Living in Wonder

Posted on December 12, 2024 by smellincoffee

“The world is not what you think it is.” Rod Dreher opens Living in Wonder with that line, one that can rattle the reader when it actually begins sinking in throughout the course of this book. I’ve struggled with writing this review because this is one of the stranger books I’ve read over the tenure of the blog: the struggle lies not in the strangeness but because I don’t know how to think about the strangeness. Dreher is a journalist and author whose books touch on Christianity and culture, and he’s been calling with increasing urgency for Christians to take their place in the world more seriously. Here, though, he looks beyond the temporal into the spiritual — to where we wrestle not with flesh and blood, but with “against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” These are not factors most of the modern postwest thinks about: we are “material girls in a material world”, convinced that we are singular intelligences rising from dead matter and ruling over it, shaping the world to our will and actively trying to create a new intelligence out of bits of silicon and code. But what if that were not the case? Living in Wonder invites us to consider that there is a spiritual world beyond, that the west’s turning away from it has not lessened our hunger for it, and that certain trends in our current time are the result of people groping in darkness for that something else and finding trouble. This is a fascinating little volume that brings in hermits and saints, technologists and architects, all into a common conversation about the human need for enchantment. It is both an unusual look at modern society and a work of Christian formation, urging a deeper and richer religious practice — one that will sustain Christians against the adversity to come, from both ‘princes and powers.’

I should note from the start that I have an unusual relationship with this book: I’ve been following Rod’s substack long enough that I was ‘present’ for its entire life, from Rod announcing his next book idea, to his sharing interviews as he conducted them, even to voting on what book cover I thought was best. I’ve therefore been living with his thinking and his arguments for a lot longer than from when I acquired the book in October shortly before its release. Dreher begins by pointing out that the contemporary western world is an outlier in human history in its strict materialism, and he traces the rise of that materialism beginning in the medieval era, with the rejection of nominalism. Nomimalism asserted that the material world is inherently meaningless, save for that meaning which we humans assigned to it. It countered the medieval conviction that the material world was inherently saturated with meaning of its own, not simply what human thinking assigned to it: all of creation was endued with something else — immanent with the presence of God. This divorce of the world from its creator, and the driving out of the realm of spirit altogether, became larger and larger through the Protestant rupture and then the Industrial Revolution, the latter of which not only made it easier to believe only in the material world, but opened the door wide to profits and power. As Wendell Berry observed, there are no such things as unsacred places — only sacred and desecrated places. The trees have no dryads, no spirits, reflect no beauty of God: they are merely timber waiting to be harvest. The mountain has no glory, only minerals to mine. Families? What are they but cogs in the machine and then wallets to plunder? The twentieth century’s millions upon millions killed in grim industrial fashion shows what happens when the machine is set upon human beings who, after all, are not persons made in the image of God, but simply animals to be disposed of if they’re inconvenient to a political ideology, whether it be Nazism or the far more murderous state socialism of Stalin and Mao.

Despite the apparent triumph of materialism, people still appear to sense an absence, as though the house is missing a wall, or a roof. In The Enemies of Reason, Richard Dawkins mourned the fact that Europeans had gone from believing in God and saints right back to believing in fae folk and horoscopes: it’s as though we’re primed to believe in something else — or, as Lewis posited, “made for another world”. These days we are looking for the something else from other quarters, Dreher argues — from dabbling in the occult to psychedelics to UFOs. These are not unrelated, either: one book discussed here intimates that UFOs are not physical arrivals from another world, but rather manifestations of some other intelligence that is appearing in a form that we are prepared to accept. One man Dreher interviewed claimed that he saw a shimmering in his kitchen through which stepped two E.T.’s, who began predicting mundane events that would happen shortly: a bird landing on a sill, a car horn going off, etc. This man saw these visitors once a year for several years, and so did his wife. He sought answers from neurologists, who found nothing wrong with him: eventually an exorcism gave him relief from these beings, from whom he felt a strong sense of malice. Dreher also suspects that our experiments with AI may be acting like a high-tech ouiji board through which other beings are trying to insert themselves into, and quotes technologists who are gravely concerned about what they’re creating and yet feel compelled to summon it to life. More disturbing for me were the accounts from people who have taken DMT and report seeing similar beings in whatever plane their brain is going to while under the influence: Dreher thinks that somehow these drugs allow human consciousness to perceive the numinous more directly, but in a chaotic and dangerously exposed way. The threat from LSD and similar substances in not that they don’t do anything real, Dreher writes, but that they do.

Of course, it’s not just baddies out there in the ether: Dreher also discusses miracles and mystic experiences, including his own, and these are part of the fundamental point of the book, which is not merely to argue that the spiritual realm exists, but that it must be taken seriously. Not only does becoming more porous to the enchanted realm enrich the Christian life, something which will be much more important as the world grows more hostile toward Christian faith, but spiritual warfare is happening regardless of whether we believe it or not, and if we’re going to walk through a battlefield it would behoove us to find shelter and return fire from time to time. (Or at the very least, don’t open doors into the spiritual realm when we don’t know what’s on the other side.) Dreher’s own story is a powerful testimony into what living in the “enchanted world” can do: in the last decade he has been drug through several layers of hell, with family drama, heartbreak, excruciating illness, and then divorce. Through this, it has been his Orthodox faith and the way it calls him above the material world, allowing him to see beauty in broken places, to find meaning in suffering and to help other ‘forlorn and shipwrecked brothers‘. One especially powerful story he has shared takes place across several years, as he recounted being confronted by an Italian artist at a book launch years ago, and presented with a hand-drawn portrait of a strange scene involving a saint, St. Galgano: this was first in a series of events about Galgano and the church named in his honor that drove Dreher to write this book, and has become an integral part of Dreher’s religious understanding. Dreher shares some of his practices for making himself more ‘porous’, more open to the voice of God, including the Jesus Prayer that I’m given to understand is a fundamental part of Orthodox prayer life. Another recommendation is dialing back immersion in the digital world: smarthphones, he writes, are disenchantment machines, destroying our ability to be mindful and present in the moment, or attend to anything — mired in the quicksand of push notifications and facebook reels.

This is an intense book. When Rod first started writing about this a couple of years ago, I remember thinking wow, he’s getting into some weird stuff, but the more he interviewed people the less absurd it seemed to be. Looking around the world today, I can almost believe in some being that actively hates a human race made in the image of God and wishes us ill: the increasing absence of beauty in western architecture and art, soaring rates of mental illness, the war on biological reality, plummeting birthrates, the black hole of egoism that both are connected to — the worship of greed and excess, the loathing so many sectors of the population have for each other, the pervasive lust for domination, the fact that politicians keep pushing us closer to nuclear war despite the fact that it means the destruction of a habitable Earth and the extinction of humanity, — I could go on. There’s a reason the closest thing I have to social media these days is goodreads. There is a small part of me that would readily believe that yes, Satan and all of hell are out to enslave humanity and are planning on using technology to do it — but I say that knowing my own deep-seated mistrust of the Machine. Then, too, is my own skepticism: after I escaped the Pentecostal sect I was raised in, I hardened my heart toward religion and the supernatural, and despite having a series of mystical experiences that drew me back to God and then to Christianity, I’ve retained that skepticism for the most part. Reading Dreher and other’s experiences with something beyond has rattled that a bit, even as part of my brain is arguing with their experiences. “Rod is a creative personality and has an increased ability to see patterns when they aren’t there,” “Rod is reporting what someone else reported to him, but how can we know if they’re legit?” “Rod took LSD once as a teenager, so who knows how changed his brain long term?” — that sort of thing. And yet it rattles me, and so did Will Storr’s Will Storr versus the Supernatural, because Storr himself experienced some weird stuff, and my impression when reading his book was that he was actively resisting admitting it, dismissing it all as quantum mechanics or whatever.

In short, I can’t give you a….thoroughly digested review for this book. I can only say it’s interesting as hell, it’s moving, and it’s unsettling. This is one I will revisit after the ladyfriend has finished it (I gave it to her to her just so I’d have someone to talk about the experience with), but I may buy the kindle version so I can have highlights. (The Selections posted yesterday were taken from photos I took of th book’s pages while reading!) There so much in the book this review is missing, simply because I want to get something out there, to get some of my thoughts onto the page so I can better organize my thinking.

Related:
If you want to learn more about Rod, WaPo did a story on him while he was researching the Benedict option book that goes into his biography a bit.

Posted in Religion and Philosophy, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , | 11 Comments

Selections from Living in Wonder

Posted on December 11, 2024 by smellincoffee

Review to follow tomorrow.

“We should know these ways of knowing not simply to tell us about the world but to draw us more intimately into relationship with it. To know the world not as a scholar knows the library but as the lover knows the beloved. This is what it means to live in wonder — to live within enchantment.”

“My argument is that if I could make it snow at will, then I could never experienced being called by the falling snow,” writes Rosa. “If my cat were a programmable robot that always purred and wanted to be cuddled, she would become nothing to me but a dead thing.”

“We cannot think our way back to enchantment or unity with God. We can only find it in participating in his life.”

“Saint Augustine knew it as far back as the fifth century: what we attend to is what we love, and what we love, we will become.”

“Economic and social liberalism — forms of social organization built around satisfying individual desire — have created a world full of narcissists obsessed with their own needs and desires, who no longer know how to give and experience love. Radically lonely, they try to escape their despair through consumption, especially consumption of sex via promiscuity.”

“The lesson is that humanity can take only so much disenchantment. If the disenchanted materialists will not have God, they or their children will one day accept Allah or some other creed — even a political psuedo-religion such as Communism or fascism — that gives them a sense of purpose and meaning.”

“[Generation Z] has been raised in a culture of radical individualism, therapy, and you-do-you self-fulfillment. What they don’t know, but will one day find out, is that a religion you make up yourself has no power to enchant. A religion designed to serve one’s perceived needs is unavoidably self-worship.”

“Put simply, we really are living in a crucible, as the fourth century was for the pagans of Rome. Either we will recover enchanted Christianity or we will succumb to chaos and cruelty.”

“A jig is a tool that manufacturers use to hold materials in place so they can guarantee the precision and accuracy of the finished product. the traditional liturgical and spiritual practices of the Orthodox Church are an example of a cultural jig — the kind of framework that keeps the individual believer in place and makes it more likely that he will be formed, over time, into a faithful and obedient Christian within the Eastern tradition.”

Yoinked from Rod’s substack

“To step inside the little church is like entering a dreamworld. There are Biblical stories painted everywhere, in colors so intense you can almost taste them. The figurative style is austerely Byzantine, in the Orthodox tradition, but the strong lines are dams barely holding back surging seas of glowing color, of the energy of life.”

Beatrice tells [Dante] not to forget that any beauty he sees in her is only a reflection of God and is a sign pointing him to God. This is a common mistake we all make: to love created things as if they were God, as opposed to icons through which Gods light shines. A beautiful thing is only seen rightly if it leads the soul’s eye to contemplate God.”

“To live in beatitude in this life is to live within enchantment.t. It is to begin to see things as God sees them, as much as that is possible in our limited mortal state. This is not to say one lives without suffering. But suffering becomes bearable because we know by faith that all things, good and bad, have ultimate meaning. Beauty has the power to pierce the gloom of hopelessness.”

“We humans are like fish dwelling at the bottom of a pond. We perceive the sun’s light filtered imperfectly to the depths. […] The higher we rise, the more clearly we see. The beauty shining through great art — painting, poetry, sculpture, dance, music, architecture, and so forth — calls us out of the depths of our spiritual slumber and up toward the pure light.”

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Christmas shorts: of Grinches and Herdmans

Posted on December 11, 2024 by smellincoffee

Because of the holidays I’m doing a lot of house and dogsitting at the moment, and driving more than I usually do: consequently I’m also chewing through some audiobooks! Recently I finished two short Christmas “reads”.

What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store? What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more?

First up, Walter Matthau reading The Night the Grinch Stole Christmas. I’m pretty sure anyone reading this knows that story, but just in case: there’s a fellow named The Grinch who lives above a little village called Whoville, populated solely by Whos. The Grinch is not a fan of noise, and the Whos are especially noisy at Christmas, so the Grinch decides to steal Christmas and shenanigans ensue. This story, read by Walter “Grumpy Old Men” Matthau is as wonderful as you might expect. I was cackling the entire time.

Next up, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever!. I watched a theatrical version of this a few years back, but beyond the initial premise (terrible kids bully their way into being the stars of the Christmas play), I’d forgotten everything. Narrator C.J. Critt has a fine voice and delivery for general narration, and her vocals for different characters are varied and not horrifying like Tim Curry’s in A Christmas Carol. The story, for those who haven’t watched the new movie, is about the Herdman family coming to a church because they heard there was food, then bullying their way into the pageant. The Herdmans are raised by a single mother who is always working, so they’re absolutely feral. They’ve also never heard the Christmas story, so Best Christmas Pageant Ever allows readers to experience it through fresh eyes: the bewilderment that an innkeeper wouldn’t find room for a pregnant woman, rage at Herod’s baby-killing, etc. Because the Herdmans don’t have the assumed knowledge how The Characters Should Be, Mary is played more like an emotional Italian mamma, thumping the baby Jesus to make him burp and yelling at strangers to give the baby some space, and the wise men/three kings are not noble arcanes but suspicious foreigners who might very well narc on Jesus to Herod. Unrestricted by convention, the kid’s strong personalities give the performance a burst of unwieldly energy and actually make the audience think more seriously about the Christmas story. Comic, thoughtful, and touching.

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WWW Wednesday & Myths and Legends

Posted on December 11, 2024 by smellincoffee

WHAT have you finished reading recently? I listened to an Audible reading of A Christmas Carol (Tim Curry, very strange) and finished a version of The Screwtape Letters that’s oriented toward women.

WHAT are you reading now? The Bookshop of Memories and The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife.

WHAT are you reading next? Not sure. I’m finally done with The Big Project for my class this semester, so now I can focus on serious reads, but the question is do I want to do serious reads.

Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is, “Myths and Legends from Your Area”.

A few things come to mind! My city’s founder, William Rufus King, is buried in the Selma cemetary, Old Live Oak: there’s a story that he was repeatedly unburied and reburied between Cahawba and Selma (Cahawba being the state capital and the county seat, but losing those honors in turn to Montgomery and Selma), and is so unsettled despite resting comfortably in Old Live Oak cemetery that he will attack those who run around his crypt chanting his name, or who try to spend the night in his crypt. This used to be a thing with the high school kids, spending the night in his crypt. Eventually the city sealed the door, though. Spoilsports! Another local ghost story involves a Selma banker, John Parkman, who made some poor investment decisions after the War — and did it with federal money, during a military occupation. He was imprisoned and made his escape, but died in the process. Stories split on how he died: some say he was shot by the Yankees, others that he drowned trying to swim the Cahaba river to safety. Regardless, his spirit — myth has it — found his way home, where he began haunting the place that is now Sturdivant Hall, an art museum. According to the stories, there are certain areas of the property and the house that the servants began avoiding because it felt ominous and they kept seeing Old Master Parkman there. This story was included in Thirteen Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey. More seriously, there’s a myth that on “Bloody Sunday”, Civil Rights marchers were attacked trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge: that’s an outright falsehood, and easy to demonstrate by looking this photo of a peaceful march across the bridge, followed by this photo of marchers being attacked hundreds of yards away from the bridge. The confusion appears to have followed in the wake of bridge crossing ‘reenactments’ from 1985 on, in which participants cross the bridge and then turn around again. The focus on the bridge has made it a symbol of the Civil Rights movement: thousands of tourists show up each year to walk across the bridge, snap a selfie, and then leave — ignoring sites like the Courthouse where actual events happened.

Well, I’ll get off my soapbox now.

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Tim Curry Presents: A Christmas Carol

Posted on December 10, 2024 by smellincoffee

A Christmas Carol is one of my favorite pieces of literature, ever, not only for its story of Christmas grace and human redemption, but for Dickens’ frequently amusing writing. I recently saw a theatrical production of it (via the Montevallo Main Street Players) and was inspired to see if there were any readings on Audible I hadn’t encountered. Last year I listened to the wonderful version of it by no less than Patrick Stewart, The Best Scrooge Ever. (Stewart’s A Christmas Carol is the one I re-watch every year, and not necessarily during Christmas.) In my search I found this, Tim Curry’s version. It is….definitely an experience, I will say that.

“And call off Christmas!”

When he is simply reading, Curry’s accent makes this an enjoyable experience: when he is doing characters, though, his great talent for voicing villainous characters makes most scenes sound…askew, at best. The Crachitt children sound like demons, or at the very least like they’re demon-possessed. When Curry does Fred laughing, it sounded like I was hearing the concierge from Home Alone 2 or Cardinal Richelieu in The Three Musketeers. Curry was born for malicious characters, and his vocal talents — while serving well the buzzard-like charwoman who undresses a corpse to sell its clothing — don’t lend themselves to beauty, grace, or joy. He plays a little with accents: I’m still developing my ear for English accents, but I heard at least three (RP, Yorkshire, and Cockney).I kept listening to this mostly because it was so fascinatingly weird.

For an audio version of A Christmas Carol, I say Patrick Stewart’s on Audible is the mark to beat. It appears that Curry did voice Scrooge in an animated version of this.

Related:
My original 2008 review of A Christmas Carol
Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol

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Teaser Tuesday + my Favorite Instagram Pics from This Year

Posted on December 10, 2024 by smellincoffee

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday concerns books to read during storms, so I’m just going to post the Teaser Tueday and then something completely random.

This is what the screen gives the humans. It gives them the same escape. They don’t know when or how they came to be on their phones. They only know they are freed from the plodding, repetitive step of moment after moment. The joys and sorrows of life are muted for them, and they are carried down the road of time without knowing or caring. (My Dear Hemlock, Tilly Dillehay.)

In fact, labyrinthine regulations and bureaucratic programs favor large corporations with teams of legal experts far more than workers and small businesses. Chesterton was right when he quipped that “Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike.” (Localism: Coming Home to Catholic Social Teaching)

This is something I’ve wanted to do the last couple of years but never got around to doing properly. I have an instagram that’s used almost exclusively for nature shots — flowers, sunsets, that sort of thing. Follow me at QueenCitySon if you like that sort of thing. I promise not to beg you to support my patreon or buy t-shirts with photos on them.

I literally pulled off the road to admire this view. Jan 17 2024.
Elodie Todd Dawson,. in whose memory the mighty oaks that gave Old Live Oak cemetery its name stand. Elodie was married a prominent local, and interestingly was Abraham Lincoln’s sister-in-law. When she died in childbirth at age 37, her husband commissioned a statue for her: not liking her hair, he ordered another statue, costing him $14,000 in all. Most inflation calculators I played with wouldn’t touch it, but one suggested that that amount is nearly half a million. Even more impressive: the amount of gold that was worth $14,000 in 1877 is now worth over a mil and a half. Elodie was known for loving wax makeup that melted in the sun, so whenever she would encounter an unshaded area, she would double-time (in a lady-like fashion) to the next shade. This inspired her husband to plant the entirety of the West Selma Cemetary with shade trees.
The last time I was privileged to see a sunset from this particular cattle ranch.
Honestly, drop the utility poles and it’s fit for a postcard. Oct 2nd.
“Attending BBQ on the Green always makes me feel like a Gone with the Wind extra.” Oct 10. Annual fundraiser for Sturdivant Hall, an antebellum mansion that houses an art museum.
Will game cookoff, always an interesting experience.
“Pensacola, I do declare — I could make you a habit.” Taken on my second trip to Pensacola within a month.
Celebrating storytelling and bluegrass and tacos al pastor
“Piercing the Heavens”. First Baptist’s spire appears to be breaking the clouds open.
Falling hard for the “wild and wasteful ocean”.

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Hitler’s Heralds: The Freikorps

Posted on December 7, 2024 by smellincoffee
‘What do we care when a Putsch goes wrong? – We’ll make another before too long!’

I’ve had this review written since September, but had intended to feature it as part of a series on inter-war Germany. That’s not going to happen this year, as I’m certainly not spending Advent reading about Weimar and Nazis!

After four years of war, Germany’s army was exhausted and on the brink of revolution, tired of fighting endlessly for a front that never seemed to move. Faced with fresh foes from the United States, courtesy of “He Kept Us Out of the War” Wilson, Germany’s leadership decided to sue for peace — and, seeing how vindictive the Entente’s demands were, German authorities decided to let the demands be someone else’s problem. Specifically, the Social Democrats’ problem, who were trying to form a government even as a leftist revolution began breaking out piecemeal throughout the country. Seeking stability first, the SPD began relying on “Freikorps”, paramilitary units formed of committed veterans and fresh young men who regarded the ‘spectre of communism’ with hostile loathing, to put down insurrections. For months, these mostly-independent Freikorps would range across the country, attacking cities like Munich which had been taken over by revolutionaries, but once the red menace had been put down, the Freikorps weren’t ready to stop fighting. This is an absolutely fascinating history of Germany during a time of near-civil war, frothing with violence and driven by a restless spirit.

Although I faintly remembered a socialist revolution breaking out at the very end of the Great War — one that began with sailors — plainly it’s been a long time since my German history courses at university, or since I visited this particular area in my reading — I had no idea how potent it was. Were it not for the assassinations of two of its prominent leaders, the left may have created its own version of the DDR. After the armistice but before the diktat of Versailles, Germany frothed with militant drama, with violent eruptions seemingly every few weeks, taking over cities like Bremen and Munich. With Russia still embroiled in its own civil war — the Bolsheviks had not yet triumphed over the White Russians, let alone executed their coup over the Mensheviks — militant leftists in Germany thought their time had come. Germany barely had a government and its people had been through the wringer of a four-year war. Because so much of the regular army was demoralized and refused to fight, the provisional government of the SPD began making use of paramilitary forces — some of which organized themselves, some of which were initiated by the government itself. These forces were not ‘regular’ troops, but had their own private cultures and were devoted to their independent Fuhrers. This led to some volatility: one Freikorps, dispatched to help the Baltic states fight for independence from Soviet factions, was successful, but then decided that it might as around stick around and rule a bit: one leader pledged his conquered city to the Tsar, but decided to rule in Nicholas’ stead since the Romanovs were no longer around. Interestingly, one inducement to get the Freikorps to attack leftists outside of Germany proper was the promise — from German authorities, not Baltic — of Baltic estates. Hitler’s lust for the east was not new — and nor was use of the swastika, as one of the Baltic-venturing freikorps wore them on their helmets.

The German government, too, would feel the sting of the Freikorps’ battle-lust and interest in power: in March 1920, one Freikorps seized the city of Berlin itself, intending to establish a new Reich that dismissed Versailles. (Hitler and a comrade were not involved in this, although they’d intended to be — on their arrival they realized the effort was a shambles not worth contributing to.) It was such a poorly planned and almost impulsive action, though, that there was almost no support from the other freikorps. Coordination between the groups had previously proven necessary (especially retaking Munich from the socialists who had begun killing prominent citizens), but the Kapp putsch did little to bring in other groups and the one it contacted happened to be stone drunk celebrating the arrival of their namesake, von Hindenberg. Of course, just as leftist coups created Freikorps reaction, so too did Freikorp actions generate reactions: in the case of the Kapp putsch, workers and revolutionaries took over much of the Ruhr, only to be brutally put down by the regular Army and arriving Freikorps. It’s worth noting that the Beer Hall Putsch occurred in 1923, only three years after this, and in a place (Munich) that had already been part of leftist-Freikorp back and forth fighting: the Nazi attempt to seize power was only one of a series from varying factions and ideologies. Jones closes the book with a chapter on Hitler’s putsch, which was more successful than I realized, taking over several government buildings in Munich. The putsch was the result of Hitler forcing two other paramilitary organizations to cooperate, but their leaders switched sides once the actual fighting began.

This is an all around fascinating book, because the subjects are not all of a kind. It’s good storytelling, though facts are sometimes repeated too quickly, and I found Jones’ probing of the Freikorps zeitgeist to be especially interesting, as he reflects on both the romantic German youth movement and the forge of trench warfare itself.

Note: this book was also published under another title, The Birth of the Nazis. I’m fairly certain, anyway: the table of contents matches this book’s progress to a T.

Related:
Life and Death in the Third Reich, Peter Fritszche. The “Volksgemeinshaft”, which Fritzschze studies in part, apparently originated as a concept with the Youth Movement that’s detailed in Heralds.

Posted in history, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments

Oceans and fishes and magic needles

Posted on December 6, 2024 by smellincoffee

Within the last few weeks I’ve read a couple of science titles, one of which was a big ol’ book that deserves a proper review, but given that my mental energies are entirely focused on my last project for this semester, it probably won’t get. That big ol’ book is The Gulf: The History of an American Sea. Although I’ve lived in a Gulf state (the yee-haw kind, not the terrorist kind) my entire life, being subject to its humidity and hurricanes, I’ve never …read about it properly. Perhaps as with someone who grew up with mountains in the background and takes them for granted, I never looked at it as an object of interest. That changed when I visited Pensacola: on my last visit I was near the Gulf every single day, intoxicated by the energy of the waves and the different beachscapes they made.

The Gulf is a comprehensive history of the Gulf of Mexico, beginning with natural history and its formation, then moving to the various native American tribes that lived around its rim. These were people largely oriented toward the sea, not the land: in the case of Pensacola, the soil was so briny that agriculture wasn’t a practical option. This was a lesson that took European settlers a while to learn, though once they did they dived into fishing with such gusto that several species came close to extinction. Europeans were all over the Gulf, but especially the Louisiana-Florida rim, so Pensacola and New Orleans both have large parts in the early portion of the book. (I was amused to learn that the Mississippi’s mouth is so obscured by its delta that it was repeatedly passed by from ships looking to establish a fort or colony there.)

The further the book gets into the Gulf being aggressively settled and developed, the more diverse its topics get: there’s an entire chapter on how hunting for tarpon from a curiosity to an obsession, which is bizaare because these huge fish weren’t even being reeled in for eating, but purely because they were difficult to catch but impressive to pull out of the water, being huge and glistening silver. (Tarpon flesh evidently doesn’t taste good to most people.) Other chapters cover real estate and land development, literally in that latter case because wetlands were being “reclaimed” for development before people realized oh, wetlands are actually kinda vital for flood control, not to mention local ecosystems. The oil industry rather takes pride of place in the latter half of the book, but the author also covers the rise of tourism and environmental stewardship.

This was definitely a fun read given the sheer amount of varied history contained within: granted, it helped that the same visit where I bought this book was one in which I spent more time near the wind and waves than I did in my hotel room. Another read last month was really more of a listen: The Skeptic’s Guide to Alternative Medicine, presented by Dr. Steven Novella. I’m very familiar with Novella from his podcast, The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, in which he, his brothers, and a couple of friends go through the week’s science news, play games like “Science or Fiction”, and discuss dodgy goings-on in the news, like UFO claims. I used to listen to them on a weekly basis (beginning in 2006 on dial-up!), but it’s harder to find time for hour-long podcasts these days. SGU did a book a few years ago, and through that podcast I was pretty much familiar with all of this content. Novella kicks things off by discussing the rise of the scientific approach to health, and the infrastructure that sustains it — research, studies, etc — and then begins applying its standards to various health claims like “healing magnets”, homeopathy, chiropractic, and so on. This was an easy listen for me because I don’t have a dog in the fight. The only medicine he covers that Novella deems has any redeeming aspect at all is chiropractic, and then only certain and very limited aspects of it: the practice began with a man who was serial creator of quackery. Judging by people’s reviews on goodreads and amazon, their enjoyment of the book was directly tied to their emotional investment in the approaches covered.

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The Year of Living Constitutionally

Posted on December 5, 2024 by smellincoffee
“After Nicolas Cage successfully stole the Declaration,” Kratz said, “we decided we shouldn’t tell people where our vaults are.” (There is a strict local law that all archivists must make at least one reference to the National Treasure film franchise.)

Although I am a fan of A.J. Jacobs’ ludicrous life experiments (trying to take seriously every bit of health advice he was given for a year, trying to literally follow every single rule in the Bible for a year, etc), my eye twitched a bit at this title. I’m a fan of the Constitution, a twenty-year veteran of heaping abuse upon DC regardless of administration for abusing it, and I anticipated that much in this that would annoy me. The Constitution does not apply to individuals, for instance: its entire purpose was to define and limit the scope of the National Government — not people, not the individual States. So harrumph, I said, harrumph! However, the cheap price ($2 on Kindle!), my past affection for Jacobs, and the potential humor to be had in witnessing a band go about in a tricorn hat urging New Yorkers to sign his parchment-paper petition with a quill feather, urged me to try it. While I did find much to annoy, I appreciate Jacobs trying to take the Constitution seriously, and learned quite a bit despite my own familiarity with the founding fathers and their thinking.

Jacobs undertakes several approaches to “living constitutionally”. For one, he decides to do all of his writing with a quill and parchment paper, which entails carrying around a little wooden box to store them in. When he is working at home, he turns off all the lights and works purely by candlelight, to the annoyance of his wife and most of his children, save for one who likes the eccentricity. (That child also loved the fact that Dad also began wearing an 18th century outfit out and about while he was attempting to get people to sign petitions and such.) As Jacobs begins trying to understand rights like “The freedom of assembly”, the right to petition and so on, he tries to exercise said rights in the same fashion that Madison & company would have: he tries to vote by announcing who he is voting for, he creates a petition on a scroll to ask for a Constitutional amendment shifting the presidency to a three-person council instead of an elected monarch, and he “assembles” by inviting people to his home for a dinner to discuss politics, purposely inviting a mix of ideas to foster genuine debate. He also tries to bring back 18th century customs like baking an Election Day cake and preparing some of Martha Washington’s rum punch to give to those at the polls. He also joins up with a group of American Revolution reenactors to further immerse himself in “living history”, and in one of my favorite sections, attempts to get a Congressman to issue him a Letter of Marque so he can go forth on the ocean blue in hopes of intercepting some of America’s enemies.

At the same time that he’s cosplaying the life of an 18th century writer, Jacobs is also reading gobs and gobs of books about the Constitution, both what its ideas meant in their time and how they’ve been applied over the years. He was surprised to discover, for instance, that the Bill of Rights was appended to the Constitution in order to facilitate its passing, and that some of the founding generation regarded it as potentially an issue given that if some rights were specifically enumerated, the government might then assume that it could do as it pleased otherwise. America in the early Republic had a much different culture than our own, with laws that we could now regard as violations of free speech because they governed hurling abuse at the government, or public profanity. Jacobs is also surprised that Congress was meant to be first among equals as far as the government goes, and ends the book convinced that the President and SCOTUS, especially the latter, need to be taken down a few pegs. Although I enjoyed this part of the book for the most part, I wasn’t impressed by Jacobs study given that he doesn’t appear to appreciate the nature of the “Federal” system, especially the fact that the States were meant to be powerful actors in their own rights — with direct control over the Senate, for instance, checking the power of the national government. One amendment he suspiciously never mentions is the Tenth Amendment, which says that “any powers not given to the Federal Government are reserved to the States, or to the people”. In his study of how the Constitution has changed over the years, he also never goes near the Civil War, which dramatically changed the little-c constitution of the Union, making it a national government (by gunpoint) instead of a union of equal States. I don’t know if he sidestepped it because of controversy or something else, but regardless of how much of a Pandora’s box it is, when tackling this subject, it has to be opened.

In short, this was a mixed bag: mostly enjoyable, but with deficiencies — some serious. As much as I enjoyed his attempts to “live history”, it seemed more like a gag than a serious endeavor to understand the thinking of 18th century Americans, especially given how much time he spends judging them by the standards of a self-described “New York liberal”. I liked it far more than I expected, though.

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WWW Wednesday &

Posted on December 4, 2024 by smellincoffee

Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is “Soemthing we wish would come back into fashion”, to which I say…..people wearing actual clothes when they’re in public. Not pajama pants, not fuzzy-wuzzy house shoes, and not vulgar t-shirts. Clothes that say, “I am a human being and I choose to comport myself with some modicum of dignity.” Also, men’s hats that are not baseball caps. I like baseball caps — I wear them all the time – but I also have a a black flat cap I wear in winter, and then a brown wide-brimmed “work hat” that makes me look a bit like a cowboy, especially when I wear it with my rugged winter jacket and boots. Also, when people wear tennis shoes with suits it makes me sad. I don’t even wear suits and it makes me sad. Well, enough of my sartorial grousing and on to the books….

WHAT have you finished reading recently? The Year of Living Constitutionally, A.J. Jacobs.

WHAT are you reading now? The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife and Localism: Coming Home to Catholic Social Doctrine, which includes pieces from some of my favorite authors (Joseph Pearce, Anthony Esolen, and — in an urbanist surprise — Chuck Marohn).

WHAT are you reading next? I’ll be finishing My Dear Hemlock, which is The Screwtape Letters but oriented much more towards women. Reading this along with the lady friend, but I’ve been holding my horses since she hasn’t finished the first half yet.

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