Ironic.
(Originally published, or rather Poasted, in another place, May 7, 2026.)
Umberto Eco speaks of a descriptive semantics and syntactics but a more ambiguous or dialectical descriptive-prescriptive pragmatics, and extols this as part of "a return to the very roots of the philosophy of language" (The Limits of Interpretation, p. 213). In that spirit, let's talk about the Alanis Morissette song "Ironic," which has been a subject of philological interest for almost my entire conscious life. (I have two memories that I think might predate Jagged Little Pill's release.) The song describes a number of vaguely, or more than vaguely, disappointing or frustrating situations, all of which it wants the listener to believe are ironic--yet only a few of them seem to fit the conventional definitions of irony used by humorists, dramatists, and so on.
Notes on Northern European Protestantism in Current Year, Twenty Twentysix
Earlier this month I went on a trip that took me to England for about five days, then to Latvia, Finland, and Iceland for a day or two each. I was in England to go to Oxonmoot, which is a Tolkien thing; I was in Finland to visit an online friend, and in Latvia and Iceland getting to and from Finland. This gave me many opportunities to go into beautiful Protestant churches, and even more opportunities to look at them from the outside. Sometimes Catholic and Orthodox churches too; I’m looking forward to seeing how a film photo that I took in Riga, with a sort of herring bruschetta and a glass of kvass in the foreground and the spire of St. Jacob’s Cathedral in the background, came out. If it looks good enough, I’m going to title the photo “Daily Bread,” which is perhaps not exactly me at my most avant-garde.
An Open Letter to the London Review of Books
I did write this as a more “normal” letter to the editor, but evidently they were more interested in using their page space to let Emily Wilson nuke her own credibility for no good reason, so I'm putting it here instead. It's about Afghanistan.
Three Japanese Novels
In the past couple of months I have read three Japanese novels in translation, a statement about the recent past that in an earlier stage of my life would have carried effectively no independent semantic value—the way “the sun set in the west this evening” carries none—and that even now is not exactly remarkable. The one that I liked best was also the first one I read, The Emissary by Tawada Yōko. British readers got this book as The Last Children of Tokyo, but The Emissary has the virtue of actually attempting to translate the Japanese title, Kentoshi. The Emissary is a science fiction novel that at points reminds one of something like On the Beach or a hypothetical prequel to The Chrysalids, a quiet look at the day-to-day in a dying world, or at least a dying Japan. The tone is laid-back and almost cheerful, and one hopes that this book’s popularity in translation—Margaret Mitsutani won the National Book Award for it—finally killed off the wisdom once conventional in the West that Yokohoma Kaidashi Kikō’s pace, tone, and structure are impressive achievements. To be sure, The Emissary and Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō in fact both are impressive, I might even dare to say “great,” books, but not because those aspects are unique or even particularly unusual for Japanese science fiction of this school. Also like many of these kinds of books, The Emissary abruptly picks up narrative steam at the end, then abruptly stops. I still find this jarring whenever I encounter it, and it helps me to think of Japanese science fiction novels that do this as if the last few pages were ghostwritten by Neal Stephenson. Sometimes, as with Ōhara Mariko’s Hybrid Child, this doesn’t help, but that is because Hybrid Child does this for the first time a hundred pages or so in and then does it every twenty or thirty more pages until the book finally ends. Its page count is over twice The Emissary’s and it, in my opinion, sucks. The Emissary pointedly does not suck, which is why my mother, not much of a science fiction reader to say the least, read it on my recommendation and absolutely loved it as well.
Why Do We Write about Asia LIke This?
In the 22 January 2026 edition of the London Review of Books, to which a close friend got me a year’s subscription as a Christmas present, Tom Stevenson reviews three recent books dealing with Xi Jinping, le famuex dictateur chinois. I have not read any of the three books—The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping by Jospeh Torigian; The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China by Michael Sheridan; and On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism Is Shaping China and the World by Kevin Rudd—myself. Stevenson’s analyses of them seem evenhanded to me. I regret to say that he does not make The Red Emperor sound very good. From its title on down it comes across as a hurricane of Sinological clichés (“[t]he early party was merely a conquering army and ‘slave to the doctrines of a foreign ideology’”; “[i]n 1953, the year of Xi’s birth, many Chinese apparently ‘lived in a daze’ and ‘discontent ebbed and flowed’”). Why, one must ask, are we still writing about a rising great power like this?
Kristi “The Body” Noem
Kristi Noem, the United States Secretary of Homeland Security, has had so much plastic surgery and wears such heavy makeup that she no longer even looks like the same person as the Kristi Noem who first entered the House of Representatives fifteen years ago. She gets a lot of attacks and mockery for this, especially from the political left. I think there is a distinctly misogynistic tone to a lot of these attacks and a lot of this mockery, as is the case with other women in Trump’s orbit like Melania Trump and Karoline Leavitt. Yet the kind of hyperfemininity that people are reacting to when they launch sexist broadsides against the women of Trumpworld is off-putting for legitimate reasons. There is something Dorian Grayish about “Mar-a-Lago face,” in the sense that it is an active decision to physically, visually, outwardly represent the inward condition of the soul, only unlike Dorian Gray these people have to wear the portrait over and within their actual faces at all times.
Svengalis
I recently read the 1895 (give or take a year; I don’t feel like looking it up right now) novel Trilby, one of the most popular books of its time but one that is almost never read today. Even in 1946 George Orwell, who enjoyed the novel despite admitting that it is very bad, wrote a newspaper column lamenting that nobody was reading it any more. Orwell admitted this, though, in the context of also admitting the thing for which the novel is best-remembered, which is its intense antisemitism. Artistically, this isn’t even the biggest problem with the book, which is saying something. The book is by George du Maurier, grandfather of the much more famous Daphne; Daphne du Maurier, a writer I like very much, is more famous for good reason.
Description and Anti-prescription
Much of Umberto Eco’s book The Limits of Interpretation is preoccupied with the idea of “correct” and “incorrect” readings of texts. The various essays of his of which the book is a recension focus chiefly on this subject as well. As the title implies, Eco insists that, while there is no such thing as an obvious right reading, or interpretation, of a text, there may be any number of obvious wrong ones. This is an unfashionable idea in many circles and is possibly even more unfashionable when extended to all linguistic acts. I believe that we should, nevertheless, extend it to all linguistic acts, and not only to interpretation, but to use, mention, and citation as well. Here I will be using Eco’s book as a vade-mecum for my assessment of broader issues in the way we now understand language.
Bird of Paradise
Carole Lombard, the immensely popular comic actress who starred in movies like Nothing Sacred and To Be or Not to Be, died in January 1942 when a plane carrying her crashed into a mountain while returning to Hollywood from her native Indiana. She had been there selling war bonds, very successfully. America had entered World War II the previous month. Lombard died with her mother, to whom she was very close, and with the crew of the plane.
Calvin Coolidge and the Power of Kroll
This summer I’m working as a caretaker and docent at the Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site in Vermont; Coolidge is one of two American Presidents born in Vermont and is the one more closely associated with the state, although his political base was in Western Massachusetts (which is culturally, economically, and demographically tied to Vermont and has a closely linked political history). He was a small-government right-winger of the old school, albeit one of the least racist Presidents of the first half of the twentieth century; he is known as a man of few words, “Silent Cal,” although he was capable of holding forth at length in settings like formal speeches and the writing of his autobiography. The autobiography is very good; Coolidge is one of about half a dozen Presidents whom it’s possible to assess as a capital-W Writer, along with the Adamses, Jefferson, Lincoln, Grant, and arguably Obama. (Other countries have these as well; isn’t it interesting, and revealing, that although the Academie Francaise has had plenty of former Presidents of France on it, the two Writers who have held that office in living memory, De Gaulle and Mitterrand, were not among them?)
An Open Letter to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops on the Impending Return to Power of Donald Trump
“…I ask that the USCCB not become régime stooges like the bishops did with people like Franco in Spain and Duplessis in Québec…”
Femininomena
Dario Argento, the Italian horror director and father-in-law (sort of) to the late great Anthony Bourdain, is a very strange man who has had many contentious relationships and made a lot of enemies in Italian film culture over the decades. It’s probably a bad idea from a health-and-safety standpoint to let him keep making the kinds of movies he does, even though many of those movies are very good. Reading the things he said about his movies, at least in English translation, is almost as surreal and troubling an experience as watching them. It always reminds me a little of the commentary that Ikuhara Kunihiko did on individual episodes of Revolutionary Girl Utena (translated in the liner material for my Nozomi DVD box sets of that show), except Argento is at least trying to invite his interlocutor, his Model Reader, to understand the movies on a somewhat more conventional level, whereas Ikuhara is more interested in adding more of the same.
The Crabbing Excursion
The text of this brief essay, or autobiographical snippet, or “ars poetica” maybe, was composed mostly in late 2022, but it is in connection with a series of essays that I am currently in the process of writing and publishing elsewhere, first and foremost on the Catholic website Where Peter Is.
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When I first conceived of a series of moral, philsophical, and theological arguments that I have recently been developing, I decided that I could not credibly make these arguments if I were not making them from personal experience of having killed. Many of these arguments were to be phenomenological in nature and oriented towards compassion and attempts at empathy; this would have been much more difficult, if not impossible, had I not made that decision early on. Since I had no interest in committing murder, was not in a social or legal position to be sent to war, and would have be unable to write if I had successfully committed suicide, I decided to investigate taking nonhuman life via hunting or fishing.
Indigenous Religion in Popular Fiction: The Case of Yellowjackets
Note: This essay is, I hope, to be run eventually in some more “august” format such as a journal focusing on theology, on popular culture, or on both; however, the slow pace of publication in many such outlets, in combination with the fact that a third season of the show is currently in production, made me believe that time was of the essence when it came to getting this out in some form or another. Thus I am running it here first.—Saint John’s Eve 2024
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The wildly popular (in some circles) television show Yellowjackets, which so far has two seasons out of a planned five and airs on the American cable channel Showtime, tells the story of a turf war between a Francophone demon and an albino moose for the souls of a team of ambiguously lesbian soccer players.
I hope that the rhetorical strategies I am employing in saying so—attention-grabbing overstatement, deliberately strange wording of concepts that are in fact more ordinary, leading with an extremely confident assertion of a view my actual grounds for holding which are more tenuous—are clear to most readers. I also hope, however, to make it clear that this is a genuinely held interpretation of the program. Not only is it a genuinely held interpretation, it is an eminently defensible one based on Yellowjackets’s style and tone, narrative conceits, and genre antecedents.
Mr. Miyagi’s America
The aesthetic appeal of Japanese culture in the West has, I think, had at least as many points of continuity as points of rupture over the decades. Consistently Western observers of Japan have noted that it has an exceptionally beautiful visual and material culture, in ways that are difficult to define without lapsing into Orientalist cliché, regardless of what the observer thinks of the social and ideological aspects of Japanese life. Yet the way people in the West respond to this aesthetic appeal has obviously shifted over time; a Victorian artist’s model lounging in a kimono gives one a feeling of change-in-continuity vis-à-vis a cosplayer wearing a similar kimono at a late-2000s anime convention.
Another Autoflorilegium
The foregoing is a collection of my further thoughts on a variety of topics, mostly having to do with what gets broadly termed pop culture, and mostly from recent months. Some are gleaned from other platforms like fora or multiblogging websites, others from my personal notes about things that I watched or read or listened to or experienced. It is arranged by topic.
Greetings from the Peacock Room
Recently I undertook a solo road trip to Washington, DC, one that I think aided my understanding of the country, of many things of deep importance to me, and, least importantly, of myself.
The Princess with a Thousand Enemies
(This is (not) a music review.)
A new Taylor Swift album came out last month. This happens a lot, and people don’t shut up about it when it does. I am not going to shut up about it either.
The question isn’t whether the new album is good, exactly; that is never the point with these things, not when Swift is involved. She is a generational songwriting talent, and her musicianship is serviceable, but she is also prolific, with all that being prolific tends to imply for consistency. The Tortured Poets Department has a lot of pretty good songs on it (although they tend towards the “over-written”), a few standout ones, and one or two that are some of the most emotionally immature dreck you’ve ever heard in your life. The same, however, can be said about a lot of albums, by both Taylor Swift and other artists. What makes “TTPD” different? This question is more broadly social, cultural, and even economic and political in its way.
Public Figures with the Word “Courtney” in Their Names and Why They Are or Were Deep State Plants
John Courtney Murray, theologian: Allegedly a Cold Warrior, in fact subordinated the Church to DEEP STATE THREE-LETTER-AGENCY WOKE COMMUNISM by doing (((religious liberty))) at Vatican II.
Things That God Created to Train the Faithful: A Partial List
I write this from a more or less okay hotel lobby computer in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, dashed off in a slapdash fashion. It is my second Dune-inspired not-quite-essay, after the wildly successful (in some, extremely narrow, circles, which I suppose robs the expression “wildly successful” of most or all of its force) “Who Said It: God-Emperor Leto II or Greta Thunberg?” The original saying, attributed by noted pro-life femcel Irulan Corrino to (who else?) Muad’dib, is, of course, “God created Arrakis to train the faithful.” To Irulan’s immortalization of her husband’s observation, I add: