This popped up on reddit with the title “This man started with $9,000 and a pile of dirt. 6 weeks later, he built this dream house.” Not mentioned in that title were the free land, complete lack of plumbing, no heating due to the mild climate, and no building codes to follow. Again, housing this cheap involves major trade offs and lifestyle decisions. In this case the builder made those trade offs consciously and carefully, and the result is beautiful.
Upon reflection, I think I may have been a bit pedantic by focusing on the “tokens and doodads” that characterise most of Tolkien’s descriptions of Hobbit gifting habits. Milbank probably did not mean to ignore this aspect of Hobbit society, but rather to illustrate that Hobbit attitudes about wealth and generosity did in fact scale up quite happily when faced with large sums of money.
If this is the case, and Bilbo’s use of the dragon-hoard was typical rather than exceptional, then we can plausibly suppose Tolkien envisioned a gifting economy among Hobbits that extended a great deal further than party trinkets.
“So it is with words. The worth of each lies in the ends to which it is put. Tie your string well, or ill, and its length counts for naught. Make your point well with short words, and you will have no use for long ones. Make it not so well, and you will be glad that you kept them crisp. So, by God, will those who have to read you.”
My flight home yesterday was canceled, so I took advantage of the enforced downtime to implement something new. You can now subscribe to The Local Yarn by email.
This is a nice & easy way of getting new writings and updates, but there’s an additional important part about this: the email newsletter will include new comments as well as new posts. I’m trying to follow through with the concept of comments as “long term notes”, and specifically with holding up my end of the bargain I make with commenters: I subject new comments to varying levels of heavy scrutiny, but if your comment is published it gets nearly equal status with the original post. I’ve already implemented that idea into the visual presentation of comments, now I’m making good on it from the publishing side as well.
One of my goals for TLY is that good posts will actually get better over time by attracting high-quality comments. The challenge is that, on any site, good posts tend to drop out of view with the passing of time. In this default environment, commenters have very little incentive to add a note to an older post because almost no one would see it.
Email subscriptions are one of my ideas for closing this feedback loop. Having a community of subscribers will make it attractive to contribute to, and easy to enjoy, all the new writing on TLY. As gardener-in-chief, I’ll be doing my part to cycle through and renew older writings with comments of my own, as well as adding new writing.
On the subscriptions page, you’ll see that I also implemented an RSS feed for new comments in addition to the existing one for new posts. If you prefer the RSS route, you can get all the same functionality that way. Not as many people use RSS these days, though, so having the email subscription option ensures a low-friction way for both comments and posts to be delivered to as many readers as possible.
As of early 2014, the Bitcoin blockchain protocol (not the currency itself) seems to be the most promising possibility as a transactional replacement for HTTP. If this pans out, the client/server paradigm in the example above will soon become quaintly outmoded.
The thought behind my wish for a treatment of postmodernity was simple. If modernity involved adopting “an ethic of epistemic humility”, surely post-modernity vastly exceeds it in that regard? Does Gobry see postmodernism’s rejection of all universal-truth narratives as extensions of modernism’s project against idolatry? If epistemic humility is fundamentally anti-idolatry, surely it should be taken as far as it can go?
Postmodernity may be hard to define but surely whatever it has to say about human limitedness is at least as near the surface as what Gobry has extracted from modernity.
It's hard to say which is encroaching at this point,
the water upon the ice, or the ice upon the water.
But they do not encroach — they are the same thing.
Surely one advances and the other recedes?
Surely an angel touches the waters till they are troubled?
No such luck: it all comes from up here and goes out here,
Some of it stays for awhile. Next era things will be different, maybe.
Well we’ve had another drop in the Dean Allen roller coaster — news hit yesterday morning that TextDrive is shutting down on March 14.
I have a quick reference for server migrations which I polished up from my scattered notes last night. If, like much of the TextDrive diaspora, you still need to pack and move, hopefully it will be of use to you in the next ten days.
Please feel free to contact me with additions or corrections, or use it to publish your own version.
I’ve been watching for it, but somehow I didn’t notice Frank Chimero’s new personal site design until today. The timing is good though, because today I read where he says this:
…Choosing to follow the path that was fun and educational.
That last one was a real blessing, the kind of insight you can ride out for the rest of your life. My little conundrum of a website stopped being a grand declaration of identity and purpose, and started being an interesting little lab to teach myself…
That, I think, is the kind of ethos towards which Dean’s web publishing endeavors attracted us, however misbegotten they turned out in the end. Having to migrate your stuff requires a skill set that’s often inelegant and orthogonal to the stuff we really get our kicks from, but for me it’s been tremendously empowering and educational. In whatever little way I can I’d like to help others along that road.
(But Frank, do yourself and everyone a favour and don’t start a hosting company.)
Smike, the worthless delinquent rebel of Dotheboys Hall, whose poor character required constant physical discipline
At the end of Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby, when the Squeers family’s abusive school for boys is finally broken up, there follows this very sad scene:
For some days afterwards, the neighbouring country was overrun with boys… There were a few timid young children, who, miserable as they had been, and many as were the tears they had shed in the wretched school, still knew no other home, and had formed for it a sort of attachment, which made them weep when the bolder spirits fled, and cling to it as a refuge. Of these, some were found crying under hedges and in such places, frightened at the solitude. One had a dead bird in a little cage; he had wandered nearly twenty miles, and when his poor favourite died, lost courage, and lay down beside him. Another was discovered in a yard hard by the school, sleeping with a dog, who bit at those who came to remove him, and licked the sleeping child’s pale face.
This is a good picture of what happens to those in a cult1 when it comes crashing down around them. I see iterations of these scenes playing out all around me, and to some degree within myself, amid the breaking-up of the particular Christian-flavoured fringe in which my wife and I grew up.
To be clear, there are two senses in which a fringe like IBLP can be said to resemble Dotheboys Hall: the theological/philisophical sense first — how does the cult paint the world to its believers? — and secondly, the personally-abusive sense: the radical and repugnant harms practised upon the weak by authority figures. In many families, such as my own, there was comparatively little to no personal abuse. Other families had it much worse in that regard.
But we all experienced the effects of a false, shallow understanding of God, and of the world; and this is where it gets tough to write or talk productively. Because the whole problem with institutionalized ignorance is that even when you break free of it, you have no sound baseline to return to, or to contrast it with; you simply have nothing.
The Village is another good picture of what I’m talking about (in fact, probably a better one, since most of the parents aren’t depicted as Squeersian caricatures of evil). It may not have been a critical success2, but when we saw it, it felt personal; I still can’t be sure M. Night Shyamalan did not write it specifically for us and about us. Supposing there had been a sequel, Ivy Walker’s an escaped villager’s3 life would in many ways resemble ours. She would now, for example, see the colour red every day — in decorations, in people’s clothing — and in order to function, she would have to overcome a lifetime of being conditioned to think that red itself is sinful and would attract evil. If she kept contact with any of her old set, she would know that they were all going through the same process at wildly different rates. There would be a lot of additional social calculus around their reactions to the colour red, and any possible effects on her relationships with each of them.
Most of the headlines now flying around about our particular situation are about personal abuse of various kinds, and thosestories need to be told. But far more horrifying to me — and perhaps just as common, if not more so — is the practice of teaching a child a thing is morally wrong when it isn’t. It may be done out of honorable motives at least as often as out of selfishness, but either way, this is how you mess a person up. This is how you retard their ability to give and receive love, and their capacity to relate to other people, in such a way that, even if they someday realize it has happened, they will spend decades puzzling it out.
Anyhow, when the institution comes crashing down, you see this radical disorientation that manifests any number of ways. If your experience was more painful, you might spend an inordinate amount of time and energy criticizing or mocking the old regime, which is sad in its way, but understandable and even necessary.
I left it behind (in terms of my theology and politics) several years ago, more because I was attracted to reality than because of any loathing for my past. For some time I imagined I was enlightened or intelligent for having left it all behind; but at last, it turns out I’m neither. I’m just an ignorant wanderer. I’m like the boy in the paragraph above, who wandered twenty miles, carrying a cage with the dead bird of my theodicy still flopping about inside. Like any lost child, I have a lot to learn, but the first thing is to overcome my intense cynicism and mistrust of those who might be able to teach me.
They were taken aback, and some other stragglers were recovered, but by degrees they were claimed, or lost again; and in course of time, Dotheboys Hall and its last breaking-up began to be forgotten by the neighbours, or to be only spoken of as amongst the things that had been.
Dotheboys Hall makes an excellent picture of a cult. As headmaster, Squeers sets himself up not as a simple administrator, but as a spiritual authority, propping up his brutality with moral maxims and high-minded principles. He uses this authority to set severe limits on the physical and mental range of his students’ world, and within those limits erects a flimsy ethical structure that just so happens to align very well with his business goals. That is what I believe we mean by the word “cult”, no matter what means are employed or how unevenly their effects are felt.↩
Roger Ebert’s well-known hatred of The Village is multifaceted, but it seems centered around the twist being too mundane, too obvious: “To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It’s a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream.” It’s a valid opinion, but what it demonstrates to me is that Ebert, happily, did not grow up in a cult. Of course the premise and the twist are mundane for a normal person. For the ex-cult member, though, they are powerful — not because the ending is a surprise, but because they match our experience so frightfully well.↩
Thanks to Anna for reminding me that Ivy Walker was blind — she wouldn’t be able to notice red or any other colour.↩
There’s a staunch and traditional adversity from academia-at-large (though by no means from every constituent) when it comes to commercialization of the humanities.
The behavior is odd at best, edging dangerously toward self-defeating because while the academy praises the works they hold so dear for their romanticism, for no one assumes Romeo and Juliet to be a realistic telling of Teenage Love, the academy fears romanticism of itself. I think this largely stems from a long-standing feeling of marginalization, and to be romanticized would mean being taken less seriously.
But you hit it on the head, when you say that this ad, and Dead Poets Society, are fantastic catalysts for new blood and renewed interest in art and humanities because as humans, we like to chase the romance. And a few who do will find the reality to be different, but that much more fulfilling. And some will find the reality different, and be disillusioned. And that’s okay, because the rigor of academic reality need not be for everyone. Sometimes the chase alone is enough.
The world needs the romance. The world needs it because it’s what makes us human.
