Wild Blueberries Edition
Waugh and Greene the odd couple, McLuhan and Guardini on apocalypse, McCarthy edits whales, Victor Bombert's Weimar Leipzig, living with Didion, and more.
Dear friends,
A relatively brief update this month. July: A final flurry of preparation for an upcoming artist residency, several writing deadlines, and hopefully a bit of space to celebrate the virtues of our nation’s founding, such as they are, and the marking of the passage of another year, all at once full of surprises, unexpected graces, and the accumulating melancholy of irretrievable time.
Merlin says the cure for all melancholy is learning. What have I learned this month? I have learned that cheap hardware store paintrollers can produce intriguing effects with oils. I have learned that if bitten by a potentially rabid animal one should always strive to trap and keep it for the benefit of Science and of Health. I have learned that there are few pleasures equal to homemade wild blueberry jam.
I have learned some other things as well, declensions of strange languages, the indefinable hues of midsummer shadows, lost routes of Polynesian sailors, though as ever I go on forgetting them anew. Thanks for joining me, and read on for some of what’s crossed my desk these days.
Links & such.
Excuses have no place in art and intentions count for nothing: at every moment the artist has to listen to his instinct, and it is this that makes art the most real of all things, the most austere school of life, the true last judgment.
—Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI
William Pritchard on Anthony Hecht:
One of the most attractive things about Hecht’s work is his delicacy in creating verse whose rate of revelation is highly satisfying. Central to this effect is the daring way in which he extends without punctuation an argument that ranges over stanzas. You think it must be time for a full stop, but the voice will not be interrupted.
The odd-couple friendship of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene:
Waugh was social, humorous, snobbish, arrogant and difficult to like; Greene was solitary, gloomy, kind, generous and likeable. Waugh lived in the country, courted aristocrats and loved luxury; Greene preferred cities, low life and opium dens. Waugh craved self-indulgent comfort; Greene thrived on self-punishing hardship.
Cormac McCarthy’s lifelong collaboration with marine biologist Roger Payne:
Part memoir, history and activism, “Among Whales” was designed to maximize concern for increasingly polluted oceans and reverence for their endangered giants. It was his first, and as he wrote, he sought editing help from a new friend, a writer he had met at a reunion for the MacArthur Fellowship: Cormac McCarthy.
Cory Leadbeater on entering Joan Didion’s rarified world:
“Whatever criminal gamble my father had made—desperately poor, abused horrifically, thirty years of manual labor, a few years of wire fraud—had paid off,” Leadbeater writes. “In one generation, we’d gone from the basement of the gas station next to the junkyard in New Jersey to the Upper East Side, Madison Avenue, Joan.”
Stop saying LLMs are “hallucinating,” that’s (technically speaking) bullshit:
Both lying and hallucinating require some concern with the truth of their statements, whereas LLMs are simply not designed to accurately represent the way the world is, but rather to give the impression that this is what they’re doing. This, we suggest, is very close to at least one way that Frankfurt talks about bullshit.
Peter Berkman on the AI apocalypse that already was:
If McLuhan and Guardini were correct about technologies reshaping human sensibility, it seems fair to say that we are only at the beginning of the transition from an electric age to a digital age. It took centuries for medieval man to become modern man, and the shift from electric humanity to digital humanity is perhaps the most rapid and sweeping change we have ever undergone.
Smith-Ruiu navigates the treacherous waters of “post-literacy”:
I have myself mostly managed to steer clear of the attack mobs, and I suspect this is not unrelated to what I have just said about language. I am a “language writer”, so to speak, not an “opinion writer”. The swarms of online surveillers typically only know how to detect clearly stated opinions, and the less linguistic jouissance the writer of these opinions displays in writing them, the easier job the surveillers will have of it.
(One might call this attitude, per Miłosz, a “Ketman of literacy.”)
Distressing stats on American despair c/o Oren Cass:
You are probably familiar with “deaths of despair” and know vaguely that somewhere out there an “opioid epidemic” rages. You probably didn’t realize, though, that on top of 82,000 deaths from opioid overdose in the most recent annual data, other forms of drug overdose are climbing faster: Psychostimulant deaths rose 13-fold in the past decade, to 34,000. Americans are now dying from drug overdoses at a higher rate than Russians died from alcohol use disorders in post-Soviet Russia’s worst years.
Followed up by Gracy Olmstead’s two-part (one and two) interview with Seth Kaplan:
This tension between the individual and the community is a long-standing feature of American life, and the balance has swung back and forth many times through our history. Whereas the American Dream was once about developing a social order in which every person’s potential could be fulfilled, today it has more to do with individual success, material gain, and social mobility. Historian Christopher Lasch called this a “sadly impoverished understanding…its ascendancy, in our time, measures the recession of the dream and not its fulfillment.”

Joseph Bottum laments the passing of the Public Auden:
After Auden, English speakers no longer had what they had for 200 years, from at least Alexander Pope to Robert Frost: a name, a picture, a public figure to point at and say, Yes, whether we like his poetic techniques or not, his politics or not, his religious views or not, we agree that this is a genuine and important poet, enriching the tongue we speak and read. The settled-upon cultural place of poetry was still there, for a little longer, but the place itself was vacant. Public poetry emptied out with Auden’s passing, and no one could fill it in again.
Victor Bombert remembers the enduring influence of his steely Babushka:
My manners were still unpolished, and I would grab the food. Babushka then slapped my wrist and informed me that I must always ask first. Stubbornly naughty, I replied: “Yes, but what if I am alone?” Her own reply came swiftly. “Especially when you are alone.” I understood, though the exact way of putting it evaded me. What she obviously meant was that under all circumstances it was a human obligation to maintain decorum, dignity, self-respect.
Julian Barnes buys a painting. What happens next may surprise you.
I signed up to bid online, and logged in on the appointed day. There is a specific excitement and nervousness about bidding in this way. There are three types of bidder: those online like me; those on the telephone; and those in the room itself, some of whom you can see. Your rivals, your opponents, could be anywhere in the world: you naturally imagine them lolling about in a penthouse suite in a different time zone, filthily rich and filthily intent on thwarting you.
Ed Simon on Caravaggio’s very visible darkness.
Caravaggio certainly wasn’t a good man—he was a hustler and criminal, an addict and murderer. Cherubini knew that; everyone in Rome knew that. But he was a painter of startling originality and brilliance as well, who could coax light from darkness in such contrast that it was as if the God of Genesis dividing the day from the night. When Cherubini looked upon Lena, he only saw a prostitute, but when Caravaggio represented her, she was the very Mother of God.
The fire that gutted St. Anne’s Anglican church in Toronto destroyed more than a dozen rare sacred murals by Canada’s Group of Seven painters.
Combining narrative scenes, written texts and decorative plasterwork and detailing, MacDonald took inspiration from the colours, artistic conventions and motifs of Byzantine iconography, all the while adapting them to a contemporary Canadian context and the building’s ornate architectural style.
Ursula Le Guin’s home to become a writer’s residency.
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.
—Prayer of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ
May your July nights be short and sweet and your days never end,
As ever,
J