Juxtaposition

Posted on by albrooke

Having just finished Doris Kearns Goodwin’s masterful An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s (2024), I came across an article by Lisa Russ Spaar. “Maximalisma,” The American Scholar (May 16, 2025) [link].

Start with the book. The late Dick Goodwin and Doris Kearns Goodwin were each important people in the lives of JFK, LBJ and RFK before they married. They were Zelig-like in their ability to be in the background of truly important events. The premise/impetus for the book was that Dick Goodwin saved everything from drafts of presidential speeches to the shattered nightstick he picked up in a Chicago hotel (after Eugene McCarthy talked the police out of punishing the college students they had incorrectly thought had pelted them with debris). He kept every kind of paper and memento in 100s of banker’s boxes. With the Goodwins’ recollections of events and DKG’s historical research, they went box-by-box through the Sixties. After his death in 2018, DKG wrote this amazing book about the time, their times, and their day-by-day journey through the boxes. This book was wonderful.

Then today Austin Kleon Alan Jacobs Lore Wilbert Sarah Rowell Nate Silver Neil Paine Joe Posnanski Andrew Sullivan Robin Sloan, no, Cherie Harder [link] sent out a link to the article. It was an excellent insight in to the mind and attic of the person who saves just a little too much. Spaar says:

  • I have to admit, at 68, that all of these “things” comfort and inspire me no less than my college dorm room décor helped me, 50 years ago, feel like the person I wanted to be. At the same time, however—perhaps because I’m closer to Erikson’s stage eight now—I do worry about those who will have to make their way through all of this meaningful-to-me matter if I don’t do it first. It’s not so much that I don’t want my grown children (or worse, my grandchildren) to come upon that small batch of youthful Polaroids (where are they?). Or to plumb the histrionic depths of my teenage journals. Or to dig out, with disbelief, that long-unused bit of lingerie from the bottom of a drawer. It’s that I feel a responsibility, after a lifetime of gathering, to cull those personal treasures.

Or, hey, maybe she should write a book! Yes, THAT’s why I am saving all this stuff!

Read, Feel, Think

Posted on by albrooke

Three great reads:

A very well-written piece on the value of (well-written) children’s literature by Lindsey Cornett, “The Gospel According to Charlotte’s Web” The Conversational Life (May 9, 2025) [link].

I particularly like:

  • But I love Charlotte’s Web most of all because it paints such a beautiful picture of the kingdom of God. When children’s literature is discussed in Christian circles, books like The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe often dominate the conversation, perhaps because we know so much about the faith of the author. I don’t know if E.B. White was a person of faith, but I do know that Charlotte’s Web portrays a counter-cultural way of living and honoring one another, of making our world more whole. On Zuckerman’s farm, it is the despised, the lowly, the feared—the rat, the pig, the spider—who are best able to see each creature for the gift they are and to create a home where all are seen and cared for. 

You will probably come out of this with a list of books to reread that you haven’t picked up in some time (or ever).

The great sportswriter, Joe Posnanski (joeblogs.com), is so prolific he cannot “stay in his lane.”

It is often quite magical when he veers off into other topics. This week he and his wife have a daughter graduating from college. His stories about taking Elizabeth to Harry Potter World (“Katie the Prefect” [link]) or taking her to Hamilton (“The Story of Tonight” [link]) will make you mist up. Today’s offering was about taking her to see Bruce Springsteen (“No Retreat, Baby” [link]). (If you don’t care for the sports, just scroll down.)

The baseball writing is pretty great, too (even though Joe is no fan of the Yankees).

Here’s something that will make you think! Mary Harrington, “The Female Gaze” Reactionary Feminist (May 2, 2025) [link]. (Don’t worry, you don’t have to agree with everything — that’s the thinking part.)

Election musings

Posted on by albrooke

Via Lore Ferguson Wilbert (sayable.com) [link], Henri J.M. Nouwen’s thoughts seem relevant:

  • “Hope is not dependent on peace in the land, justice in the world, and success in the business. Hope is willing to leave unanswered questions unanswered and unknown futures unknown. Hope makes you see God’s guiding hand not only in the gentle and pleasant moments but also in the shadows of disappointment and darkness. No one can truly say with certainty where he or she will be ten or twenty years from now. You do not know if you will be free or in captivity, if you will be honored or despised, if you will have many friends or few, if you will be liked or rejected. But when you hold lightly these dreams and fears, you can be open to receive every day as a new day and to live your life as a unique expression of God’s love for humankind. There is an old expression that says, “As long as there is life there is hope.” As Christians we also say, “As long as there is hope there is life.”

Via Alan Jacobs and The Hedgehog Review, Joan Didion’s words “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” might be applicable, but probably not the way we thought when first we read them:

  • That is, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live” because there is no story outside of our minds: “We live entirely . . . by the imposition of a narrative line on disparate images” (emphasis mine). Our endless telling of stories is, then, the product not of delight but of despair: of our inability to face the chaos of what is. If people knew the context of the sentence, they wouldn’t be putting it on T-shirts. Instead, they’d be driven to therapy, to alcohol, or to church.

Alan Jacobs, “Stories to Live By,” The Hedgehog Review (Nov. 4, 2024) [link].

But there is hope and God is still on his throne, though (like Job), we often aren’t aware of what is going on behind the scenes.

The Internal Chronology of The Goldfinch

Posted on by albrooke

We start with the tentative premise that the novel’s internal timeline makes sense. The premise may be proven wrong, but there’s no point in fussing over a novel’s chronology if you begin by assuming it doesn’t work. You can skip directly to the point where you excoriate the sloppy author and editors without trying to see whether the author might have been careful.

The first good clue to the chronology comes on p. 8, where we read that the explosion in the Met:

  • [It] happened in New York, April 10th, fourteen years ago. (Even my hand balks at the date; I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail.)

Theo is writing in Amsterdam just prior to Christmas fourteen years after the explosion. Since April to December is eight months, we can hold open the possibilities that he is recollecting this thirteen years and eight months or fourteen years and eight months later.

The next good clue is that the Met explosion happens after 2001, based on the references to “Osama bin Laden” (p. 58) and the “shoe bomber” (p. 246). While some people knew of Osama before 2001, the shoe bomber’s attempt happened in December 2001.

But that is actually way too early, because by the time Theo arrives at the Barbours’ later that week after the explosion, there is a reference to “Andy’s iPhone” (p. 139). The iPhone was introduced in January 2007 and first sold in June of that year. Even a wealthy child in New York might not have gotten his first iPhone until months later. The first April that Andy could have an iPhone would be April 2008.

We also know that the day of the week that the explosion happened was Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, since Theo laments

  • If only I could go back and change what had happened, keep it from happening somehow. Why hadn’t I insisted we get breakfast instead of going to the museum? Why hadn’t Mr. Beeman asked us to come in on Tuesday, or Thursday?

p. 87. We need a year in which April 10 was a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, so the explosion happened in 2002, 2006, 2009, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019, or 2020.

We get another important clue to the timeline on p. 713:

  • “We close early today. Christmas Eve, you know? And we’re gone tomorrow, and the weekend. But we’ll be open again at eight-thirty a.m. on the Monday after Christmas.” “Monday?”  . . .  “That’s right. You get it all together by Monday the twenty-eighth. And then, yes, once the application is in we’ll process it for you as quickly as we can—sorry, will you excuse me a second?” Click.

From 2015 to 2030, there are only three December 28s that fall on a Monday – 2015, 2020 and 2026.

That means we should be looking at

  • Wednesday, 04/10/2002 + 13 years, 8 months, 18 days  = Monday, 12/28/2015
  • Monday, 04/10/2006 + 14 years, 8 months, 18 days = Monday, 12/28/2020
  • Wednesday, 04/10/2013 + 13 years, 8 months, 18 days = Monday, 12/28/2026

We know that the first two are too early, because of the iPhone issue. If Tartt considered such things carefully, only December 2026 works for her chronology.

So, tentatively, the Met explosion occurred on Wednesday, April 10, 2013 and Theo’s trip to Amsterdam must have occurred right before Christmas 2026.

That fits the reference to Osama, the shoe bomber, and the iPhone. What about the many other cultural references that Tartt works in? [1] Are there any true inconsistencies?

It is worth remembering that the book was published in 2013, with a release date of October 22, 2013. See https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/donna-tartt/the-goldfinch/ We can’t fault Tartt for failures of prognostication – she could only have known of events prior to publication. Complaints about the prevalence of newspapers and Blackberries during the novel’s later chapters aren’t her mistakes, any more than Arthur Clarke and Stanley Kubrick should have been held responsible for proposing that Pan Am would be a thriving space tourism business in 2001.

[1] One difficult piece of evidence is on page 743, Boris’ reference to “Everyone loves him—like that man who landed the plane in the river a few years back and saved everyone, remember him?” which is a clear reference to Jan. 15, 2009, when Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger makes an emergency landing in the Hudson River after his airliner strikes a flock of birds. That might be a few years ago from the perspective of Tartt, but it is 18 years ago from Boris’ viewpoint.

Well worth your time . . . .

Posted on by albrooke

Jake Meador provides a very nice analysis of Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow, a must-read for anyone who loves that novel, though if you haven’t read it, there are many spoilers:

  • In this sense, Jayber Crow is a story of how one man learned to love. That, of course, sounds syrupy and sentimental to us moderns who have grown up on hallmark cards and made-for-TV movies. But it is the manner of the learning that is important. The love Jayber learns to practice is an extremely physical love grounded in practical acts of devotion that sometimes by their very nature require that he not do things he deeply desires to do.

“The Ethics of Jayber Crow,” The Rabbit Room (Jan. 4, 2024) [link].

Harrison Scott Key writes a Christmas memory unlike any other you will ever find: “I have enjoyed many happy Christmases and plenty of disappointing ones, like the one I spent eating alone at a Waffle House due to an ice storm, or the Christmas my father accused all the unmarried relatives of being gay. But of all the sad Yuletides of my life, the one I spent guarding $100,000 worth of explosives on the surface of the moon tops the list. The year was 1996. . . . ”Christmas on the Moon,” Longreads (Dec. 6, 2023) [link].

Matthew T. Martens writes about the American criminal justice system: “Since the advent of forensic DNA technology in 1989, 3,284 people have been exonerated after having been convicted of crimes. These aren’t cases of people who later got off on legal technicalities. These are people who did not commit the crimes but collectively spent more than 29,000 years in prison before their innocence was discovered. . . .” Martens, who has worked as both a prosecutor and defense attorney, is no stranger to the criminal justice system, and does not want to reform it, but rather to re-initialize (my word) it to more closely match its original form. “3 Things that Must Change in the American Justice System,” Crossway (Nov. 6, 2023) [link].

Jonathan Rogers teaches writing and here gives some thoughtful advice about drafts and efficiency: “It’s an inefficient process. I’m afraid you’re just going to have to get used to inefficiency.” “The Third Pancake,” The Habit Weekly (Nov. 7, 2023) [link].

Waiting

Posted on by albrooke

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (2013).

A rich tapestry of a novel which moves from childhood tragedy to misdemeanors and felonies, art and antiques. Some most memorable secondary characters, especially Hobie and Boris.

One of my “top fifty” because of passages like these:

  • Things would have turned out better if she had lived. As it was, she died when I was a kid; and though everything that’s happened to me since is thoroughly my own fault, still when I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life. p. 7.
  • . . . I was worried that my exuberant drug use had damaged my brain and my nervous system and maybe even my soul in some irreparable and perhaps not readily apparent way. p. 380.
  • And yet I was grateful for the work because it kept me too mentally bludgeoned to think. The shame that tormented me was all the more corrosive for having no clear origin: I didn’t know why I felt so tainted, and worthless, and wrong — only that I did, and whenever I looked up from my books I was swamped by slimy waters rushing in from all sides. p. 392.
  • It didn’t occur to me then, though it certainly does now, that it was years since I’d roused myself from my stupor of misery and self-absorption; between anomie and trance, inertia and parenthesis and gnawing my own heart out, there were a lot of small, easy, everyday kindnesses I’d missed out on; and even the word kindness was like rising from unconsciousness into some hospital awareness of voices, and people, from a stream of digitized machines. p. 470.
  • “Accidents, catastrophes — something like seventy-five per cent of disaster victims are convinced there were warning signs they brushed off or didn’t pick up on correctly, and with children under eighteen, the percentage is even higher. But that doesn’t mean the signs weren’t there, does it?” pp. 615-16.
  • Something in me had gone dead at the sight of him, almost like with my dad when I was a kid, long hours alone at home, the involuntary wave of relief at his key in the lock and then the immediate heartsink at the actual sight of him. p. 731.
  • “. . . good doesn’t always follow from good deeds, nor bad deeds result from bad, does it? Scary idea!” p. 745.
  • “Can’t good come sometimes through some strange back doors?” p. 758.
  • Shock and aura. p. 760.
  • [We always hear] “Follow your heart.” Only here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted — ? p. 761.

This is the best of her three once-a-decade books, and here’s the kicker — it has been 10 years since it was published.

Crypto

Posted on by albrooke

Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon (1999). This book still feels cutting-edge 24 years after it was published. It is full of Stephensonian digressions and witticisms and is one of his best stories, as well. It is long and not for the faint of tech.

Some of my favorite nuggets:

  • “The town in question sports three small colleges: one founded by the State of California and two founded by Protestant denominations that are now actively reviled by the majority of their faculty. p. 50.
  • “Until he reached thirty, Randy felt bad about the fact that he was not socially deft. Now he doesn’t give a damn. Pretty soon he’ll probably start being proud of it. In the meantime, just for the sake of the common enterprise, he tries his best.” p. 213.
  • The company “is doing ‘systems integration’ work, which means plugging together a bunch of junk made by other people, and overseeing the installation of all the computers, switches, and data lines.” p. 214.
  • “The ineffable talent for finding patterns in chaos cannot do its thing unless he immerses himself in the chaos first.” p. 309.
  • “Turing is neither a mortal nor a god. He is Antaeus. That he bridges the mathematical and physical worlds is his strength and his weakness.” p. 342.
  • “Most of the brain’s work is done while the brain’s owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to deliberately find something else to think and talk about.” p. 348.
  • “It is conventional now to think of clerics simply as presiders over funerals and weddings. Even people who routinely go to church (or synagogue or whatever) sleep through the sermons. That is because the arts of rhetoric and oratory have fallen on hard times, and so the sermons tend not to be very interesting. But there was a time when places like Oxford and Cambridge existed almost solely to train ministers, and their job was not just to preside over weddings and funerals but also to say something thought-provoking to large numbers of people several times a week. They were the retail outlets of the profession of philosophy.” p. 398.
  • “War gives men good ignoring skills.” p. 421.
  • “Pursuing an explanation for every strange thing you see in the Philippines is like trying to get every last bit of rainwater out of a discarded tire.” p. 481.
  • When the protagonists meet some church-going Christians: “Randy hadn’t the faintest idea what these people thought of him and what he had done, but he could sense right away that, essentially that was not the issue because even if they thought he had done something evil, they at least had a framework, a sort of procedure manual, for dealing with transgressions. To translate it into UNIX system administration terms (Randy’s fundamental metaphor for just about everything), the post- modern, politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz. society) with no documentation or instructions of any kind, and so whose only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce certain rules with a kind of neo-Puritanical rigor, because they were at a loss to deal with any deviations from what they saw as the norm. Whereas people who were wired into a church were like UNIX system administrators who, while they might not understand everything, at least had some documentation, some FAQs and How-tos and README files, providing some guidance on what to do when things got out of whack. They were, in other words, capable of displaying adaptability.” pp. 585-586.
  • “In war, no matter how much you plan and prepare and practice, when the big day actually arrives, you still can’t find your ass with both hands. This day is no exception. But after a few hours of chaos, things get straightened out, people learn their roles.” p. 681.

Murder Mysteries

Posted on by albrooke

Richard Russo, Elsewhere: A memoir 153 (2011) on the difference between English and American mysteries:

  • My mother’s large collection of murder mysteries was particularly instructive. She much preferred the English variety, with its emphasis on the restoration of order. In books by her favorite “Golden Age” British mystery writers—Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, John Dickson Carr, and Agatha Christie—evil might lurk around every foggy corner, and murder most foul would throw everything into temporary flux, but in the end the detective, often a rogue aristocrat like Lord Peter Wimsey or Roderick Alleyn, ferreted out the culprit in a stunning display of logic, intuition and, often, an understanding of complex social realities for which aristocrats, in novels like these if nowhere else, are famous.
  • American murder mysteries left her cold. She thought they were less clever, which was true enough; Raymond Chandler famously couldn’t follow his own plots. But they also operated on an entirely different set of premises. Here detectives didn’t solve crimes by means of brilliant deductions or arcane knowledge. In American detective novels the hero’s primary virtues are his honesty and his ability to take a punch. Sam Spade hasn’t much interest in restoring order because, as he knows all too well, that order was corrupt to begin with. Villains are typically either rich men who made their money dishonestly or, worse yet, people of limited moral imagination who aspire only to what money and power can buy, who want to move up in class and don’t care how. In this noir world, cops are on the take, lawyers and judges all have a price, as do doctors and newspapermen. In a sea of corruption your only hope is a lone man, someone you can hire but who can’t be bought off by anybody who has more money.

This does seem more-or-less right, and I wonder if it holds true for film?

On finishing

Posted on by albrooke

From Robin Sloan, who is always entertaining and sometimes serious:

  • When you start a creative project but don’t finish, the experience drags you down. Worst of all is when you never decisively abandon the project, instead allowing it to fade into forgetfulness. The fades add up; they become a gloomy haze that whispers, you’re not the kind of person who DOES things. When you start and finish, by contrast — and it can be a project of any scope: a 24-hour comic, a one-page short story, truly anything — it is powerful fuel that goes straight back into the tank. When a project is finished, it exits the realm of “this is gonna be great” and becomes something you (and perhaps others) can actually evaluate. Even if that evaluation is disastrous, it is also, I will insist, thrilling and productive. It’s the pump of a piston, preparing the engine for the next one. Unfinished work drags and depresses; finished work redoubles and accelerates.

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