if you do have it in you. Both anti-intellectualism and an idolatry or fetishization of mere bookishness4 can mislead an author. Modernism, for example, bore witness to both tendencies: Lawrence at his worst over-valuing blood and instinct while Pound sank his poetry under trivia he thought the key to history. I got to certain books late in life myself. I don't think I read the Aeneid—and even then only in translation—until I was 30, a more foundational text (until its displacement by the full recovery of Homer) it’s hardly possible to imagine. You should read the most obvious classics that still have currency sooner rather than later. If you’re reading this but haven’t read Hamlet, please stop reading this right now and go read Hamlet. In response to a similar question earlier this year, I noted that the core works of the western canon, everything before the explosion of print culture in modernity, are a fairly small and manageable set: the Bible, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the major Greek tragedies (the Oresteia, the Theban plays, Medea and Bacchae) and Platonic dialogues (the Apology, Symposium, Republic), Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the major plays of Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth, The Tempest), Milton’s Paradise Lost. But you don’t need to read all of those before you write a novel. The “western canon,” which is essentially a 20th-century construct (cf. Naomi on “Great Books”), was not always equally available to all the great writers. Dante did not read Homer; Shakespeare did not read Homer or Dante. As Ian Watt long ago pointed out in The Rise of the Novel, many of the early major novelists, like Defoe and Richardson, were in fact marked by their non-elite non-education in the Greek and Roman classics, which they either didn’t read at all or read in translation, as we tend to do. I did hate the way the rival identity politics of the last decade and a half dismissed so many still good and still relevant classics, the English canon of poetry and novels, Shakespeare and Jane Austen, because the one side regarded them as white imperial oppressors and the other side as effete relics for the liberal elite. When I wrote this a few years ago, people responded as if I’d meant to criticize “the woke”—and I don’t have a lot of patience for left-wing canon-smashing when a left-wing defense of the canon as extending high culture to all is the more obvious and (if I may) dialectical position—but I actually had in mind some of the more literalist exponents of “men’s literature” who often establish their bona fides by going on podcasts and saying they don’t read such gay stuff as Austen or George Eliot.5 To return to your question, though, let me cite the aforementioned Pound in one of his sounder judgments from ABC of Reading, a book I’ve carried around with me since high school despite my generally not being a Poundian: “Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree,” his enlargement of the equation he chanced upon in a German-to-Italian dictionary, “Dichten = Condensare.” The prerequisite to serious writing, then, is not reading this or that particular work, but a period of immersion in—serious contemplation of—some number of the greatest works where language is so charged, both to study consciously how this energizing can be accomplished as a matter of method and to incorporate unconsciously the experience or what I have elsewhere called the music of such intensive energetics....

Think about this because I am thinking about this, something I have been known to do much of:

... One final piece of advice though: read poetry no matter what you intend to write. Poetry is the base or basis of all literature, its taproot into the vaster reservoirs of orature, of music, of dance, as well as the form in which language is always maximally charged. We read prose sentenced by sentence, sometimes even paragraph by paragraph or chapter by chapter, but poetry word by word.

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Research, Amusements & Place I've Stuck My Nose Into The Past Few Days

With the hope that your sense of discovery might be ignited, I put together this post. 

Inheriting Wendell Berry (The Hedgehog Review)

We don’t need our elders to be perfect or even good; they just need to set us listening in the right places.

Jimmy movie review & film summary  - makes it sound like the movie avoids my biggest fear of being schmaltz. World War Two changed Jimmy Stewart, and that change should be respected.

Tabu (actress) - Wikipedia

I should let go of Nolan's The Odyssey, but it is hard when something like The Pyrrhic Victory of Nolan’s Odyssey (Antigone) comes to my attention.

 Few films have managed to divide critical opinion so thoroughly as Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. The divisions break across political affiliations, cultural backgrounds, and even prejudicial expectations: some critics found their pre-release presentiments – whether for good or for ill – firmly validated; others were taken completely by surprise, pleasantly or otherwise. Given the turbid clamor of critical opinions, I believe some elucidation of Nolan’s poetic vision may be in order.

***

In Christopher Nolan’s vision, Odysseus’ victory at Troy was personally, politically, and existentially Pyrrhic. Every element of the film – its plot, its characters, even its casting – is in service of this ominous message. Nolan emphasizes those aspects of the poem that allow him to communicate this message, and he either minimizes or deletes everything else.

I recognize the movie I watched more in this essay than in any other. 

A medieval map mystery may finally be solved (Big Think). How to resist maps and mysteries?

First, a quick refresher. A portolan chart is a nautical chart of the Mediterranean, western European, and northwest African coasts, criss-crossed with dense color-coded web-like networks often called “rhumb lines,” dotted with harbor names written perpendicular to the coast (so you had to keep spinning the chart to read it). The charts are calibrated with little beaded scale bars marking off distances in miglia, or so-called portolan miles whose roots remained enigmatic for decades until Marelić’s recently proposed explanation. (A Portolan mile is a bit shorter than a modern statute mile.)

***

“The immense accuracy of coastline renderings on portolan charts, which, as far as is known, suddenly appeared in mid- to late-13th century, was never fully and objectively explained,” says Marelić.

***

Claudius Ptolemy, the 2nd-century astronomer whose Geography dominated Western cartography during the Renaissance, underestimated Earth’s circumference by about 29%. Measure out two degrees of longitude along the Mediterranean’s mid-latitude using Ptolemy’s too-small Earth, and you get almost exactly 125 kilometers — which just so happens to be 100 portolan miles, the length of one grid square on these charts.

In other words: The miglio isn’t a freshly measured medieval nautical mile at all. It’s a fossil, the shadow of an ancient astronomer’s arithmetic error, smuggled across more than a thousand years and built into every portolan chart’s ruler.

***

Lay all of Marelić’s studies end to end, and a single picture emerges. The portolan chart wasn’t a eureka moment of 13th-century Italian seamanship. It was a very good copy — or, more precisely, different copies — of cartographic knowledge that was already ancient before the Middle Ages even began, filtered through at least one confused but conscientious medieval hand, and finally dressed up with compass roses and scale bars to look shipshape for a new seafaring age. 

History of Maps: Mercator & Equal Earth Proejction (HISTORY)

The Lost Kingdom of Apalache (History Today)

The story may have been more than just pure fiction, however. Rochefort, unlike More, was a real traveller and was connected to transatlantic information networks. Huguenot refugees did flee their ruined colony in 1565 – at least 150 of them, according to a 1565 report by the Spanish conquistador Pedro Menéndez de Avilés – and some ‘fled into the mountains’. Rochefort may have heard survivors’ stories, even if they were embellished. He may have then added elements from native folktales, including Mexican stories of their origins in a northern realm with a lake and sacred cave, the fabled land of Aztlan. Rochefort mentioned that centuries earlier a group of Apalachites had migrated south, eventually forming a group in Mexico called Tlatuici, meaning ‘people from the mountains’. There they settled ‘in a neighborhood similar to the one of their birth, situated at the foot of the mountains on fertile land’. Rochefort’s narrative was a cross-cultural fantasy, blending indigenous and European utopian ideas, and fragments of stories he had heard on his travels.

Finally, Rochefort’s account was not dissimilar to the actual American southeast, which was not a blank slate. It abounded with large polities, late Mississippian paramount chiefdoms with capitals that could be properly classified as cities, the most famous being the late-medieval metropolis of Cahokia (near present-day St. Louis), which declined in the 12th century but inspired waves of successors. In north Georgia, in the 15th and 16th centuries, the chiefdom of Coosa lay not far from where Rochefort placed Apalache. Several Spanish explorers reached the capital, population 5,000, after a trek through the mountains, and encountered a king carried by retainers on a litter. Rochefort’s story may have been an exaggerated account of Coosa or another similar chiefdom. The ‘fabulous stories’ may not have been purely fantasy.

China's Overlooked Role in World War II (HISTORY) raises a good point. Maybe several.

Had China surrendered in 1938 as expected, World War II’s entire trajectory would have changed, according to Mitter. “The escalation that Japan had to go through in the following years because of Chinese resistance would never have happened. That means no Pearl Harbor because without the escalation of Japanese attacks on China you don’t get the desperate hunger for resources that leads ultimately to the oil embargo and President Roosevelt’s decisions in 1940 and 1941. And if you don’t have Pearl Harbor, you don’t have an Asian war that can then be joined with the European war.”

***

The Japanese surrender, however, did not mean the end of war in an exhausted China. The country’s civil war reignited and led to Mao’s communist revolution that toppled Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist government in 1949. As China and the United States went from friends to foes, public memory of China’s role as a member of the Allies faded on both sides of the Pacific.

“After 1949, when Mao and the communists won power in the mainland, the one thing that became pretty unacceptable, certainly at the central level, was anything positive to say about the Chiang Kai-shek regime,” Mitter says. “During the high Cold War, both the West and China had strong motivations not to revisit the story, and therefore for more than a quarter century it essentially lay in the shadows of historiography.” 

Archaeologists at This Ancient Maya Metropolis in the Forest of Belize Are Debunking Long-Held Myths About the Mesoamerican Civilization

The Maya lived in a world where kings had cosmic power and a cyclical calendar ruled every aspect of life. Still, strolling through Caracol’s elegiac splendors, one can’t help thinking about how these ancients grappled with the most essential elements of the human experience: community, sustenance and survival in an interconnected world.  

Why the dilettante is the anti-hero of our over-optimised age (Aeon Essays)

Merriam-Webster defines the dilettante as ‘a person having a superficial interest in an art or a branch of knowledge’. Encyclopedia.com calls the dilettante someone who cultivates an interest ‘without real commitment or knowledge’. Cambridge settles for someone whose understanding ‘is not very deep or serious’. Collins gives us someone who ‘seems interested in a subject … but does not really know very much about it’. None of it is flattering.

Clearly, the dilettante is no aspirational character. No university markets itself as training the next generation of dilettantes; no magazine runs a ‘dilettante of the year’ issue (except, perhaps, for the excellent Idler publication). He – for the dilettante is, historically and in popular imagination, so often a ‘he’ – is in essence an amateur, a role defined by wide interests and narrow expertise.

  ***

But what if the scheme has it backwards? What if the dilettante’s perpetual movement from one thing to another is not a failure of nerve but a different and defensible way of being, one whose exploratory zeal turns out to be just what a hyper-specialised, over-optimised and all-too-serious world needs most? Then the dilettante would turn out to be not a capricious buffoon but a kind of modern anti-hero. That, I argue, is a dilettantism worth defending. 

 ***

Further, the dilettante is no dabbler. The dabbler scratches the surface of interests, whereas the dilettante, I argue, can and does go deep – without, however, anchoring a sense of self in any one interest. This also sets the dilettante apart from the flâneur, Charles Baudelaire’s urban wanderer strolling through the city’s offerings, sampling everything, invested in none of it. The dilettante is deeply engaged in interests, and more an active participant than a passive spectator.

***

The more important aim, however, is to show dilettantism as a way of living that offers more than we might think. It is a life liberated from specialisation, instrumentalisation and meritocratic bean-counting, as well as from a Protestant work ethic that is suspicious of pleasure for pleasure’s sake. Arguments denigrating specialisation in education and vocation are well known, as are those championing well-roundedness and the virtues of the liberal arts. Though similar in spirit, this defence of dilettantism is less about the purpose or outcomes of academic or professional life and more about making the mental switch away from the socially conditioned pressure to find your thing and stick with it to an open and exploratory pursuit of pluralistic interests. Reclaiming this sense of joyful experimentalism is intended to show dilettantism as a mode of abundance rather than deficiency. 

All that sounds well enough. Odd that the internet has not encouraged exploration of pleasure rather than pron of various sorts. 

 The key to perceiving dilettantism as abundance instead of deficiency is to appreciate the sense of freedom it affords. It is, in the first place, a negative freedom, a freedom from the constraints that otherwise bind professional practitioners. More precisely, it is a freedom of mobility within a practice.

Where is our curiosity? Some of mine follow. 

11 brilliant albums that nobody understood when they first came out

The Rolling Stones Singles 1963-1966 | ABKCO Music & Records, Inc.  

Chuck Berry – Go Go Go Lyrics | Genius Lyrics

Bob Dylan – Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again Lyrics | Genius Lyrics

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The Last Of Politics, I Hope

 I am happy enough with how the midterms went. I am unhappy to see Indiana's bail amendment passed. But time will tell if the Democrats prove themselves effective or spiral out in wasteful actions. 

I have too much on my table that has been distracted by the condition Trump has put this country into. So, back to that and turn the damper down on my political concerns. 

A look inside how Democrats made big gains in the Indiana Legislature (Indiana Capital Chronicle) mostly follows the national trend that Trump needs a kick in the shins. However, the Indiana Democrats still seem to lack vision:

Despite being a former Allen County Democratic chair, Meehan received no money from state party committees. She unseated Morris with 51% of the vote, even though she had less than $10,000 in campaign cash. Morris had more than $200,000  

What voters want after Democrats' big gains in Indiana 

Several voters who helped Democrats flip seats said Republicans are out of touch with the challenges in their lives and communities.

Lisa Stump, 64, lives in Osceola, a small town a few miles from Mishawaka. She will also be represented by Wait. Stump said she supported some judges she described as Republican, but otherwise she voted entirely for Democrats.

A widow who now works as a crossing guard, Stump used to work in RV manufacturing. She said she’s seen jobs in that industry disappear and wages fall.

Stump was glad to see DeVon defeated because she does not believe he has done much for the area. She wants Republican state leaders to focus on serving Hoosiers.

Elon Musk is about to learn how much America hates him (The Independent). Yep.

Braun: Election results a 'wake-up call' for GOP (Indiana Capital Chronicle).

I am too lazy to follow up on how many Republicans lost who beat the anti-gerrymander Republicans. I do not think there are many. At least, no one has made a point of connecting winners to that issue. 

Two major Election Day developments can help improve government in Indiana  (Indiana Capital Chronicle).

Straight-ticket voting was likely a factor for Bayh, but not the reason he won.

Nearly 127,000 Marion County voters cast straight-ticket Democratic ballots, compared to 40,000 for Republicans, according to unofficial Indianapolis election results.

Interestingly, Bayh wants to get rid of straight-ticket voting. And there have been bills to do so led unsuccessfully in the past by Republicans. While it would no doubt help Democrats in many parts of the state, he acknowledged it could hurt his party in Marion County.

“I don’t support policies because they benefit my political party,” he told the Capital Chronicle last week. “I support them because they’re the right thing to do for the people of our state.”

Allen County — which in 2022 had nearly double the straight-ticket Republican ballots than Democratic — saw Republican straight-ticket ballots only slightly leading Democrats.

In the end, it’s clear Hoosier Republican voters crossed over to support Bayh. He reached 1 million votes — well above the 742,000 the Democratic nominee received in 2022.

I remain agnostic on whether another Bayh will improve the Democratic Party in Indiana. I want to see action on direct access for referendums, which Beau is supposed to be backing.

This rural county has the worst voter turnout in Indiana. Why? How is it possible not to know you can split your vote?

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