Monday Dribs and Drabs
[Catedral de Morelia, San Salvador. First construction in 1660, completed 1744]
How reporting works in the mainstream media:
A story comes in illustrating the ongoing racism of American society.
What do you do?
Obviously, you avidly report on it, over and over again from every angle. Make sure especially to focus blame on anyone else who didn’t report on it quickly and avidly enough.
Later, evidence comes in that the story you were just reporting over and over again is not true.
What do you do?
Obviously, you do not focus any attention whatsoever on possible repercussions for the individual who fabricated the story—and thereby assaulted the reputations of involved individuals and institutions—and instead insinuate that those investigating parties who found it to be untrue are probably not entirely trustworthy. Also keep to the line that we still don’t know what really happened, so the original story just might still be true, even though zero evidence to corroborate the original claims has appeared despite massive media focus on the story. (Sure, “…what the school called “an extensive review” was carried out, but we all know what that likely means coming from an institution like this one, don’t we now, nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more?).
More importantly, you never, ever, ever issue a retraction of the original story in its many versions, and you leave all of those up on your webpage for people to find later in their search for evidence of how overwhelmingly racist American society is.
Because that’s how much you care about the truth.
In the first paragraphs of his Life of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell laments that Johnson did not write his own autobiography. The man had expressed the view that “every man’s life may be best written by himself,” but “he never had persevering diligence enough to form [the bits and pieces of recollection on his own life that he wrote] into a regular composition.” Indeed, most of what he had written “was consigned by him to the flames, a few days before his death.”
I sometimes try to reckon the quantity of writing that has met with this fate: Impartially and imperfectly undertaken because of lack of time or energy on the part of the writer, and so existing only in fleeting sketches and fragments, or reduced to dust and ash by human action or the process of time and so no longer existing at all.
What makes us at all certain that the best writing has not met with some such destiny, and that what we have is more than a poor and partial substitute for all that vast sea of writing that is now only an absence?
High school seniors in 2022 have lowest ACT scores in more than three decades.
The reporters do all they can to blame the pandemic, which doubtless did have an effect, and school shootings (less clear how they’re reasoning that this can have generalized effects on test scores), but right there in the article is the fact that scores were down before the COVID-19 years.
My child is in the process of taking standardized tests, so I’ve had a recent look at some of the popular study materials for the test. In the Princeton Review SAT prep book for 2022, there is a section in the foreword that straightforwardly tells students that their SAT scores don’t really tell us anything about their intelligence or their college readiness, and in fact that it’s “pretty poor” about telling us anything useful about students or their abilities.
An odd set of claims in a book about how to study for the test. Here’s the relevant section:
It is of course true that such tests do not tell us everything we might want to know about test-takers. But if we really believed they told us so little, why on earth would we still be administering them?
One cannot but suspect that something suspicious is going on here.
How much of the lowered performance of students on standardized tests is about our constantly reminding them that standardized tests are not really testing anything meaningful and that they are in fact complicit with the old reactionary racist and misogynist “structures” that are always and everywhere keeping some students down? Will anyone look into that question at any point?
Written almost a decade ago while riding the #10 metro line in Paris:
Leaning into the curve The acceleration and the stop I waver unsteady On a knife’s edge All in the balance
The relationship between popular and high culture is ever-evolving. I once taught a course on this subject, but it’s been a while, and I know almost nothing about American popular culture over the last 20 years or so, so cannot speak to what that relationship looks like today except very anecdotally.
But regarding the relationship of popular and higher culture in my youth I can say more. Just two small things:
1) The first time I was exposed to elements of Hamlet and to melodies of arias from Bizet’s Carmen including the Habanera and the Toreador Song, plus a bit from The Tales of Hoffman, was in an episode of Gilligan’s Island that I probably saw in the 3rd or 4th grade; and
2) I first heard Mussorgsky, Janáček, and Bartók via Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Every time I hear Janáček’s “Sinfonietta,” I get the same big grin on my face I got the first time as, discerning the melody in an instant, I automatically started air-drumming Carl Palmer’s part.
Pierre Hadot: “In the last analysis, we can scarcely talk about what is most important.”
Misconceptions and oversimplifications about the relationship between science and religion are commonplace in this culture, showing up even in textbooks.
One of the best examples is the story of Galileo’s conflict with the Church. He is understood in the popular imagination as a scientific martyr to intolerant and anti-scientific faith.
The story is quite more complicated than that.
Galileo was given permission by the Pope to write about the Copernican sun-centered view of astronomy, so long as he didn't give away his support for it, i.e., he could explain and describe it without saying it was right. He then wrote a book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, that consists of a discussion between a character who lays out the Copernican view and another who describes the Ptolemaic geocentric view.
He gave the first character the name of one of his close friends, which fairly obviously indicated his closeness to that position. The Pope required him to insert a sentence saying that the Copernican view was only hypothesis. Galileo acquiesced, but he put the phrase in the mouth of the advocate for the Ptolemaic view. This was a character he named Simplicio, implying the character and the Pope who required him to insert this bit into the book were simpletons.
How could he have imagined he was going to get away with that kind of provocation?
The Inquisition then condemned him to life imprisonment, which ended up being lightened to confinement in his own home. When he was told to recant from his position on the Earth rotating around the Sun, Galileo never gave the “And yet it moves” reply to the Inquisition that is everywhere in legend and historical sources that should know better. If he had done this, the Inquisition almost certainly would have punished him far more severely.
And all the evidence suggests that if he'd toned it down just a wee bit, instead of doing just about everything he could to antagonize the Pope, he might have escaped trouble altogether, as he had significant support among the Jesuits in Rome and elsewhere.
Another thing: Giordano Bruno was not burned at the stake for supporting Copernicus, as is commonly believed. He got into trouble for his involvement with Hermetism, a religious heresy.
Upshot: The Church was not nearly as enthusiastic about finding and burning Copernicans as much popular history would have us believe.
Hi all,
I’ve been at this project now for more than six months. Hardly seems possible, but I just checked the calendar and I believe that is the right math.
So, this is a note to you: Thank you.
I’m tremendously flattered by your interest in what I have to say about life, art, politics, death and I’m grateful that you read my ramblings. Every writer desires to be read (Lovecraft’s letter accompanying his submission to an editor notwithstanding) and thus owes a debt that cannot really be repaid to readers, however much the writer sometimes pretends not to recognize this (it’s part of the persona, you see…).
So that’s something I want to be sure to say and say again: THANK YOU.
Now, the other reason for this little note.
I finally got around to doing the technical stuff necessary to provide a paid subscription option.
What does a paid option mean?
It means it’s an option. At present, everything on this account remains open to all subscribers, paid or free. Even if I move at some currently unforeseen point to separating material here into paid and unpaid categories, I still plan to always make the great bulk of it available when it’s produced without cost to everyone interested in seeing it. I’m tremendously appreciative that you read this site and want to do everything I can to ensure you continue to be interested in doing so.
I am hopeful though, and I make so bold as to ask, that if you have a few extra dollars rattling around, you’ll consider kicking some of them my way to help make it more feasible for me to spend more time on this project.
Inevitably, and despite my deepest feelings about writing, I think at least a bit about possible material returns when I am allocating time to writing projects. I have two kids who eat and are in constant need of new clothes and a house in which things are constantly breaking down. Add to that the fact that, to my great regret, I do not have infinite time to dedicate to writing, and it emerges necessarily that sometimes the possibility of writing things for pay trumps writing things here. This is so even though I much prefer writing here precisely because it allows me more freedom to engage with the topics I find most interesting.
If I can generate some paid subscriptions, then, I can spend more time doing this writing, the writing I most care about, and the writing that I hope you find valuable. If I generate enough, I may even finally find enough time and energy to get around to dipping my toes into Podcast World, which is professionally speaking probably the last thing I should do, given my tendency to say things that get me into trouble, but YOLO, as I’ve heard they say.
I hope you’ll consider a paid subscription and, whatever your decision on that, I look forward to writing more for you as All Things Rhapsodical Phase II gets underway. Should you decide to “go paid,” you need only click the button below and it should lead you in the right direction.
Cheers, and thanks again! And very special thanks to those who have already switched to a paid subscription!
ATR