Tag: Alan Jacobs

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I would counsel the reader of Pynchon to remain conscious of (a) his changes in stylistic register and (b) his tendency to confine his own level of understanding to that of the character he is portraying at the moment, and to remember (c) his interest in portraying the “diseases of the intellect” that afflict the residents of late modernity; and I would encourage the reader further to work from the assumption that these novels evidence a mastery of the conditions they seek to represent.

Source: Pynchon: An Introduction by Alan Jacobs

Alan Jacobs provides an introduction to the works of Thomas Pynchon. He begins with a summary of what we know about Pynchon and an overview of his novels. He then turns his attention to the process of reading Pynchon. Although the writing itself is often clear, the real question is why is he telling us what he is telling us. This can be disorientating and hard to figure out, made even more challenging by the casual wise-ass style, silly humour and characters that serve as mouthpieces for ideas. For Jacobs this is all intended to capture the unsettling experience of life within technopoly. Obscurities subsequently need to be embraced and waited out.

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There are many valid reasons to read, but if you’re about self-improvement in one way or another — an increase in knowledge or insight or, hey, even wisdom — then one of the most reliable ways to become a better reader is to read fewer books but read them with greater care. If you would be wise, an essential book you know intimately — through slow reading or repeated reading — is of more use to you than a dozen lesser books that you know only casually.

getting through – The Homebound Symphony by getting through – The Homebound Symphony

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I agree that novels, and other long narratives, have become less culturally central, less influential, than they were fifty or sixty years ago. (And I regret this.) But are they less culturally central than they were a hundred years ago? I’m not sure about that. Two hundred years ago? Hard to say.

How many ambitious and masterful novels can we reasonably expect our culture to produce each year? How many thoughtful and sensitive readers can we reasonably expect those novels to have? I don’t find these questions easy to answer.

here we go again – The Homebound Symphony by Alan Jacobs

It is interesting to think about how many people read books alongside the discussion of listening to music. One of the really interesting ideas presented by Michel Faber in his book Listen is that there are actually people who do not like music at all. Maybe the same goes for literature and long reads?

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I think maybe this is one reason why I like demos so much: no added cheese. An overly earnest or emotionally indulgent song can be great if the arrangement is suitably restrained. Dylan’s Blood in the Tracks is in many respects an emotionally excessive record, but the simplicity of the arrangements helps to make it not cringey but overwhelmingly powerful.

cheese – The Homebound Symphony by Alan Jacobs

Alan Jacobs’ critic of what constitutes as ‘cheese’ has me thinking about Michel Faber’s book Listen and how subjective music can be.

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What I’m loving here — of course! — is human effort, human exploration, figuring it out, trial and error, rough edges, things in progress: the rough ground. I’m basically repeating here the message of Nick Carr’s book The Glass Cage, and much of Matt Crawford’s work, and more than a few of my earlier essays, but: automation deskills. Art that hasn’t been taken through the long slow process of developmental demonstration — art that has shied from resistance and pursued “the smooth things” — will suffer, will settle for the predictable and palatable, will be boring. And the exercise of hard-won human skills is a good thing in itself, regardless of what “product” it leads to. But you all know that. Demos and sketches and architectural drawings are cool, is what I’m saying.

deskilling and demos – The Homebound Symphony by Alan Jacobs

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For Clark, “the Enlightenment” definitely happened — but it happened in the 19th and 20th centuries as a scholarly concept, not in the 18th century as an intellectual movement.

Clark’s Enlightenment – The Homebound Symphony by Alan Jacobs

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A couple of years ago I wrote about kinds of thinkers: Explainers, Illuminators, and Provokers. That classification was based on effect, that is, what those thinkers do for me as a reader. But you can also classify thinkers by their purposes. Thus my second tripartite scheme, thinker-writers who are

  • Diagnostic
  • Prescriptive
  • Therapeutic

Source: a taxonomy of writers: 2 – The Homebound Symphony

I am intrigued by Alan Jacobs’ taxonomy of the effect and purpose of writing. I wonder if this might be a useful means of categorisation when reflecting on what I have read and consumed. I feel that it would be interesting to consider a breakdown of content in this way.

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My attitude toward the works I have completed — at at this point that’s fifteen books and a couple of hundred essays and reviews — is that I have never finished anything to my own satisfaction, I have only been forced to abandon it. That’s why I am psychologically incapable of re-reading anything I’ve written. I may retrieve small chunks of it for one purpose or another, but I’ve never re-read anything of mine longer than a blog post. I learned early in my career that revisiting what I’ve published brings only regrets. So, you know, as the man said: “Fare forward, voyagers.”

Source: things made and in-the-making by Alan Jacobs

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The question is: How did we get here? How did we get to the point at which our Presidential candidates are actually less articulate than the average person? How did we manage to create a Presidential campaign season which resembles nothing so much as a pack of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights? 

I dunno. But I have one theory: To speak articulately, in an age in which one’s every utterance is recorded and analyzed, is to court refutation and correction. Perhaps this is evolutionarily adaptive behavior for politicians: nobody can call you out if you just hang the tattered washing on the line. 

Or maybe we’ve just ceased to care about anything being done well.

Source: articulation – The Homebound Symphony by Alan Jacobs

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“Chords of inquiry” is Joni’s term for sus chords — which “suspend” (i.e., don’t play) the third of a triad and instead go down to play the second or go up to play the fourth. When you remove that third the chord itself also becomes as it were suspended between major and minor. It is ambivalent; it moves us to inquiry into its character. 

Source: Court and Spark by Alan Jacobs

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It is pointless to insist that Democrats have not in fact unleashed weather weapons on Florida and the Carolinas; even more pointless to argue that if Democrats had such weather weapons they would have used them when Donald Trump was President in order to discredit him. Whether it is factually true that Democrats have and deploy weather weapons could not be more irrelevant; what matters is that this is the kind of thing we say about Democrats — so if you want to be part of this “we,” you’d better say it too. 

Source: Rorty’s bastard children – The Homebound Symphony by Alan Jacobs

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Alan Jacobs argues that the current situation, where we no longer speak in declaritive statements, but rather in language that creates solidarity, represents the bastard of Richard Rorty’s ideas on pragmatism, where the focus was on “building a new, more just, more generous society.”

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When I write, I’m not looking for hooks to current events — for me, that’s now a reason _not_ to write about something. I don’t promote my writing on social media, and I don’t ask anyone else to do so either. I’ve become the writerly version of the family in _The Quiet Place_, trying not to attract the attention of the uncomprehending and incomprehensible aliens.

Source: POS, not POSSE by Alan Jacobs

I appreciate your point about POSSE Alan. I remember the days when I would Tweet and Retweet my posts, in the hope that someone would read it, I guess. These days, I only POSSE when I feel it is applicable. For example, if I see something online, whether it be a blog (like yours) or a social media post, I will write on my site and syndicate if required. Most times it is not required, so I just leave it to chance. Although I sometimes fear I have become a recluse in the digital woods living in the small hut that is my own website, just talking to myself as the local habitat walks on past wondering what I am doing. I think it has been important in realising why I write here, first and fore mostly for me. If someone wants to follow, they can easily follow via RSS. It makes me wonder about the future of Eli Pariser’s ‘online parks’.

P.S. Austin Kleon told me you were here, blame him.

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Copy-editing is often invisible labor, thought by many to be grunt-work and not really intellectually demanding. This is unfair to every competent copy editor, but grossly unfair to Lauren, who in her thirty years at Princeton must have made hundreds of books far better than they would have been without her. She did an important job, and she did it better than I have ever done anything.

Source: behind the scenes – The Homebound Symphony by Alan Jacobs

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Alan Jacobs reflects upon the legacy of Lauren Lepow and the invisible labor associated with the roll of the copy editor. Austin Kleon recently reflected on paying ‘attention to the credits’:

If you want to be a better student of any art form, you have to pay attention to the credits! If you love an album, read the liner notes, notice the personnel involved in the recording, and seek out more of their work. (Reading the liner notes is increasingly impossible, as people do so much listening via streaming. Personally, I rely a lot on AllMusic.com or Discogs.) If you like the way a movie looks, watch the credits or check IMDB to find out more about the cinematographer. (Again, increasingly harder — Netflix skips credits by default these days, so you have to scramble for the remote at the end of a movie.) If you like the way a book is designed, check the acknowledgements or copyright page for the designer, the imprint, and the other personnel involved. This is one of the easiest ways to find more of what you like and discover what you don’t know you like yet.

Source: Collective creativity by Austin Kleon

After recently spending time with Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, I was left wondering who edited such a book and what other books they may have edited? I was also left thinking about editing a book like Anti-Oedipus?

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Academic literary criticism doesn’t do fun these days. It rarely has, of course, but now it has descended fully into an apparently permanent, and permanently dour, secular-Calvinist recitation about structures of oppression — and, when critics lift their heads long enough to notice that students are utterly bored by all this, have no better response than to say Neoliberalism made me do it. I am not sure academic literary criticism can ever come back from its moribund state, but its best chance of doing so would be to try to have some fun. Surprise itself. Play the Game. 

The Game by Alan Jacobs

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I have always disliked Substack, but I’m beginning to see why people move to Substack, which handles all these problems for them. I would just say to the proponents of the open web: If you want more people to move onto the open web, you have to be more patient with them than you’ve been with me, and you have to be willing to provide more basic instruction than, so far, you’ve been willing to provide to me.

Changes Ahead by Alan Jacobs

Alan Jacob’s reflections on living on the open web reminds me of Doug Belshaw’s recent remark about enshittification:

@mrkrndvs If there *is* a post-2023 AI era I’d wager there’s also one before it from about 2017-2022 which has something to do with enclosure, authoritarianism, and what Doctorow eventually identified as enshittification.

TL;DR: the time when it became all but impossible impossible to avoid cloud services and Big Tech

Bookmarked The Far Invisible (The Hedgehog Review)

Pynchon diagnosed our idolatry of the inanimate.

Alan Jacobs explores Thomas Pynchon’s work from a theological perspective. It was a reminder of how deep and complex Pynchon can be and made me wonder if I have really “let down my shields or opened the valve” to really let him in?

Continue reading “📑 The Far Invisible”

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a blog is probably the least cool way to communicate with people. It doesn’t have old-school cred or state-of-the-art shine; it falls into a kind of uncanny valley. To be a blogger is sort of like being that Japanese guy who makes paintings with Excel. But that suits me.

The Uncanny Valley of Blogging

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Alan Jacobs extends upon Elle Griffin’s discussion around the hard-truths associated with publishing and getting an advance:

Anyway, let’s imagine that I receive a $100,000 advance for a future book. Not impossible by any means. The thing is, and this is the point I think Griffin should lean on more heavily: “advance” is a misleading term. Advances don’t come all at once, they come in stages, either three or four of them, for instance:

  • $25,000 at contract signing;
  • $25,000 at submission of an acceptable (but still to be edited) manuscript;
  • $25,000 at publication of the hardcover;
  • $25,000 at publication of the paperback, or, if the publisher chooses not to make a paperback, one year after the publication of the hardcover.

(Sometimes the unit payments vary: for instance, for Breaking Bread with the Dead my agent negotiated bigger payouts for the first and third stages, smaller ones for the other two.) In a typical situation, after you sign the contract you might need two years to write the book. Supposing that your manuscript is pretty good and just needs editing, that process can take several months, and then getting the book ready for publication can take several more months. And the final payout will come a year after that initial publication. So while a $100,000 advance sounds like a lot of money, it often ends up being $25,000 a year; not nearly enough to live on. 

Advancing by Alan Jacobs

The more I read books about the music industry or interviews with artists, I feel like being a rock star or an author is not always as glamorous as it is sometimes portrayed as?

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You can assign reading to students; but if you don’t develop strategies for holding them accountable, then it doesn’t really matter what you assign. They’re Self-Deceived Rational Utility Maximizers after all, and if there’s one thing you can never change about them it’s that. 

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