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.
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.
Some Aphorisms
Massachusetts politics from the beginning has drunk deep of the belief that an objective moral law exists and that Massachusetts voters, perhaps only Massachusetts voters, can be trusted consistently to know what it is. It is only the contents of that moral law that, to the minds of the state’s body politic, have changed.
One Thesis on a Morality of Art
A principle that occurs to me when it comes to “separating art from the artist,” a concept and verbal formula that I think is stupid, misleading, and mendacious to begin with, is that on top of everything else it frankly depends upon the quality of the art. If we are going to use flippant aesthetic terminology in order to have half-baked discussions of morals, it ought to be used in reference to aesthetic and moral ideas that are themselves at least vaguely proportional in terms of scale.
Unkillable Grief Monsters
Of late I have been getting very into the television show Yellowjackets, and also into the Locked Tomb books by Tamsyn Muir. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that I have been into the books for a while and have only recently discovered the program, but I am currently getting similar things out of them. Both of these are series that assess grief very openly and in great emotional and narrative detail. The overtly fantastical setting of The Locked Tomb is built, cosmologically, on grief (for loved ones, for the natural world, for human societies), and in the superficially more normal but still demon-haunted world of Yellowjackets grief is the only thing that gives the relationships between some of the characters their longevity and meaning.
“Anxious Not to Appear Unhappy”; or, Why Mansfield Park Is the Austen Novel One Never Knew One Needed
So-called “classic” art and literature comes into and goes out of fashion just as do popular culture trends. For most of the twentieth century Edward Elgar was considered a fundamentally unserious composer; today he has reentered the classical concert repertoire. Johann Sebastian Bach, unbelievably, went through the same rehabilitation in the early nineteenth century. Renaissance castigation of High Medieval art has gradually over the past several centuries given way to appreciation of that art’s numinous aspects. Post-World War II horror at Victorian architecture and interior design, as seen for instance in Shirley Jackson’s novels, seems itself quaint and dated today. In literature, too, we see such long-term trends. To the end of understanding why certain books spend decades or centuries in or out of favor, I recently read the Jane Austen novel Mansfield Park. For many years Mansfield Park was considered a contender for Austen’s best novel; today it is widely seen as her worst.
Repent at Leisure
With neither joy nor penitence
In these lethargic times, the one
And only laugh that still makes sense
Comes from a grinning skeleton.
—Paul Verlaine, translated by Norman R. Shapiro
Patriots in Control
A specter is haunting the American left, the specter of “America Bad” thinking—not “America Bad” in the sense that America is flawed and most Americans are not willing enough to recognize those flaws, but “America Bad” in the sense that we are both the villain and the main character of current world history, a sort of Walter White or Patrick Bateman of the international arena. This is the tendency that Jeane Kirkpatrick attributed to the “blame America first crowd”—unhelpfully, because Jeane Kirkpatrick did not actually know who was and wasn’t in the “blame America first crowd,” or, if she did, she pretended not to for the sake of the cheap seats.
Trahison des Mémoires
In my master’s thesis, which was written in late 2016 into early 2017 and was in the field of theology, I coined an expression called trahison des mémoires, “treason of memories.” It was a snowclone of trahison des clercs, the concept of disloyalty to the principles of serious thought by a society’s intellectual or cultured classes. With trahison des mémoires, my idea is that memory, especially publicly-held memory like the institutional memory of a country or a religion, can be twisted and weaponized in ways that do great harm to the people holding onto the memory. I was not so much interested in political or sociological harm—looking at cultural memory through that framework is old hat—as in emotional and interpersonal harm. In the thesis I introduced this concept as part of a discussion of (and I am both dating myself and outing myself as an irremediable dweeb here) the 2001 anime Noir, one of whose main characters is trying to piece together the circumstances of her parents’ murders. When she finally does remember—or, in point of fact, when she finally is provided with other people’s memories concerning—the killings, she wishes she hadn’t.