…the snake’s-hands in a story can be the best part.

— John Crowley

1.

John Crowley died this month, on August 4, at the age of 84. He was (evidently, although the available texts aren’t explicit on this point) a Catholic. He spent most of his life in Massachusetts, had six siblings, a devoted wife of 62 years, and four children. He built not one but two houses over the course of his life, although by profession he was an electrician. He is much missed by his friends and family.

A different John Crowley also died this month, on August 8, at the age of 83; he was writer (and documentary filmmaker and teacher at Yale) whose work was overwhelmingly important to me, and who is mourned by fans worldwide, judging by the internet reactions I have seen, although his extraordinary works are not nearly as well or widely known as they deserve. Which is perhaps why, when I went looking for obituaries after hearing (from my friend Ron Drummond) of his death, I found, a day later, none save personal ones on social media (more formal ones have since started to appear), and instead landed on an obituary for the other John Crowley, the one who was one year older than the writer and predeceased him by four days.

I don’t know why I wanted to begin with the person whom I can’t help but think of as the fake John Crowley, even though he was, of course, just as real as the one whose work has meant so much to me and many other readers. It’s not precisely the sort of event with which Crowley (and from now on when I mention Crowley I will mean the writer) filled his work; he was not a tricksy writer in quite the way that, say, Gene Wolfe and Vladimir Nabokov are (to name two other writers whom I also extravagantly admire). But Crowley was, on the other hand, an author who, in his four-volume novel Aegypt, had one main character named “Rosie” and another named “Rose”, and a third character (the protagonist, to the limited extent that that sprawling, worlds-containing saga can be said to have a single protagonist) who confuses and conflates them until the very end of the first volume. And I couldn’t help thinking that Crowley would smile at the coincidence of his googleganger’s almost simultaneous departure from this earth.

I wish peace to both sets of their families and friends, and to the many readers of the writer John Crowley, whose works, in an unfairness doubtless designed by the loving deity of this world, can carry so much farther than is possible for the undoubtedly fine work of the other John Crowley—even if the works of the writer have not been carried nearly far enough, not nearly as far as the quality of that work would warrant.

2.

In his magisterial biography of Nabokov, literary critic Brian Boyd mentions, almost in passing, that Nabokov penned seven masterpieces.1 This is not, as I read it, a slight on Nabokov’s other works, many of which are (as Boyd clearly acknowledges) very fine indeed. But in Boyd’s view those seven are the peak of Nabokov’s work, the best of the best. At the same time, however, he is careful to avoid naming one: a list of seven allows him to avoid pernicious choosing among equally gorgeous, radically-different splendors: Nabokov did not write just one masterpiece, but a set of them. The world may have long thought of Nabokov primarily as the author of Lolita,2 but Boyd would not so limit him.

John Crowley, in my view, wrote four masterpieces—which, however, were spread across seven volumes, equaling Nabokov in number of books if not titles. Specifically, I claim that the four books of John Crowley which are the peak of his work, the best of the best, are Engine Summer (1979), Little, Big (1981), Ka (2017), and the four-volume novel Aegypt, comprising The Solitudes (1987),3 Love & Sleep (1994), Dæmonomania (2000), and Endless Things (2007).4

And, as with Boyd and Nabokov, I do not mean by this to slight Crowley’s other works. I have read every novel of his save for his very first novel (The Deep) and his last (Flint & Mirror), and I have thought all of them were fabulous. I have seen people cite The Translator, Four Freedoms, and The Deep as favorites, if not quite as often as the four I am privileging. Crowley’s short stories and essays are likewise amazing, standing aside the novels as the pinnacles of his achievement. But novels are, for better or for worse, more popular than short stories, and tend to be central to most fiction writer’s ongoing reputations; and whether or not they are alone there, those four novels are at the absolute peak of Crowley’s fiction—works which can’t be further ranked because they are too high for our measuring apparatuses to reach. With things that splendid awe and delight and savoring, not adjudication, is the only fitting response.

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3.

Despite his having been the author of four co-equal masterpieces, there is no question that Little, Big or, the Fairies’ Parliament (to give it the dignity of its full title) is John Crowley’s most famous and beloved book. To the extent that people know his work, they know him for it.

Little, Big is about a family who has a relationship with faeries—beings who are neither twee and tinkerbell-like nor the undying elves of Tolkien (one of the few fantasists who deserves to be mentioned alongside Crowley). It is a generational saga, starting in what was at its publication the present day (a deliberately ambiguous time seemingly in the 70s or 80s but only referred to, in a charming 19th-century style, as the year “19—”), but which reaches both back to the late nineteenth century and forward to a then-unreal future of American decline and totalitarian threat. And while its central characters occupy the chronological center of its span, important family members of both older and younger generations also take the novel’s stage for many pages. It is gorgeous and haunting and beautiful and sad, and also (here and there) extremely funny.

If you have not read Crowley before—and, thus, have an immense and soul-shaping treat in store for you—this is probably where you should begin: his most widely-loved work. But if you are to travel into Crowley’s land, let me forearm you with a word of warning (which I am copying from something I wrote a decade ago): It’s not an easy book to get into.5 Several very fine readers whom I have pushed it upon have begun it, seen its merits, yet not finished it. I myself began it several times before making it to its (utterly glorious) end. After the first time I did so, I went online and searched for information about it, and found person after person saying some variation of, “it took me several tries to get into it but now it’s one of my favorite books”. Well, me too. I have now read it many times, and look forward to reading it again. But it requires a little effort at first. It reminds me of what Umberto Eco said in his Postscript to the Name of the Rose:

After reading the manuscript, my friends and editors suggested I abbreviate the first hundred pages, which they found very difficult and demanding. Without thinking twice, I refused, because, as I insisted, if somebody wanted to enter the abbey and live there for seven days, he had to accept the abbey’s own pace. If he could not, he would never manage to read the whole book. Therefore those first hundred pages are alike a penance or an initiation, and if someone does not like them, so much the worse for him. He can stay at the foot of the hill. Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away.

Just so: the same is true of the life of a family that lives in the country and waits for a Tale to unfold.

Little, Big is not a book that you “can’t put down”: it is that much deeper and more wonderful thing, a book that you must continually put down to catch your breath, to marvel at the view, to hold a phrase tightly in your mind in sheer delight. It is a slow book, although it is a journey well worth the taking. Some reviewers have complained that “nothing happens” in the book: which is not at all true, though I grant that there is no punching or shooting (well, except for the person who ends up getting shot, I mean; there is that. But it’s not the sort of shooting you find in what we used to call cops and robbers movies). Little, Big is not a novel paced to the attention spans of the digital age. It’s the richer for it: but it has become for us, I think, a harder read than it was when it first came out. But it will repay you many times over if you make the effort. Sometimes long journeys need to be taken on foot, with food made not purchased and resting places begged or found, not bought, so as to be the more marvelous when you finally, dusty and tired, arrive.

4.

John Crowley’s first masterpiece, however, came before Little, Big, and while there are far more fans of the later, longer work than there are of the earlier, shorter one, there are certainly many who will place them (as I do) side by side as incommensurably wonderful, and there are even some who, daring a comparison, prefer the the briefer book.

Engine Summer is an SF novel, as were all of Crowley’s first three novels though none of his later ones. It’s set in a future after a series of apocalypses and declines have changed the world dramatically, returning to a less technological age and to a more scattered world; it shows its protagonist, Rush That Speaks, leaving the home in which he was born and searching for angels, which he eventually (this is no spoiler, it is on page one) finds. Like so much of Crowley’s work, it is beautiful and elegiac and deeply sad.

The dear friend who first introduced me to the work of John Crowley—a friend who, like Crowley in his last years, is presently struggling with memory problems (which Crowley writes beautifully about here)—told me that Engine Summer is a book which reads very differently on its first reading than its second. When I first read it a few decades ago, therefore, I read the entire (short) text, arrived the end, flipped it over, and, without pause, read it again. It is indeed different on the second reading; and while I would certainly not say that it is a book that requires rereading (which is to say, that only rewards rereading), it is certainly a book that richly repays it.

Incidentally, it is from Engine Summer that the lovely notion of Snake’s Hands comes.6 Here is the part of the novel where it is most clearly laid out:

When you said it before, a snake’s-hand was something in talk. Now it’s a place.…

All right. I told you about Path: Path is like a snake, it curls around the whole of Little Belaire with its head in the middle and the tip of its tail by Buckle cord’s door, but only someone who knows Little Belaire can see where it runs. To someone else, it would seem to run off in all directions. So when you run along Path, and here is something that looks to be Path, but you find it is only rooms interlocking in a little maze that has no exits but back to Path—that’s a snake’s-hand. It runs off the snake of Path like a set of little fingers. It’s also called a snake’s-hand because a snake has no hands, and likewise there is only one Path. But a snake’s-hand is also more: my story is a Path, too, I hope; and so it must have its snake’s-hands. Sometimes the snake’s-hands in a story are the best part, if the story is a long one.

It’s a concept that gets deeply at one facet of what makes Crowley so fabulous, both in its meaning (Crowley’s stories have many snake’s hands) but also in style (the elegant comptylexi of this passage is characteristic of his work). Indeed, the only critical book devoted to John Crowley’s writings so far is entitled Snake’s Hands: The Fiction of John Crowley.7

I said that Little, Big is where you ought to begin: but many have begun here, too, and fallen as deeply in love with Crowley’s work as any other.

5.

Crowley’s work is, as I have said, not (yet) nearly as widely-read as its many intense admirers believe it ought to be. It has been, however, highly regarded by people who are themselves highly regarded—in particular his fellow writers. Ursula K. Le Guin’s blurb for Little, Big—”a book that all by itself calls for a redefinition of modern fantasy”—is splashed across the covers of many editions. Gene Wolfe, himself something of a writer’s writer for a significant part of his career, although his popularity has increased of late, said something similar, that Little, Big was “an education in modern fantasy all by itself”. He has been praised by Kim Stanley Robinson and Tom Disch.—This list could be greatly lengthened. Those who know writing best have tended to love Crowley’s writing.

One of Crowley’s most prominent admirers was the literary critic Harold Bloom, who championed Crowley’s work,8 and Little, Big in particular, saying of the latter “there is no other book by a writer still with us that I love as deeply”. Of course that sentence is now doubly out of date, since Harold Bloom is no longer around to love any texts, and Crowley is now no longer with us. But it is notable, I think, as the a sign of the respect and delight with which the book has been greeted. Bloom, in fact, singled out three of the four books I myself would privilege, saying that Crowley’s three central works reversed Dante: Little, Big was Crowley’s Paradiso, the Aegypt series his Purgatorio and that Ka, published last, is his Inferno. (And the comparisons, while obviously inexact, do capture the tones and tenors of the three books well.) Both Little, Big and the two then-published volumes of Aegypt were his list of the western cannon. And he wrote the afterward to the beautiful 40th anniversary edition of Little, Big published in 2022 (which is where the quote near the top of this paragraph comes from).

If Crowley is so good, why has his appeal been (so far) so limited in the breadth if not depth of its appeal? Why, for all the enthusiasm of his many fans, are there yet so few of us—not in absolute numbers, but compared to other great writers to whom he might reasonably be compared?

It is in fact no real mystery; there are several fairly straightforward explanations. First of, he is (as it were) struck on both sides by the segregation of fantastika from the mainstream of contemporary literature (a segregation which has never been complete, which has long been eroding, and which by now has tumbled much further than it had when Crowley’s major works were published, but which was still extremely powerful for most of Crowley’s career and which shaped the reception of his work). Readers of mainstream literature were, I suspect, put off by the explicitly fantastic elements of Crowley’s fiction (Engine Summer is blatant SF and requires a familiarity with what critic Samuel R. Delany calls the “reading protocols” of SF in order to properly engage, while Little, Big is about fairies for chrissakes. Elf?!?). At the same time, however, readers used to genre were equally put off by the lack of genre motifs and architectures.9 Falling in-between the sharp cracks of publishing categories, I think Crowley’s works struggled to find its natural audience.

Another reason is the nature of Crowley’s style. Stephen King has dubbed a particular quality a book can have as its gotta — as in, “I gotta read another page!”. John Crowley is a writer who has, I think, almost every gift a novelist can have. He writes beautiful prose; he crafts marvelous structures. His characters are human, surprising, relatable, fully present. He is insightful and funny and wise. He even creates moments of superb narrative tension, moments when his book makes your chest tight and your shoulders tense. He is a wonder.

Yet almost every gift is not quite every gift. Alas for him — or alas for us — the one that he lacks is the only gift, I sometimes think, that our culture cares about. Crowley’s books simply don’t have gotta. Nothing in the book compels you to turn the next page. You have to do that yourself; bring, yourself, the thirst for story and poetry and yes, even narrative tension. (An odd, understated sort of miracle, to create true narrative tension without gotta: but Crowley manages.) Indeed, as I said above regarding Little, Big (and it is equally true of all of his books), his works are not books one cannot stop reading but books one must stop reading, to admire, wonderingly, the beauty and artistry and awe. It makes a poor match to our current culture.—Yes: definitely alas for us!10

Those two reasons cover most of Crowley’s insufficient reach, I suspect. Oh, there are other reasons too; for instance, there is Crowley’s deep engagement with past literature and with history, both of which can be barriers in an age when people will regularly describe themselves as “late” to a discourse that is two weeks old. But perhaps that is simply more of the same? Crowley’s are, to steal Nietzsche’s word, untimely. He was not cut to fit our contemporary age; he wrote from and for a deeper, slower one. It is one very worth visiting, but you have to be willing to take the effort to make the trip, and deal with the culture shock once you arrive.

6.

The longest of Crowley’s masterpieces was his four-volume Aegypt cycle. Ordinarily I would feel I should speak most about this work—a book which, presumably in part due to its length, is overlooked even within the realm of Crowley’s insufficiently celebrated oeuvre—but I won’t, for the simple reason that I have, in fact, written about it at some length before: three and a half years ago, my very first substantial essay on this second instantiation of Attempts was about John Crowley (and J. K. Rowling: I tried to capture the ways in which Crowley’s work in some strange ways echoed Rowling’s, while also being so entirely different.) It remains, I think, one of the best essays I wrote here. As I published it when fewer of you were reading, I will leave a link here; if you missed it back then, you might go take a look:

In fact, that earlier essay can claim to have the approval of no less than Mr. Crowley himself. I don’t recall offhand if I was cheeky enough to send it to him (probably, but I’m not certain) or if he simply saw it on my Facebook feed (since we were Facebook friends), but he posted a link to it, and said nice things about it, and even put me in touch with an editor whom he thought might reprint it (this went nowhere because the journal in question didn’t do reprints and, as I had suspected but I think Crowley had not, posting it on substack definitely counted as a first publication). So I will say no more on that book, save that it is precisely as wonderful as Engine Summer, Little, Big and Ka—and that there is, really, no higher praise.

7.

There was actually one other time (that I know of) in which Crowley read my work, and, at the price of unseemly boasting,11 I can’t resist mentioning it: John Crowley read and said nice things about my graphic novel Happenstance. He had seen some of the images of it I posted online (I was posting the pages to Facebook), and expressed interest, so I offered to send him a copy, and he posted the following:

It was, of course, an extraordinary honor to have my work read at all by John Crowley; that he seems to have thought well of it, was, well, an honor indeed.

Read Happenstance

8.

I knew Crowley mostly from his work, of course; I certainly can’t say that we were friends in any save the technical Facebook sense of the term. I honestly don’t know if he would have recognized my name, or me, even before his heartbreaking late-life problems with memory.

But I did encounter him a number of times, both in the real and in the digital world. In the digital world, I sent him a number of emails, which he was kind enough to respond to, and, due to one of those email exchanges, we became Facebook friends, so we also interacted on Facebook a few times.

In the real world, I saw him a number of times at Readercon—saw him on many panels, went to one of his koffeeklatchs, and so forth—and a handful of times exchanged some words with him—usually, in my memory, my quoting others’ words to him, which he usually seemed to think well of. For instance, after one panel I went up to him and quoted Gore Vidal’s remark that “What matters finally is not the world’s judgment of oneself but one’s own judgment of the world.... Any writer who lacks this final arrogance will not survive very long in America;” he liked the remark, said I should have offered it in the comment period, but doubted the limitation to American writers only. On another occasion I remember trying (foolishly) to port into paraphrased words the power of the point in Umberto Eco’s above-quoted remark about the pace of The Name of the Rose; on yet a different occasion, I did the same with the substance of the greatest book review ever written. He liked both of those, too, although it would have been better if I had somehow managed to send him the texts rather than try to summarize them.

Then there was the time after one panel during which he had made about disparaging remark about the idea of Perec’s lipogrammatic novel La disparition to the effect that it sounded like no more than a stunt (although he was clear about never having read it), I went up to him and said that he was wrong, that Wright’s Gadsby was a stunt but that La disparition, or at any rate A Void, was deep and beautiful (Crowley was quite open to the idea, and saw at once that it at least might be on the right side of the interesting structure/stunt division he had been proposing).

Those are some of the instances that stand out in my memory. In a memorable line of Cyril Connolly (used as an epigraph in Nicholson Baker’s superb U and I), he says of fans meeting writers that “it may be us they wish to meet but it’s themselves they want to talk about”. This conveys the same pathetic egoism which ensure that what I remember from my in-person encounters with Crowley are not his words to me but mine to him; but at least I can say that it was not myself, but other people’s words, that I wished to talk to him about.

I wish I had had more chances to do so.

So my relationship with John Crowley, as you can see, while not entirely parasocial, was mostly so. Yet parasocial relationships are real relationships, as one-way streets are real streets and as photographers really do see their subjects. Our relationships with strangers (or comparative strangesr) can and often do mean a great deal to us. John Crowley’s death this past week hit me hard. I feel, along a lot of other people who never had the pleasure of speaking with Mr. Crowley even a single time, like we have lost something. For we have. Something went out of the world last Saturday; an evanescent flash of magic which had burned bright in the corners of our eyes has guttered and gone out. The world is poorer, and we are less.

9.

Aegypt, Crowley’s third masterpiece, took twenty years to publish (the first volume was 1987, the last 2007), and took (as I heard him lament, both at panels and even once in a personal exchange) a very large chunk of his career.12 Forty-five when the first volume came out, he was sixty-five by the time the last one did; I can see why he lamented the time, although I myself believe it was very well spent indeed. But he had not, in writing it, exhausted his powers, for after Aegypt came his fourth and final masterpiece: Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruins of Ymr.

I have a half-finished, probably never to be finished essay on that novel in my files, written soon after its release, once I had time to read and reread it.13 I will share some of those fragments here. The essay would have been organized around the brambles before the door of this splendid book, trying to clear the way for readers to find their way into it.

One of those barriers is the book’s title. Frankly, I am astounded that that book moved into the world under the title that it did. Granted, it is a perfect title for those who have already read the book, or even those who are a short way into it; but for everyone else, it must seem qutie forbidding: aside from the usual grammatical particles (what players of charades would classify as “small words”), there are five words in it, and four of those are not English. Before one reads the book, it comes across as more or less gibberish. Now there are plenty of fine titles which sound like gobbledygook before reading them—my two favorite examples are The Crying of Lot 49 and Stuck Rubber Baby, both of which make no sense whatsoever until they have been read, although both of which are so clear afterwards that it’s hard to fully remember how weird they sound to everyone else. But the difference between them and Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruins of Ymr is that strange as they are, they are at least clearly English. It’s like the difference between colorless green ideas sleep furiously14 and dimismitt shiip ecaur thaan goseiotmy; one is intriguing, the other is excuse me? But since Ka is far too fine a novel to be hindered by a trip on the doormat, let’s see if I can help: Dar Oakley is a creature’s name, specifically the name of the crow who is the protagonist of the novel. As we learn in the opening pages (so it’s not much of a spoiler), Dar Oakley sees the world as divided into realms, the human realm and the crow realm (which not locations so much as modes of being). “Ka” is the name of the crow realm in crow-speech; “Ymr” the name of the human realm, again in crow speech. Hence: Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr. (Isn’t that a great title now that you know what it means?)

Another barrier, beyond the title—or another barrier for me, at least, when I first heard of the book—was my idea that a book about talking animals was not a genre I was much interested in. I don’t know why I thought this, but somehow the notion seemed impossibly twee, or something. Prior to Crowley’s novel, I believe the last book I read with an animal protagonist (aside from kids’ books and comics) was Watership Down, which I had read sometime in middle school. For whatever reason, I thought that it was not a genre which appealed to me. Even as a lover of Crowley’s work, the idea was sufficiently off-putting that when I first heard that Crowley was writing a novel about crows, I thought, sadly, that I might just skip that one.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. I might not have been able to imagine a good novel about (and largely from the viewpoint of) a crow before reading Ka, but it rapidly became clear that it was a masterful work.

Now in retrospect I shouldn’t have been quite so surprised. A lot of Crowley’s earlier fiction had sections with animal points of view. Beasts, in fact, not only has the half-human hybrids who are the major characters in the book, but also a few chapters out-and-out narrated from the point of view of a (somewhat intelligence-heightened) dog. Engine Summer... well, I won’t say because it’s too good to spoil, but anyone who’s read it knows what I’m referring to. And Little, Big has a lengthy animal story in it (”Brother Northwind’s Secret”), told as a story for children but rich and wonderful and splendid. There might well be others I’m forgetting too. Does the werewolf in the Aegypt series count? Eh, probably not.

But I didn’t think about any of this this, so I was hesitant to read a novel from an animal’s point of view. I emphasize this point simply to say that, if this is true of anyone else, I would urge you to set those fears aside. Since it turns out, despite my prejudices, it can, and in Crowley’s hands does, work splendidly.

It is worth dwelling for a moment on why it works so well, something captured in an interview Crowley did15 where he says (in transcribing this, I have eliminated a few verbal repetitions):

I wanted to avoid the trap of the talking animal book: where animals in the stories are basically human beings dressed up as animals, in effect. They have some animal problems to deal with, specific to their type and their situation, but basically they’re human beings. And I wanted them not to be that way, if I could avoid it.

This gets at what makes Ka work, and work so splendidly: this is a book about a crow. A crow imagined as speaking, and as probably somewhat more intelligent than even such intelligent creatures are; but nevertheless an animal, not a person in an animal suit. Its viewpoint is non-human — effectively and powerfully so — while not being so remote as to be incomprehensible to the human. It’s not quite right to say that Ka is like an SF novel where humans encounter an alien intelligence, but it’s close. Actually, one major difference is that in this book we are put in the head of the alien, not the human; this is a first-contact story told from the alien’s point of view.

In the same interview, Crowley described his research into crow intelligence (and raven intelligence, a species which is part of the same family corvidae and which can therefore provide clues about crow thought); in particular he mentioned the books The Mind of the Raven, Ravens in Winter and In the Company of Crows and Ravens. Having not mastered this particular literature myself, I can’t say to what degree Mr. Crowley has successfully done so; but I can report that he has, at the very least, faked having done so splendidly: to a non-specialist who has not read the available popular books about crows, he comes across as having captured crows splendidly. Since this will be the vast majority of the books’ audience, that will be good enough for most of us.16

Part of the trick by which Crowley pulls this off is to have the story told by a (mostly backgrounded) human narrator: while the point of view is largely Ka’s, the novel is presented as a retelling of the story he told the narrator, so that every so often the narrator will explain that some particular point is one which he simply could not understand, with the implication (sometimes stronger, sometimes diminished) that it is a crow way of thinking which humans in general could never understand. So to revise my earlier statement, this is not a first-contact novel told from an alien’s point of view, but one told from an alien’s point of view as recounted to and understood by a human narrator. Another part of this is that Crowley occasionally foregrounds the narrator’s attempts at interpretation: Crows, at least in Crowley’s telling, use stances where humans would use gestures and facial expressions: these are “translated” by the narrator, but we are reminded, often enough, that they are stances that it seems just slightly inhuman. Together these techniques—the human narrator, the interpreted gestures, the sense that some things simply elude the narrator and us—allow the foreignness to be our basic window onto the narrative while also keeping it convincingly foreign. It’s quite a tour-de-force.

And, of course, the entire novel is, ultimately, about not just any crow, but a specific crow who learns to be partly in Ymr rather than wholly in Ka: about the parts of Ymr he can never fully understand, about the things he brings across from Ymr which become a permanent part of Ka, and about the unique sorrows of Ymr that he wishes he could escape but, which having entered it, he can’t quite let drop. This, too, allows us to see the novel’s viewpoint as foreign while finding our way into it.

Yet another thing that Crowley does, masterfully, is not only show crow society, but show crow society changing. It is a remarkable thing: even when SF writers show aliens having different cultures, they rarely show those cultures change. But Crowley does. Some of these changes are portrayed as directly caused by humans; some are reactions to the humans’ alteration of the environment. This helps both the society of crows, and the viewpoint that endures among them over time, feel both real and other.

There is another barrier worth mentioning, which is that, ultimately, Ka is a book about death. This is overdetermined by the fact that crows have long been symbolically linked with death in human culture, and Crowley is too sensitive a dweller within Ymr to ignore this fact. (Among other things, they are in part eaters of carrion, which helped create and continues to reinforce the link.) And though Ka has humor and charm and even in places optimism, and although the steady, non-human viewpoint can be read as actually uplifting and encouraging in the face of the Ruin of Ymr, it can’t be denied that in a great many ways this is a very dark book. (Remember that, according to Bloom, this is Crowley’s Inferno.) It is about death — what death is, how humans view it, and, more broadly, the death of our planet that we are all currently living through. And in our age, when we are desperate for fluffy humor and empowering optimism as we fall ever-faster towards the end of the world, this thanatic focus will be, for some readers, hard to take. No less an authority than Ursula K. Le Guin (who was, as noted, a big fan of Crowley’s earlier work) reportedly put it down as darker than she wanted at the moment — as this occurred in the final year of her life, it was not an unrelatable response!17 But I would encourage people to read it anyway. Not only for the many non-dark parts, and not only despite the terrible darkness of some of the vision, but because of it. We are all, now, living in the ruin of Ymr: this is a novel of precisely that. In that sense, if only that sense, this was, and still remains, a very timely book indeed.

And, personally, I found its very darkness comforting: to see the unbelievable suffering of human life as simply producing wealth (which is what the crows in Ka term food to eat; our wars and horrors producing, for crows, a rich bounty indeed) is somehow reassuring: it normalizes it, reinforces the cycle of life, the sense that all our concerns are evanescent and even if they, and we, will vanish, other things will go on: and that most of life is like crows, not people (although most is, as it were, even more so: most of the universe is not alive: to write a novel like Ka, but from the point of view of a tree, or a rock, would be a yet more distancing thing, and quite possibly not doable in a way that would remain readable18). Who knows how I will really feel once perched on the edge of the grave that is our common destination, but I can easily imagine at least some people reading Ka as a comfort while in a hospice.

Ka is wonderfully wise, wonderfully penetrating, about many things: about consciousness and language and religion and death, and about the relation between the material and everything else. Crowley shows us, in crows, a consciousness that is fundamentally other than our own, but not so other as to be incomprehensible to us. And he shows it, in part, by showing Dar Oakley learning a bit about our (human’s) consciousness. He shows us Dar Oakley learn about names, for instance, and how Dar Oakley creeps up to the strange beliefs of humans in things that cannot be seen — the persistence of the dead after death; the existence of the sacred — and peers at it from a foreign viewpoint, showing it to us again as if for the first time.

Crowley, of course, also literalizes those beliefs — Dar Oakley goes many times into the world of the dead — but in a way whose ambiguity, uncertainty and vagueness is its strength: we’re never quite sure how literally to take it (and it contradicts itself, as each time Dar Oakley goes to the realm of the deead he goes to whatever version of the afterlife is current in the culture of his time), which means it is open to readings by believers, skeptics, and skeptics who will pretend to believe for a fantasy; all three.

Sometimes a writer’s later works will be ignored, since their reputations are formed by their earlier ones, and I think it may be so with Crowley: Little, Big was his breakthrough, and if people read more, they tend to move backward to Engine Summer or forward to the majesty of Aegypt. Both of those are good destinations! But so is Ka, and I urge readers not to overlook it. This, too, might be a place to begin, and fall under the enduring and powerful spell of Crowley’s words.

10.

Superb as all of Crowley’s books are, there is another, very very closely related art form in which I think his work may be equally good—one which will probably, for some readers, be even better. I speak of Crowley’s own readings of the audiobooks of his own work. At times I have been convinced that Crowley’s highest art is not his writing, but his writing as read by himself (at other times, I think this is a foolish thought). People process text differently, and I imagine some people will never like any audiobooks as much as even a lesser text; for such people the books are there to treasure. But if you are someone who finds themselves having trouble getting into Crowley’s work, I recommend his self-read audiobooks as one possible door. And if you are a fan of Crowley but have not yet listened to the audiobooks, I urge you to give them a try: his voice adds yet another layer of richness to these richest of all contemporary works, one that should not be missed.

Sadly, Crowley only recorded three of his books—2¼ of those I am calling his masterpieces.19 Specifically, he recorded in their entirety Little, Big and Ka; and he recorded the first volume of Aegypt, under (confusingly) its originally-published title—that is, under the title “Aegypt” rather than under the proper title for volume one, The Solitudes; but despite the title it is not the whole of Aegypt but only the beginning of it. I expressed (at least) once on Facebook to Mr. Crowley the wish that he might record the rest, and he replied that he thought the audience would be small enough that it would be simpler to just gather us all in a room and read it to us. Even if this was true at the time—I don’t believe it, but assuming it arguendo—this neglected the dimension of time: if he had recorded them, we could still have them, to listen and relisten, and for our children’s children’s children to do the same. The chance, alas, is now gone. But of course his reply, however facetious it was, got at the reason it never happened: it was, alas, not deemed financially worthwhile to make the recording.20

(Three others of Crowley’s books are available as audiobooks, but read by someone else: his last short story collection, And Go Like This and his last nonfiction collection, Reading Backwards, both read by Graham Rowat, and his last novel, Flint & Mirror, read by Samuel Roukin.21 I can’t comment on the quality of any of those recordings.)

11.

When someone we care about (even in a parasocial way) dies, our instinct is usually to try and do what those no longer able to act for themselves would wish done.22

The most important thing a writer’s admirers can do for his or her work is to ensure its survival and its spread. In this vein, I have some hopes for Crowley’s work I would like to express (since I have, alas, little other power to affect their odds or effect their occurrence).

My most important wish is that I would like his complete works to be in print. At the moment, only some of them are. This ought to be a scandal for American letters. I hope that someone with the power to remedy this state of affairs will recognize this and address it.

But beyond that, I would actually like not just any copies, but specifically copies with Crowley’s preferred texts to be widely available. At the moment at least three of his works which were later (re)edited and prepared for publication by Mr. Crowley are, in those better texts, only available in limited editions.

The most important of these, undoubtedly, is the 40th-anniversary edition of Little, Big (edited by my friend Ron Drummond), which is a masterpiece of book design and a splendid physical creation—there are still some for sale, and if you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.23 Indeed, I would go farther and say that it is a work of art which stands slightly apart from any other text of the novel, since in it Crowley’s novel is masterfully interwoven with the art of Peter Milton in a way that draws out not only the brilliance of Crowley’s tale but the beauty of Milton’s art as well: in that volume, you can not only read the best possible text of Little, Big, but you can also enjoy Milton’s sublime work, and be dazzled by their intricately arranged conversation; three artistic experiences in one. But at the moment this book costs almost $200, and is only in a limited edition which will sooner or later sell out and not be reprinted, and is not at all available as an ebook.24 I would very much like to see that corrected text of Little, Big published both as a trade paperback and as an ebook—not, presumably, with all of the art by Milton as interspersed in the 40th anniversary edition (which would presumably make it prohibitively expensive), but at least with the unadorned corrected text or even, if possible, an edition with at least a few of Milton’s marvelous etchings.

Additionally, two other works by Crowley were also put out in expensive and (even more limited) editions: his first masterpiece, Engine Summer, and one of his very finest short works, “A Great Work of Time”, were both published by Subterranean Press in editions with texts corrected by the author. These are now both out of print; the former was in so limited an edition that, to my intense frustration, it sold out before I could order one. So those versions of those splendid works are currently available only to a small handful of people.

I am not a fan of manufactured scarcity. I understand, I think, the economics of it, but I am opposed to it on grounds of justice and aesthetics and human flourishing. I would like all of Crowley’s books, in their best available texts, to be accessible to everyone who wishes to read them—which, in my utopian imagination, would be many millions of people. Which means I would like to see all three of those works republished, following their preferred texts, in inexpensive, unlimited editions, both on paper and as ebooks.

For that matter, Crowley’s nonfiction, which has been collected in two volumes, In Other Words (2007) and Reading Backwards (2019), which were also limited editions (also both Subterranean Press), and both are, I believe, out of print in paper (and the former was never released as an ebook). For that matter, they did not, between them, collect all of Crowley’s non-fiction; as long as I am shouting desires into an indifferent universe, I would wish that the collected contents of both books, and other pieces besides (such as the heartbreaking essay already linked above), would be gathered up into a widely-available Collected Non-Fiction. And then there are his short stories, currently in two books (the one subtitled “Collected Stories” having been rendered incomplete by later works)…

Enough. My readers get the idea. In this day and age, with ebooks and print-on-demand books of acceptable if not ideal quality, and similar technologies, there is no reason that anyone who wants a copy of any of Crowley’s books (or of any books at all, for that matter) should not be able to readily obtain them. I would like to say “we should make it happen”, but in truth all that most of us can do is hope and wish and advocate; the rights are, presumably, tied up in a small number of hands. I hope they will let them fly freely, as widely as they can.

12.

So many words, but so few, as of yet, of Mr. Crowley’s. But his words are so much better than mine, so I want to end with his words. Here are a few passages of his that I have loved—just a tiny sampling; if you like them too, then seek out more of them, in any of his many fabulous books.

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We say that to console us for the loss of Paradise
God gave to us alone among all his creatures
Hope and Memory. We might rather say,
Only because we are creatures burdened with
Hope and Memory do we intimate a Paradise
which we alone have lost.

— Epigraph to the story collection Antiquities (unisgned but written by Crowley himself)

There aren’t many now who leave from the same world they were born into. Not here, not anywhere on earth as far as I can tell or know; the simplest and most unchanging of human societies have been so shattered in the last hundred years, people flung into centrifuges of change and loss, that there comes to be nothing at last to say good-bye to. I was leaving the world, but it was not my world I was leaving.

— Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

Pity. He felt it in his breast and in his hooded eyes when at dawn he roosted to sleep in hiding. He had no name for it in the language of Ka; there was no name for it because he was the first Crow ever to feel it within him. Pity for them in the awful complications of the lives they built for themselves, laboring as helplessly and ceaselessly as bees building their combs, but their combs held no honey, he thought now. Useless, useless, and worse than useless, needless: the labor of their lives, the battles and deaths, and all their own doing. He lifted his wings to fly, to fly from this pity, but he could not; folded them in disorder; bowed with open mouth in pity.

If only he had not gone into Ymr. For out of Ymr he had brought pity into Ka, and now could never get it out. He saw the earth and the night as People did, and it wasn’t a different place from their day-world. It was all one now, Ymr was, and he was in it.

—Ibid.

On the night Orion rose and Scorpio set, a night as warm almost as August for reasons of the weather’s own but in fact by that sign the last night of summer, he and Sophie and Daily Alice lay out in a sheep-shorn meadow on their backs, their heads close together like three eggs in a nest, as pale too as that in the night light. They had their heads together so that when one pointed out a star, the arm he pointed with would be more or less in the other’s line of sight; otherwise, they would be all night saying That one, there, where I’m pointing, unable to correct for billions of miles of parallax. Smoky had the star-book open on his lap, and consulted it with a flashlight whose light was masked with red cellophane taken from a Dutch cheese so its bightness wouldn’t blind him….

But this now Sophie could see clearly: these were falling stars. She thought perhaps she could pick one out and watch and see it fall: a momentary bright exhalation, that made her draw breath, her heart filled with infinitude. Would that be a better fate? In the grass her hand found Smoky’s; the other already held her sister’s, who pressed it every time brightness fell from the air.

Daily Alice couldn’t tell if she felt huge or small. She wondered whether her head were so big as to be able to contain all this starry universe, or whether the universe were so little that it would fit within the compass of her human head. She alternated between these feelings, expanding and diminishing. The stars wandered in and out of the vast portals of her eyes, under the immense empty dome of her brow; and then Smoky took her hand and she vanished to a speck, still holding the stars as in a tiny jewel box within her.

So they lay a long time, not caring to talk any more, each dwelling on that odd, physical sensation of ephemeral eternity—a paradox but undeniably felt; and if the stars had been as near and full of faces as they seemed, they would have looked down and seen those three as a single asterism, a linked wheel against the wheeling dark sky of the meadow.

— Little, Big

He thought how there is but one road, one dark wood, one hill to climb, one river to cross; one city to come to, one night, one dawn. Each one is only encountered again and again, apprehended, understood, recounted, forgotten, lost and found again. And yet at the same time and for everyone the universe stretches out infinitely in every direction you can look in or think about, at every instant. He had thought this thought before, not once, more than once, but he had long forgotten all those other instances, and he soon forgot this one too.

— Daemonomania (Aegypt, book 3)

She wept and wept, and the gods drank up her tears, as they have always drunk up our tears, yours and mine and everyone’s, and by their sweetness were sustained for another day.

— Ibid.

Only one world after all, here where it had always been, like it or not. She had thought a summer ago that she and the county and everybody in it lay under a spell, and somehow it was hers to break it, but she’d come finally to see that of course she never had been, and neither had they or anyone and that’s how spells are broken.

— Endless Things (Aegypt, book 4)

Rest in peace, John Crowley. You are missed.

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Well, there were a number of possible answers—I did briefly toy with putting it at the very end2—but I settled on the midpoint: there would be the first half, Z to N, an outlier, and then the second half, M to A. As for what symbol the outlier tale’s title would commence with, it seemed to me that the answer had to be a numeral.3 And so the title for the most recently released story—released, in fact, today—was chosen: “9/11, 2020, 3:56 on 4/4/31,and Other Possibly Significant Numbers“.

It took longer than I had hoped—much, much longer. There were specific problems and reasons this time, but in general it seems obvious that these stories are taking me longer than I had hoped and planned. In his author’s note to his novel Bearing an Hourglass, Piers Anthony4 writes that since that book is about Time, that clearly Time has bedeviled his work; I fear I am suffering from the same fate. Or perhaps it is the other way around, and I chose to write about Time because I have always been wrestling it, and I won’t let it go unless it blesses me.5

But I finished it, and it’s now out! If you wish to read it, you can buy it at my web site (where you can also buy a subscription to the entire series, including all past & future issues), or you can buy it at any of the usual ebook stores: Amazon (and all the non-US versions such as Amazon UK), Apple Books, Fable, Kobo, or Smashwords. (It has not yet posted on Barnes & Noble for some reason, but I hope it shows up there soon.) Here’s what the cover looks like:

But since that photo is (due to the greediness of the title) only half the image, here is just the image on its own

And yes, as I noted in the title to this announcement, this story is the midpoint, halfway through the second movement. I think it will be fair to say6 that Retcon really has two structures: there is the major triparte structure which organizes the whole mosaic tale, but also a less prominent, but still real, division into two halves. That second half begins here.

Hopefully by now everyone reading these words will have run out and purchased the story, or even the whole series, and is eagerly waiting for me to draw this note to a close so you can go read it. If so: consider it closed! Nothing of particular note will be said in the remainder that is not in the books themselves. Go read! Enjoy!

But in case anyone is not quite sold I thought that, as a teaser for this story, and for the series as a whole, I would reprint the opening section of the story here. So that follows.

“9/11, 2020, 3:56 on 4/4/31,and Other Possibly Significant Numbers” (Opening Section)

1944-02-29

It was my colleague who archly dubbed it “the mystery box” when I brought it down to the kitchen this evening. I stumbled upon it completely by happenstance. It was in one of the two buildings (we’re down to only two!) that we have not yet used, which I therefore go into only rarely. (I say “buildings”, even though “sections” might be more accurate since they are all connected by walkways and thus might be considered but wings of a single building the way that two islands become one if connected by even the narrowest of causeways, yet it does not feel like a single building, so I let my language drift.) But early on one of my visitors—Noam, perhaps?—suggested that I should take care not to let “rarely” slide to “never”: that just to make sure there were no failures of heat or leaks or anything else, it would be wise to simply pass through it from time to time. Thinking this good advice, I sometimes take the long way around and traverse from building to building along the outer ring rather than cutting through the hub of the lattice. Usually I just pass along the ground floor for the most cursory of checks, but on rare occasion, as a way of taking a slightly longer break that is still not entirely wasted time, I will climb the stairs and pass through one of the upper stories as well. I doubt I do this as often as once a month (we are, of course, miserably busy), but I did it today, and as I stepped briskly through the third floor of building six, passing row upon row of empty grey shelves as though viewing the preserved skeleton of a library, I saw a dab of white break the monotony: a box was sitting on one of the shelves, a single full pixel on an empty page, carefully placed as straight as if it were crammed in on each side with fellows.

The box as I said is white, or at any rate would have been when new, although when I spotted it it appeared dirty and scuffed, as if used in many moves or stored for many years in a storage locker or basement. It’s made of cardboard, one of those boxes you can fold up from flat into three dimensions which will hold its shape without tape or glue, paired with a removable top and possessing handles just below the upper edges of the narrower sides. It is perhaps a foot high and wide and a bit more than a foot deep. It had no handwritten markings (as we use for all our boxed storage), only labels printed upon the box. There was the word “staples”, although from the look of it I think that is a brand name, not a contents marking (and even if it had once contained staples, it no longer did when I saw it). There was, in large characters, “#33250” printed upon it. And in smaller characters above that a number of blank boxes were labeled with suggested uses (box number, location, contents, etc.). Otherwise there was no indication of its origin or context.

At first I assumed it must have been left over from construction. It is clearly a standardized box of some sort, although I do not recall any box of this make being used during the construction days. But when I took it off the shelf and opened it I saw at once that it was not anything we would have transported during construction; rather it was full of files in manilla folders cut to hold standard American-sized paper. Rifling through it it appeared that each folder had only one document, although some were of many pages. On each of the folder’s tabs was a typewritten label containing a number—dates, presumably, although the formatting of them was oddly inconsistent. Here are the numbers from the labels of the top dozen folders, reproduced precisely as written there:

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9/11
2020
3:56 on 4/4/31
2021/1/6
19/2/23
1993
9/11/56
12/12/1998
88
2028/3
6/5/68
11/11

The variety of formats was indeed puzzling. Some were marked with just a year, some with just a day, and some with a complete date (in one instance, of course, not just a day but a time on that day—that being the only date that is not mysterious to me). The formatting varies in order throughout (sometimes American style, sometimes European, sometimes Chinese, as though people from each of our three research units contributed files), which leaves some of the dates ambiguous. Take, for instance, the first pair of numbers, 9/11: is this a reference to September 2011 or November, 2009? There is no way to know. “19/2/23” is, to be sure, not month first (not American style); but is it the 2nd of February in 2019 (European style), or the 19th of February 2023 (Chinese)?

Ascertaining all this took only seconds, but actually reading the documents would take much longer, so I picked up the box and brought it all the way around to building 7 and left it in the kitchen. Then, this evening as I was fixing dinner (we have been eating together, alternating cooking and cleaning, although we get other meals on our own, save that the first up makes coffee for two), my colleague came in, opened the box, and looked briefly through it.

“What is this? This isn’t any format I’ve seen. Did you keep the files this way before I came up?”

“No,” I replied. “It’s not in any format I’ve used. I thought conceivably you...”

“No,” My colleague looked at several labels, opened one, flipped through it. “So where is this from?”

“Building 6. I was just doing a quick status check as a break—”

“You know,” my colleague chided me, replacing the lid on the box and moving it to the side so we could sit for dinner, “You are allowed to take actual breaks. Not just switch types of work.”

“How far behind are we now? Two full days?”

“Two and a half.”

“And it’s not like I’ve seen you take a break.”

“Touché.” I put a bowl of stir fry over rice before each of us, and we sat to eat. “So where did it come from?” my colleague asked after tasting the dinner and making complimentary noises. “And what was it doing in building 6? I thought we haven’t used that yet.”

“We haven’t. After I found this I walked through every aisle on every floor. Except for this it’s entirely empty.”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” my colleague quoted. “Are you going to look through it?”

“At some point,” I said. “But I think we should try to catch up on the real work first.”

My colleague nodded. “The mystery box will wait.”

“’Mystery box?’” I said skeptically.

My colleague’s only reply was to laugh.

I have left the mystery box in the cold storage room besides the kitchen for now.

And in case you want to read the rest, let me repeat the purchase links from above (heaven forefend you have to scroll back up to find them): you can buy it at my web site (where you can also buy a subscription to the entire series), or at Amazon (and all the non-US versions such as Amazon UK), Apple Books, Fable, Kobo, or Smashwords.

So go! Tolle lege!

Purchase Retcon at Amazon

Purchase Retcon Elsewhere

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1 I was popping along, posting an essay a week for nearly three months… and then nothing. Further, I promised a forthcoming installment of my serial story Retcon some months ago: where is it?

Reader, I have no good excuses. Some combination of life difficulties, aesthetic struggles, and good, old-fashioned writer’s block has held me up. I have spent more days this year beating my head against a blank piece of paper than I have in years. It’s upsetting and grueling and frustrating. I can do nothing but plead for your forgiveness and say that I am trying.

The only good news is that I think—I think (kenina hara, deo volente, insh’allah, im yertze hashem, knock wood)—that I have seen the far shore of it. Things are moving better.

So where am I?

As far as Retcon goes, the next story, “9/11, 2020, 3:56 on 4/4/31, and Other Possibly Significant Numbers” is…almost done. I am hoping I can get it into a good enough shape that it can be published a week from today (July 9). Even if I decide it needs a bit more polishing, it should be finished soon and will definitely (kenina hara, etc) come out on August 9. And I should say that the fifteenth story is already sufficiently underway that I am cautiously optimistic that it will follow in much less time than the fourteenth has taken.

And I am hoping to finish more essays soon; I have many drafts, half or three-quarters finished, which need polishing and capstoning before being released into the wild. There the hold-up is largely ordinal: I feel so behind on Retcon that I have not devoted the time to the essays, which I could otherwise turn out at a respectable pace. To tide you over, however, here’s a brief (they edited it down a lot, because there wasn’t space on the internet for more than a hard cap of 1000 words, I guess) piece, a review of Jo Walton’s latest novel Everybody’s Perfect which I wrote for Ancillary Review of Books.

And thank you for bearing with me. More should be coming soon. Kenina hara. Etc.

In the meanwhile, while I in general avoid back-to-back bricolage posts, I have gathered a few items which are too tasty for me to keep from sharing.

1. The Predecessors of “the Motte and Bailey Fallacy”

I recently came across this nearly two-decade old post by John Holbo:

...a standard rhetorical move which has no accepted name, but which really needs one. I call it ‘the two-step of terrific triviality’. Say something that is ambiguous between something so strong it is absurd and so weak that it would be absurd even to mention it. When attacked, hop from foot to foot as necessary, keeping a serious expression on your face. With luck, you will be able to generate the mistaken impression that you haven’t been knocked flat, by rights. As a result, the thing that you said which was absurdly strong will appear to have some obscure grain of truth in it. Even though you have provided no reason to think so.

What interests me is the connection between this and the now-common idea of the Motte and Bailey fallacy, as coined by Nicholas Shackel (2005) and later popularized by Scott Alexander. It’s almost the same idea: a statement which is ambiguous between an obvious, weak, dull claim and a false, strong, interesting one.

And it’s not the only time that Mr. Holbo anticipated the Motte and Bailey fallacy. In an old post on the sadly-defunct John & Belle Have a Blog, he wrote:

The fallacy that Theory = theory needs a catchy name. Meno accuses Socrates of being a stingray. I accuse Theory of being a puffer fish. When you can see you are about to be attacked, inflate to several times your actual size in an attempt to intimidate the attacker into backing off. Actually, what Graff and McLaughlin produce is just one genus of the species. We see the puffer in action when thinkers like Derrida imply that Theory is just philosophy, so that resistance to Theory = resistance to philosophy; and when thinkers like de Man imply that Theory is just attention to the nature of language, so that resistance to theory = resistance to language; and when Eagleton declares these days that Theory is just moderately systematic self-reflective study of a subject matter, so resistance to Theory = resistance to any kind of systematic thinking. The page I linked above gives a blurb of sorts for the McLaughlin book, saying he understands ‘critical theory’ to mean “raising serious, sustained questions about cultural practice and ideology.” So resistance to critical theory = a refusal to be intellectually serious in a quite broad sense. In each case a false equation produces the illusion that Theory is necessary, thereby obviating the need to provide any basic account about why ‘doing Theory’ might be better than doing something else.

The puffer is a standard Theory defense mechanism. But it is tedious and ought not to be employed; it truly doesn’t get anyone anywhere.

This is not quite as close to the Motte and Bailey fallacy as the two-step of terrific triviality, but it’s clearly in the same neighborhood.

Why did the Motte and Bailey win the memetic evolutionary struggle? I think there are two plausible explanations. If you want a “survival of the fittest”-type explanation, you can point out that it’s both catchier and more general than either of Holbo’s formulations. If you want a formulation that talks instead about the also-considerable role that chance plays in life’s history, then you can simply point out that the asteroid-strike of Scott Alexander favoring Motte and Bailey was the decisive factor.

Either way, I believe it was clearly an idea whose time had come. I think it is not a coincidence that 2/3 of these three formulations were from 2005, while the third is from 2007; nor is it a coincidence that 2/3 of them were about postmodernism/Theory, while the third is about conservatism.

Wait, conservatism?—Yes, conservatism: you might think that conservatism and postmodernism were opposites—certainly two decades ago conservatives claimed to be hard-headed, objective, grounded where liberals were pie-in-the-sky, etc.—but you would be wrong. Recently, of course, Trump’s well-nigh continuous flat denial of reality (passim) has made the connection between the very worst type of postmodernism and conservatism plain (it is now the topic of interesting and learned books), but even in the mid-naughts, when the Motte-and-Bailey notion was formulated, you famously had Ron Suskind interviewing an anonymous high-level Bush official (rumored to have been Karl Rove) who said:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.

It was in the same year that Chris Ekman memorably wrote “Postmodernism, whatever its accomplishments, is a little dated now, and certainly no longer radical. These days, to argue that ‘True Knowledge is Impossible’ is to sound less like a young literary turk than a White House spokesman.”

I think that liberals and leftists who developed and promoted postmodernism ended up (unwittingly, of course) doing damage to one of the pillars of knowledge that undergird our world. They are not responsible for the depredations of the conservatives, of course, but they did end up helping them do them.

But the central point here is that the Motte and Bailey fallacy was of its time: a time of postmodernism still being strong in the academy (if sufficiently weakened that it could be more loudly and deeply questioned than it usually was ten to twenty years before), as well as conservatism deep denial of reality really coming into its fore. Now, of course, with politicians whose claims provide not only no evidence of a statement’s truth but approach providing substantial evidence for their negation’s correctness, and the disinformation machine that is the contemporary, debased interent, the most evolutionary fit version of the idea (whether it was the actual best or simply the one that happened to thrive in the aftermath of the asteroid strike) is now well established in our mental landscape.

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2. The Greatest Book Review Ever Written

Critic and novelist James Elkins has a candidate for the greatest book review ever written—actually, to be precise, he says that it is the most perfect book review ever written, which may be synonymous, but then again may not be. And to be further precise, he doesn’t say he has a candidate; he says it is the most perfect review ever written. It’s Vladimir Nabokov’s review of the English translation of Sartre’s first novel, Nausea. And it’s… a really good candidate! It’s a superb review, as you would expect from Nabokov, one of the very greatest writers of the 20th century. You should go read it! (That link is a gift link so that you should be able to read it even if you don’t subscribe to the NY Times.)

Then, having read it, go read Elkins’s write-up as to why it is the most perfect review ever written. He makes a good case—understandably, since it is, indeed, an absolutely first-rate review.

And yet—

I, some time ago, put forward my candidate for the greatest book review ever written—and I stand by my choice. I think the most perfect, or greatest, book review ever written2 is the review of the (now largely forgotten, I think, although it turns out it is still in print so it is not entirely so) novel Excellent Intentions by Richard Hull. The review is by Jorge Luis Borges—one of the very few writers who stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Nabokov in the list of great 20th-century writers. And I think Borges’s review is better than Nabokov’s. The purpose of this brief section is to say why.

First, you ought to read this review, which you can do so at the link, or you can just read it here:

Before I say why I think Borges’s review is greater, let me reiterate that, first, I adore Nabokov as a writer; I think that his review of Sartre is superb; and that I think Elkins’s arguments are strong.

And yet.

What I would say about these two reviews, held side-by-side, is that they display Borges at his best (or close to it) but Nabokov at his worst (or close to it).

Nabokov could be nasty especially about translation and literature he didn’t like, and both qualities are on full display here. His tone is supercilious and not in the least generous, and there is not a hint of self-doubt anywhere in the piece. I grant there is, as Elkins argues, a very interesting idea in Nabokov’s review (his critique of philosophical novels tout court), but I think it is an idea which needed far more elaboration than Nabokov here gives it (doubtless than he had room to give it), and also very much fits with Nabokov’s very particular aesthetic preferences.

(I should say that, in general, while I find Nabokov to be an excellent guide when he points out writing he thinks is great, he is next to useless in pointing out writing he dislikes, since he dislikes huge swaths of great literature—that is, literature which is great by the estimation of the world at large; and even if you think Nabokov is right in some cases, he is surely not right in all of them (not even, I would say, in most of them)—and makes no distinction between it and actually poor writing, and simply dismisses it all with words such as “trash”, “Poshlost” and the like. Authors he dismisses this way include Cervantes, Dostoyevsky, Mann, Camus, Kazantzakis, D. H. Lawrence, Sartre (in the present review), and all of science fiction.3 I certainly think Nabokov’s iconoclasm is refreshing, and I think a freedom say one dislikes supposedly great books is part of the process of genuinely liking others, and I don’t begrudge him his opinions at all. But I do refuse to take even remotely seriously his opinions; I think if he dislikes a book that gives you, basically, no information, even though if he likes one that is a very strong recommendation indeed. This is, of course, still a very useful guide to have! One must just selectively listen to him.)

In contrast Borges’s review is generous, self-doubting, understated, and civilized… while still being as devastating as Nabokov’s. It’s not that Borges is positive where Nabokov is not; it’s that Borges is just much pleasanter about it—and, as a consequence, far more convincing in his negativity.

At the same time, of course, Borges also outlines an imaginary book of his own—something that he does in a many of his short stories, such that this piece, which appeared with Borges’s nonfiction, could almost as readily fit in with his fiction, too.4 Which is to say, he gives us a superb little short story (in the vein of his own short fiction), and as part of it (again, characteristic of his short fiction) a fabulous idea—one which, unlike Nabokov’s, is not hurt by the brevity of its expression.

Again, Nabokov’s is a great review, fitting squarely in the sub-genre of “nasty reviews”.5 But I think Borges’s is better. Although, as always, de gustibus non disputandum est.

Postscript: If anyone wants to read a more straightforward review of Excellent Intentions, I came across a few while researching this section; you can read one here and another one here; the first is positive, the second mixed-but-positive.

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3. The Imaginary Library of Mr. Reid Byers

I was looking for something online when I stumbled across the following photograph:

The book displayed is The Architecture of Country Houses by John Drinkwater, first published in 1880, with six editions the last of which was privately printed in 1910. A rare book indeed, particularly given that it is, in fact, entirely imaginary, existing only in the world of that best of all fantasy novels, Little, Big by John Crowley.6 And yet there was that photo.

Elf?

…So then, of course, I had to go digging.

I had stumbled across a photograph of a book from the delightful imaginary library of one Mr. Reid Byers. Mr. Byers was planning a “jib door” for his personal library;7 these secret doors are often coated with fake book spines, which are often spines of imaginary books, and in the process Mr. Byers decided to go farther, and has created, forged, faked, assembled (each verb has something to recommend it) a sizable collection of imaginary books. These are real physical objects (as the Dinkwater volumes above clearly seem to be), done up in various persuasive ways—Byers has said he wanted each book to be good enough to fool an expert for five seconds, and a layman indefinitely, unless they should open the book, in which case it will “thaumaturgically transform” into something else to protect itself. As an going exercise—again, words cluster, none quite fitting: hobby, art project, joke—Mr. Byers made over a hundred such items over many years.

I should clarify that while Byers calls them “imaginary books”, they are not all fictional. Borrowing a three-fold division from (apparently) Diderot’s Encyclopedia, he divides them into three categories: lost books (real books which have not survived); planned books (which were never completed or even begun); and fictive books, that is, books that are mentioned or (even quoted) in a work of fiction. (Byers uses “imaginary” for all of them, but while it’s perfect for the fictive ones it is an odd choice for the others.)

A year and a half ago more than a hundred of these were displayed in an exhibit titled Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books from December 5, 2024 to February 15, 2025 at the Grolier Club in New York City. (It was then shown for a few months at the Book Club of California.) Alas, the exhibit has not continued to tour and is no longer on display; it has returned to its permanent home at the fittingly yet disappointingly nonexistent Le Club Fortsas in Paris.

Fortunately, the exhibit is well preserved online. There is a delightful video tour8 where Mr. Byers walks us through some of the highlights,9 and then there is an online presentation of the exhibit (starting here and continuing in the fourteen pages following) which is more comprehensive than the video. (I don’t know that it’s complete—it may or may not be—but it is definitely larger.) And should none of that be enough, you can also buy a print copy of the (real, not imaginary) catalog written by Mr. Byers and published by Oak Knoll Press. (I can’t tell from what is online if that simply duplicates the online material or if there is more). This is not even to mention the many press write-ups of the exhibit (writers tending to be bookish people), such as those in the New York Times (gift link), the Washington Post (jailbroken link), The New Yorker, and in many other online periodicals and similar, including a previous write-up on substack.

Finally, let me tell you about the books themselves.

Lost books on display include: Homer’s Margites, the complete poems of Sappho, Shakespeare’s sequel to Love’s Labors Lost, Love’s Labors Won; Byron’s Memoirs (burned at his request), the lost second volume of Aristotle’s Poetics devoted to comedy,10 the lost first novel of Ernest Hemingway, and a copy of the lost sixth of the Five Chinese Classics, the Classic of Music, and a great many more. The unfinished books are the “and Peggy” of this particular triumvirate, but the collection does boast the complete, 24-canto version of Kubla Kahn, as well as an unfinished comic novel by Karl Marx written when he was nineteen.

The bulk of the collection, however, are the fictive books, which to me are the most delightful of all. Here are the originating works of the fictive books appear in the collection.11 Where two books are listed by the same author, this indicates two different fictive books, not dual mentions of one fictive book.

• A Thousand Nights and One Night

• Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (displayed with towel)

• Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

• John Barth, Tidewater Tales

• Aubrey Beardsley, Under the Hill12

• Max Beerbohm (c.f.), Seven Men (x3)

• Bibliotheca Scatologica

• Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (c.f.), and “The Garden of Forking Paths”

• A. S. Byatt, Possession (x2)

• James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion

• Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler and The Baron in the Trees

• Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

• Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

• Robert Chambers, The King in Yellow

• John Crowley, Little, Big

• Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

• Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Polans” and “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”

• Lawrence Durrell, Alexandria Quartet

• Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose13

• George Eliot, Middlemarch

• Paul Fournel, Jason Murphy

• Lev Grossman, The Magicians

• Frank Herbert, Dune

• Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

• H.P. Lovecraft, “The Hound”14

• Aldous Huxley, Brave New World and Crome in Crome Yellow

• Henri Murger, Scène de la vie bohème

• Norman Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

• Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

• C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

• Herman Melville, Mardi

• Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (x2)15

• Patrick O’Brian, Desolation Island

• George Orwell, Coming Up for Air and Nineteen Eighty-Four

• Elizabeth Peters, The Deeds of the Disturber.

• Abbé du Prat, Venus in the Cloister

• Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic and Thief of Time

• Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”

• Stephen Potter, Gamesmanship

• Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time

• Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 29 and Against the Day

• Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel

• Gareth Roberts, Doctor Who: Shada : the Lost Adventure by Douglas Adams

• Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night (x3), Clouds of Witness (x2), Strong Poison (x2), and The Nine Tailors16

• William Shakespeare, Hamlet17

• Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age

• Lawrence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

• Tom Stoppard, Arcadia (x2)

• Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

• Juan Villoro. The Wild Book

• Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

• P. G. Wodehouse, “Bingo and the Little Woman” and The Crime Wave at Blandings.

• Virginia Woolf, Orlando

• Herman Wouk, Youngblood Hawke

...plus a few from Jib doors, hoax catalogs, and the like.

What a superb list!

If I could add a few, I would add some from Gene Wolfe: most fans would think immediately of The Book of the Wonders of Urth and Sky (aka the Brown Book18), and of course there are many other books described in The Book of the New Sun, too; but I would think immediately of some of the books from the shop of Louis Gold from Peace—a collection which has such rich intertextual connections with Byers’s project that I have to assume that he has (poor soul) not read Peace, or else he could not possibly resist. And, if Byers wants a real doubly-imaginary book,19 he should look at the microstory “Kirk Patterson Arthurs, Ph.D.” from Wolfe’s charming and sadly out-of-print chapbook Blbiomen (I would be glad to get him a copy of the story, although the book I have only one copy and am not parting with). There are many others from Wolfe books too, of course: Wolfe puts fictional books in many of his novels and stories, and I can think of another half dozen good candidates without opening a volume to skim. Wolfe was (at the very least) the greatest creator of fictive books since Sayers,20 and he deserves a place in Byers’s collection. Perhaps I will write to Mr. Byers and suggest it.

I am delighted that Byers’s collection is a thing in the world: it is a richer place for its existence. What sort of a thing it is is hard to say—Byers says it is a conceptual art piece, which is of course true, and also suggests it is a bibliophilic folly (in the old sense of “folly” as a non-functional, ornamental structure). But of course that ontological oddity is precisely what makes it such a delight.

4. David Oks is Awesome

Sometimes I discover a new writer online and dive into their works head-first, reading post after post or essay after essay, until I am well-nigh gorged. But there is another pattern, too, which has escaped my attention before, because its very strucutre is all-but designed to make it hard to spot,

Here’s how it works. Occasionally I will read a long and fascinating piece which—due to its very length, complexity, and interest—will engage me for a sufficiently extended time that I won’t go and read more: I will simply think about what I read, pass it around, and all but forget the byline of the poor neglected author. These pieces stick with me—but their writers don’t.

Yet sometimes, even after reading a long piece, I have enough time or energy left to think “who wrote this?” and go and look. And sometimes among those sometimes, I will realize that it is someone who has written other long, amazing pieces that I had already read: and a byline will assemble itself in my notice out of objects already existing unsigned in my mind, like seeing a constellation in a random collection of stars and finding out that the Greeks saw it too.

This is the experience I had with substacker David Oks.

The essay of his which knocked me out was on the economics of the airline industry, really not a topic that I would normally expect to hold my attention: I described it to my family, mid-way through, as “the juciest, spiciest, raciest article on the economics of the arline industry it has ever been my pleasure to read”. It’s called, Why airlines are always going bankrupt: How aviation companies (fail to) make a profit, and it is one of those essays that adds something to the world, not a thing you don’t know, but a pattern, an element of design. It’s fascinating. So I went and looked at his archives.

And it turns out he was also the author of Why ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did: There’s a lot more to replacing labor than just automating tasks, which was just as good and which I had read some months before when it came out and which also was a rich text to think with.

And several others which I also had already read and enthused over and had enrich mymental landscape.

So I subscribed to his substack… and then he came out with Why China got rich and India didn’t: The human roots of the Sino-Indian divergence which was just as good as the others, just as filled with paradox and insight (although in that case commentators did raise a good question about how his discussion could incorporate the history of South Korea and Japan).

Other Oks pieces to check out:

• Language models are weird for the same reason human cultures are weird

• Why poor countries stopped catching up: The rise and fall of the Great Convergence

• Social media is a demonic force in the world (about the Charlie Kirk murder & its aftermath)

• On Getting Robbed (And Finding the Thief and Getting My Stuff Back), which is a narrative rather than a conceptual essay like the others, but which is great and worth reading

…and I’m going to stop here before I simply list every essay in his archives that I’ve read—which I am dangerously close to doing: they’re substantial, and they take time to read and think about. These are long, meaty essays, not quick reads. But my Noble Readers should be used to that, and Oks is at the top of the game. So pick one of the above-linked pieces that sounds interesting, fortify yourself with a coffee, and read it. Then subscribe to his newsletter, and join me in the slow process of gradually spelunking his archives. Lots of gold in there.

5. A Few Final Links

• For anyone who (reasonably) skipped section 0, I will repeat that I reviewed Jo Walton’s latest novel Everybody’s Perfect for Ancillary Review of Books.

• I haven’t yet gone full David Oks on the works of Henry Belger, but I think I might; two of his essays have filled me up too much to go read more of his work, but left me stuffed with nutreants and eager (in theory) to read more. So I may be writing a version of section 4 about him in some future Bricolage post. In the menatime, I recommend:

  • All Changed, Changed Utterly, an essay on the Yeats poem “Easter, 1916” which is one of my very favorites (I have it memorized), which nevertheless had a lot of insight and new information about the poem for me;

  • Runaround Sue: The Life and Afterlife of Susan Sontag, a fascinating overview of Sontag’s career and reputation

• From the always-brilliant Ada Palmer—whose Terra Ignota tetralogy is the best novel of the 21st century so far. and which is probably the book I most often try to push on people, and whose history Inventing the Renaissance is absolutely superb—comes an essay “All People Are Created Educable, a Vital Oft-Forgotten Tenet of Modern Democracy” which (among other things) contains an important if subtle rebuke to the cancellers and refuse-to-debate school of the left.

• Palmer has also been on a number of podcasts recently. She’s done two lengthy appearances on the podcast of Dwarkesh Patel, on Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird and Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time, which give a good sense of why her history book is so fabulous, so if you listen to those go buy it. And she is the co-host of several podcasts: in particular there is a new one called A Short History of Saving the World, whose first episode I can recommend. (There’s also another one forthcoming, and another one she co-hosts with Jo Walton that I haven’t gotten to yet.) I am rather of two minds about all this: on the one hand, each one of those podcasts is a delight and I loved every second. On the other hand, I fear that she is spending time on those when she should be writing more books as brilliant as Terra Ignota and Inventing the Renaissance instead. If I could speak to her in person, I would quote her own work back at herself: “Do less… You’re filling your hours with nano-charities and calling it productivity. Do less and you’ll output more.” But in the meantime, we might as well enjoy the podcasts.

• Shane Littrell wants you to know that if you are citing Harry Frankfurt’s classic analytic philosophy essay “On Bulllshit” (which, if you haven’t read, I highly recommend), you’re probably getting it wrong.

• And speaking of bullshit, from Kim Stanley Robinson we have: Author of Red Mars calls ‘bullshit’ on emigrating to the planet

• Philosophy Bear, “A List of the Problems We Face on the Left”

• Adam Roberts’s old joint review of Tolkien’s The Children of Hurin and Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind really gets at why Tolkien was so brilliant in ways some readers miss, and few if any fantasists match.

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There is a type of argument from science that strikes me as wrong. I articulated it as a response to Scott Alexander’s review of Bryan Caplan’s book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, so I will use that as my example, but the point is really a general one.

The magic of science is that you can come up with reliable, often counterintuitive results through controlled processes. But they are controlled processes, which means that if you remove the controls you have to wonder if the results are still good. In this specific case:

Caplan (judging from Alexander’s review) points to studies where parents did more or less active parenting and showed that it didn’t make a difference, and more broadly to studies showing that parental involvement doesn’t make a big difference in outcomes. But given how common beliefs in the other direction are, all of those studies were presumably done on parents who thought that what they were doing would make a big difference. And presumably this affected what they did—all of those who did less (and avoided bad outcomes) presumably worried and made sure they didn’t go over the line to too much less, for instance. Which is to say, that it’s entirely possible that the results Caplan points to only hold under the conditions that parents don’t think they’re true—that is, that parental outcomes don’t make much difference if parents are convinced of the contrary!

Now, you might say that this is ridiculous and counterintuitive. But then, the idea that parental involvement doesn’t matter is pretty counterintuitive for most people. We will believe it’s true if there are studies showing it is true. But if those studies are done under a specific condition (parents believing the contrary), then can you extrapolate them without that condition?

I guess what I’m saying here is that once you’re playing the science game, you can’t really rely on intuition, “well of course THAT does/doesn’t make a difference!”. The power of science is its repeatability and reliability; but its specificity is its weakness. Either you are relying on studies in the face of general beliefs—in which case this specific issue, does parental involvement matter if parents believe it doesn’t—hasn’t been studied; or you are relying on your general sense of what is plausible, in which case of course parental involvement matters! I don’t see how you can have it both ways.

This is a concern to anyone who tries to apply social science results to practical issues.1 For instance, in the case of Caplan’s book, I can imagine that parents who don’t think parental involvement matters, or matters much, doing radically less and thereby going farther than any parent who thought it mattered did and thereby achieving outcomes in ways that were not studied—possibly worse ones.

I personally don’t see a way to rescue the practical application of social science from this theoretical concern. It seems like you either need to walk the road of following science—in which case you can’t ever do common sense extensions of the results, which means that practically speaking you’ll almost never find equivialent cases—or you need to be skeptical of any application of social science to ordinary life.

But, of course, just because I don’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist! So I would love to hear what people think about this.

2. The Obsolescence of Fears About Not Selling Out

Last year Adam Kotsko wrote a great essay called “On Not Selling Out”. Here’s a taste of it:

Increasingly, being given space to do valuable work in a dignified way sounds like an impossible utopia—and not just in journalism. The market did that. Unfettered capitalism did that. It took away our dignity and purpose. It degraded us and continues to degrade us. We should not have to live like this. And, in their undoubtedly flawed and unattractive way, at least some segment of Gen X, the first generation to live in a fully commercialized world, the first generation to be raised by the TV, sensed what was happening and rejected it.

To that, what can I say but amen? But I did dissent from his essay on a few points, one minor, one less so.

The minor point: Kotsko frames his aversion to selling out in generational terms. He says that he was born in 1980, “right at the cusp between Gen X and Millenials”, and possesses some of the values of each, but “on balance I have to confess that I identify more with Gen X—above all in my reluctance to embrace these fake labels.”. Well, I myself (being a handful of years older than Kotsko) am pure Gen-X, with no millennial contamination whatsoever. And my first thought on reading the generational part of Kotsko’s essay is that—perhaps because of that!—I would never, ever think of writing an essay using these terms at all. I share Kotsko’s “reluctance to embrace these fake labels,” but it has never occurred to me to think of that reluctance as a generational marker rather than as a personality trait or intellectual stance. Say it’s because I’m Gen-X if you like, but I avoid those labels enough that I wouldn’t use them, save, as in this comment, in response to someone who does. Whether the reason for that is my generation is an.... uninteresting question I’ll drop here. But I wouldn’t do it.

The more substantial point builds on something that might. or might not be implicit in Kotsko’s essay, but which certainly isn’t said outright. Kotsko portrays the anti-selling out position as partly right and partly wrong, but I don’t think that’s right. I think that the injunction not to sell out sheltered within it two very different positions, one worse, one better. In other words, rather than a single mixed tendency, it was two tendencies conflated.

The worse version of ‘don’t sell out’ was anti popularity: and as such was just as formed and directed and constrained by the market as those who were selling out was, since after all to say that something is bad simply by virtue of the fact that it is popular is to give the market aesthetic control precisely as much as those who sell out do, just in the opposite direction. This is the group Kotsko is gesturing at when he says that "often unattractively snobbish in its assumption that mass appeal actually required artistic inferiority"; I am just going farther: they are not simply unattractively snobbish, they are precisely as much slaves of the market as those who sell out, arguably in a more risible fashion since they often don't even know it.

The better version of ‘don’t sell out’ is not anti-market but is indifferent to it, recognizing that the market is sometimes right, sometimes wrong, but that either way to pay attention to it is (as Kotsko correctly) degrading—of work as well as of life.2 But even this better version is, perhaps, only half right. As Kotsko correctly notes, “don’t sell out” is a privileged position (it is a privilege that he and I share). Which means that, even among the better adherents of not selling out, their disdain was unwarranted. So while they are correct that selling out is degrading, they err in ascribing that (simply) to a moral tendency rather than to economic position. Or perhaps we could say it is a moral that only the privileged can afford to sustain. Being anti-sell out is the very definition of a luxury belief. And within unfettered capitalism, escaping degradation is always a matter of privilege and luck, and is rarely permanent.

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3. The Nature of Actually Existing Conservatism

Substacker Lorenzo Elijah tries to steelman conservatism as a position, which differs from other descriptions of it in that it uses the language of scientific epistemology to describe it:

Imagine mapping all possible configurations of society onto a landscape, where altitude represents how well society is doing. What would that landscape look like? Given high-dimensionality and the rarity of functional configurations, you should expect it to be rugged. Full of peaks and valleys. Not a smooth hill you can climb easily, but a jagged terrain where good configurations cluster in local peaks. These peaks are separated by deep valleys of dysfunction. A small move in the wrong direction doesn’t just set you back slightly; it may send you off a cliff. This is why the features of complex systems matter. Non-linearity means that nearby points in the landscape can have dramatically different altitudes. Feedback loops mean that small missteps can cascade. Emergent properties mean you can’t read the landscape by inspecting the components. You have to explore it to learn what’s there… This is the Conservative’s core insight about society. The same structure that makes untested drugs dangerous makes revolutionary change dangerous. Revolution is a large jump across the social landscape. You tear down existing arrangements to build something new, something you have excellent reason to believe will be better. The Conservative says: your reasons are not good enough. In a rugged landscape, large jumps are in expectation negative. Most of the space you might land in is worse than where you started.

As I said, the notion of what conservative is that he sketches is a common one—certainly it should be familiar to anyone who has taken an introductory political theory course. But the exposition is new and useful, and it sums to a very useful steelmanning of the position. I definitely think that steelmanning is, in general, a very good practice; but I have several problems with it in this case that I think really ought to be spelled out.

First, there is the fact (and I think it is a fact) that what is called “conservative” in the U.S. today (and I think a lot of other places too, but the U.S. is what i know best) has absolutely nothing to do with the attitude and approach you are describing. Which is important if you want what you describe above! I think that cautious reformers these days are found in the moderate half of the Democratic party, and have been more or less been exiled from the Republicans.

Second point: this is not a new observation. It has been said a lot. For instance, Andrew Sullivan, who I think really is a conservative in this sense, wrote a whole book (The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It; How to Get It Back (2007)) about the abandonment of this spirit during the Bush years. And he wasn’t the first! You can track down a long line of “THIS guy isn’t conservative, the LAST guy was” in a chain where the exception becomes the exemplar. So even if you think that this is what “conservatism” is, it is important that it isn’t what it has been historically, at least for several decades.

Third: One of the reason it’s important is the question of whether such a program works at all, or if it always ends up being reactionary. Under this telling, the idea of conservative you outline would be rather like the idea of socialism as portrayed in Marx & many others: sounds nice and has little or nothing to do with what actually existing socialism looks like. In fact, “actually existing socialism” was a term from (if memory serves) Eastern Europe in the 1960s, where they were trying to talk about the terrible societies they lived in and kept getting derailed from those discussions by people talking about what socialism theoretically was. Its been pointed out that we need to discuss “actually existing conservatism”, not whatever image of it exists in such a theoretical model. If for some reason conservatism always ends up like this (just as socialism for some reason has always ended up like that) that is at least as important, and arguably far more important, than whatever nice story its proponents tell in the abstract.

Finally: is this even an accurate picture of the abstract? Would a conservative never say such revolutionary sounding things as “Acquiescence will not do. There must be zeal.” or “Distemper is still the madness of the wise, which is better than the sobriety of fools.” or “Every little measure is a great errour.”? (Those are all Burke, by the way.) There are arguments both ways, but it is worth looking at the argument that not only have recent conservatives not been governing in the (pseduo?) Burkean spirit you describe, but basically none have. The strongest form of this argument I know of is in the work of political scientist Corey Robin, whose book The Reactionary Mind I commend to the attention of everyone interested in this (the second edition is a significant improvement on the first). But you can get the gist of his argument here.3 I am by no means well read enough to have a firm opinion on this, and certainly a great many people have cited views like those you describe to Burke (such that even if Robin is right and it’s not the best reading of him, it is clearly an important reading). But there is a counter-case to be made.

But even if you don’t think point four holds—and I do think it’s a complex question—I would submit that points 1-3 are enough to require any essay like this to be covered in enough caveats that it is in serious danger of sinking under the weight.

On a related note, this essay on the long-standing conservative sense that we musn’t let the masses think too much by Matthew McManus (one of the more interesting scholars I’ve come across in the history and theory of conservatism space) argues that “It's not that conservatives are stupid people. It's that conservatives want people to be stupid”. It’s worth a read. And it definitely fits a lot better with what Actually Existing Conservatism looks like than Elijah’s steelmanning.

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4. Anthony Etherin’s Palindromes

Poet Anthony Etherin has a real talent for palindromes. He publishes a lot of them on his Substack, either in his regular newsletter or in notes. Here are some of my favorites of his work. First, a few short ones:

Emit a tale woven one vowel at a time.

Yell, “Avast! It’s a valley!”

Till I win, I will it.

So: genial lives oppose villain egos.

Why did the palindrome cross the road? To get a map a mate got.

And then a whole poem:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Film Noir

Prepare trope résumé:

Mad, arid antihero.

Man in a motel,
at a femme fatale,
to man in a more hit nadir.

A dame,
muse,
reporter —
a perp.

And one more poem, from a fairly recent issue of Etherin's newsletter, this time a palindrome not by letter, as in all the others, but a palindrome by words:

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Dystopia

Nowhere was truth less respected.

Gradually, 
we humans,
under persisting uncertainty,
suffered.

We struggled.

We suffered uncertainty,
persisting under humans
we gradually respected less.

Truth was nowhere.

So if you like those, go check out Etherin’s other work.

A few extra links to round this section off. First, a non-palindrome poem of Etherin’s which I like (based on anagrammed lines instead), can be found here.

And some non-Etherin palindromes: First, another word-level palindrome I like can be found here. Other letter-level palindromes I like can be found here and here. And this is just great.

5. Diverse Links on Various Topics

• As someone writing a time travel series, I feel like I have a personal stake in this: China bans time travel

• For anyone interested in book covers—and in all honesty quite possibly even for some people who aren’t, or aren’t especially—this in-depth look at the (generally brilliant) covers of the NYRB Classics series from the LA Times is superbly done. Read it if you think it’s even the sort of thing that might interest you.

• One sign of an article or essay that really makes an impact which I try to pay attention to is when you find yourself digging through the internet trying to find it again. This article on the AlphaGo and Lee Sedol Go tournament (from shortly after it happened) was one that I went looking for recently. There is a lot of writing on the now-famous Move 37, and some (if less) on Move 784, but this article (where I learned about both so that framing effects are in full swing) discusses them together, and I think it’s really effective. NB: If you have no idea what I am talking about in this paragraph, that is more, not less, reason to read the piece.

• The brilliant fantasy (and SF) writer Michael Swanwick writes A Thumbnail History of Twentieth-Century Fantasy which is precisely what it says on the tin.

• Philosophy Bear brainstorms a list of existential tragedies.

• Adam Roberts does a joint review of The Name of the Wind and The Children of Hurin, and demonstrates both some of the problems with so much modern fantasy and why Tolkien was so incredibly special.

• Is Trump in fact the worst human being in the world? Paul Campos assembles a surprisingly strong case in Trump and the Seven Deadly Sins: A Theological Analysis.

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One of the great retcons—indeed, what I have to say is probably the greatest single retcon in the history of the art, the one against which all others can be measured—occurred precisely one year after the words “retroactive continuity” were first applied in print to a narrative topic (as opposed to the theological coinage of 1973). The retcon in question was done by writer Alan Moore, in his second issue of his run on The Saga of the Swamp Thing, that is, in issue #21, “The Anatomy Lesson” (February, 1984).1

Unlike many retcons, Alan Moore did not want to change some fact or event in earlier narratives (a fact like “Sherlock Holmes died” or “Gollum was willing to give up his ring”). He wanted to change something more basic: the very way a character was understood. So to understand that, we must first take a serious look at the way the character was (as first created, up until Moore got ahold of him).

Swamp Thing was a D.C. comics character created in 1971 by Len Wein (more famous as the co-creator of Wolverine) and Bernie Wrightson. Swamp Thing has a somewhat complex history: first of all, he debuted a mere two months after the debut of an extremely similar Marvel comics character named Man-Thing, leading to suspicions of plagiarism; mostly, it turned out, both were copying inspired by a still earlier (1942) character known as The Heap, whose adventures had received a reprint that year which both writers probably saw. Further adding to the complexity, the first version of Swamp Thing (in an eight-page story which was one of several stories in House of Secrets #92, July, 1971)2 was set in the early 20th century, and then when the story proved popular, rather than simply continue that one, Wein and Wrightson reimagined the character as a contemporary (1970s) figure with the same origin story. This latter version debuted in Swamp Thing #1 (October–November 1972). This was a type 2 retcon:3 it simply ignored the earlier story.

To understand what Moore did that was so extraordinary, you have to understand the status quo for Swamp Thing as he appeared over a dozen years before Moore took him over. Swamp Thing was originally a scientist named Alex Holland. He was working on a “bio-restorative formula” (whatever that is) when he was attacked by a company that wants the formula: a bomb goes off, and he runs into the nearby swamp, and dies… except that the bio-restorative formula (which was near the bomb) brings him back as a hideous swamp monster. So (after some genre-appropriate fighting) he sets out to some day restore his humanity… and, in the meantime, have adventures and stuff.

Swamp Thing appeared in 21 issues of his own title (1972-1976) which was then canceled (presumably due to low sales, which is the main reason any comics are canceled). He then did the circuit as a guest star in other comics for a while without making too much of a splash. In 1982, however, Wes Cravern released a movie, Swamp Thing (1982), and to capitalize on the publicity DC decided to try again, starting Swamp Thing’s second comic, this time called The Saga of the Swamp Thing, rhe first issue of which debuted in May, 1982. It didn’t light the world on fire, and was on the verge of cancellation when they decided to hand it to a young British comics writer named Alan Moore, who had not yet written anything for the American comics market but had had some successes in England. After all, it was going to be canceled anyway; what harm could it do to let him try a few issues and then cancelling it? So Alan Moore took over with The Saga of the Swamp Thing #20.

Moore saw at once that there was a problem with the basic structure of the series: namely, as soon as the protagonist got what he wanted (his humanity restored) the series was over. It was an endless quest narrative whose quest had to fail (and thus could never really create suspense or interest), because a success would end the story—and comics lived (certainly then) just to. continue.4 To be fair, it’s not an uncommon problem: a lot of serialized narratives have the same structure. And it works when the narrative isn’t really serialized, but is just an excuse for a string of similar stories. If the title character of The Fugitive finds the one-armed man who was the real murder of his wife (and enough evidence to convict him), the series’s is over. If the titular ship in Star Trek Voyager gets back home, ditto. Mostly those shows are only mildly serial, and mostly want to show an adventure-of-the-week—entertaining, I suppose, but not of strong interest. Moore had higher ambitions—but to do that he had to change the status quo.

The first thing he did, in issue #20, was to kill Swamp Thing. The head of (a different) evil corporation sends a bunch of army goons after Swamp Thing, and end up shooting him. He falls over; the final panel confirms that, yep, he’s dead. Strangely, however, that is not the end of the story: a final caption reveals the title for the next issue: “The Anatomy Lesson”. — I have to imagine readers were curious what Moore could possibly be up to.

The first thing that would have struck the reader of “The Anatomy Lesson” (Saga of the Swamp Thing #21) is that it was much better written and much better illustrated than most comics of the day. This is crucial, of course, because the greatest idea in the world will fall flat if the actual writing is poor; if Moore had turned in an average issue in other ways I doubt anyone would remember it. But the converse is true to some extent as well: Moore turned in a lot of extremely well-written works over the years; this one stands out not simply because of how good it is (nor because of its immediate effect on his reputation, which instantly skyrocketed, and the character, who finally was in a hit book), but because of the retcon. It was not either/or but both, so it matters that it was well-written.

—Now, I am not sure if that will carry over to today: Moore’s writing can tend towards the purple, and rarely more than in this issue. But if you compare it to any other issue of a 1984 comic you will see the difference. Below I will show, side-by-side, two pages from DC comic books published in February 1984, The Saga of the Swamp Thing #21 and All-Star Squadron #30. Look at them; click through and read them if you can.

Even if you think Moore’s prose is purple, it bursts with energy and interest. It is descriptive and scene setting—”It’s raining in Washington tonight. Plump, warm summer rain that covers the sidewalk with leopard spots.”—of a sort more familiar from novels; in comic books prior to this, the scene was generally conveyed only in the pictures. And the words repeat, too: both “rain” and “blood” repeat all through the many captions, thereby setting up the echo of the two: it is raining not only rain but blood: the “it is raining in Washington tonight” is revealed by the end of the page to have a double meaning we don’t expect at the top. The art, too, is terrific, with the panels which occupy most of the page mirroring the muntin window which the narrator is looking out of, some showing the face of the man looking out of it, some showing the death he is imagining, while the red of the blood he imagines matches the red of the wine in his glass and reflected in his eye. And the silhouette that grounds the page does wonderful things for the overall design, as well as echoing the body both of the old man (whose identity we have not yet learned) and the Swamp Thing, whose death we just saw in the last issue.

And it’s not just the first page; the whole issue is great. It’s non-sequential—it starts (on the page above) with someone thinking, and then tells the story in a series of flashbacks. The nonsequential nature is just disorienting enough to engage the reader—and to mimic the disorientation that Swamp Thing himself feels, when he learns what the issue is about to reveal to us.

But I have gotten distracted by talking about the general quality of Moore’s work; we are here to talk about retcons.

In the course of the issue, Swamp Thing’s corpse is examined by Dr. Woodrue, aka the supervillain Floronic Man (who has plant-based powers); Woodrue works in the employ of one General Sunderland and who wants to know how Swamp Thing worked. So Woodrue investigates, and he learns two key things. To explain them, however, he has to give us a bit of exposition:

General Sunderland (speaking, no doubt, for some number of readers) gets impatient, and Woodrue goes on to retell—to retcon—the story of Swamp Thing’s origin (again, click through for larger versions):

In case that text is hard to read in the images here is what Woodrue says in those panels. Picking up after the bomb goes off, he explains:

The combined effects of the blast and the reflex muscles in his legs propel him through the door and into the swamp… but Alex Holland is already dead. His body goes into the swamp along with the formula that it is saturated with. And, once there… it decomposes. A patch of swampland like that would be teeming with microorganisms. It wouldn’t take long, General. But what about the plants in the swamp? The plants that have been altered by the bio-restorative formula? The plants whose hungry root systems are busily ingesting the mortal remains of Alec Holland? Those plants eat him. They eat him as if he were a planarian worm or a cannibal wise man, or a genius on rye! They eat him… and they become infected by a powerful consciousness that does not realize it is no longer alive. You see, we were wrong, General. We thought that the Swamp Thing was Alec Holland, somehow transformed into a plant. It wasn’t. It was a plant that thought it was Alec Holland. And plant that was trying its level best to be Alec Holland…5

So instead of Swamp Thing being Alec Holland raised from the dead but transformed into a plant monster (and thus wanting to restore his lost humanity), Swamp Thing never was Alec Holland: he was a plant who thought he (it?) was Alex Holland.

Instantly the narrative problem vanishes: the problem of the predictable failures of the quest (the quest that could never be completed, because if it was the story would over), with its consequent series of near-misses and dead-ends, is gone. Now Swamp Thing has a new quest: he has to figure out who he is, and what his place in the world is—an open-ended narrative which allows Moore to write an expanding, rich and (ultimately) hopeful comic, rather than a series of random encounters on a Doylistianly hopeless quest.

At the same time, it invalidates nothing in the earlier comic. Every single story there still works: if Swamp Thing for a decade (or whatever it was in comics time) thought he was Alex Holland, then it would make sense for him to try to recover his humanity; the story changes when he changes, but that doesn’t mean the old stories just vanish. Bad retcons weaken or invalidate the old stories; good ones don’t. And great ones, we might say, make them richer: Swamp Thing’s ongoing quests to become human take on (in my view) an added poignancy if the quest is hopeless.

Furthermore, Moore’s retcon makes sense. It is not forced or strained the way that Holmes’s cliff-climb was—at any rate, not beyond the basic facts of the walking, animated vegetable as a character. It is not a surprise that in that world one would think fishy; it is the sort of thing a being in that situation could miss, so it is not a strain on suspended disbelief to say that he did. One might even argue that, as fantastical premises go, “plants were infected with consciousness” is more plausible than “a person was turned into a plant”. Whether one buys that or not, however, it is quite definitely cooler—richer, more interesting.

And, last but by no means least, Moore’s retcon opened up new possibilities for stories. In a later tale, Swamp Thing lays Holland’s ghost—and in a still later one he encounters Holland in heaven—since of course he can now do that (since he isn’t Holland himself, presumably Holland has a spirit that survived him, if the universe is such (as the DC universe is) that this is standard for humans). Further, once you consider that he is not a transformed person but a animated plant, all sorts of other possibilities come up that I shan’t spoil—but Moore plays with a great many of them in a variety of rich ways.

It’s the perfect retcon: one that instantly made Moore’s name, made Swamp Thing one of the key comics of its time, and changed the comic book industry (not always for the better, as writers, almost none as good as Moore, now strived to reinvent characters in various ways that, in addition to being clunkier than Moore’s, also became, under the weight of their eventual accumulation, their own sort of cliché. But the later poor imitators don’t reflect poorly on Moore, who did it perfectly.

But the reader might remember that I said there were two retcons in Swamp Thing #21. What was the other? — Oh, you know: Swamp Thing isn’t actually dead. As Woodrue puts it: “You can’t kill a vegetable by shooting through the head. Oh, you could give it such a shock that it would plunge into a cellular coma, you could keep it in that state by placing it in a freezer unit… But you couldn’t kill it.” (Ibid., p. 16). So once Woodrue defrosts the “corpse” of the Swamp Thing, he returns—enraged and bereft, since the one thing he wanted, the one hope he held on to (the possibility of some day regaining his humanity) has been taken from him. This retcon is lesser than the main one, but it, too, works in all the same ways: it makes sense, in enables new stories, it does not undermine the old ones. And, of course, the two retcons work together—closely enough that most readers probably interpret them, reasonably, as only one.

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This was, to be sure, only the first retcon of Moore’s run: he wrote the comic for nearly four years—45 issues (#20-64), plus an annual (#2))—and Swamp Thing goes through a lot of changes; as I said above, the new status quo opened up many possibilities for stories and Moore explores them in his brilliant many-year arc. But I’ll let readers discover that on their own—the comic mostly holds up well, I think, even all these decades later.

But just as we couldn’t leave Holmes without mentioning a few further retcons, I want to mention one further one from Moore’s run.

It was in The Saga of the Swamp Thing #33, from February 1985—exactly one year after Moore first revolutionized not only the character of Swamp Thing but the comics industry as it then existed, and two years after the phrase “retroactive continuity” appeared for the first time in print in a narrative context. I believe that the background to this issue is that the process of artistic creation had fallen behind, and that to catch up Moore’s editors suggested a shorter new story for the next issue, padded out by reprinting an old Swamp Thing story. Most writers, in similar situations, would simply use this as an excuse to do a shorter story (we know this because it was not an uncommon occurrence, and that’s what most of them did). Moore, characteristically, does something far more ambitious.

First of all, Moore brought back Cain and Abel, who had been the “hosts” of the horror comics House of Mystery and House of Secrets6 respectively, which meant they would appear in the first page to introduce the stories (both were anthology series without an ongoing plot), and occasionally pop up mid-tale as a narrator, but they weren’t for the most part fully fleshed-out characters. Moore showed Abby Holland Cable (one of the regular secondary characters in Swamp Thing) dreaming, and, in her dream, meeting Cain and Able, and getting them to tell her a story—the content of which is the reprint. So rather than simply having, at the end of a shorter issue, a Special! Bonus Story!, Moore incorporates the reprint fully into the narrative, and int he process returns Cain and Abel to the DC universe as characters (this would later be picked up, as so much in Swamp Thing was, by Neil Gaiman in Sandman).

But was just the beginning; the significant part was what story Moore reprinted, and what he did with it.

Remember how I said Swamp Thing first appeared in a story set in the early 20th century, and then, when it was popular, was brought back (with almost the same origin story) in Swamp Thing #1? This was, as I said, a type 2 retcon: it worked by ignoring the other story and pretending it never happened. Well, that story—the one that had been memory holed to make the modern character—was the story that Moore incorporated into his own. Naturally reprinting a story as a told tale in the midst of another is the opposite of a type 2 retcon: it puts the offending contradiction right up in the reader’s face. But Moore knew what he was doing: and what he was doing was a type 1b retcon—recontextualizing an old story. Moore does not just reprint the contradictory story which DC had previously hid away to make the revised story work, he reinterprets it, and through that opens up yet more possibilities for his own ongoing story.

Here’s how it worked. After Abel tells the story to Abbey (that is, after the eight-page reprint, once the story returns to the frame narrative), Abbey naturally objects: “But that’s Alec’s story! Alec Holland… not Alex Olsen! And it didn’t happen at the turn of the century… it happened decades later! Look, what is this?” To which Abel replies:

Rather than trying to sweep the revised origin under the rug, Moore highlights it—and uses it to change (yet again!) what Swamp Thing as a being is. In issue #21, Swamp Thing (along with we, the readers) learns that he is not Alex Holland, but is in fact a plant brought to life by a scientific technobabble formula which absorbs the consciousness of Alex Holland and thus thinks it is Alex Holland. In #33 we learn that this was not an accident: that it is one of a series of such events, all nearly alike, that are the product of a design and are intended to produce a “protector”. The strangeness of the doubled story is not an embarrassing remnant of corporate storytelling; it is a mythic force returning multiple times—which means that the contemporary swamp thing is, once again, not what he thought: not a scientific accident, but a creature whose existence was, in a more mystical way, both willed and purposeful.

This, too, makes sense with earlier stories (why would Swamp Thing have known about his predecessors?) without invalidating their stories: quite the contrary, it not only refuses to invalidate earlier stories, it goes out of its way to redeem one that had been written off. And, of course, it sets up even more future story possibilities: if Swamp Thing’s creation wasn’t an accident, what was it? What was directing the creation of these swamp creatures? What was the purpose for which they were made? And so forth.

A year after kicking the table over, Moore did it again, in another brilliant retcon with the same character. Granted, this is not quite as great as the retcon from #21—largely because it occurs in the shadow of that earlier retcon, and thus lacks the fundamental unexpectedness which shook the comics world. But this, too, is a masterpiece of the retconner’s art: a dramatic and incredibly effective retcon, bringing an old, deliberately marginalized story back and by doing so making the ongoing contemporary story more mysterious, more powerful, and teeming with even more possibilities.

Since Moore (through the mouth of Cain) told us that there are no accidents, let us examine why it is no accident that Moore was the writer of (what I at least consider) the greatest retcon of all time. Because whatever is true in Moore’s fictional world, we can say with some confidence that this really was no accident.

Moore is, as I suggested above, an excellent writer in a great many ways. But the retcon as a form rhymes with his writing ability, which is to say that one of his great talents is for taking old ideas and recontextualizing them. A significant proportion of his best work has involved taking preexisting fictional (or historical) characters and revising them in ways that both respect their old tales and make new ones. From Hell, his historical novel about Jack the Ripper (arguably his masterwork) incorporates lots of real historical characters, both those close to the Ripper story but also ones such as Aleister Crowley, W. B. Yeats, Queen Victoria, and many others. Moore’s pornography Lost Girls is about three grown women who, as kids, were Alice of Wonderland, Dorothy of Oz, and Wendy of Peter Pan, with their trips to marvelous countries reinterpreted as sexual awakenings. Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen brought together Victorian characters like Mr. Hyde, the (original H. G. Welles) Invisible Man, Nemo from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the once-popular, now largely-forgotten Allan Quatermain, Mina from Dracula, and a host of minor characters from other tales, including both Mycroft and Moriarty from the Sherlock Holmes stories.

Those are all cases where Moore brought back old characters (whether real or fictional) rather than coming on to write ongoing characters, but in the latter cases (which, thanks to the success of Watchmen, were mostly confined to early in his career) Moore generally engaged in dramatic retcons too. The most famous example is his work on Miracleman,7 which was somewhat analogous for the British comics market to the impact of his book Watchmen on the American one. He entirely upended the character, in a way that became, for him, almost standard. He did similar things for Captain Britain at Marvel and Wildcats and Supreme at Image, and (controversially) the Joker and Barbara Gordon in his Batman comic The Killing Joke for DC. Even his briefer stories could do significant retcons—in three short eight-ten page stories Moore did a dramatic amount of work revising the Green Lantern mythos, for example.

Of course sometimes Moore did invent his own characters. But even then, he most often used common archetypes and rung changes on them. In Watchmen (the other main contender for Moore’s masterpiece) Moore’s initial plan was to use the Charleton characters which D.C. had just bought the rights to; only when D.C. editorial demurred at having its new purchase rendered unusable in more standard ways did Moore go on to create his own characters, based above all on the Charleton characters but also drawing from broader superhero archetypes as well. Similarly when, in a burst of creative energy, he ran a number of comics in the America’s Best Comics line, the various characters in them were largely based on a variety of archetypes,8 although in that case the resulting characters are somewhat farther from their originals (Tom Strong is supposed to be a Superman analog, and Promethea a Wonder Woman analog, but neither is really that much like their original).

If retconning is an art—and I have been arguing that it is—Moore is its most esteemed practitioner. Of course he would be the author of the single greatest retcon of all time!

But let me end by returning to Tom Strong, one of the comics in the ABC line, for there Moore does something that is, in fact, quite different than his usually retconning and playing with archetypes. For in the course of this series of new stories about a brand-new character, Moore regularly interpolates supposed reprints from earlier parts of history as flashbacks in his story. In other words, Moore regularly pretended to do what he had actually done in Swamp Thing #33. But they weren’t just flashbacks; they were pastiches. They were both written and drawn in the style of the period they supposedly hailed from. As comics scholar Geoff Klock describes it,

many pseudo-histories of Tom Strong [were] written and drawn to be stylistically in accord with its proposed period of writing: heroes smoking cigarettes, excessive use of thought bubbles, and closing narration like “Is Saveen truly finished? Find out ...in future issues of —Tom Strong Magazine!!!””?9

Similar points could be made about the art (usually done by guest artists to further differentiate them from the main story). But Klock goes on to note one stranger thing about these interpolated stories: Moore not only includes this fake history, he deliberately introduces contradictions and anachronisms in a comic he has, in fact, just started from scratch. As Klock says, “Moore, given the chance to write a new comic book character free of the continuity difficulties that plague established superheroes, artificially creates the contradictory history within his own book.”10 One might think, given all I have said about Moore’s career, that he did this in order to retcon them; but this is not the case. He simply lets the contradictions sit. It is not an act of retconning but an engagement with the genre’s history.11

Which is a good reminder that Moore is not simply a retconner: he is an artist who has a deep engagement with his genres and mediums’s pasts, and who plays with those pasts not in one way, or even one family of ways, but in a whole host of ways. Moore is a great retconner, and the writer of the single greatest retcon of all time; but he is, far more importantly, a great artist. The retcon is but one tool in his toolkit.

But boy does he wield that one well.

In the next installment in this series we will look at a creator who made retcons central to his art in a very different way than Moore did. When that is done, I will replace this sentence with a link to it. And all of the entries of this series are here (in reverse chronological order).

But first, in next week’s essay, I will review a contemporary novel with a main character loosely based on Moore, one of whose works is called “Marsh Man”. So yeah, it’s about Swamp Thing. When that has posted, I will replace this sentence with a link to it.

Meanwhile, stay tuned for both! And to get them delivered straight to your inbox, hit subscribe:

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     1. Ones that are done through reinterpreting previous stories done through...
            A. ...adding new context which changes the meaning of previous stories;
            B. ...recontextualiztaion or reinterpretation of previous stories;
            C. ...brute-force misrepresenting of the content of previous stories;
     2. Ones that are done through simply ignoring previous stories;
     3. Ones that are done through actually altering previous stories by putting out new
            editions with the old text, images, etc, altered.

Well, I’m not 60, not yet; and the most loudly tolling numbers in this context, for me, are the multiples of 20, given the age I was when she died. But any number that is a multiple of 5 always feels significant, the milestones on the calendar: and in two days (on April 4, 2026) my mother will have been dead for 35 years.1 Half a lifetime, if Psalm 90 is to be taken literally.

But in the time since that day on which I marked 30 years passed (5 years ago) I have done something which makes this date—April 4 (coming in two days as this essay posts)—ring just slightly differently for me than it previously did. And, in particular, the specific April 4 that will occur five years from now—April 4, 2031—rings, and will ring, differently. The emotional color has been overlayered, as in a doubly-exposed piece of film.

Regular readers may be ahead of me here. But for the rest: I am writing a series of time-travel short stories called Retcon. The premise of the series is that in 1951 time travel was invented by a physicist at Cornell.2 But since she had played a (minor) role in the development of the atomic bomb, she decided not to let anyone know what she had discovered for fear that it, too, might be turned into a terrible weapon. So she set up a secret research program to carry on the science without any outside knowledge of thee work, one that carried on past her death. Then, in the fall of 1991, a time traveler returns from forty years in the future—coming back from April 4, 2031. And he explains that while they have been traveling and communicating back and forth through time for decades, they have never—not once—received any visit or even message from anyone beyond the instant that he just left (a time they call “zero second”). Presumably something terrible happens immediately after he departs; but there is no way to know. They have a great deal of information up until then; and then—nothing.

That’s the premise of the series. Check it out if you are intrigued.

But the reason I bring this up here is the date which I chose for zero second: April 4, 2031. The day on which it will have been 40 years—two-thirds of my life—since my mother was killed.

Why would I do such a thing? Well, for the obvious reason: I needed a date that was, to most of the world, random—one which had no inherent meaning, the way, say, New Year’s Eve or the 4th of July would—which I would then imbue with a narrative meaning within the universe of the story. And just as one’s gaze goes straight to smudges and flaws within an otherwise empty room, I thought at once of this date that held a special meaning for me. To be clear, the year wasn’t entirely arbitrary—I knew approximately when I wanted the date to be (I might have pushed it a year or two in either direction, but I had a rough idea)—but the specific day was. April 4 was a day that held special meaning for me, but not for the world as a whole; it would sound, as it was supposed to, essentially random.3 The only people for whom it would not sound arbitrary were me, my family, and the friends of my mother.—Truth be told, I probably gave it less thought than I gave to spelling out the reasoning while writing this paragraph; it felt right, and I used it.

But now I am stuck with overlapping emotional significances. To be sure, my mother’s murder was a rupture in my life the like of which nothing else will ever4 compare. L’havdil. But of course I am thinking about Retcon—and, hence, zero second—every day these days, and have been for years. It’s the main work I am doing (even on days when for one reason or another I fail to make any headway). I have been doing so since at least a year before the first story came out (on March 9, 2023). I can’t at this juncture recall precisely when I began work on the series—I think it was somewhat longer than five years ago, in fact, but certainly the last time a big round anniversary number trundled along (April 4, 2021) I hadn’t yet decided on the precise date of zero second, so that that date didn’t have that secondary layer of meaning to me, then. But now it looms large—not in ultimate significance, but in perspective,5 in that this meaning is near and the other (however mountainous) is ever farther off, and ever further receding.

So two days from now will be 35 years since my mother’s murder. It will also be 5 years before zero second, the day upon which my fictional characters fear that the world will end, or at any rate collapse. For me, now, in inevitably means both.

Notable events which occurred on April 4: in 1814, Napoleon abdicated for the first time; in 1841, William Henry Harrison died; in 1865, Lincoln visited Richmond, Virginia (the Union having retaken the self-proclaimed Confederate capitol the previous day); in 1905, an earthquake in the Kangra Valey of India killed an estimated 20,000 people; in 1945, the U.S. army liberated Ohrdruf, one of the subcamps near Buchenwald, while on the same day the Soviet army liberated Hungry; in 1949, the treaty creating NATO was signed (and on the same date in 2023, Finland joined the alliance); in 1960, France signed the treaty which gave independence to the Mali Federation, a very short-lived entity which then broke into the countries of Senegal and Mail (Senegal still celebrates its annual independence day on this date); in 1967, Martin Luther King delivered his famous speech taking a stance against the war in Vietnam in Riverside Church in New York City; in 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated; in 1973, the Twin Towers were officially dedicated; in 1975, Microsoft was founded; in 1983, Challenger flew its first mission. 6

I don’t know what to do with this doubling—a strange doubling which is wholly of my own making (the first emotional layering was set in place by some person still unknown, but the second (and hence the doubling) was my free choice). I suppose there is nothing to do with it save to live with it. I have put myself in check, and now have nowhere to go. Does a chessboard king of which its opponent says “that piece cannot be moved” try and feel a stoic acceptance of its fate?—No matter. The overlapping is set: done. What can we ever do with the past but endure it?

But this emotional overlay is true for a great deal of time, isn’t it? Events do not cooperate by finding free days to color with emotional significance. The dates of world history, of all of the many groups which any of us identify with (our nation, our friend group, our religious cohort, our generation, our fellow enthusiasts, and on and on) pile up until there is nothing simple, nothing clear: April is the cruelest month; April is the cheeriest month;—and so are all the rest. The date of Holocaust Remembrance Day was set to mark the anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but some objected, since that day happened to be in the omer, which was already a period of semi-mourning in the Jewish ritual calendar, and it is a rabbinic principle not to overlay emotional valences in this way. But as I said, time does not arrange itself to the convenience of our emotional clarity.

There is a parallel here to “Strong’s law of small numbers”,7 which says that “there aren't enough small numbers to meet the many demands made of them”, so that coincidence and overlap are both inevitable and not necessarily meaningful. In the same way there aren’t enough dates to meet the many demands we make of them. Emotional overlap will always, for all of us, create little piles of contradictory feelings which gather in awkward places and threaten to overspill the available contemplation. To live is to feel mixedly. It is always the best of times and the worst of times.

One passage from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land that stays with me is when Mike (the orphaned human who was raised by Martians and is thus from the most foreign of possible cultures) thinks that human cities must be used up quickly. (In reading the following, what you need to know (or remember) is that, first, in the novel the Martians are at least semi-telepathic; second, that “Old Ones” are the oldest most powerful Martians; and third, that “grok” means to understand thoroughly, including telepathically). Heinlein writes:

It seemed to him that a human city must wear out almost at once, so choked with experience that only the strongest Old Ones could bear to visit its deserted streets and grok in contemplation events and emotions piled layer on endless layer in it. He had visited abandoned cities at home on a few wonderful and dreadful occasions, then his teachers had stopped it, grokking that he was not strong enough.… Why, these people must be preparing to abandon the city to its thoughts before it shattered under the strain and became not… Mike looked forward to returning to Washington in a century or two to walk its empty streets and try to grow close to its endless pain and beauty, grokking thirstily until he was Washington and the city was himself—if he were strong enough by then. He filed the thought as he must grow and grow and grow before he would be able to praise and cherish the city’s mighty anguish.

Well, Heschel claims that Jews build palaces in time rather than space space: so we know that humans can and do build in both. Our days, too, have “events and emotions piled layer on endless layer… endless pain and beauty” of conflicting emotions, layer upon layer. But whereas Heinlein’s Martians abandon their cities lest they become too overloaded with different layers, we cannot abandon our days.

Unless that’s what death is.

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Notable people born on April 4: Emperor Caracalla of Rome (188); Thaddeus Stevens (1792); Dorothea Dix (1802); Stanley G. Weinbaum (1902); Marguerite Duras (1914); Maya Angelou (1928); Andrei Tarkovsky (1932); Dan Simmons (1948); Hugo Weaving (1960); Robert Downey Jr. (1965); and Heath Ledger (1979).

Notable people who died on April 4: St. Isidore of Seville (636); John Napier (1617); William Henry Harrison (1841); John Venn (as in diagram) (1923); Martin Luther King Jr (1968); Adam Clayton Powell (1972); Gloria Swanson (1983); C. L. Moore (1987); Max Frisch (1991); and Mary Joe Frug (1991).

What will I do on April 4, 2031, assuming that I am still around to do anything?8

I don’t know, of course. Who could plan that far ahead?

But I would like to dream—an idle fantasy, to be sure, but a mostly harmless one—that Retcon will have attracted enough readers by then that we might have a Zero Second party that afternoon—a (hopefully belated!) wrap party for the series, or possibly for the world, if it turns out my arbitrary guess was true.9 The natural place for such an event would be Ithaca, NY (the setting for most of the series), but I could also imagine it being in the Boston area. Not for any particularly good reason—except that it’s easier to get to, I suppose—but largely because, if it were there, then I could do something else that day, too, something else I will want to do on that day assuming (again) that I am still able to want anything.10

I can visit my parents’ grave.

In the meantime, in two days it will be five years before the fictional silence that might or might not mark the end of a world, and thirty-five years since one woman’s world ended in abrupt horror, forever shattering the worlds of many whose realms orbited hers. It is not too far ahead to plan for that. So I will spend some of the day remembering what happened half a lifetime ago, as well as remembering the half-lifetime that was so well lived up until the moment of its horrifically premature end, and whose quality gives its end its peculiar horror. And I will spend much of the rest thinking about the silence that my fictional creations are struggling with, and how I can continue to move them along their multi-temporal-dimension journey towards that seemingly unmovable end. And with this disjunction I will simply have to live.

If you wish to join me in the former task, you can read some of her work. If you wish to join me in the latter, you can read some of mine.

To end on a bathetic note, the next story in Retcon, which I had hoped to have ready to be published on April 9, is proving more of an aesthetic struggle than I wished, and so it will be delayed—hopefully no later than May 9, but I can’t make that a hard promise; all I can say is that I am trying, and will continue to try.

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9

I suppose I am imagining something like:

But when I recently read it and went around recommending it to various friends (generally an extremely well-educated bunch, I should emphasize), the only person I found who had ever heard of it was the person who recommended it to me in the first place. From everyone else I drew blank stares. I think it’s safe to say that neither Max Beerbohm nor his novel Zuleika Dobson is any longer a household name. I wonder if even scholars of English literature have read it if they don’t specialize in its period.

So, as a public service, I thought I should discuss the only novel by Sir Max Beerbohm,—”the incomparable Max”, as he seems to have often been called—Zuleika Dobson: An Oxford Love Story (1911).

The very first thing I want to say, before anything else, is that nearly every description and review of the book I have seen spoils the major element of its plot, giving away crucial details right up to the penultimate chapter. I can’t even say why that matters without vague spoilers, so I will put those in a footnote2 and simply recommend that you read the novel, if you wish to, without reading any other reviews or discussion of the book (or footnote 2 of this one)—including, say, the above-linked one by Robert McCrumb. Since it seems to have never been attempted before, I am going to try to write a discussion of the book which is free from major spoilers—all the big plot points after, oh, the first chapter or two of twenty-four. This will not be entirely without spoilers—I do want to talk about the book!—but it will be free of what I deem major ones. I doubt anyone else will give you that deal, so unless you want to go read it now, without further ado, I recommend you take it.

Max Beerbohm

So who was “the incomparable Max”?

Max Beerbohm (1872-1956) was a decadent, that is, part of the aesthetic movement of the decadents that flourished in the late 19th century in both France and England; in England the most famous decadent was Oscar Wilde. As the case of Wilde makes clear, a lot of the men involved in this movement were gay (they might have said “uranian”), which was a dangerous thing to be in that time period. Certainly the fall of Oscar Wilde (they might have described it as his “disgrace”, but of course to modern eyes the only thing disgraced in that affair was the British justice system, which disgraced itself in its treatment of Wilde) haunted Beerbohm ever after. He was pretty clearly gay by inclination, although he did marry and it’s not clear if he ever followed through on his sexual interests. So he came from a very particular culture, one which had its share dangers, and those dangers shaped his life in various ways. On the other hand, unlike Wilde, he lived to a ripe old age: so whatever the dangers, he came through them.

Beerbohm had a number of careers, and being a writer of fiction was not a main one. Above all, perhaps, he was an essayist: his first book was a collection of essays called (with, of course, deliberate irony) The Works of Max Beerbohm (1896). He went on to published any number of follow-ups, including More (1899), Yet Again (1909) and Even Now (1920). As perhaps a subspeciality of his work as an essayist, Beerbom worked for over a decade as a theater critic, taking over from George Bernard Shaw at the Saturday Review at the latter’s suggestion (this portion of his work was, I believe, done fairly straightforwardly for the money). And then, in what can also be seen as an extension of his work as a writer of essays, in his later career Beerbohm turned to writing pieces for broadcast on the radio.

But in addition to writing, Beerbohm was an artist—in particular, and mostly, a caricaturist, drawing superb caricatures of all sorts of late Victorian and Edwardian figures. Here is some of his caricatures of still-famous people from the era (click through for full versions):

So Beerbohm’s reputation was not made as a writer of fiction, but as an aesthete in a much broader sense. His work was deeply bound up with the era and social milieu in which he lived. He was (as were many artists and writers of his day) a personality—one might even call him an influencer.

But since time “worships language and forgives everyone by whom it lives”, let’s go on to discuss his novel.

Zuleika Dobson

Zuleika Dobson; Or, An Oxford Love Story is itself a caricature of sorts. It certainly has the feel of a fable. If it were an American novel, I would not hesitate to call it a tall tale. There is also a lot of farce in it, and of course farce and tall tales have a lot in common. Beerbohm himself, and a number of others at the time, referred to it as a “fantasy”, although that meant something very different in 1911 than you might think if you know about fantasy from more recent works.

Zuleika Dobson is the story of the visit to Oxford made by the titular woman,3 who is a celebrity magician (in a way that has exploded into a more general celebrity). She also happens to be, however, the granddaughter of the warden (head) of an imaginary college at Oxford, Judas College. She goes to pay him a visit for a week; the novel opens with her arrival by train and tells the story of her stay. In particular, Zuleika (in the manner of a tall tale or farce or fable) causes every undergraduate who lays eyes on her to fall in love with her, with increasingly wild results. In particular, one of the undergraduates she entrances is the Duke of Dorset, who is the other main character of the story aside from Zuleika herself.

Here are some key points to know about the book.

First, it is hilariously funny. Some of that humor will be blunted for modern readers, and some of it for Americans: it is a satire of Oxford in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.4 The style of the humor reminds me of P. G. Wodehouse (who was early in his career when Zuleika Dobson was published). There is a lot of satire that you will miss if you don’t busy yourself looking up references (for instance, Americans might have to look up what the “order of the garter” was, and what its ceremonial garb looks like), and undoubtedly a lot you will miss even if you do. But even with whatever percentage of humor that goes over the modern head subtracted, it is still a funny, witty, charming and delightful book. The humor is of many kinds, but two of the largest are satire and farce: I suppose contemporary readers will do better at spotting the farce, although honestly much of the satire is hard to miss even if the culture is entirely different from our own.

Second, as noted in the first point, it is not of our time, which means you will have to do some work. Beerbohm was himself an Oxford graduate, and he does not wear his erudition subtly: the novel is peppered with foreign quotes and phrases and words he does not bother to translate and often does not even flag.5 He makes references to various things (myths, literary works, historical events) that many readers will miss (that is to say, many readers will miss any given one of them; almost every reader will miss at least one of them). He uses an elevated vocabulary which you can find either delightful or tiresome: if you find it delightful (as I did), it will help you enjoy the work a great deal. Just for a taste, here are some marvelous words I learned in reading Zuleika Dobson: , intagliated, aposiopesis, aseity, octoradiant,6 raillery, ataraxy, monody, and tuist.7 Nabokov said that good readers should have “imagination, memory, some artistic sense, and a dictionary”;8 this is definitely true for Zuleika Dobson—and the dictionary in this case will have to be robust, including a lot of quotations in foreign languages and mythological references (fortunately, in the age of the internet, we all have such references at the ready; you just need to take the time to look them up).

Third, it is both a realist and a fantastical novel. I said above that Beerbohm called it a fantasy, as did E. M. Forster and many others. But it’s not a fantasy in the sense that any reader of books shelved under “fantasy” would recognize.9 The most fantastical thing about it is the wackiness of the events portrayed in it—that is to say, it is a fantasy to the extent that, and in the way that, it is a tall tale and farce: things get really weird, but not in a “magic exists” kind of way, but in a “people are acting in a strange and exaggerated fashion” kind of way.

But that’s not to say that there aren’t more fantastical elements, too. There are! It has ghosts, omens, and a person with a variety of superpowers. It’s just that none of them ever make much difference to the story. The fantasy is more like background details or gilded decorations than anything central. It’s all around the edges.

To take one example, the 17 sculpted emperor’s heads which adorn Oxford (apparently an Oxford landmark10) form a sort of chorus, commenting (or more strictly thinking) about the action as a group. They are a minor but distinctly real character in the story. Further, a number of ghosts pop up here and there. Not that they do much: they, too, tend to comment or observe the story rather than participate in it. Various other fantastical elements intrude too—the (Greek) gods play a role, various omens have foretelling power, and so on and so forth. But it’s all done in such a way that I can imagine some readers, if they were reading quickly, coming away and describing it as an entirely realistic novel.—Except for chapter 11, of course.

Ah, chapter 11. Now, to reassure you: I said I wouldn’t spoil the main plot and I won’t. Chapter 11 has nothing to do with it. It is, you might say, the circumstances of the book’s creation. In particular, in chapter 11, we swerve away from the main story to follow the life of Clio, the muse of history. We learn that Clio early on fell in love with Herodotus, and so acquired her domain, but soon discovered that most history is not as fantastical and entertaining as Herodotus (since more scientific history tries to capture the truth and does not just report myths). In other words, she soon comes to find history dull, is jealous of the other muses, and spends most of her time reading novels. (At this point the unforewarned reader is doubtlessly completely flabbergasted and is wondering what book they have wandered into.) Her verdict on Edward Gibbon is “for people who like that kind of thing, that is the kind of thing they like”—a phrase for which Beerbohm’s novel is an early source but is not (as has been claimed) the first source.11 (Zuleika Dobson is, however, the original source of the line “death cancels all engagements”.)

Eventually things change for Clio when Zeus falls in love with her. Now you may remember that Zeus has a habit of courting lovers12 in various shapes such as a swan or a bull. So in the case of Clio, he also takes on a different form— but a very different different form:

Zeus, after all these years, is still at the beck and call of his passions. And it seems anyhow lamentable that he has not yet gained self-confidence enough to appear in his own person to the lady of his choice, and is still at pains to transform himself into whatever object he deems likeliest to please her. To Clio, suddenly from Olympus, he flashed down in the semblance of Kinglake’s Invasion of the Crimea (four vols., large 8vo, half-calf). She saw through his disguise immediately, and, with great courage and independence, bade him begone. Rebuffed, he was not deflected. Indeed it would seem that Clio’s high spirit did but sharpen his desire. Hardly a day passed but he appeared in what he hoped would be the irresistible form—a recently discovered fragment of Polybius, an advance copy of the forthcoming issue of The Historical Review, the notebook of Professor Carl Vöertschlaffen … (final ellipsis in the original)

In the course of negotiating the fall-out, Clio asks Zeus to let historians be able to write like novelists (that is, with complete knowledge and the ability to confidently talk about interiority, which she thinks makes novels more exciting). Zeus declines to go that far as a general matter, but agrees, on a one-time basis, to let one chosen writer become invisible, intangible, telepathic, and able to fly, so that he can zip around and write a history in the manner of a novel. Clio picks Max Beerbohm, and Zuleika Dobson is the result. Then we return to our story in progress.13

A related point is that in the same way that Zuleika Dobson is lightly fantastic—containing elements which are unquestionably fantasy, but mostly as decoration or digression—it is also lightly postmodern. Max Beerbohm is a (minor) character in the story. He will also talk about your (the reader’s) memory of reading about these events in the paper, and notes that his heroine is “well known to some of you personally, to all of you by repute”. As with the fantasy, however, none of this really gets into the heart of the novel. The overall effect is less postmodern than premodern, intruding in something like the way that novelistic narrators before Flaubert and James would sometimes intrude without really being a presence. It adds to the fantastical atmosphere (since, of course, we don’t know Ms. Dobson personally, nor even by repute), but doesn’t shape the narrative.

But in all this I have manage to capture almost none of what makes the book so great. It is full of strange passages—the Duke’s listing of his wealth and titles goes on for pages and pages in a sort of humor which I recently mentioned in the context of Goldberg’s Mattering Instinct, with the same sort of piling-on-enough-makes-it-funny.14 Lots of small characters—Zuleika’s grandfather, the Duke’s landlady and her daughter, various other undergraduates, and many others—take on vivid (if caricature-style) life. Time and time again Beerbohm pulls out some plot twist that seems utterly inevitable given what has come before but which I, at least, did not even remotely see coming: he is wonderful at arranging for surprising yet retroactively inevitable results from various circumstances.15 In short, in addition to humor and whimsy, Zuleika Dobson has vivid (if not really three-dimensional) characters, a compelling plot, and a marvelous atmosphere.

—Nope, I’m still missing it. To truly convey what is delightful about this novel, I shall have to share a bit of it with you. Here, for instance, is a paragraph of scene description from chapter 9:

The moon, like a gardenia in the night’s buttonhole—but no! why should a writer never be able to mention the moon without likening her to something else—usually something to which she bears not the faintest resemblance? … The moon, looking like nothing whatsoever but herself, was engaged in her old and futile endeavour to mark the hours correctly on the sundial at the centre of the lawn. Never, except once, late one night in the eighteenth century, when the toper who was Sub-Warden had spent an hour in trying to set his watch here, had she received the slightest encouragement. Still she wanly persisted. And this was the more absurd in her because Salt Cellar offered very good scope for those legitimate effects of hers which we one and all admire. Was it nothing to her to have cut those black shadows across the cloisters? Was it nothing to her that she so magically mingled her rays with the candlelight shed forth from Zuleika’s bedroom? Nothing, that she had cleansed the lawn of all its colour, and made of it a platform of silver-grey, fit for fairies to dance on? (ellipsis in the original)

You can see in that a lot of the elements of Beerbohm’s style I have been discussing: there is the low-key postmodernism (Beerbohm intruding upon his text) as well as the casual fantasy (the moon is consciously trying to do things) that don’t, however, really matter. There are the digressions (the 18th-century toper) which are there to be charming rather than for any other reason. And then, at the end, there are bursts of poetry—which will be overdone to some ears, I suppose, but which I find affective: for me the final few sentences grow increasingly poetic, and the last sentence is simply marvelous.

One more passage. Here is the Duke hailing an unknown fellow student from whom he hopes to gain knowledge of what the student body at large is thinking:

There was no time to be lost, then. But he wondered, as he paced the grand curve between St. Mary’s and Magdalen Bridge, just how was he to begin?

Down the flight of steps from Queen’s came lounging an average undergraduate.

“Mr. Smith,” said the Duke, “a word with you.”

“But my name is not Smith,” said the young man.

“Generically it is,” replied the Duke. “You are Smith to all intents and purposes. That, indeed, is why I address you. In making your acquaintance, I make a thousand acquaintances. You are a shortcut to knowledge.”

This is, I think, a good example of the strangeness and satire that pervade the novel. It is strange that the Duke should call some random young man “Smith”; it is a satire upon both the arrogance of the upper classes and upon the commonness of the name Smith. And, again, it is simply funny.

Did you like those two passages? I did. If you, too, found those two passages delightful, then you will love this novel. But if you did not, then I am not sure I can recommend it to you. This is a novel which demands an enjoyment of lightness, whimsy, and the similar charms I have been at some pains to describe. This novel is not a solid dinner, it is a rich, light dessert, one that will utterly delight you but won’t fill you up too much.

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Peripherally Related Texts of Divers Kinds

I have not yet touched upon the illustrations of Zuleika Dobson—for the very good reason that most editions don’t have any. But “most” is not “all”.

Beerbohm was, as I discussed above, an artist as well as a writer. Apparently he had an ideological aversion to illustrated novels; he wrote once

I do not like to read a novel in an illustrated edition… If I cannot see the characters in a novel, then they are not worth seeing. If I can see them, then any other man’s definite presentment of them seems to be an act of impertinence to myself and of impiety to the author.16

But he didn’t stick to this: he did caricatures of characters from various of his short stories, and did a few formal caricatures of characters from Zuleika Dobson. He also did (on his own initiative rather than the publisher’s request) a frontispiece for a later (1947) edition which I have been unable to find online (at least, I have been unable to find it properly labeled: it may be that one of the available drawings of Zuleika are that frontspiece, but I don’t know with confidence which one.)17 But most interestingly Beerbohm took his own copy of the 1911 edition of the novel and drew in it, using margins and the beginnings and ends of chapters to draw various characters and incidents from the novel. There are also 20 full-page illustrations—where he found room for those is unclear.18

As you know if you’ve been reading the footnotes, those illustrations—the ones in Beerbohm’s copy, some 80 in all, including the 20 full-page ones—were published in 1985 (in a partial facsimile of the Beerbohm’s personal copy of the novel19) under the title The Illustrated Zuleika Dobson. (The original copy of which it is a partial facsimile is now in the New York Public Library.) To give you a sense of some of the illustrations (and some of the highlights) here are six pages from the book:

The first two are illustrations of the two main characters, Zuleika and the Duke; in the latter the Duke is in his full regalia as a member of the Order of the Garter (compare). The third is Zuleika chasing the Duke. The fourth is the picture of the aforementioned emperor heads; notice the flying figure of Beerbohm himself, placing a crown on their heads, slyly acknowledging that it was he who dubbed them “emperors”. The fifth is the title page, on which there is a picture of Beerbohm and Clio from their encounter in chapter 11. And finally, as a sample of some of the more whimsical and minor drawings in the book, a bottle of champagne popping open.

Is it worth tracking down a copy of the illustrated edition when you can read the novel for free? That’s a personal choice, but for the most part I would say not to bother. The illustrations are fun, but they are hardly essential. (The one I got the most out of—that of the Duke in his Order of the Garter get-up—is one of the ones I reproduced above.) If you really like illustrated books, then sure, get that edition. But I will admit for my own part that I read the ebook and went and looked at the pictures afterwards.

I have not yet read any of Beerbohm’s other fiction, but having read Zuleika Dobson I probably will, so I will mention what I have thus far learned about it. Aside from Zuleika Dobson he wrote only short stories. His main collection was first published under the title of Seven Men (1921). It contains five stories—one of them is about two men; the titular seventh is Beerbohm himself. For the American edition, he added a gallery of caricatures of six of the seven (excluding himself). Then for a much later reprint (1950) he added a sixth story, and changed the title to Seven Men and Two Others (1950).20 I should say that there seem to be some writers who think that Seven Men (with or without the two others) is really good. For instance, Adam Gopnik, in his marvelous profile of Beerbohm, “The Comparable Max”, says that it is “a true masterpiece of English prose”.21

Apart from that, he wrote a book of parodies called The Christmas Garland (1912)—a number of them are of now-forgotten writers, but a few names are familiar, and Gopnik says of the parody of Henry James that it “may be the best parody in English”. And Beerbohm wrote a few other stories too such as "The Happy Hypocrite: A Fairy Tale for Tired Men" (1896) and "The Dreadful Dragon of Hay Hill" (1928), which (aside from online) are typically found in broader surveys of Beerbohm’s work—that is to say, he did not publish any other collections focused on short stories. And for fiction that’s it. (There are, of course, many books of his essays and caricatures, both from his lifetime and subsequently.)

I shouldn’t leave the topic of related works, however, without mentioning that another writer, one Sydney Castle Roberts, wrote a parody of/sequel to Zuleika Dobson—today we would probably just call it ‘fan fiction’—called “Zuleika in Cambridge”. The current edition is emblazoned with a quote from Max Beerbohm reading “I had often wondered what happened when Zuleika went to Cambridge. And now I know beyond any shadow of a doubt.” But if that was intended as a promotional plug, let me dissent from the incomparable Max: the sequel/fan fiction/parody by Mr. Roberts is dull and not worth reading.

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“The Prince of Minor Writers”

Why has Beerbhom, once so lauded, been forgotten?

I think the simple dating of the text is one reason. As far back as the 1947 reprint of the novel, Beerbohm added an author’s note (dated 1946) in which he wrote the following:

I myself had supposed it was just a fantasy; and as such, I think, it should be regarded by others. But all fantasy should have a solid basis in reality; and to any young readers of the book it may seem that my presentment of Oxford life was a wild infraction of that law. Let me assure them that my fantasy was far more like to the old Oxford than was the old Oxford like to the place now.

So when my father was a little boy, its presentation of Oxford was already out of date; and no doubt any novel set in the Oxford of the 1940s would have seemed dated to readers of the 1980s, and any set there in the 1980s would seem dated to readers of today. We are several outdatings of reality removed from Beerbohm’s book: and the fact that it is not quite a strange a culture as, say, the Roman Empire or the England of Henry VIII is probably as much a hindrance as a help, since we will expect familiarity and misinterpret things we read. And of course this is in some sense a particular hindrance in comedy, where so much depends upon manners and social expectations and the like. All this is aside from the fact, as I said, that Beerbohm is liberal with his erudition, and while for those of us who like that kind of thing this will be the kind of thing we like, not everyone does.

But it’s more than that, too. A recent collection of Beerbohm’s essays was called The Prince of Minor Writers—hardly a term of praise, however softened by the word “prince”. In The Common Reader, Virginia Woolf says that “Mr. Beerbohm, in his way, is perfect, but it is not a big way.” Now, both of those are talking about Beerbohm’s essays (which were, after all, the majority of his output). But even from his admirers, and even from those speaking specifically about his fiction, the sense that Beerbohm is light is recurring. Certainly there are defenses made; Updike says (in his introduction to Seven Men) that “Minor artistry became in him a determination, a boast… he remains readable while many mightier oeuvres gather dust. The filigree is fine, but of the purest gold.” And Gopnik goes farther in his essay, defending him as such:

There is no such thing as a minor writer, because—there is really no such thing as a major writer. As Max wrote, considering Whistler, even Shakespeare occupies shockingly little of our attention—shocking, that is, for those of us who are trying to occupy it, too… This means that bigness is a mirage, but it also means that smallness is a kind of illusion, too. Anyone who is read at all is more or less the same size. People who love reading will always love reading Max, because he mocked so wisely, and read so well.

But still the notion of Beerbohm’s lack of weight remains.

The reason, I think, is that we associate greatness with seriousness. Shakespeare’s comedies are sometimes thought lesser than his tragedies, histories, and romances. Light and funny writers are often simply given less respect than those who are serious. Hell, even the word “great” can imply “heavy” among other things.

This linking of greatness and seriousness is mostly unthinking and automatic. Once we see it, we are likely to equally automatically reject it as ridiculous, and to stamp our feet about how comedy is no less worthy than tragedy. My own feelings on this matter are complicated, but I think that neither instinct, neither the quick claim for nor the equally swift one against, really gets at the heart of the matter. But that is another essay for another time. For the moment, let me just stop with this: I don’t know if we should say that Beerbohm was the prince of minor writers. But I do think that Zuleika Dobson is a princely piece of comic fiction. It requires a dictionary and some patience, but it amply rewards them with humor and whimsy. Whether those things themselves are what you look for in a book, however, is something you will have to decide for yourself.

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Back when I started this substack, three years ago, I had the ambitious goal of publishing weekly. On that schedule, I felt justified in sending out occasional miscellanies. But after a few good months, my schedule flagged. There were various reasons for this—it was probably overly-ambitious to begin with, especially when combined with my ongoing shot story series (which at first I was even trying to record as audiobooks as well as write and publish as ebooks!); but of course the rapid decline and death of my father played a huge role, too. And since I had promised at the outset “to never let the substantive essays drop down to less than every second post”, as the quantity dropped in 2024 and 2025, I stopped doing the bricolage posts altogether; my last one was September of 2023.

But I have tried, this year, to get my posts back on a more regular track, and have so far done pretty well: for the last seven weeks I have posted once per week (plus one off-schedule post). In fact, I think I have done well enough to justify another bricolage. So here we go.

Attention conservation notice: many of the things quoted, linked or said here are from my Substack notes feed; if you read that you can probably skip this.

1. They Will Pry My Em-Dashes Out From Between My Cold Dead Fingers

As you probably know—at least if you are online enough to be reading this—em-dashes are, apparently, beloved of our new AI overlords. This has led to a push-back against the em-dash.

This is a terrible thing.

Now I thought I had adequately deal with this nonsense with the brief Emily Dickinson pastiche I wrote thirteen months ago when I first heard about the issue:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

They say that using em-dashes—
Can prove—that you're AI—
No human ever uses them—
No matter when—nor why—

But if you find them suitable—
Or even perfect—form—
Deploy them well—and often—
And brace for coming storm—

I think we should all agree that that ought to have put the issue to bed.

And yet, somehow, it didn’t. It seems further argumentation was required. Fortunately, the superb substacker Colin Gorrie is on the case:

I’ve been using em-dashes since I was in graduate school back in 2008. I used them in my dissertation. I use them in birthday cards to friends and family. I’ve used them in many of the articles I’ve written for this newsletter. But now, every time I write one, a small voice in my head whispers “Better get rid of it. People are going to think this is AI.” So it gets replaced with a semicolon, a colon, or a period….

Anxiety about AI writing is, paradoxically, making us worse writers. We’re voluntarily surrendering the writerly tools we want to use — the ones that would be the best thing for the piece we’re writing — simply because machines have learned to imitate them…. the em-dash is part of your heritage as a writer of the English language. Don’t let it be taken away from you!…

So I went back to my Shakespeare article and I put those em-dashes back in. Every last one of them. They were, after all, good little em-dashes, doing the job they’re supposed to do: cracking open a window in the middle of a thought, letting you peer through it, and then closing it again.

It’s a great essay, which goes into its similarity to the prior panics, the importance of the em-dash in Lawrence Sterne and Emily Dickinson, what’s wrong with AI writing, and all sorts of other great stuff. Read the whole thing.

One thing I’ll add is this: Another writer whose key uses of em-dashes he doesn’t mention is Wittgenstein, particularly the later Wittgenstein, in the Philosophical Investigations. The Investigations are a series of rethinks, questions, saying-one-thing-and-then-doubting it; it’s essential not just to the style but to the philosophy. Here, for instance, is section §165 of the Investigations, chosen almost at random:

But surely—we should like to say—reading is a quite particular process. Read a page of print and you can see that something special is going on, something highly characteristic.—Well, what does go on when I read the page? I see printed words and I say words out loud. But, of course, that is not all, for I might see printed words and say words out loud and still not be reading. Even if the words which I say are those which, going by an existing alphabet, are supposed to be read off from the printed ones.—And if you say that reading is a particular experience, then it becomes quite unimportant whether or not you read according to some generally recognized alphabetical rule.—And what does the characteristic thing about the experience of reading consist in?—Here I should like to say: “The words that I utter come in a special way.” That is, they do not come as they would if I were for example making them up.—They come of themselves.—But even that is not enough; for the sounds of words may occur to me while I am looking at printed words, but that does not mean that I have read them.—In addition I might say here, neither do the spoken words occur to me as if, say, something reminded me of them. I should for example not wish to say: the printed word “nothing” always reminds me of the sound “nothing”—but the spoken words as it were slip in as one reads. (Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe)

The point is the sort of half-turns, re-thoughts, clarifications, objections, that sound so much like someone thinking out loud, as it were conversing with himself, is deeply integrated not only with Wittgesntein’s style but also his philosophy. And it is centered around the em-dash.

A related thought to Colin Gorrie’s came in this brief note from Philosophy Bear:

LLM’s use dashes a lot because there’s a limited sense in which they’re extremely good writers- LLM writing is easy to read, and LLM flow is good. Dashes are great for flow and comprehension because dashes are best interpreted prosodically - as a call for a certain sort of pause- rather than grammatically.

Modern writers are taught to think of punctuation as a grammatical instrument, but it’s much easier to follow writing in which punctuation is treated as a prosodic instrument. The dash is the refuge of prosody. Incidentally, this is how I generally use punctuation. It means “pause here for a bit”- not some godawful nonsense about clauses.

I think Bear’s point about punctuation as prosody is key, and it connects to one of my favorite essays. It was written by Nicholson Baker and was originally published in the New York Review of Books under the title “Survival of the Fittest”; it was later republished in Baker’s collection The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber (1996) under the perhaps less misleading title “The History of Punctuation”. Baker’s point basically is about the importance of treating punctuation as prosody, not a series of technical rules; I find it both convincing and important. But along the way he talks not only about em-dashes:—he talks about the hybrids:

The nineteenth century didn’t think the dash on its own was nearly enough.… [T]he single most momentous change in twentieth-century punctuation [was] the disappearance of the great dash-hybrids. All three of them—the commash ,—, the semi-colash;—, and the colash :—(so I name them, because naming makes analysis possible)—are of profound importance to Victorian prose, and all three are now (except for certain revivalist zoo specimens to be mentioned later) extinct. Everyone used dash-hybrids. They are in Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Charlotte Brontë, and George Meredith. They are on practically every page of Trollope… in Thackery… in George Eliot.

Baker gives a number of possible reasons for this, but seems to settle (convincingly) on the need for standardization, for rules;—the making of punctuation into a mere technical question, rather than making it a conveyance of meaning.

So fight back against The Machine:—use em-dashes;—and even hybrids.—When it suits your meaning, of course.—And brace for coming storm.

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2. Some of the Problems with AI are Really Problems With Broader Society

A couple of different things I want to link to revolve around this theme.

First, Noah Berlatsky points out that the ability of AI to degrade writing and journalism is only possible because of twenty or more years of degredation of its status prior to the advent of AI in “Journalists Have Been Turning Into AI Slop For Years”:

AI is tempting for many because creative endeavor, except by a handful of superstars, is already wildly devalued. If you are a mid-level slogger AI can seem like the only way to pursue a creative career without working 24-7 and/or starving to death. Authenticity may be the purpose of art in theory, but in practice—again, unless you happen to be a superstar—the capitalists with the money mostly want to pay for the thing they’ve seen before, delivered as slickly and with as few surprises as possible.

Starting off on the flip side, historian (and substacker) Timothy Burke had a great essay about how he uses AI effectively in class. It sounds like a good idea! But then he notes that his technique is not remotely scalable; it “is predicated on being a professor at a small college that has small classes, considerable resources and students who are generally well prepared for higher education. It’s also a result of a high degree of pedagogical freedom.” And then he makes the connection to the same point that Berlatsky made in the context of journalism:

Massive classes, built around a lecture pedagogy. The conversion of most teaching to contingency, with the loss of mentorship and curricular governance that resulted from that change. The spread of over-specialized credentialism and the narrowing of a wage premium to a smaller and smaller number of professional and white-collar jobs linked to credentialism. The willing acceptance of our role as gatekeepers and weed-outers, of being the alibi for the accelerating failure of the American political economy to provide a decent living standard for most of the country’s residents. Higher tuitions and the risk adversity they have helped to cultivate. The punishing accumulation of bullshit work processes within the academy and the disconnects between them and the core labor of faculty. Visions of austerity slamming into teaching and scholarship while administrative ranks grow seemingly without end. It all has led to many students at large universities feeling as if the university and its curriculum is little more than a credentials pinata to be whacked until it gives up the candy, and GPT is only the best and biggest stick ever provided for that purpose.

And finally there is this fascinating “manifesto”, “A Third Way for the Humanities” from a substack called The Hinternet (fabulous name):

The arrival of generative AI was, for many university-based humanists, the event that finally pushed us over the edge, and suddenly compelled us to begin naming the problem in lucid and uncompromising language. But AI was not so much a new threat to humanistic inquiry as it was the final, decisive blow dealt by a many-fisted menace that had been stalking us for years. A combination of technological, economic, political, and cultural forces, at work both within and without the university, had by the early 2020s effectively pummeled the tradition of universitarian humanism into unconsciousness. Humanities professors could still “report for duty” in a narrow sense; like apparatchiks in the early days of post-Soviet confusion, they could still show up for work and collect their (greatly devalued) paychecks. What they could not do is fulfill their duty — they could no longer, that is, have any real hope of guiding their students from beacon to beacon of a millennia-long tradition of reflection and discovery that, once internalized, likely represents the greatest hope a person has in this hard world for achieving a condition of true freedom.

But the manifesto may start there, but it doesn’t end there, and I think it’s worth reading all the way through. I will quote two more passages I particularly liked. First:

The principal purpose of what has passed for humanities education has been to convince students that the humanistic tradition is not what they think it is. This is a peculiar pedagogical goal, to say the least, since typically at the outset students do not have any idea what the humanistic tradition is, or even that it exists at all. They are being rushed straight from ignorance to contempt, without any serious effort to familiarize them with their contempt’s object. And in contrast with our loose use of the term in the previous section, this is a tragedy in the literal Greek sense: it is a blindness as to the nature and consequences of the professoriat’s own choices that ultimately contributes to their own downfall. For in fact nothing has been more useful to the administrators seeking to transform the entire university into a business school than to hear from the humanists themselves that their tradition is in any case really only the propaganda wing of white supremacy, patriarchy, and imperialism. Imagining themselves as occupying a site of resistance to capitalism, they end up among its most obedient running-dogs.

And also:

…a rediscovery of the historical fact that there is nothing intrinsically “elite” about reading Homer or Shakespeare. Yorkshire coalminers used to do it, together, with great joy and satisfaction. It was a lie and a betrayal on the part of the heremeneuticists of suspicion to have told their students —and their deans— that humanistic inquiry is, in its essence, anything but democratic. The humanities are democratic precisely because they do not come down to us through blood-ties, but must be cultivated anew over the course of an individual life. As Seneca said: “If there is any good in philosophy, it is this — that it never looks into pedigrees. All men, if traced back to their original source, spring from the gods.”

As I said, the entirety is worth reading.

While I’m quoting it, perhaps I will admit that I have always been a little suspicious of the substack The Hinternet: there is throughout that publication a particular type of irony which makes me think they’re putting me on in a way that makes me feel like readers who not in the know are the butt of the joke. For instance, are all the multiple “writers” who work there simply heteronyms (in the Pessoa sense) of Justin Smith-Ruiu? I think so, maybe? But it’s hardly clear. As anyone who reads my substack knows, while I adore irony, I am a stickler for sincere, accurate and clear metadata, which The Hinternet lacks. So I both am attracted by the writing there but also put off by it. Its sort of irony is either precisely that used in a lot of writing I greatly admire, or is a half step away from it, but its a half-step off a cliff, so where it stands really matters.1 I would love to hear from Smith-Ruiu, clearly and without art, what he is doing (this is what I wanted from Sam Kriss, and what he wanted not to give: I am sure Kriss thinks I am either simpleminded or a boor, and Smith-Ruiu may well think so too, but I will simply respectfully disagree: I think that, especially in the age of decontextualization, accurate labeling matters). In lieu of that, however, I would like to solicit thoughts from anyone else who has read him (or them?). For I found this essay marvelously sincere (yes, I am silly enough to mean that as a compliment) and it makes me want to read more of their work.

But to end this section on a happy note, there is at least the possibility of some upside to these things, or at least so argues Dylan Matthews in “Pro-Social Media” and Dan Williams in “How AI Will Reshape Public Opinion”. And Noah Smith made this argument too, just this morning (he said, leaping in with a last-minute edit before this sends this afternoon). I hope they’re right.

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3. The Death and Life of Reading

I, of course, published something on this in early January. But of course it comes up all the time these days. One of the best recent essays on the topic was by James Marriott in his viral essay “The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society”, which I am delighted to say he is turning into a book, The New Dark Ages, which is coming out in September. Marriott’s substack, incidentally, is mostly made up of bricolage posts, and they are some of my favorites of the genre; if you missed it when it was doing the rounds, check it out.

Speaking of the post-literate society, Boze Herrington points out that the roots here are deep:

Been haunted lately by something C. S. Lewis said—“If one were looking for a man who could not read Vergil but his father could, he might be found more easily in the twentieth century than in the fifth”—and I don’t think we realize how rapidly we’ve slid into a new dark age. The tragic thing is that we didn’t lose mass education and mass literacy through war or invasion; very powerful companies have spent billions designing ways to keep us uninformed and distracted. We were the best-educated people in history and we surrendered it voluntarily.

I grant you that Lewis quote is a bit of a cheat: after all, a man trying to read Virgil in the fifth century probably knew Latin—a by-then half-century old Latin, but still something that would give a considerable leg up; in the twentieth century Latin is a foreign tongue to almost everyone. But I think the point still stands, even if watered down by that dodge.

Boze Herrington also pointed out that

A key point in Fahrenheit 451 is that books were banned because they made people depressed and uncomfortable. The novel's protagonist, Montag, is taken into custody after he reads a poem that makes a woman cry because she realizes the emptiness of her life.

What are we to do about this?

That is a bigger question than a mere bricolage can handle, but let me cite one answer, from one of my favorite writers, Gene Wolfe. This is from an essay that it also one of my favorites—if anything I would place it higher than Nicholson Baker’s essay. I actually heard it first as his guest of honor speech at the very first Readercon in November, 1988. (There’s a contemporary write-up here.) It’s not online, alas, but it was included (somewhat confusingly folded into another piece whose title is “From a House on the Borderland” in Wolfe’s collection Castle of Days. In it, Wolfe talks about two kinds if illiteracy: the old illiteracy (people who can’t read), of which he says “its victims hate it, and escape it when they can”, and the new illiteracy, “the illiteracy of those who can read but don’t”. He says goes on to compare the two:

This new illiteracy is more pernicious than the old, because unlike the old illiteracy it does not debar its victims from power and influence, although like the old it disqualifies them for it.… And the victims of the new illiteracy are proud of it. If you don’t believe me, talk to them and see with what pride they trumpet their utter ignorance of any book you care to name. The old illiteracy is with us still, and indeed is growing; but its victims hate it, and escape it when they can. The new illiteracy, though it is so easily escaped, is escaped far less often. It is a jail so good that its doors need not be locked. The prisoners sit staring at the screen—or at the wall—or out of the window at the cell across the way; and they never try the knob.

And then he goes on to talk about possible responses, one of which he outlines as follows:

I suspect that many of you recognized this new illiteracy before I did, and that many of you have despaired of fighting it—as I, too, despaired for so long. For years it seemed to me that the only way to reach the victims of the new illiteracy was through television; and television was and is beyond our reach. But at last I realized that there is a more powerful medium than television, and that it is available to every one of us. It is speech—talk, if you will. Conversation. We can do two things.… The other is simply to talk of books even to those who have not read. It exposes us to their contempt, indeed; and it may be that though they watch us enter their prison a hundred times, and leave it a hundred too, it will suggest nothing to them. But the opening and closing of the doors is bound to let in free air, and who knows what that may do?

If you want to know what his other suggestion is, and all the other brilliant parts of the essay I skipped, go track it down in Castle of Days.

So let me end by pointing at someone talking about some books, in specific the books of Mr. Wolfe. Lincoln Michel, author of the great literary substack Counter Craft (as well as the novel Metallic Realms which is quite fun and clever) wrote a great essay called “Why You Should Read Gene Wolfe (and Where to Start)”. Michel makes the great point that while SF readers should probably start with either The Best of Gene Wolfe, The Fifth Head of Cerberus or The Book of the New Sun, people who mainly read literary fiction would be much better off starting with Peace (which is also superb, in some moods I think it the best thing Wolfe ever wrote). If you’ve not read Wolfe, the essay—and then Wolfe himself—is very much worth reading.

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4. Extracts, Supplied by a Sub-Sub Librarian

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I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't
you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write

— W. S. Merwin, “Berryman”

I learned about this splendid poem in Rebecca Newberger’s recent book The Mattering Instinct, which I reviewed here.

∞

…in dismantling the canon—in largely doing away with the idea that there is a single set of books that everyone ought to read—English professors have had a hand in their own undoing. If there is no unified set of books that everyone has read, there is no subject matter for public-facing criticism that will automatically make sense to most readers. Public-facing literary critics will either have to summarize like mad, or will have to appeal only to readers who haven’t read what they’re describing, thereby limiting their audiences.

— Isaaac Kolding, “Review: How to Read Like a Professor”

∞

Philosophy Bear (q.v.) writing about the level of rejection of our moral heritage involved in sending immigrants to torture prisons:

I think it’s worth reflecting on the depth of the rejection of human achievement inherent in sending Andry to a torture prison, and supporting the same. The sheer weight of history, of the human story that is here cast aside ‘to own the libs’. It is no exaggeration to say that a world in which we are not supposed to do things like this is the fruit of thousands of years of moralists, of millions who fought in the defence of human dignity. It goes straight to the base of human ethical achievement, because even before we recognised the essential humanity of women, slaves, etc., we knew that it was terribly wrong to punish the guest extra-legally. The guest was the foundation of everything else, of the idea of a morality that went beyond us versus them, and thus of morality itself.…

Unlike, say, the rejection of slavery (Gregory of Nyssa- 400s), the history of hospitality is far too old to be known. The idea that we owe at least tolerance and the keeping of our own promises to wanderers is so old as to be present in almost all surviving cultures, and it marks the moment we demanded better of ourselves than endless fighting and murder between ourselves. I suspect it came well before the first homo sapiens sapiens was born. Culturally, it is equated with humanity itself, and its rejection with bestialness. The usual mythic punishment for violating the laws of hospitality is death and worse. Sisyphus was condemned to roll that boulder up the hill for killing his guests. The inhospitable were among the main prey of The Furies.

I want to keep quoting but just go read the whole thing.

∞

Scott Alexander cited The Mahabharata as saying “After ten thousand explanations, the fool is no wiser, but the wise man requires only two thousand five hundred”." I was moved to track down the quote. (Most of what follows is from this thread on Language Hat.) Here is the original, for anyone who (unlike me) can read it:

सहस्रेणापि दुर्मेधा न वृद्धिमधिगच्छति

चतुर्थेनाप्यथांशेन बुद्धिमान्सुखमेधते

This is how google translate renders it:

Even with a thousand, the wicked does not attain growth By the fourth part, too, the wise man grows happily

And here it is in the 19th Century translation of Kisari Mohan Ganguli:

With even a thousand (explanations), one that has a bad understanding succeeds not in acquiring knowledge. One, however, that is endued with intelligence succeeds in attaining happiness, through only a fourth share (of explanations).

You’ll note that Alexander’s 10,000/2,500 has now become 1,000/250. So where did the inflation come from? It seems to be the innovation of one William Buck (born either 1933 (according to the University of California Press) or 1934 (according to Wikipedia); died 1970 according to both). He published a version of the Mahabharata which sounds more like an adaptation or retelling than a strict translation. He wrote “My method in writing both Mahabharata and Ramayana was to begin with a literal translation from which to extract the story, and then to tell that story in an interesting way which would preserve the spirit and flavor of the original.” His version was published by the UC Press in 1973, and reprinted several times, most recently in 2019. An earlier edition is on the Internet Archive; in that version, the quote appears on p. 71. So presumably Buck punched it up by an order of magnitude to accommodate modern sensibilities.

5. Further Links of Diverse Kinds

• A great short story by Lincoln Michel (q.v.), “Consider the Eagle”

• A comics adaptation of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (which contains the entirety of the text). The same artist has done the first of five parts of the “The Waste Land”, but in the year or so since I saw it hasn’t added to it, so I don’t know if he’s continuing the project or not.

• A great essay about Susan Sontag by Henry Belger, “Runaround Sue”

• An essay about George R. R. Martin’s failure to finish A Song of Ice and Fire. Warning: it begins with the sentence “George R. R. Martin has died” and doesn’t clarify that he doesn’t mean literally died, just died as an artist, until the second paragraph; if the comments are any indication, this has rather distracted from the rest of the essay,—which is unfortunate, since it’s good.

• Henry Farrell wrote an introduction to the new edition of the early and, in my mind, terribly under-rated Kim Stanley Robinson2 novel Icehenge. He also did an interview with KSR about the novel, although that should probably wait until you’ve read the novel if you haven’t. In the interview KSR does confirm my long-time suspicion that Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus was a structural influence on (or model for) Icehenge.

• Erik Hoel, “Making a living as a book author is as rare as being a billionaire”

• Timothy Burke (q.v.) writes about “How to Save Movie Theaters”, pointing out that while covid is blamed, the roots of the problem are deeper than that, and that in particular “movie-going is priced to consumers like a premium experience, but in no way feels like a premium experience in your average AMC or Regal movie theater, at the same moment in time where many consumers, even at the lower end of the income scale, can view media in their own homes on screens that very nearly approximate what a fully decked-out home theater would have been like fifteen years ago.” He has some good suggestions, including (most importantly) cut the advertising out completely.

• Ozy Brennan posts a lot of great essays. Here are two: “The Life Goals of Dead People: Advice for the excessively guilty” and “Moral Standards For Parenting Need To Be Achievable By Mediocre People”. (Personally I think the issue addressed in this latter one is a bigger factor in the coming baby bust than most people realize.

• The grave stone of Russian composer Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998), showing “a long rest, played as loud as possible” (source)

  

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The Holmes retcon is “great” largely in the sense of being important—it was the first of its kind, and as such was original in doing what so many later stories have done in dull repetition. But I think another story else gets the prize as the first great retcon in an artistic sense—the first retcon which is itself a work of art, where the artwork is reinterpretation. Strangely enough, this retcon was in part a type 3 retcon1 (not a type usually given to greatness)—but it also included a type 1a retcon, and therein its greatness lies.

In the original (1937) edition of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, the riddle game in chapter 5, in which Bilbo trades riddles with Gollum, the events, particularly around the magic ring that Bilbo comes out of the episode with, are presented in too light a fashion to fit with The Lord of the Rings.

The problem, from a Doylist point of view, is that when Tolkien wrote The Hobbit he hadn’t yet planned the sequel, and so didn’t think of the ring the way he would later come to. In The Hobbit, both as originally conceived but even in the final text, the ring had a particular narrative function, as described by Tom Shippey in his brilliant book The Road to Middle Earth:

[In The Hobbit,] the ring is just a prop: a stage-prop, like the marvellous devices common in fairy-tales or legends (there is a wish-fulfilling ring in the Grimms’ ‘The King of the Golden Mountain’, and a cloak of invisibility), but also a prop for Bilbo’s status with the dwarves. It is a kind of ‘Equalizer’. After acquiring it Bilbo remains in most ways as out of touch with Wilderland as before… But the ring makes up for this. Before he had it he was essentially a package to be carried, his name as a ‘burglar’ nothing but an embarrassment even to himself. With the ring he can take an active part.… it brought a new possibility of action which would be simultaneously ‘heroic’ and credible.

For the most part this works perfectly well with The Lord of the Rings, although without question even the latter chapters read oddly when juxtaposed with how fraught the ring is in the latter book. On the other hand, The Hobbit is a children’s book, whereas The Lord of the Rings is not;2 the tone and feel of the entirety is different (for a more “adult” version, see the story “The Quest of Erebor” in Tolkien’s posthumously published Unfinished Tales.3) We are reading the story in a different style: we must make allowances.

But the original version of Chapter 54 stretched this past the breaking point. In the original version, Gollum bets the ring in the riddle game (as opposed to betting a willingness to show the way out), and gives every indication that he was planning to go through with it when he lost (apologizing for not being able to find the ring, declaiming a lack of desire to cheat, and offering to show Bilbo the way out as a substitute). This sort of casualness about the ring simply contradicts what it would become in The Lord of the Rings.

So Tolkien did a type 3 retcon: he changed the text. In the second edition of The Hobbit, published in 1951 after The Lord of the Rings was finished but before it was published, he rewrote the chapter, showing Gollum as desperately attached to the ring and (as Shippey notes) ending not with apologies but with the plaintive cry “Thief! Thief! Thief! Baggins! We hates it, we hates it forever!”—a reaction much more in keeping with the way the ring was/would be portrayed in The Lord of the Rings. So far, so clunky.

But what makes the retcon great is that Tolkien didn’t just revise the chapter. In most type 3 retcons, there is an attempt to pretend that it never happened, a “let us never speak of. it again” wish that every copy of the original would be revised. This sweep-it-under-the-rug aspect really grates on those who like the work, and it tends to simply highlight rather than actually fix flaws.

Tolkien doesn’t do this. Instead, he wrote the difference between the two texts into his story, coming up with a Watsonian reason. In the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien sums up the (new) version of how Bilbo found the ring, and then writes:

Now it is a curious fact that this is not the story as Bilbo first told it to his companions. To them his account was that Gollum had promised to give him a present, if he won the game; but when Gollum went to fetch it from his island he found the treasure was gone: a magic ring, which had been given to him long ago on his birthday. Bilbo guessed that this was the very ring that he had found, and as he had won the game, it was already his by right. But being in a tight place, he said nothing about it, and made Gollum show him the way out, as a reward instead of a present. This account Bilbo set down in his memoirs, and he seems never to have altered it himself, not even after the Council of Elrond. Evidently it still appeared in the original Red Book, as it did in several of the copies and abstracts. But many copies contain the true account (as an alternative), derived no doubt from notes by Frodo or Samwise, both of whom learned the truth, though they seem to have been unwilling to delete anything actually written by the old hobbit himself.

In other words, he writes into the text of the story (in a way that matches up with his general presentation of The Lord of the Rings with fictionalized metadata) the fact that there are two copies of the text around. Some copies tell Bilbo’s lies, and others have the true version as told to Frodo and Sam; if you have a copy of the 1937 edition, well, you have the former; if the 1951 edition, the latter.

But what makes this not simply clever but great is the way that Tolkien then ties this into his story in The Lord of the Rings. He takes the (otherwise awkward) fact that the ring played such a very different role in The Hobbit (an “equalizer”, to use Shippey’s term), and makes that very contradiction serve his theme and story, and uses it to promote, not hinder, the role the One Ring will play in the latter story. In the second chapter of The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf says to Frodo:

I heard Bilbo’s strange story of how he had “won” [the ring], and I could not believe it. When I at last got the truth out of him, I saw at once that he had been trying to put his claim to the ring beyond doubt. Much like Gollum with his “birthday-present”. The lies were too much alike for my comfort. Clearly the ring had an unwholesome power that set to work on its keeper at once. That was the first real warning I had that all was not well.

What was a contradiction due to a changed mind of the author—the ring is a mere equalizer in one narrative, while the One Ring becomes the symbolic and fictive weight which bears the whole story in the second narrative—instead becomes a sign of the Ring’s importance and power: it already began to corrupt the (generally good and innocent) hobbit. What seemed to be mere changing of minds (in a Doylist view) in fact displays the power that the ring has. The author didn’t change his mind; you, the reader, were misled.

Perhaps the best way to think of this is not as a type 3 retcon mixed with a type 1a retcon, but as a type 1a retcon preformed upon a type 3 retcon. That is, the rewriting of the story was a type 3 retcon: Tolkien changed his mind and changed the text. But then he took this fact, which existed in the real world not the imagined world of Middle Earth, and brought it into Middle Earth—and by so doing retconned the fact of the change. In the same way that a type 1a retcon reinterprets what you think you know (Holmes is dead;—nope!, Watson was fooled and Holmes is still alive), this reinterpreted what you think you know (my 1937 copy of The Hobbit tells the story differently than your 1951 edition) and makes it mean something else (Bilbo lied, the ring corrupts).

Retcons exist to allow authors to change their minds, or later authors to tell different stories than earlier ones intended. This can be done by simply ignoring or changing the earlier tales, but it is much more respectful to the readers—to the stories as stories—to come up with a good reason for changing them. Of course when done badly it can backfire, coming across not as respectful but as violently disrespectful, just as a sufficiently bungled apology can make matters worse than silence would have. But when done well, they are little bits of art, attempts to make something flow and not block the narrative. It is similar to what prequels do, but in the case of prequels in general they fill in gaps; retcons change how we see what we’ve seen.5

In the next installment I will discuss what I think is the greatest single retcon of all time. This has now been posted and can be read here. And all of the entries of this series are here (in reverse chronological order).

Read Part Four

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And if I’ve gotten you interested in the general idea of the retcon, perhaps you’d like to give Retcon a try? It’s an ongoing serial that (among many other things) plays with some of the notions we will see in this series.

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    1. Ones that are done through reinterpreting previous stories done through...
            A. ...adding new context which changes the meaning of previous stories;
            B. ...recontextualiztaion or reinterpretation of previous stories;
            C. ...brute-force misrepresenting of the content of previous stories;
     2. Ones that are done through simply ignoring previous stories;
     3. Ones that are done through actually altering previous stories by putting out new
            editions with the old text, images, etc, altered.

And yet, and yet, and yet.

I was going to post today about the first great retcon (as part of this series). But it felt… unseemly to post an essay last week and then an another essay this week on a different topic as if nothing had happened, as if the U.S. government—which I suppose I still have to acknowledge as in some sense my government—hadn’t just began a war out of nowhere, for essentially no reason. As if we were not dropping death from the skies simply because Trump thought it might give him a poll boost or because he felt impotent and emasculated over the general failure of his policies2 (and in particular his risible (even though dangerous) saber-rattling at Greenland). Saying anything feels less like writing than like performing a ritual. Yet while those, too, are words on wind, I say them just the same.

And, of course, no one is saying quite what I would say, although almost all the various parts of it are being said by various people. Donald Trump is assaulting—and in some cases murdering (in others it has not yet reached that stage, although in any it may)—a number of different things. We should keep track of the different things and the differences between his various crimes. So I have decided, reluctantly, that I ought to spell them out as I see them.

So here we go. Trigger warning: if you pull on them, you fire guns and they kill real people.

Aggressive War is Immoral, So Trump’s War is Murder

This is the most basic point. A lot of people are focusing on other assaults that Trump is committing, which I shall discuss in a bit and which are indeed bad, but we can’t ever forget that, first and foremost, people are being murdered.

Anyone who is not a pacifist can’t say they would never kill: but the only moral uses of violence are in self-defense. On a national scale, this unpacks into just war theory which (to oversimplify a long and rich intellectual tradition into a phrase) says that aggressive war is immoral.3 The only permitted wars are wars of self-defense. And just war tradition is very clear that what is called “preventative war”—that is, a war started because you think your enemies might be growing stronger or might plan to attack you—clearly count as aggressive wars. Thus the 2003-2011 American war in Iraq would have been immoral even had its promoters’ lies been true: a plan to get a WMD does not justify an assault unless there are very specific reasons to believe it will be used, not just ‘they’re bad guys’ reasons. (In contrast, the war in Afghanistan, at least in the very beginning, was a response to an attack and therefore justified; similarly the current war that Ukraine is fighting is just since it was attacked by an aggressor.) As Jim Henley put it 18 years ago in a retrospective on the start of the Iraq war, “Any war you can describe as ‘a war of choice’ is a crime”.

War unleashes horrors: that is its nature. We justify things because ‘those things happen in war.’ But that very justification requires that we hold the decision to start a war—which inevitably leads to horrors—to a strict standard. You can’t use ‘bad things happen in wars’ as an excuse unless the war could not be avoided. It is because bad things happen in wars that it is a crime, immoral, evil, to do it under anything less than the direst necessity.

The United States understood this once. The most serious charge at Nuremberg was not about the Holocaust or any other of the many specific atrocities the Germans committed; it was that Germany carried out an aggressive war. As Robert Jackson, the chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, famously put it:

War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent States alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.4

Trump started a war based, essentially, on a whim. Therefore he has murdered everyone who will be killed in this war, on all sides. This is true regardless of who fired what, since the entire situation is his doing. For instance, I saw a claim that the school bombed in Iran (pictured above) was hit by a misfired rocket from Iran. I have no reason to think this is true; it is probably just a rumor. But let’s say for the sake of argument that it were true. It doesn’t change the fact that Trump has committed murder, killing 175 people, mostly schoolchildren, since the fighting was only happening because of the immoral and unjustified assault that he ordered.5

The war is a war of aggression: and thus it is immoral. This will remain true even if (by some miracle) it were to end well; and it would have been true even if (in an alternate history) Trump had followed the Constitution and gone to Congress and gotten a declaration of war, thereby making the war legal under American law.6 Whatever happens in this war, it was a crime to begin.

This is not, incidentally, just a leftist point—or at any rate it shouldn’t be. Standard centrist values in this country have embraced (at least in theory) the idea of sticking to the just use of power; Michael Walzer’s essential book, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations is, I have heard, regularly taught at Westpoint. And of course the tradition of just war theory begans in the Catholic church, and you can find some (actual) conservatives sticking up for it in those terms.

Even if Iran is (by some miracle) free and prosperous and flourishing by whenever this ends, Trump should still be arrested, tried at the Hague, and sent down for the rest of his life. For war crimes. And for murder.

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Trump is Assaulting the World Order

A related but not identical point to the previous. The chief victims of aggressive war are, of course, the Iranians who are under assault. But there is a broader victim too one which (while we should never give it first place) is worth remembering: namely, the international order. This is a phrase that will produce sniggers in some, since the U.S. has far too often acted as if it were not bound by the rules it has done so much to establish and promote. But the sniggers should be squelched, for the international system and international law, however imperfect, was good. The world had taken some—partial, inadequate—steps towards making aggressive war illegal over the past century. This is the duality that Canadian prime minister Mark Carney was getting at in his epochal speech at Davos:7

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.

I grant you that in this case (unlike the previous one which—I repeat—is the central problem with what Trump is doing) this is an assault on a victim who was already down. Putin’s aggressive war against Ukraine hurt the consensus; so did Bush’s war against Iraq. The U.S. has a particular tendency to arrogate to ourselves the right to unilaterally attack a country, but we are hardly the only ones. So yes, the international order was already significantly damaged. But there is a big difference between mostly dead and all dead: and every blow counts.

François de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) wrote in his Maxims that “Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue" (#218). This statement is, I believe, often misinterpreted: it is not a condemnation of hypocrisy—or, at least, not only that. It also can be read (so to speak) straight: that hypocrisy is a real tribute to virtue, and one that, however inadequate, still matters. Being forced to speak in a way which respects virtue not only pays it lip service, it gives it (some, limited, but nevertheless real) power.8 Bush’s war was horrible, immoral, and based on lies. But somehow Trump’s war is even worse, since it’s based on nothing but his whim.

Which brings me to my next point.

Trump is Assaulting the U. S. Constitution

This is the point I have seen emphasized the most, so I won’t belabor it. Like the previous point (indeed, like all except the first) this is a question of further harm to an already-damaged cause rather than a brand new crime. In fact, the U.S. Constitution has been previously damaged in two distinct and important ways. First, Trump’s assaults on the Constitution have been horrific and relentless all through his second term (as well as before); he is trying to turn the U.S. into an authoritarian state and while he may (possibly) be failing, it’s far from a sure thing. This latest step may be worst in that it is going to kill more people (although given some of his actions, like his ending PEPFAR, that’s hardly a given), and it may even be the worst in the scope of its constitutional violation (although January 6 makes that a close call), but it is just the latest in a long train of abuses and usurpations.

But the U.S. Constitution, or at least this part of it, is facing a two-front assault: it’s also been damaged by a long history of U.S. presidents initiating military action without authorization (or with inadequate authorization, or deceptively-achieved authorization) from Congress. But this is not just another unauthorized attack that Trump has committed; it is far bigger than that. Therefore Trump has done more damage to the Constitutional order, been even more blazon about it, than any previous president. Size matters: and this looks likely to be far bigger than any earlier war the U.S. got involved in on sole presidential authority. (It is, for instance, much worse than Trump’s attacks on Iran from last year.) What the U.S. is carrying out are not limited strikes, but all-out war. Clinton bombing a factory in Africa without congressional approval was bad, but it’s not in the same time-zone as this. So the violation of the constitution is worse.

Trump can be best summed up in familiar 250 years old words: “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

A lot of people, as I said, are pressing this point. And I don’t want to say they’re wrong. They are completely right! And it is indeed important. But I also think that we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that while congressional approval was necessary for this to be legal under the constitution, it would not have made it either legal under international law or moral. But yes, this point counts too: even if it had (in some wild, hard-to-imagine alternate universe) actually been a defensive (and therefore moral) war, and even if it was (somehow) sanctioned under international law, it would still be against the constitution.

So even if Iran is (by some miracle) free and prosperous and flourishing by whenever this ends, Trump should still be impeached, convicted, and removed from office over this (for a thousand other things too, but this by itself would be enough).

No Case Was Made

This is, I trust, obvious. But I want to make a few points about the fact.

First, while this issue is intricately connected to the issue of the lack of Congressional approval (and thus the illegality of the war under American law), it’s not identical to it. War involves death and destruction and sacrifice—even from the aggressor. People deserve to hear, clearly, without the contradictions and post-hoc rationalisations that we have been getting, a case clearly made out. This is not only true for practical reasons—if the U.S. public isn’t on board, it’s unlikely to go well—but moral ones too: the people who are going to die, whose loved ones are going to die, the people who will be poorer and less safe, deserve to know why.

Second, leftists tend to be cynical about this aspect: it’s manufacturing consent, it’s all based on lies anyway, people are sheep, does it really matter. And of course it’s true that past wars were based on lies—both Vietnam and Iraq leap to mind—while others (the Gulf War) were not argued for for consistent and clear reasons.9 But this is the La Rochefoucauld point again: the hypocrisy is a type of concern for virtue; it at least understands that the virtue is important. And, of course, the wars that were flat-out sold with lies (Vietnam and Iraq) were both disasters with long-term damage to both the countries we attacked and to the U.S. They were bad ideas! The fact that earlier wars were justified based on lies doesn’t mean that justifications don’t matter, it shows they do. Here, Trump didn’t even try.

But Isn’t the Iranian Regime Evil?

Yes! Or, I should perhaps say (to be accurate): sure sounds like it, from everything I’ve read, although I (like most Americans) don’t know that much. But I have no reason to doubt it. So let’s stipulate that it’s a dreadful tyranny (and, again, I suspect it’s true, I just haven’t looked into it).

But it’s important to note that that doesn’t actually effect any of the previous points.

Take the easiest three first: if the point was that the Iranian regime was evil and should be overthrown for the good of its own people, that doesn’t justify, even a smidge, doing it without making a case to the American people, or in a way that violates the U.S. Constitution, or in a way that further degrades the already-weakened consensus against unilateral military attacks on other countries. If, in fact, the evil is the problem, then go to the people, go to Congress, go to the U.N., hell, go to NATO, and get the American people and the world community on board. The lack of doing those things were legal as well as moral crimes, and should be treated as such—by impeachment in the U.S. and by trial for war crimes if by some blessed miracle Trump ends up in The Hague.

But what about the first point—which I have said is the key point—that aggressive war is wrong?

The first thing to be said here is that the point about aggressive war basically still stands. You still are starting a war, an act which “contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”. Which is to say that starting an aggressive war is an act like a calculated murder: impossible to justify on deontological grounds, but possibly, just maybe, at least arguable on consequentialist ones. This is a much thinner reed to hang an assault on.

And it means that the consequentialist-only case is almost always wrong. I won’t say it’s always wrong: sometimes the world might be better if a particular regime were destroyed. But usually we are fooling ourselves about our motives (or our politicians are lying to the rest of us), usually we are underestimating both the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns, and usually the world is worse for its being done. And, of course, one very important type of consequentialism is rule-based utilitarianism: and an aggressive war for moral ends violates that (with theoretical but almost no actual exceptions). This is the same reason that people going around and assassinating bad people on the street would not make the world a better place, even from a purely consequentialist viewpoint, and even if they are genuinely bad people.

Because of all of this, our presumption against a consequentialist-only case should be incredibly high. Far, far higher than nearly any real conflict ever meets.

Making a consequentialist-only case for war strikes me as rather like those arguments for torture you used to hear back in the naughts when the U.S. was torturing people in the post 9/11 era: you know, the scenarios about a nuclear bomb on a short fuse and only one person who knew where it was. The whole point of those arguments was not to make a good-faith consequentialist case for torture, since they were not talking about cases that ever come up in real life. They were simply an attempt to get you to think in consequentialist terms (about which they could then lie) rather than deontological ones. And to use a practically impossible scenario to get you to not think about the real, and unjustifiable, scenarios they were in fact supporting. In the same way, those saying war can be good for regime change are trying to blind us to the fact, the essential fact, that aggressive war is wrong, and that the war, this war, is an aggressive war without any utilitarian justification.10

But, of course, if you did want to try to make a consequentialist-only case for a war on Iran (or anywhere else), and if you were actually making it in good faith and not as a flimsy excuse for aggression, you would of course need to get everything right: both to help ensure the consequences are good, and to ensure that you are not fooling yourself about your own motives (or that your politicians are not fooling you about theirs). The process really, really matters: it requires vast cooperation within the nation and within the community of nations, extraordinarily careful planning, overwhelming public buy-in, and so forth.

The notion that the Iran war meets this test is a laugh line, at least for those who think that Dr. Strangelove and The Death of Stalin were comedies. For everyone else, it is simply a very, very bad joke.

Not just a Crime, but a Blunder

Trump has done nothing right in the war—hell, he basically has done nothing right in his entire public career from the beginning until now.11 He has begun this war by violating every procedure that exists—which, as I have tried to articulate, are not just namby-pamby niceties (as contemporary conservative thought, vilely, increasingly tends to say), but essential steps towards preserving good in the world, democracy in our country, and any possible good outcome to this war.12 He has done no planning for the war’s aftermath, or even for what happens during the war or if it goes wrong. He has done this as he has done everything: on a whim.

I said above that even if, by some miracle, the war ends well, Trump should still be impeached and removed from office, then shipped off to The Hague and put on trial for war crimes. But of course in real life there is no earthly reason to think it will work out well. Even if you ignore how we got into it, even if you ignore the moral questions, this was a stupid thing to do, done in the stupidest possible way. We went to war without a plan, with the biggest gang of corrupt cronies and incompetent morons ever to have run a major country in charge of the effort. Even if what they were doing were moral; even if they had gotten sanction from the U.S. Congress and the United Nations…. we should still oppose this war because it is likely to have terrible consequences, even apart from the terrible consequences inherent in its immorality, its destruction of the world order, and its flagrant violation of the U.S. constitution, and the gruesome horror of dead innocents in Iran (and dead soldiers ordered to murder them).

The damage to Iran is likely to be the most obvious; the damage to the rest of the Middle East will be clear too. But it will damage America too: not just the lives of the soldiers Trump has murdered, not just the money wasted, not just the still further damage to the constitution; I think it will hurt us in still other ways too. The unknowns (both known and unknown) are too thick to see how, but this sort of thing blows back. (The movements laying the ground for Trump may themselves be blowback from the Vietnam war: the world operates on far, far longer timelines than America’s tattered attention span.) But a few can be made out, dimly, through the thick haze of war. To mention just one example: It will yet further erode our standing with our traditional allies. Yes, that standing was already hurt by Iraq; it was already horribly wounded by Trump’s conduct in office over the past horrible 13 months; but this will weaken it further.

And who knows what horrible movements the betrayed veterans of this war, built not even on lies but on a vile tyrant’s idiotic whim, will found in their hurt and rage and grief? I doubt that the architects of the Vietnam War thought that some share in the guilt for the murder of 150 Iraqi school children would be added to the vast oceans of blood on their consciences, but if, indeed, Vietnam helped spark militias and white power, and they helped elect and enable Trump… then some share of those murders should be added to their account as well.

So yes: this war is vile in multiple ways. You could slice them up differently than I did—make more sub-categories, say. Maybe I even forgot some which ought to be highlighted. But I think mostly we should recall that each of the separate and distinct ways in which it is bad—it’s a flagrantly immoral, unjust, aggressive war; it’s against the rules of the international community (imperfect though they are); it’s a direct violation of the U.S. Constitution; it’s a stupid idea done with no reason, no plan, and by the worst gang of incompetent idiots ever to befoul our nation. We should oppose this war four times over, and not limit our criticisms to any one of those crimes.

In that sense, I suppose, it is like Trump himself: he, too, is so overflowing with horrors that simply opposing him on any one of them seems wrong: he is pursuing terrible policies, he is corrupt, he is incompetent, he is dumb, he is demented, his values are vile, he himself is a terrible person… on and on and on and on, to the point where it is hard to mention any of them because you trip yourself up trying to say all of them at once, since who could omit this horror or that, they all clamor for recognition, until our conscience is like a Beatle signing autographs in She Stadium. So with this war: like Trump, it is so overflowing with bad qualities as to make it almost impossible to talk about.

But of course we must: it is our country committing these crimes, murdering these children, to say nothing of our countrymen dying in combat. With all that happening, it simply feels incumbent upon all of us—including, of course, on me—to say something.

Even if no one is listening.

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The practice of philosophy is generally held to consist in the crafting and evaluation of arguments. Ever since Socrates complained that the sophists made the weaker argument appear the stronger, philosophers have held themselves out as the disciples of reason against various forms of rhetoric. One of the skirmish lines in the continental-analytic divide within 20th century philosophy1 was that analytic philosophers accused continental philosophers of not making arguments, or at any rate of not making good or clear arguments; the response was usually that they did, in fact, make arguments (and you, our critics, just are missing them/ignoring them/what have you), rather than any response along the lines of arguments, shmarguments. Which goes to show that the idea that arguments were the main tool of the craft was usually admitted: an important point of unison between the divergent traditions.

At the same time, if you dig down a bit in the history of philosophy you can find some counter examples, philosophers for whom arguments are, if not ignored, then not central. To pick two examples, neither Wittgenstein nor Nietzsche center arguments in their texts, and while they both do make things that we’d probably call arguments, it’s less clear cut than you’d think.2 When some contemporary philosophers dismiss older philosophers as not having actually been good philosophers (here’s one example), in part they are saying that what arguments look like have changed, in part they are saying the field has in fact progressed and standards have improved, and in part they are just being silly, but I think that in part they are reacting to the fact that while old philosophy contains arguments, it contains a lot more than that, too. But philosophy has (broadly, with exceptions) trained itself to think that only the arguments matter.

I don’t mean to suggest that I think that philosophy should, or even could, dispense with arguments; they are clearly too core to the discipline. But I think that it’s worth remembering that, at least in some cases, arguments are not all that a philosophical text offers—and that those things, too, can be, in fact often are, central to the text’s philosophical purpose. What sort of thing am I referring to? I shan’t list all of the various other things philosophy offers—that would be a different essay—but I do want to talk about one in particular.

A lot of philosophy does something that I might call proposing viewpoints. It offers lenses—or angles, or ways of thinking—which we can then pick up and make use of, or see if we have any needs which they might fit. These viewpoints3 generally consist of a large number of different things cobbled together: obscure facts brought to light, newly defined terms hypostatizing new entities, approaches to certain problems, texts to read or recall and, yes, arguments: usually a lot of different bits of intellectual hardware will be drawn upon to construct a viewpoint. These viewpoints will contain arguments, but they aren’t themselves arguments: they are portraits we are invited to look at. Think of a conversational moment in which someone says “Think of it this way—”: a philosophical viewpoint is a similar move, just developed at length. Once given, the reader judges them not true or false, but useful or unhelpful—the response is not to either accept or reject them, but to either take them up or forget about them—to employ them or not.

Doesn’t this depart from philosophy’s stated mission of seeking truth? I would argue4 that it doesn’t—at least, not when thought carefully through. After all, there are lots of truths: science, history, mathematics, economics, and every other discipline gets at truths of various sorts. What distinguishes the truths of philosophy? There are of course multiple answers to that to the point where it has become a joke in the form of a viral image:

—but if some part of the answer is undoubtedly that it includes thinking about certain issues (metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, epistemology), another part of the answer is that it seeks wisdom: after all “philosophy”, etymologically, means love of wisdom rather than love of truth. Wisdom, broadly speaking, is a more practical concern than knowledge, by which I mean not that it will pay the rent or fix the sink, but that it involves what we should do, not (just) what we should think. To say something is true is a statement about the world; to say it is wise is to suggest a course of action. Most classically, the question of wisdom was raised in the form of a particular question: how should we live?5 And of course it ought to go without saying that how should we think? is one component of the question of how should we live?—a component which can impact the broader topic in fairly obvious ways, since how we think will shape how we answer the question of how we should live. And in thinking through questions about how we should think (particularly when the sort of thinking under examination touches on how we should live), arguments are often less useful than viewpoints.

I am not saying here that we should dismiss the search for truth. But, as I said before, there is a lot of truth to go around: and in asking how should we think we are seeking not only true viewpoints but usefully true viewpoints. It is, after all, true that the square root of 2,049 is approximately 45.265881, and also that that square root can’t be expressed precisely as anything less than an infinite decimal.6 But those truths aren’t going to get you anywhere; they aren’t useful. I think that pragmatism as an approach is broadly useful one, but at the very least it is a sieve for sorting out what truths we want to attend to.

So how do we tell if a viewpoint is useful? An argument will only get you so far. What is needed is experience: try it and see! Put these lenses on and look around and see if you see more clearly. This is not an argument of the classic premises and conclusion form. If you like you might say that it is an argument of a sort, but if so it’s an ostensive argument, not a logical one. We want to know what we gain from seeing things this way.

What I am saying is related to the superb aphorism from poet James Richardson’s Vectors:

It is by now proverbial that every proverb has its opposite. For every Time is money there is a Stop and smell the roses. When someone says You never stand in the same river twice someone else has already replied There is nothing new under the sun. In the mind's arithmetic, 1 plus –1 equals 2. Truths are not quantities but scripts: Become for a moment the mind in which this is true. (Vectors §26)

While the sort of logical truths which arguments deal with are good approaches for questions of fact and rule, if you are looking for something broader, then you are going to want to adopt a pragmatic test: what works?

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s book The Mattering Instinct—yes, this is a review of that book, I’m getting there, detain your destriers—contains arguments, even persuasive ones: it is a philosophy book, after all. But I think that what is most valuable in it is the viewpoint that Goldstein offers. This may simply be a way of saying that I find her arguments persuasive but not entirely so: but I think it’s something more. Goldstein does not offer a series of thoughts that should be evaluated as logical arguments and either adopted wholesale or discarded: it is a set of tools for thinking (concepts, observations, connections, etc) that should be employed to some extent. It is a lens that will help you see the world better—but only at certain distance; there are other lenses you will want to pair it with.

2. The Argument of The Mattering Instinct

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (who earlier in her career published under the name “Rebecca Goldstein”; you may find some of her books published under that name) is a philosopher and a novelist (and, recently, a substacker). Her new book—it really is new: it came out this year, and as I write it is still February—is a work of popular philosophy called The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives us and Divides Us. Notwithstanding where I left off section one of this review, in this section, I want to outline her arguments (the rest will return in due course).

Goldstein’s argument is that what is central to being human is the longing to matter. “We are creatures of matter that long to matter”, she says several times in what could be the book’s slogan. She argues that this desire comes out of a quirk of evolutionary history (her book is thoroughly naturalist, although she shows respect for those who get their sense of mattering from belief in transcendent things). Namely, attention evolved for straightforward survival purposes (if we pay proper attention we’re more likely to live and reproduce): we all have a drive to survive (those creatures which didn’t aren’t around any more), and we need to work at it due to the second law of thermodynamics: life is a low-entropy state, and we must sustain it through constant input of effort, and attention helps us do so successfully.

That much is common among many creatures, all of whom pay attention: we see attention in dogs and birds and bears. What is uniquely human is that when this attention to our own survival is combined with human intelligence and the consequent ability to self-reflect, it sparks a question about whether the attention we inevitably and necessarily pay to our selves is deserved. “Mattering” Goldstein defines as “deserving of attention”, and she argues that human beings are universally and uniquely pressed to feel deserving of the attention that we give to ourselves for what are in fact straightforward evolutionary reasons. She writes: “Longing to matter… is what happens when our cognitive processes try to rationalize our self-mattering.” She even proposes—tongue, I think, at least somewhat in cheek—that this difference is central enough that we ought to consider human beings as existing in a new phylum,7 and dubs us “homo iustificans”— the justifying animal.8 She argues that it is mattering, not happiness, that we truly care about, which is why people pursue all sorts of things that make us unhappy (at least in the short term), and even give up our life for sufficient cause. This desire to matter she calls the mattering instinct.9 She places the mattering instinct at the center of our lives. She implies (although I don’t think she quite says) that it is the grounding of all (most?) of our values; she writes that “The mattering instinct means that we are normative creatures down to our core. We think and act and shape our lives within the sphere of justifications.” She also argues that the mattering instinct “makes us staunch realists”: we don’t simply want to feel that we matter, we want to believe that we objectively, really matter, a fact with a number of important consequences.

In response to the mattering instinct human beings engage in what Goldstein calls “mattering projects”: things which we center our life around in order to try and make them matter. Goldstein divides the vast multiplicity of mattering projects which people engage in into four big categories, which she calls transcenders, socializers, heroic strivers,10 and competitors. The categories are fairly self-explanatory, but just in case: “transcenders” root their mattering in some objective reality outside themselves (usually God, but other options, even secular ones, exist); “socializers” root their mattering in other people (usually family, friends or a community, but she also puts people who seek fame or who follow cults into this category); “strivers” seek to do something well for its own sake (an art, a sport, an intellectual pursuit, or the pursuit of moral ends); and finally “competitors” seek to be better than others, either on an individual basis, or as part of a collective (my group is better than your group). As a visual aid, Goldstein thinks of these as land-masses and arranges them into what she calls “the mattering map”, the frontispiece of the book, drawn in a style derived from Tolkien:

Two of the book’s eight chapters are given over to discussing the four big categories, and their various subcategories, in depth. Goldstein is usually quite good at being subtle about the complexities here: some athletes are competitors, as you might expect, but many are strivers; some artists are strivers, but many are competitors, while still others are transcenders.11 One way she characterizes these continents is by pointing out the different ways in which the different groups think about mattering: socializers talk about whether they matter to other people; competitors seek to matter more than other people12; transcenders seek to matter to God or some other objective reality; and strivers think that the work they are engaged in (artistic, intellectual, ethical, athletic) matters in and of itself. Goldstein talks a bit about what leads people to pick their diverse mattering projects, mentioning some psychological theories that line up (to some degree) with her categories, as well as noting that chance must surely play a significant role. But this is one place where I wish she had engaged in greater depth: her narratives of how people pick (or change) a mattering project are rather under-developed: she is so busy charting the land that she does not do much to chart the history of people’s settlements upon it.

Goldstein argues that one common problem that arises from mattering projects is a tendency to universalize them: to assert that one’s own mattering project is the only one that is worthy. In one splendid passage in chapter six, she illustrates her point by quoting twenty different people saying either that some particular thing is the only thing that matters or that if you don’t do some particular thing then you have no reason to live, with a dizzying array of somethings, including: having style; doing science; mountain climbing; being a parent; finding love; doing a deadlift; helping others; observing nature; drinking wine; having manual competence, and using language. It’s argumentation by avalanche, and is far more convincing than if she’d only chosen five good examples, as well as much funnier and much more aesthetically pleasing.13 This sort of universalizing is sometimes harmless, but it can create great harm when people set out to force others to take what matters to them as the objective good. Unfortunately, this universalizing is, as Goldstein points out, also a deeply-rooted phenomenon, since our tendency to be realists about mattering makes us think that we are not just picking for ourselves, but for what actually matters. Both diversity and conflict are central to Goldstein’s picture of how the human works.

Finally, Goldstein proposes an objective criteria for judging which mattering projects are good. She is, for the most part, an admirably robust proponent of pluralism, and of the importance of not forcing our own mattering projects upon others. On the contrary, she delights in the variation that our mattering projects contain and our mattering instinct inspires:

Save me from the impoverished world in which there are no people whose mattering project is playing the drums, or running a successful discount plumbing supply business, or trying to reconcile quantum mechanics with relativity theory, or creating new recipes, or doing all the good for others they possibly can, or analyzing the poetry of Paul Simon’s lyrics, or raising joyful, flourishing children, or designing public art installations, or performing the gymnastic feat of the triple-double in floor exercise and the double-double dismount off the balance beam.

At the same time, Goldstein doesn’t want to say that all mattering projects are good—mattering projects that involve violence and cruelty, for instance, she is clearly (and of course rightly) against. Her proposal for an objective criteria is rooted in the second law of thermodynamics, a law which, she says, “has been elevated to “the supreme position among the laws of Nature””14 On that basis, Goldstein says that we should embrace any mattering project which is anti-entropy (since life itself is necessarily anti-entropy, entropy is, she suggests, the common enemy of all), and condemn those which increase it. She says that anti-entropic mattering projects promote “the spread of flourishing, knowledge, love, joyfulness, peace, kindness, comity, beauty“, while pro-entropic mattering projects promote “conflicts and confusion, discontent and despoliation, disease, disaster, and death”. Goldstein ends her book by suggesting that the mattering instinct provides a philosophical explanation (and even justification) for the creation of values beyond ethical values (those she seems to take for granted, or at least roots them elsewhere), that is, judgments about what lives are worth living and what projects are worth attempting.

There’s a lot more in Goldstein’s book that I haven’t touched on. She has an analysis of depression and existential crises as due to the collapse of mattering projects. If you are willing to follow hints and implications, there are a lot more suggestions for things which might be grounded upon the notion of the mattering instinct: for instance, she hints here and there that it contains an implied politics (pluralism, broad human flourishing—basically classical liberalism), a way to approach others (in a cosmopolitan spirit arising out of respect for different mattering projects), a theory of education (allow people to find their own mattering projects, a focus on self-actualization), social theories of what leads to human conflict (the inevitable clashes of our invariably different mattering projects, each of which we (due to the nature of their origin) claim an objective realism for), and a lot more. It’s a very ambitious book: and that ambition is one of the best things about it. But it is an ambition that is more pointed towards than fulfilled.

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3. The Mattering Instinct as a Book

I want to go on and talk about the various gaps and lacunae in Goldstein’s arguments and viewpoint, but first I think I should say a little bit about the book as a book. What’s in here? What’s it like as a reading experience? And I have to say that the answer is: mixed. Some of this is probably a disjunction between my personal tastes and the intended audience for the book. I mention it however because I suspect that it is a disjunction that a lot of people will experience: in other words, while the book imagines itself to be aimed at one variety of reader, it will mostly appeal to others (people more like me), who will find some of the gestures at the former group to be grating.

The Mattering Instinct is a work of philosophy: full stop. It is about values, how we live, how we should live—the classic questions of philosophy. If you’re not interested in philosophy, you won’t be interested in the book. (I would also claim that philosophy is (I want to say inherently) interesting: I think you will be interested in the book. But you know best.) Yet a fair amount of the book seems to be designed to get it to appeal to readers who are not primarily, centrally interested in philosophy. It has, stylistically, a whiff of the self-help book about it—nothing I can point to without a closer textual examination than I have the space to give it, but it certainly seems to be within its stylistic DNA. In particular, it has a lot of, and spends a lot of energy and space upon, what one might with Cary Grant call “human interest”.15

Specifically, the book contains lengthy narratives of various figures’ lives. Some of these are famous people—Ludwig Boltzmann, William and Alice James, Scott Joplin, Blaise Pascal, Ludwig Wittgenstein—while a lot of others are people that most readers will have never heard of: a MAGA mother who devoted herself to Trump’s lies about the 2020 election; a thief who stole a million dollars worth of feathers from the London Museum of Natural History to pursue the Victorian art of fly-tying; a poet whose work was only published posthumously; the founder of a sanctuary for people with leprosy in India; an impoverished Chinese woman who rescued abandoned baby girls (sacrificed to the conjunction of sexism and the one-child policy) and raised dozens of them; a skinhead who not only repented and tried to make amends but now lives as a ba’al teshuvah. While those are the ones told at greatest length, there are a lot of others told more briefly. This is a book with a very large cast of colorful characters.

But most if not all of these stories, while intended to be illustrative of various examples of people exploring their mattering instinct, are not really that necessary to make her case—certainly not when given in such detail. Do we really need long narratives to prove to us that some people pursue helping others? Or that some people have trouble finding what area of life to focus on? Or that still others will pursue idiosyncratic goals to ludicrous ends? I think most of us could conjure our own examples; Goldstein, however, offers us new ones—at great length. The result is that the book feels like someone dropped a philosophy book into a collection of shilling lives and decided that, like chocolate and peanut butter, they were two great tastes that go together. The result is rather a chimera.

I don’t mean to say that these aren’t good stories: they mostly are, and some of them are great. And certainly there were many about which I previously knew little or nothing (although of course a few were familiar). But I had picked up a philosophy book because I wanted to read about philosophy; I also own a copy of Chris Milkul’s The Eccentropedia: The Most Unusual People Who Have Ever Lived, and that wasn’t what I picked up to read. I can certainly imagine readers who will think that the life stories in The Mattering Project are the best part, but I can’t imagine many of those readers wading through the rather substantial amount of philosophy to get at them. If one wants charming life stories, there are easier ways to hear them.

This strikes me as a marketing/publication strategy gone awry: either Goldstein herself or an editor thought that she needed more human interest, and so she put in a lot of fun stories to liven up the (presumptively dull) philosophy. But that’s just a guess; we can of course imagine other possibilities too—perhaps the book was running short and needed expansion. All of this is ungenerous, and may well be wrong: Goldstein is clearly moved by these stories and perhaps she simply thinks that her arguments will work better with real examples to hang upon.16 And of course I may be wrong about their effect on the reader: perhaps most readers will find them deeply relevant, or at least necessary palette cleansers between the philosophically denser and richer sections of the book. But for my own part I found them a bit odd, and it makes me (just slightly) hesitant to recommend the book (although I do recommend it), since I can imagine that some readers who would get a lot out of it if they persevered tossing it quickly aside with a sneer. To use an archaic and possibly entirely wrongheaded term, it comes across as very middlebrow.

I think I found this aspect of the book especially frustrating because while the philosophy that was included is really interesting, there seemed to be so much left out—dropped issues, counterexamples that weren’t discussed, key threads that weren’t explored, problems with Goldstein’s viewpoint that simply weren’t addressed. It is certainly true that as it stands the book, were it stripped of its human interest stories, would be far too short; but it wouldn’t have had to stay that way: there were more than enough dangling philosophical issues she could have covered to fill out the book with plenty left over. To those lacunae I will now turn.

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4. What is Left Out of The Mattering Instinct

Why did I begin with the claim that philosophy is not just about arguments, but about viewpoints? Because I think that while Goldstein’s book contains some interesting arguments, I didn’t find any of them entirely persuasive, yet at the same time I think that it contains an extremely valuable way of thinking about the world. You might want to cash this out as my saying that her arguments seem to have a lot of lacunae, flaws, exceptions, and the like: but that is emphasizing what the book lacks, and that is itself a distortion, since what is notable about this book—which really is a good book, and which I recommend—is what it offers. Goldstein is definitely onto something; and that something is an important issue, for people in general and (perhaps) for our time in particular.

But there are a lot of questions that I had and omissions I noticed, and I want to discuss some of the more important ones now.

My first question, which Goldstein never really addresses, is how universal this all is. Goldstein writes as if the mattering instinct were found in all human beings, but I wonder if that’s really so. Did Russian peasants in the eighth century, barely scraping by, worry about whether they mattered? What about members of the pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer bands that made up most of human history? To be clear, I am not asserting that they didn’t worry about their own mattering; I actually don’t know. But I think the question should at least be raised. How much of the pattern Goldstein describes is a result of the modern self whose historical construction was so complex, so contingent and so recent? How much is the the result of a century and a half of genuinely unprecedented economic growth that bought far more of us than ever before the leisure to worry about such things? The closest Goldstein comes to addressing these questions are a few brief comments about how the mattering instinct kicks in once the basics of survival—food, shelter, and the other things as the base of Maslow’s famous pyramid—are met. But this rather demands the question: for what percentage of human beings (both now and historically) have these issues not been overwhelming concerns? The question of mattering is, in a very real sense, a “first world problem”: one that only those lucky enough to be sufficiently wealthy and secure can afford to worry about. Perhaps the issue of mattering is like, say, literacy: a big deal in some societies and at some points but hardly a universal problem. If so, of course, it is probably a growing issue. But a growing problem is different than an eternal one, and Goldstein writes about the mattering instinct as if it is the latter. The very name—instinct—implies a universality, even a biological innateness, that is by no means obvious. I think Goldstein ought to address the issue’s salience through history and culture: and that whether she decides to defend the claim’s universality despite these worries or to admit that this is a problem localized in certain human experiences, her overall argument would end up looking and feeling quite different.

This relates to a point which Goldstein raises briefly here and there but which she does not discuss in detail, namely, the political dimensions of the mattering instinct. She hints a few times that contemporary dislocations and upheavals are the result of a lot of unmet mattering needs. I think this may be true; but if it is, it is an important aspect that demands more than a few asides. Perhaps Goldstein should team up with Brink Lindsey, whose new book The Permanent Problem is about these issues, albeit not in precisely these terms. And to the extent that the permanent problem (to use his phrase) is a one which has not only driven a lot of the problems of recent decades but one which is (as Lindsey noted in his most recent substack post) quite like to get dramatically worse very soon if the prophecies of AI-inspired abundance happen to be true, then Goldstein’s work would take on a new and pressing relevance—but in a direction she does not do more than gesture towards.

The question of how far this goes could be pushed along dimensions other than those of history, economics, and geography, too. To take one more example, think about a single human life. How universal are mattering projects within a person’s span? Presumably babies do not have mattering projects. How about four year olds? Eight? When do they develop? Is it standard (e.g. always around adolescence) or is it highly variable? On the other side, do they ever disappear? Do people have mattering projects in hospice? At what point do we cease to seek meaning? None of these are questions Goldstein treats. Perhaps because she was enticed by the metaphor of instinct, she doesn’t ask any of the great swarm of questions about extent, about beginning and endings, and variations in intensity, etc, that seem like basic questions for developing her (once again, very useful!) viewpoint.

A distinct set of issues arise out of Goldstein’s arguments regarding the objective criteria for mattering projects. As I said above, Goldstein argues that we can use the mattering instinct (and the second law of thermodynamics) to establish objective criteria for what are good mattering projects: good mattering projects, she claims, join life’s fight against entropy, while bad ones promote it. But having raised the issue of both the objective truth of mattering projects and their moral evaluation, Goldstein does not pursue the thoughts anything like adequately.

Take the issue of moral evaluation. Goldstein says (persuasively, to my mind) that “when a person’s own sense of mattering demands, as the very condition of being fulfilled, the diminished mattering of others” we should call them (baldly) “immoral”. But at the same time her description of competitives sounds as though their mattering projects necessarily require “as the very condition of being fulfilled, the diminished mattering of others”. So are competitives by nature immoral? Goldstein doesn’t say, or even acknowledge the issue. She does, however, say that all four types are likely to always exist—a tricky problem if one of the four types is (as it seems to follow from her arguments) inherently immoral.

Another continent on the mattering map seems to be inherently wrong: transcenders. In Goldstein’s telling transcenders get their sense of mattering from the belief that they matter to some objective aspect of the universe—God being the most common one, but as I said she suggests there are a number of other options including even atheist ones. But isn’t a problem that nearly one quarter of those who have a mattering project17 at all have one that is based in something wrong? (I say ‘nearly one quarter’ because even if one of the subcategories of transcenders are correct in their metaphysics, the rest are (consequently) wrong.) Goldstein says that she would never try to “foist” her viewpoint on various metaphysical transcenders, which strikes me as wise; but it seems a bit blasé to ignore this fact entirely. As Goldstein says, we all really care whether our mattering matters: when it comes to mattering, we are all realists. Shouldn’t we then care that some large proportion of our fellows are basing their mattering projects on things that are simply untrue?

Which raises another question: Goldstein largely avoids the question of judgments of other people’s mattering projects. The only contexts in which she discusses the issue are in their moral evaluation, and in her proposed objective criteria for what counts as a good mattering project (i.e. one that works against entropy). But it seems to me to be (if nothing else) an important empirical fact that we do judge other people’s mattering projects as more and less valuable. Most people will see (for instance) painting as a deeper art than fly-tying. Goldstein’s viewpoint seems to be a laissez-faire ‘you do you’ approach, which is undoubtedly socially wise. But in point of fact most people do worry about the esteem in which they are held by others (a point which I have worried at before). This is a pressing issue, particularly if you find the idea that the need for mattering is (on some broad scale) increasing. This in turn leads to the issue captured in that quote from philosopher Agnes Callard which I find so haunting:

There is a philosophical conundrum at the root of all this: morality requires we maintain a safety net at the bottom that catches everyone—the alternative is simply inhumane—but we also need an aspirational target at the top, so as to inspire us to excellence, creativity and accomplishment. In other words, we need worth to come for free, and we also need it to be acquirable. And no philosopher—not Kant, not Aristotle, not Nietzsche, not I—has yet figured out how to construct a moral theory that allows us to say both of those things.

Goldstein is talking about the worth that we all need, the mattering that we all are (in some sense) entitled to. But I think that Collard is right that while that is necessary—she says for moral reasons, but we might add social, political, psychological, and many other flavors of reason as well—I think she is also right that we need, or at any rate that many of us want (a desire that is what I have called “deeply rooted”) a broader level of esteem—which would lead to a hierarchy of mattering. This is true in part to provide what Callard calls an “aspirational target”—which is to say incentives—but I think it may be broadly true as well. (Are those people all competitives? Do no strivers who are clearly such feel a need to make work that not only matters but which is exceptional?) This, too, strikes me as at the heart of what is to be gained from Goldstein’s book. Of course, as Callard says, this is an unsolved philosophical problem. I certainly don’t have a solution (any more than does Kant, Aristotle, Nietzsche, or Callard), and I don’t blame Goldstein for not having one too. But I think it is a problem that is worth noticing, and incorporating into the viewpoint of the mattering instinct.

Another issue in this broad region is that I don’t think that Goldstein’s objective criteria for mattering will be worth much in practice. Goldstein suggests that due to how well-grounded the Second Law of Thermodynamics is, it will do as a universal criterion for mattering projects. But of course that assumes a scientific worldview that some mattering projects are indifferent to and that some may outright oppose. We can easily imagine theists who would deny the truth of the second law (since God will come down and change everything at the last trump, say). I fear Goldstein is, in the end, imagining an agreement that might well be true of anyone who works their way through her book but won’t be true of everyone in our society (to say nothing of the world, or ever in the future of humanity). It might be nice to live in a world where grounding an objective value in a scientific law is a safe bet, but I don’t think that we do live in such a world.

But it gets worse: I fear that even if people accept her criteria, the terms are so vague that it won’t provide any actual guidance. I fear everyone would simply reinterpret their own particular mattering project as “anti-entropy). Thus some religious transcenders might argue that a world with only one religion would be less entropic than a jumbled mixture, while ethnic cleansers might claim that a mixture of two tribes in one society is more entropic than having them anti-entropically sorted into two ethnically pure camps; for that matter, Hitler might claim that having a world with Jews among the nations is more entropic than a world in which they don’t exist. I am not saying that these claims have any merit; I am simply suggesting that Goldstein’s terms won’t be of much use in arguing against them: a vague alignment of everything good with anti-entropic forces and everything bad with pro-entropic ones will default to the question of what we see as being bad and good. It is, certainly, slightly suspicious that an anodyne list of good values are all anti-entropic and an equally predictable list of bad ones is pro-entropic. In short, I don’t think that her criterion has any criteria in it; in the end it simply will end up renaming “good” as “anti-entropy” and “bad” as “pro-entropy” and letting us continue the same arguments we were having anyway.

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5. Why Goldstein’s Mattering Matters

I could go on listing gaps and problems in the book’s argument for a long while—it is a rich and ambitious project, and rich and ambitious projects tend to leave a lot of untended side issues in their wake. But I will limit myself to one more broad category, which will allow me, in due course, to get around to the book’s true usefulness. That final issue (or set of issues) is this: while I find Goldstein’s book a useful lens, I wonder how much it is squeezing the world to fit within its categories rather than seeing what already lies within the world. How much is being discovered, and how much simply superimposed upon?

For instance: most people who talk about similar issues to the ones Goldstein is addressing would talk about meaning rather than mattering. Why does Goldstein use the former not the latter?18 One answer is that she doesn’t, entirely: once or twice she uses phrases like “meaning-seeking” as more-or-less synonyms for the mattering instinct, or talks about deriving “meaning” when she means “a sense of mattering”. But I think that the other reason is that meaning is larger and more general—life or a project has meaning: we ourselves do or don’t matter. And Goldstein is putting the emphasis on the latter, the personal dimension. This is correct for many cases, but I wonder is it correct for everyone? Perhaps some subset of people (possibly even definable in Goldstein’s terms, e.g. strivers) wish to matter, while the rest are content with the various different things that give their life meaning.

Similarly, Goldstein is usually fairly confident about what category to put various individuals in. But I sometimes wonder about the validity of her judgments. For instance, she puts seekers after fame into the socializers category (since the famous matter for other people), whereas strivers seek to do a thing for its own sake, because it matters. Yet she also says the following:

Aristotle… was not only a heroic striver, but also gave us perhaps the best statement of what it is to be one: “We must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal by straining every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us.”

But that doesn’t sound to me like someone who is pursuing knowledge for its own sake; it sounds like someone who is pursuing it to become immortal i.e. famous after one’s death.19 I am not saying that Aristotle really was a socializer (subcategory fame-seeker) and not a striver; I am saying rather that the categories are not always so clear out in the wild as they may seem in the laboratory. A lot of strivers speak about wanting immortality through their work; this presents a complication of categorization that Goldstein simply doesn’t address. Nor is it the only such. If a person seeks to perfect their following of God’s will as the only thing that matters, are they a transcender or a striver? How would you tell? What would that distinction even mean?

People might even not always be sure about themselves. Those doubts aren’t necessarily dispositive—people can be unclear about their own motivations, and sometimes we understand others better than they understand themselves.—Sometimes.—But it’s a tricky claim, and one that must always be made with due caution and humility. Very often people will understand themselves better than others do: so if they don’t see themselves as having one clear mattering project, who are we to contradict them?

Along those lines, let me ask: what is my mattering project? The truth is I don’t know. I feel like have two. I would certainly call myself a striver; I seek to write well for its own sake, despite my lack of evident success in it (let’s just say I really empathized with Goldstein’s tale of Scott Harvey, whose lack of success in the literary market place caused him to write without an audience until his work was posthumously published), and basically feel like nothing else that I do matters, like this is the only thing I want. But I also get most of my sense of meaning and value and purpose out of my family and friends, and I certainly quite often prioritize them over my work. I simply don’t think it’s clear which I am. Perhaps as I age I am switching? Or am I allowed to have two? I simply don’t know.

In fact, this particular divide may be rather common. Goldstein says that human beings need two things above and beyond survival, connection and a sense that they matter, but she also makes connection one of the four big categories of mattering (socializers). Goldstein is careful not to say that only those who make connection their mattering project have real and important connections (in particular, that people can pursue other goals while parenting: yes, you can have it all!). She in particular wants to deny that people who make their kids their mattering project are better parents, and she does have a point about over-parenting, helicopter parents, being unable to let go, etc. Nevertheless, I think it would make many people queasy to think that while other people live for their kids they have other priorities. Perhaps they (we?) are all in denial. But while Goldstein does address this issue (unlike many), she doesn’t do so in a way that settles my mind.

This leads to the more general question about whether or not people can have multiple mattering projects—people for whom multiple things given their lives meaning. Beyond that specific conflict of strivers, competitives and transcenders who also care deeply about their families (which I would guess is the most common split), there are other ways we can imagine people having multiple mattering projects, too. How common is it? Perhaps our earlier question about the extent of the applicability of the mattering instinct should be rephrased: how many people having mattering projects at all, how many have multiple, and how many have only one? How broad is the group this book describes, really? As I said, Goldstein doesn’t discuss this, and I fear for good reason: it would do significant damage to her viewpoint. Her analysis of the evolutionary/psychological origins of the mattering instinct works well for the idea of having a mattering project, and reasonably well for someone who has one at a time—serial mattering monogamists, we might call them—even if sometimes their mattering projects fail and they then have to reconstitute them. It does not work that well for people who have a number of things in their life that give them meaning, or whose values conflate issues of competition, striving and transcendence, or any of a number of other ways in which people might end up seeming, to themselves or to others, to be halfway between two mattering projects, or simultaneously in two (or more). Clearly there are some people for whom a single mattering project dominates their entire life. But are there people who split their time? Are they happier or less happy, do they flourish more or less, are they more or less successful? Goldstein does talk in chapter seven about changing mattering projects, which she calls “emigration”, which is one way in which people can have two mattering projects—abandoning one and embracing another; but she never talks about lives that might be divided not between youth and maturity but between mornings and evenings. Perhaps she doesn’t think such lives exist; but this seems to me to be, at the least, something to be shown and not assumed.

This connects to a more rhetorical question, namely the aptness of the map metaphor, and what it is doing both for and against her conception of the world. Using a fundamentally geographic metaphor has certain consequences: we are all somewhere, and we are never (physically) in more than one place at once. Is this true for mattering? Would the possibility of mixed, or ambiguous, or multiple sources of mattering be clearer with a different metaphor?

Here is a not-too-charitable reading of Goldstein’s book: it works perfectly for people like her: people who are WEIRD, ambitious, and are strivers committed to their careers. Employing the now-familiar model of concepts (in general) as being structured around core examples, without outlying examples dropping some (different) features but still belonging to the category, whereas those which drop to many cease to fall under the concept at all (an idea originating in Wittgenstein’s notion of concepts as clusters of family resemblances, which has been extended and is I believe in common use within contemporary cognitive science and philosophy), then the center of Goldstein’s concept of the mattering instinct are people like her. People missing some features, but maintaining key ones—in particular, a single-minded devotion to one thing20—still fit comfortably within her model. It can, for instance, readily extend to Lou Xiaoying, a poor Chinese woman (neither WEIRD nor careerist) who devotes herself to raising abandoned children. But I think there may be people for whom it doesn’t fit. Goldstein herself acknowledges those who are not materially secure, and would presumably admit the extremely young and dying as well, but as I have been suggesting I think there are many more than just those edge cases, people who may outwardly resemble Goldstein far more than Lou Xiaoying does but who nevertheless don’t fit easily within her categories: people who are not single-minded enough, or whose sources of meaning don’t clarify the way Goldstein presumes to be universal.

On the other hand, a lack of charity is pro-entropy, not to mention intellectually poor practice. So let me provide an alternative, charitable reading: Goldstein has offered an extremely valuable lens. There are, after all, a lot of people for whom it does fit, and it is entirely possible that many of the objections I have raised could be answered within her framework. Her work illuminates issues—types of disagreements we have, why we do things which make us unhappy, the source of existential crises, and so on—which are not merely important but are quite plausibly increasingly so. I don’t think that she has uncovered the Mystery of Life’s Meaning, the way that (say) Darwin did for life development, shattering paradigms and igniting intellectual revolutions, as is suggested by some of her more breathless blurbers. But I think that it is an important contribution to the question of what matters, what meaning life has, how we think and argue and feel about these issues—a question that for many reasons (including the political and social ones of the present day) is an increasingly pressing one within our society and world.

I do think this is an important book: not as an end, but as a step towards something. I may have sounded like I was joking when I said earlier that Goldstein ought to team up with Brink Lindsey, but I actually meant it: I think that his political and social worries would be illuminated by her vocabulary and categories, and vice-versa. I think she should reach out to Agnes Collard and talk about the Status Game, too. I think they are two thinkers who would benefit from Goldstein’s lens—and she from theirs. But I think it is less a revolution than another tool for probing a deep and important set of questions: what is the meaning of life? how should we live? These are, as I stated at the beginning of this review, core questions to philosophy—although not ones always prioritized by recent philosophy. Goldstein’s book is returning our attention to old problems and offering new ways to think about them: and that is enough for it to matter.

Perhaps what I have done in the last two sections of this review could be understood as outlining a sequel to The Mattering Instinct: which should be, for Goldstein, good news, since she has said (although not in these words) that mattering projects are never finished, only abandoned. Presumably with the publication of this book Goldstein has finished one step in hers; perhaps she needs another. I think she has plenty of work left on the table to take up next—or for other writers to take up in their turn.

So give the book a read. I don’t think it will upend your universe; but it may help you see somethings you’d otherwise miss.

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Yes, I took philosophy classes with Stanley Cavell. Why do you ask?

Arthur Conan Doyle published the original twenty-six Holmes tales between 1887 and 18931 (two novels, A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of the Four (1890), and then twenty-four short stories compiled in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892) and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894)). But by the end of that run, Doyle was getting thoroughly sick of Holmes. First of all, he was tired of coming up with plots for the stories: he said “the difficulty of the Holmes work was that every story really needed as clear-cut and original a plot as a longish book would do…. I was weary, however, of inventing plots.”2 Further, Doyle had high literary ambitions, and was writing other books that he thought loftier than the Holmes stories: in the midst of his initial Holmes run he published a novel called The White Company (1891) which he said was “the most complete, satisfying, and ambitious thing that I have ever done… I knew in my heart that the book would live and that it would illuminate our national traditions.”3 He lamented that “if I had never touched Holmes, who has tended to obscure my higher work, my position in literature would at the present moment be a more commanding one“. So Doyle decided to kill off Holmes: on a visit to the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland he decided they would make “a worthy tomb for poor Sherlock”. He wrote a story (the last of the ones in Memoirs) called “The Final Problem” (1893) and pitched Holmes off the side of the falls, where he plunged to his certain death.

The public objected, vociferously. After letting Holmes lie utterly fallow for eight years (1893-1901),4 Doyle tried to buy off the public with a Holmes novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)—a story presumably describing an adventure which occurred before Holmes’s death at Reichenbach Falls, although that is not explicitly clarified in the text. This did not satisfy the public, however, so eventually Doyle had to do more than return to writing Holmes stories; he had to actually resurrect him. So (presumably with some regret), Doyle published “The Adventure of the Empty House” in 1903, in which Holmes startles Watson into a literal faint by showing up alive and well. Holmes revives Watson and then explains how he managed to survive: he beat Moriarty in the fight (ending with the villain alone falling), and then once Moriarty was dead Holmes (thinking that he had other enemies, and that if they thought him dead they would be easier to catch), decided to deliberately make it look like he had died.

This was a retcon in the narrow sense.5 The text of “The Final Problem” (presented, like nearly all the Holmes stories, as a text written by his friend Dr. Watson) remained unchanged. Doyle did not simply ignore the story (which would have been a type 2 retcon), nor did he go back and rewrite the ending (which would have been type 3). Rather, he recontextualized it. In “The Final Problem” Watson concludes that Holmes fell off the side of the falls to his death on good evidence: there is a good-bye note from Holmes, he sees two sets of footprints walking out the path and none returning. None of that is altered in the second story; we simply learn that Watson was wrong—understandably so given that he was deliberately misled. Doyle changed the meaning of the earlier story in the new one: the classic retcon.

And, to the delight of the reading public, Holmes was back! And he would appear in another 33 stories over the next twenty-four years (32 short stories, collected in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905), His Last Bow (1917) and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927), plus one final novel, The Valley of Fear (1915)).

It was the first comic book death, not only avant la lettre, but avant the entire notion of comic books at all. But unlike today’s use of the term, I do not mean to say that Holmes’s original death was dismissed as temporary nor that his return was predictable. Today, of course, a main character falling into a cavernous pit with no body found would practically scream “HE’S GOING TO COME BACK!!”—but this was long before those conventions were established. Was there an earlier popular character who had been clearly called dead and then had that death taken back? I can’t think of one.6 I think that Doyle—however reluctantly—got there first.

For that same reason, I think that Doyle’s solution was somewhat more artistic than it looks nowadays. In contemporary culture bringing back a main character (especially when there is no body and the death is not witnessed) is old hat, but Doyle should get credit for being the first one to invent and use the trick. True, it’s a trick that has long outstayed its welcome; but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t fairly clever the first time it was done.

It is worth pausing for a moment to think about the precise demands of the audience (conceived of as a sum or average of all those who made it up) before which Doyle gave way. The audience didn’t just want more Holmes stories; this was proved by their being unsatisfied with The Hound of the Baskervilles (which was not only another Holmes story but was actually one of the best of them). If all they had wanted were more stories, then they could have clamored for more: this would not have required a resurrection since, as Doyle himself wrote in the interregnum, “there is no limit to the number of papers [Holmes] left behind or the reminiscences in the brain of his biographer”.7 Doyle could, in fact, have written the remaining 32 of the stories in the back half of the Holmes canon without returning him to life in “The Adventure of the Empty House”; only minor adjustments would have been necessary to set the stories prior to Holmes’s death. But this is not what the audience wanted! They wanted the death undone. They wanted this character they loved to be still alive inside their minds.

It was a very modern moment—one which would pave the way for serial storytelling thereafter. Prior to this, the deaths of famous characters (Hercules, Robin Hood, King Arthur, etc.) were often part of the story-cycles: if you wanted to tell a different story you just set it before the death. Nowadays, however, the characters in comics and movies and the like—Batman, Spider-man, James Bond, and so forth—either never die in the first place, or don’t stay dead for long. Just as with Holmes, this was not a matter of wanting more stories: if there was some classic ending for those recurring heroes, they could simply be set in a vague future time, after all later stories that could readily continue.8 But modern audiences are not willing to live with death if they can avoid it: and while it cannot be avoided in real life, it can be in fictional characters. Part of this, to be sure, is a matter of intellectual property: presumably you sell more lunch boxes and branded underwear if Batman is “really” alive; but since the stories are there either way, and could continue either way, this seems unpersuasive as a reason. I think, rather, it says something about our attitudes towards death: we like to pretend, at least in fiction, that it never happens.

And, yes, in the end, Holmes never died again—which is to say, he was never again portrayed as having died. He retired and became a beekeeper; as far as the canon goes, he is still there, tending his bees. The audience demanded immortality, and they got it. If we can see in the Holmes retcon an early example of retconing’s artistry, we can also see the beginning of one thing which has helped to give them (for many people) a bad name: the fact that narrative stakes are eviscerated when any story beat can be undone. This is, of course, due to audience desires—they wanted Holmes alive again!—but that doesn’t mean that the audience was satisfied by getting what they thought they wanted. Whether you think of it as an example of a collective action problem or simply a case of people being poor judges of their own desires, the Holmes retcon contains the nucleus of much of what is bad about contemporary culture too.9

We shouldn’t leave the topic of Holmes before talking about two other important retcons in the Holmesian canon.

First, a decade before the death was undone, there was actually a (more subtle) retcon which occurred in the text of “The Final Problem”, the very story which killed Holmes off: namely, the introduction of James Moriarty. Holmes mentions Moriarty to Watson for the first time—as his intellectual equal, and as the force behind most of the crime in London:

He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organized…. You know my powers, my dear Watson, and yet at the end of three months I was forced to confess that I had at last met an antagonist who was my intellectual equal. My horror at his crimes was lost in my admiration at his skill.

This is simply to give Holmes a big enough villain to die defeating. He isn’t much used thereafter—he is only mentioned in a handful of other stories. But the degree of his influence can be seen in all of the various retelling, adaptations, and modern sequels, which inevitably make Moriarty a far more important character than he ever was in Doyle’s stories.

Second, a retcon not done by Doyle at all, but done by a later writer: making Holmes a cocaine addict. This is a retcon not of type 1a, but 1b, for Holmes’s cocaine use is mentioned in Doyle’s stories, most prominently in the second Holmes novel, The Sign of Four, where he shows Holmes about to inject cocaine to keep from being bored:

“My mind,” he said, “rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.

This is interrupted by the case that forms the novel, which provides enough mental stimulation for him to not need the cocaine; at the end, with the case over, Holmes reaches for the cocaine bottle. Which is to say: Doyle was not operating with a modern notion of “addiction”; the idea that once he starts, Holmes might be unable to stop is not one that occurred to him. (We can imagine someone treating gambling and excitement that way, if not now then certainly recently, without any sense of the addictive nature of it.)

It was not until seventy years later that a novelist, Nicholas Mayer,10 reinterpreted Holmes’s cocaine use with the contemporary understanding of drug addiction, and wrote The Seven Percent Solution (1974) about Holmes’s addiction and recovery—retconning, in fact, not only Holmes’s cocaine use, but also (in a type 2 retcon) the entire affair of “The Final Problem” and “The Adventure of the Empty House”, which were explained as fictional cover stories (in a work where the other Holmes stories “really happened”) designed as a cover story for Holmes’s going to rehab.

Although the dismissal of “The Final Problem” and “The Adventure of the Empty House” were, as I said, a type 2 retcon, the general notion of Holmes as a (recovering) addict is a superb example of a type 1b retcon. It’s not a new idea added in the interstices of the earlier stories: the cocaine use is right there in some of the earlier stories (the “canon” of Doyle’s texts, one of the first non-religious contexts in which the word was used), but it wasn’t understood properly, or at any rate as we would now understand it. While Mayer does mess around with two other stories, as I said, the core of the retcon doesn’t require this: it requires, rather, simply seeing the facts in the earlier stories in a new light. This, I think, lets us better articulate the difference between type 1a and type 1b retcons: in type 1a, old events are seen through the light of new events; in type 1b, they are reinterpreted as they stand, or in the light of later developments outside of the story (in this case, the changed social and medical understanding of cocaine use).

In the next installment of The Official Retcon™ History of Retcons, I look at the first great retcon in an artistic sense—the first retcon which was done with sufficient artistry to be genuinely admired for its own sake and not just for the result. That essay has now posted and can be read here. And all of the entries of this series are here (in reverse chronological order).

Read Part Three

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And if I’ve gotten you interested in the general idea of the retcon, perhaps you’d like to give Retcon a try? It’s an ongoing serial that (among many other things) plays with some of the notions we will see in this series.

Learn More at the Retcon Home Page

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    1. Ones that are done through reinterpreting previous stories done through...
            A. ...adding new context which changes the meaning of previous stories;
            B. ...recontextualiztaion or reinterpretation of previous stories;
            C. ...brute-force misrepresenting of the content of previous stories;
     2. Ones that are done through simply ignoring previous stories;
     3. Ones that are done through actually altering previous stories by putting out new
            editions with the old text, images, etc, altered.

Freddie de Boer recently got fed up with AI boosterism and decided to issue a challenge. He picked a good way to do it: he offered a public bet. This was a good way to do it both because it is a very respected form within the communities that AI boosters come from—an intellectual legacy, I think, from the famous bet that Julian Simon made with Paul Ehrlich in 1980, and one which has spread and been institutionalized in prediction markets—but also because it is a good form: making specific predictions allows people to really test their understanding of the world in ways they can’t then wriggle out of.2 So de Boer picked a high-profile AI booster—the great essayist Scott Alexander—and offered a $5000 bet as to whether the U.S. economy would be unrecognizable in three years, coming up with a list of specific criteria that would decide the issue: de Boer claimed it wouldn’t change that much and presumed that Alexander (based on his participation in AI 2027) would.3 Importantly, de Boer’s main irritation seemed to be (based on the proportion of space given to it in his article, not to mention earlier ones) the hype and rhetoric from those who think AI is going to change everything.

But in the course of offering the bet—or, rather, in the course of defending the bet later, on substack notes, after Alexander’s (and other people’s) responses—de Boer ended up making the precise same error that AI boosters make (and that Alexander, notably, did not make). Which is somehow all the more annoying: someone doing irritating thing X is less grating than someone doing X while complaining about other people doing it.

I asked de Boer about this on substack notes, and didn’t get what felt to me like an on-point answer, so I wanted to type this up and toss it out into the conversation in a more detailed way.

First things first: I liked de Boer’s essay a lot, especially the ending (precisely the part that he said people would find irritating, ironically). I run hot and cold on de Boer’s work, but when he’s on he’s on, and he was on in this piece. No less than two sizable quotes ended up in my commonplace book, and I want to start by sharing them since if I’m going to criticize de Boer I think I ought to first give him credit where due. I thought this description of our current predicament was (if familiar in its content) very well expressed:

I don’t think this is a particularly materially hard time in which to live… But I do think this is a very emotionally difficult time. Human beings need other human beings, and we’ve created immense digital barriers between each other in a way that has left millions feeling lonely and unheard; human beings need depth and meaning and purpose, and we’ve created a digital world that can provide only momentary distraction and novelty but which is nonetheless killing the parts of art and culture and community that provide slow, durable, meaningful rewards. No more potluck dinners but endless hours on TikTok, no more romance but endless amounts of extreme online pornography, no more deep, hard-won knowledge but plenty of podcasts that will enable you to pretend that you’ve gained that knowledge, no more challenging and electrifying novels but as many shitty webcomics as you can consume, no more human beings, only the black mirror staring back at you. That’s where we are: we have sacrificed everything deep and penetrating and good about human life, for the right to absolute convenience and total distraction. It’s a horrible bargain and everybody is sad all the time.4

And secondly this paen to the nature of human existence was extremely good too:

You can’t escape what you don’t like about your life because you can’t escape yourself. And no magical computer is coming to saves you from that condition. The goal in life is thus to forgive yourself for being yourself and to try and scratch out an existence where the contentment in your life just barely outweighs the disappointment and boredom that are something like the default state of adult life. People take that as an extremely bleak, doomer kind of view, but honestly I think it’s just life. We are an accident of evolution and life itself is an accident of history and none of us were every promised anything. We were put here on Earth for no reason and against our will and we are born in absolute terror and only the luckiest among us die in any state other than terror. I do think that we can reach fuller and richer and more peaceful lives, but it won’t come from AI. Instead it will come from a return to the human, from tearing down the digital walls we’ve built between us. The only thing that can save humanity is humans.

Words to live by: if de Boer did nothing else with that essay, it was worth it for that passage.5 (It’s somewhat related to what I was going on about here.)

But those were the poetic part at the end. The main part of the essay was de Boer’s irritation at the sweeping claims that AI boosters make to the effect that the world, including the economy, will be utterly transformed: “we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye”. So he offered a bet, as I said.

But in doing so he conflated two issues: first, whether AI will be as transformative as its boosters say, and second, how quickly AI will be as transformative as boosters say.

This is important for any number of reasons: obviously the answer to the latter question depends on a positive answer to the former—it can’t occur on any timetable if it doesn’t occur! But it’s central to the debate because if the entire world is going to be transformed, not in three years, but in ten, or thirty, that is also really significant and justifies the level of hype that de Boer is chiefly interested in complaining about. It doesn’t, mind you, justify the inaccuracies: if the transformation is ten years off, not three, people should say so, and if it is somewhere between three and thirty, they should say that. Hype is bad; I’m against hype. But if all human life is about to be transformed in thirty years that seems really important—and means that while AI boosters are indulging in a little hype, they are not indulging in much, because their level of alarm is warranted. And, of course, things that will transform the world in a few decades’ time are very worth worrying about. (Many people were complaining about climate change when they thought the effects were still thirty, or even far more, years away; if only we had listened!)

And, to be fair, it seems particularly important to me because I think that’s where the truth is most likely to lie. Three years is a very short time frame to transform the world—not impossible, God knows (an asteroid or supervolcano could do it in moments), but highly unlikely. But thirty years—or even ten—seems more plausible. Now I am not predicting it will happen, because I have no fucking idea what will happen: a lot of smart people are saying “this is huge watch out” and a lot of very smart people are saying “this is overblown watch out”, and I have no way to tell who’s right. This is a topic about which I want to make no predictions (indeed, it is my uncertainty that makes me irritated at those who equivocate, like (in my view) both de Boer and the more careless AI boosters). And as Eliot remarked, “among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.”6

So I don’t know if it will happen soon, later, or never. I really have no idea. But I would feel a lot more nervous betting on longer time frames, and the longer the time frame, the more nervous I would be. Since with a long time frame, you’re not betting on the time frame—just the event.

So which is de Boer saying? Is he saying this world transformation won’t happen in three years’ time? Or is he saying it won’t happen at all?

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Reasonably enough, this was actually Alexander’s question, too. His response to de Boer’s bet was precisely to try to adjust the time frame:

[M]y median for AGI is more like early 2030s, and it might take a few years to have effects this profound on the economy. If you want to make the same bet for 2036, I’m game… If you prefer it be about 2029 so we can resolve earlier, let me know and we can talk about what intermediate endpoints we disagree about for 2029.

This was, I thought, an incredibly reasonable response: I think it will take longer! I thought that de Boer might well just accept the 2036 bet. Game on!

—But de Boer didn’t do that. He complained that Alexander was in the group called AI 2027, which predicted a transformation by next year, and also that people tended to talk as if it would happen soon—and said that this called into question everything they said.7 But this is precisely to make the issue not will it happen but when—which is, I think, the far more interesting and consequential question. If de Boer believes what he says about AI—that it won’t ever transform the world the way its boosters say—he should take the 2036 bet. And when I pressed him on this point, his response was to say (inter alia) that “LLMs are… very unlikely to fundamentally change the lived experience of being human or indeed the human economy.”

So why not take the 2036 bet?

Because de Boer is equivocating just as the AI boosters are equivocating.

The AI boosters are saying THIS TRANSFORMATION IS GOING TO HAPPEN SOON!!—and then when it fails to occur (as it has along some past timelines that some people have laid out—although not, so far as I know, Alexander specifically), they retreat to, well, it’s going to happen sometime. **Regarding this paragraph, please see update below.

Whereas de Boer is saying THIS TRANSFORMATION IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN SOON!!—and then when people say Ok, maybe not soon, but it is going to happen, de Boer doesn’t take up the new response but simply says See how they aren’t trustworthy?

Both are eliding an issue—the AI boosters the issue of soon versus later, and de Boer the issue of later versus never. But the issue of whether is far, far more important than precisely when. It is a perfectly plausible situation that AI boosters might be right about the level of transformation but wrong about the timetable. But what de Boer wants to complain about is the level of hype. That level of hype is, of course, not justified if the transformation never happens. But if it happens in ten years rather than three, that level of hype is… basically still reasonable! Again, as I said above, I do think accuracy is important, and I’d like to see the boosters add some error bars to their specific predictions.8 But de Boer ought to say whether he means “not then” or “never”.

Put it this way: Alexander was responsible for popularizing the very useful (if arguably now overused) Motte-and-Bailey fallacy. I think de Boer is engaged in a form of the Motte-and-Bailey. His Motte (defensible but less interesting position) is that this transformation won’t happen by 2027; his Bailey is that it won’t happen at all. Now he might reply that AI Boosters too are doing a Motte-and-Bailey, with the motte being that the transformation will happen by 2027 with the bailey being it won’t happen for ten or thirty or some indeterminate number of years.

The problem is, the difference between 3 and 10 is 7; the difference between 10 and never is infinite. As I have said a few times, the AI Boosters are wrong to say it will happen soon if it won’t happen for a few years yet—but their level of hype and concern and excitement are almost entirely warranted if it were to happen in ten years: we’re still talking about a transformation of all human life! That’s a big fucking deal even if it is ten years down the road! Whereas if de Boer is right that it won’t happen in three years, that’s only a bid deal if he’s saying it will never happen (or, generously, if he’s saying it won’t happen for a century or something like that), not if he’s saying well it will take ten.

De Boer is complaining about the level of hype of the 3-year prediction… with hype that only fits if he’s making a never prediction, not if he’s making a well-actually-10-year prediction.

So I think de Boer needs to either take the 2036 bet… or walk back the majority of his rhetoric and complaints.

Update:

Alexander objected to the paragraph flagged above on two grounds: first, because he didn’t think any specific dire warnings had been falsified (he challenged me to name someone specifically), and, second, because he thought that even if one was, that didn’t mean that this was equivocating or wrong. He said specifically (private DM):

Imagine a doctor sees that your arteries are extremely clogged and says "I think you will have a heart attack within five years". But you don't. You go back to the doctor. What does he say? I think the correct answer is "You're still at very high risk of a heart attack any moment now", not "I guess I was wrong and clogged arteries never cause heart attacks".

And then pointed me to this post of his for a longer explanation. And he suggested I delete that paragraph. (I am not deleting it, but adding this note, which will explain why.)

Taking the points in reverse order: as to the latter, I agree—and I think that that was a pithier and possibly clearer version of what I was saying, which was some thing like: just that it didn’t happen in a specific time frame didn’t mean it wasn’t anything to worry about. So I agree with that point, and I think that in fact he and I were saying the same thing in that regards.

But I disagree (slightly) with his first point. He’s probably right that no specific predictions, particularly specific predictions of doom, have been falsified (certainly he knows a lot more about this than I do). But I am not removing the paragraph for a few reasons: first, the structure of the piece was meant to be (roughly) something along the lines of “even if you think the one side is equivocating, De Boer is equivocating in the same way, in fact worse”. It’s true that I said the “even if” as if it had happened, but it wasn’t important to the argument. I wasn’t even (I don’t think) committing to it as a claim; it was (as I thought of it) in the voice, as it were, of anti-Doomers like de Boer. (I would call it free indirect discourse, if it didn’t sound too grand.)

So why aren’t I deleting the paragraph? Well, partly because I think the parallel works (albeit on an “even if” basis). But largely for this reason: AI doomers have very much given the impression of having cried wolf many times. To take one example: Alexander was part of a project called AI 2027, which later updated its forecasts, pushing back its median doomsday by a few years—importantly, for my purposes, from within the limits of De Boer’s bet to outside of them. Now, I think it’s possible that a close examination of their forecasts would say that my paragraph above is misleading (honestly, it’s not my area and I don’t want to get into it). But if so, I would suggest that their headline—like, literally the title of their report—is misleading. And I think that it is misleading in a way that matters, because I think it pushes people like de Boer to think that they are crying wolf. So I think it is, if not equivocating, then at least making it look like they’re equivocating.

Again: I am more on Alexander’s side here than de Boer’s. (My own headline shows equivocating more than I think.) Because my key point was and remains that whether it happens at all is important, not whether it’s by 2027 or by 2037. And I was primarily frustrated with de Boer for not being willing to say clearly whether he thought it was never going to happen or was simply going to happen later—his rhetoric implied the former but his refusal to alter the bet (at least so far, maybe that changed) speaks the latter; but in that case his rhetoric is misleading. He should either accept the later bet (adjusted, as Alexander suggested) or take back a lot of what he said.

But I do also think that some of the rhetoric of AI doomers—again, the title of “AI 2027” is a chief example here—has been actually undermining their case. I grant that “AI Sometime Between 2027 - 2050” isn’t as catchy. But the catchier rhetoric lets people dismiss them who, if they slowed down and thought, might not. The latter point is what I was principally trying to encourage; but I think the former is true too. So I will leave my paragraph as is.

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Pannenberg contends: “Only in this way, as the backward-reaching incorporation of the contingently new into what has been… can the primary connection of history be conceived without losing its contingency.” Hence, the continuity of events is actually visible only in retrospect. Pannenberg’s conception of retroactive continuity ultimately means that history flows fundamentally from the future into the past, that the future is not a product of the past: “The essential nature of the future lies in the unpredictable new thing that is hidden in the womb of the future.”

— E. Frank Tupper, The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg (Westminster Press, 1973), pp. 99-100; emphasis added

“Retcon” is one of those fan terms that has spread beyond that particular family of polymorphous subcultures that and spread far into the larger surrounding cultural space.—At least I think it has: that was at any rate the belief underpinning my decision to name my ongoing 27-story series (eventually to be a three-volume series, once I finish the whole thing and assemble all the parts). I was presuming that the word “retcon” would simply be understood, and as far as I can tell it has been; at least I have not yet received any feedback from readers saying that they don’t know what it means (although it might simply scare them off before they get so far as to ask, of course). But it is a fairly. new word, so in case anyone wants a definition, here is how the OED defines the term: “In a fictional work or series: a piece of new (and typically revelatory) information which imposes a different interpretation on previously described events, often employed to facilitate a dramatic plot shift or account for an inconsistency.”

But as the author of an (ongoing) work named “Retcon”,1 I thought it might be informative to write about the history of retcons. Knowing what the term means is one thing; but knowing how it actually works, with a richer sense of where they come from and which ones have been important, is another. So I herewith offer The Official Retcon™ History of Retcons, a series of posts of which today’s is the first, largely introductory, installment. In today’s essay I will talk about the history of the term, and make some theoretical remarks about how retcons work; future episodes will discuss specific examples.

The History of the Term “Retcon”

“Retcon”, as you almost certainly know, is a shorted version of the phrase “retroactive continuity”. The full phrase was (according to Webster’s) first used in a theological context in 1973 (see the epigraph to this essay),2 but it’s not clear how that influenced the later narrative use, if indeed it did.

“Retroactive continuity” in a narrative context arises out of the culture of comics fandom. Its first documented (that is to say printed) use in a comics context seems to be its occurrence in the letters column of All Star Squadron #18 (cover-dated February, 1983). In the letter column,3 Roy Thomas (then in the early middle of a 67-issue run of writing All Star Squadron) wrote:

As for what Roy himself (myself) is trying to do, we like to think an enthusiastic ALL-STAR booster at one of Adam Malin’s Creation Conventions in San Diego came up with the best name for it, a few months back: “Retroactive Continuity”. Has kind of a ring, don’t you think?

Since we don’t know who that anonymous All-Star Squadron fan was, we certainly can’t rule out the idea that they might have heard the term in its theological context, but of course it might well have been an independent recreation. Regardless, “retroactive continuity” (in this sense) pointed to a prominent feature of comics storytelling which it was convenient to have a term for, so the phrase stuck around, and was at some point in the next few years shortened to “retcon”. The shorter term came into regular use on Usenet newsgroups in the 1980s, with “noun and verb forms appear[ing] almost simultaneously” (Webster’s, op. cit.)

By now, the concept and term “retcon” has both spread into the mainstream and diversified. It is in Merriam Webster’s and the Oxford English Dictionary (as both a noun and a verb). TV Tropes’s (warning) main article on retcons links not only to over a dozen separate pages of examples, but also to over a dozen pages describing specific sub-types and varieties such as “Cererbus retcon”, “Orwellian retcon” and “remember the new guy?”—and that doesn’t even include them all of the TV tropes retcon pages since (as of this writing) a number of other subcategories including “deliberate flaw retcon”, “parody retcon” and “evolutionary retcon” aren’t even linked from the main page. In other words, the term has spawned many other terms, has entered mainstream sources, and the underlying phenomenon includes an overwhelming array of examples and instances. You can see why I thought I could just use it to name a short story series without further explanation.

Was it happenstance that “retcon” originated in comics fandom? I would suggest that it is not. Recons are (or are most usefully thought of as) narrative devices which only occur in a serialized work in which the past “counts”—that is, either a story intended from the get-go to be an ongoing serial, or a story which becomes a multi-part work through the addition of sequels (or prequels, sidequels, etc) to a work originally intended as a single story. Both parts of this—that it be a serialized work, and that the past counts—are key here. One-shot narrative works will, of course, often recontextualize previously portrayed events or notions as the work goes on, but those doesn’t count as retcons, which (I would say definitionally) involves changing the author’s mind about what has previously occurred—either a single author changing their mind about their own earlier, in-print work, or a later author changing the work of an earlier one.4 And if a serialized work does not have any particular connection between one installment and the next—if the past does not count—then there is of course no need to retcon anything; any inconvenient past can just be ignored. Retcons are an evolved strategy to a particular problem, namely, how to deal with past narrative history to which an author is accountable but which also can’t (simply and easily) be changed: one appearing an earlier, already-released installment of a serial work.

And comics were the most culturally important example of serialized storytelling at the moment in history (1970s-1980s) that the term “retcon” originated. Sure, serialized novels had been a regular thing in the 19th century,5 and they are arguably making a return today, but at that time they had largely vanished.6 There were occasional sequels to individual novels, but they weren’t all that common (and they certainly were far less common than they are now). Television, which seems like it might have been a natural home for serialized narrative, was at the time still mostly producing shows which reset the status quo at the end of every episode—shows without a memory, to use a phrase of Herbert Newcomb’s.7 Movies, like novels, would occasionally spawn sequels, but not nearly as often as would be true even a decade or two later. In short, serialization was rare in much of the narrative culture at the time.

Comics, however, were not only serialized, they were deliberately so—that is, most comics aimed to run forever. Comics (with the exception of some lower-circulation alternative comics) were not published as a single issue which would only spawn a sequel if they were popular; they were begun as serials, numbered from the very first issue.8 This was not due to the essence of the medium, as the later rise of graphic novels would show; it was the historical origins and culture which surrounded them, and which had evolved into this particular publishing format, in which comics were like magazines rather than like books (despite being called ‘comic books’). Further, at least since the innovations of Kirby, Ditko and Lee in the early 1960s, comics stories deliberately referenced past events. That is, unlike then-prominent TV shows where the status quo was reset at the end of most episodes, comics would often refer to past events which the readers might remember. (“Scorpion? I haven’t fought him since that time….”), and would build on past events to make future stories work. They were, in short, ongoing stories with a memory. This is not to deny that most of them had a heavy status quo bias; but it was a status quo, not a memory wipe.

And serialized narratives of this sort—the sort whose audience is expected to remember past events (or at least it is expected that some portion of them will)—often gets into a problem where an earlier choice blocks a later story. These earlier choices could be major (a character is dead, and the new story would work well with them in it), or they could be extremely minor—often a hasty choice, a fact in a throw-away line done without much thought will block some richer narrative path. These unfortunate earlier choices might have been made by a writer earlier in their own career, or by another writer who wrote a particular character and universe prior the current scripter. Either way, it produced a past which needed to be explained away or changed, if the new story that the present writer wished tell tell were to proceed.

Enter the retcon.

Then, of course, culture got more serialized generally: movies began to beget sequels (until now we see frequent complaints that most prominent movies are nothing but installments in ongoing franchises9), and then, slowly and occasionally in the 80s and 90s and picking up speed around the turn of the century TV shows began to regularly tell serialized stories too (until now we see frequent complaints that some shows aren’t episodic at all but are simply long films cut into many pieces). Book sequels became more prominent, at least in genre literature. And as a serialization that had once been confined to comics and soap operas spread into a broader narrative culture, so did the term ‘retcon’, until now it is ubiquitous—and, fittingly, is often retroactively treated (in thinking about some past narratives) as if it had always been a concept in lots of areas, as we will see in future installments, since a number of important milestones in the history of retcons predate the concept and term “retcon”: which can be seen as an irony or an instance of nominative determinism, but which is in fact a very common feature of words, which often follow behind concepts rather than herald them.

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All Retcons Can Be Divided Into Three Parts

Before moving on to the actual history of retcons, a few more theoretical points are in order. In particular, I think it is clarifying to divide retcons into three types. As with most such divisions, these types are not pure: although I think many retcons can be uncomplicatedly put into one of these categories, there is no question that some retcons encountered in the wild will be hybrids. This doesn’t, to my mind, diminish the categories’ usefulness: while most actual, real-life water includes something besides hydrogen and oxygen (salt, fluoride, chlorine, a tiny bit of residue stirred up from the bottom of the lake, an almost undetectable bit of soap from when we last washed the glass, or some variety of fish), it’s still helpful to know the basic chemical structure.

The three main types of retcons are:

1. Ones that are done through reinterpreting previous stories;

2. Ones that are done through simply ignoring previous stories;

3. Ones that are done through actually altering previous stories by putting out new editions with the previous text, images, etc, altered.

The first type may be usefully subdivided into several categories:

    A. Ones that are done through adding new context which changes the meaning of
         previous stories;
    B. Ones that are done through recontextualiztaion or reinterpretation
         of previous stories without adding new events or facts;
    C. Ones that are done through brute-force misrepresenting of the content of
         previous stories.

I think that the core meaning of “retcon” is 1a: new stories which recontextualize old ones. It would be reasonable, I think, to say that this is in fact the only one of these types to deserve the term: let us call them retcons in the narrow sense.

But the word is not used only in the narrow sense. In particular alterations of type 3 are very commonly referred to as retcons—in some usage, in fact, those are seen as the core of retcons, as what retcons actually are. I myself think of these as rather the opposite of true retcons: rather than figuring out a way to make the old story true, the author instead simply changes the old text. And I would argue that both types 2 and 1c are similarly anti-retcons. But they are all called retcons, so we can’t entirely ignore them. I will call the use of the term “retcon” which encompasses all of the above types retcons in the broader sense.

The reader might notice that I have not yet addressed retcons of type 1b. They are, in some ways, the hardest to get a handle on—I think the idea may only become clearer in future installments as we examine various examples. But to expound a little bit: the feature which distinguishes type 1a and type 1b retcons are that in type 1a retcons old events are reinterpreted when seen through the light of new events, the portrayal of which is the retcon, whereas in type 1b, old events are reinterpreted without the fictional addition of new events—either being simply reinterpreted without any particular new context, or (more often) reinterpreted in the light not of newly-presented fictional context but rather in the light of new context from outside the narrative, such as social and cultural changes which make the new narrative sound different to modern ears.

While I am mostly saving examples for later installments, I think one example is warranted to help clarify type 1bs. In the 1980s,10 the Marvel superhero Starfox was portrayed as having (among others) the superpower able to affect the pleasure center of people’s brains, which he would use to (e.g.) convince villains to stop fighting. He was also shown to be rather a ladies’ man (his real name is, in fact, Eros, and he had some sort of relation to the mythical figure of cupid). As portrayed in the 1980s comics, this was all innocuous. But two decades later, in the first decade of this century, sensitivities to issues of consent had been raised considerably, and the notion of someone who both had a form of mental control and a noted history as a cad seemed deeply disturbing, and in a story line in 2006 Starfox was put on trial for rape. This didn’t involve showing us a new scene from the past which made the old ones read differently; what made the old ones read differently was what readers brought to the text, so the new stories addressed it.11

Are retcons of type 1b within the scope of retcons narrowly understood, or only in the broader sense? I would say that type 1b retcons (or most of them) do in fact qualify as retcons in the narrow sense. But I still think that retcons of type 1a are best understood as the paradigmatic examples because, first, they are far more common, and second, they contain features which may not be definitionally central to the term but which tend to be coupled with it in imagination. When we think about birds, we think of swallows and ravens and seagulls, not chickens and penguins and ostriches, even though the latter are as much birds as the former. The former are more paradigmatic, even though all are birds. That is the relation of type 1a to type 1b retcons.

Are Retcons Necessarily Bad? Can They Even Be Art?

The other theoretical question we ought to address is whether retcons are necessarily a bad thing. I definitely think the term is sometimes treated as a pejorative. (This overlaps with, but is not isomorphic to, the usage of the term centered around type 3 rather than the usage centered around type 1a.) But I don’t think that “retcon” ought to be treated as a bad thing on its face; people tend to think of them way as a consequence of running into examples of poorly done ones. But any artistic technique can be (and will be) done badly more often than it is done well; and artistic tropes are not in and of themselves bad things. So I don’t think that saying something is a ‘retcon’ is in any way an insult.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that retcons are themselves an artistic form—or perhaps I ought to say artistic technique; “form” is too broad, as they always occur within other forms. But they are a technique which has a particular sort of artistic merit, a specific thing that they do when done well, and provides a characteristic sense of artistic satisfaction.

What is the characteristic art of the retcon? A retcon is an artistic technique employing reinterpretation as artistic act.12 When well done they can be clever, moving, even beautiful (just as they can be stupid, irritating and ugly when done poorly). They involve the sort of high-wire elegance that one finds in arts like jazz, where improvisation is done at the speed of thought, or in physical arts such as dance or gymnastics, where the exigences of the moment must be adapted to. The elegance of that sort of improvisation is real: and it is at the heart of what makes retcons artful when they are done well.

This high-wire nature of the retcon is also what distinguishes them from other examples of artistic reinterpretation.13 For there are plenty of elegant narrative reinterpretations which give something of the same variety of pleasure as does a well-done retcon which are not retcons. In particular, narratives which contain plot twists or revisions can force a reader to examine earlier events in a new light in a way that can be deeply satisfying; this is a common thing to do in narratives from Jane Austen to Gene Wolfe. But these are done in the course of setting up a single story: they are as different from retcons as improvised music is from composed music. The entire point of the word “retcon”, its chief use, is to distinguish rethinkings (either done by the author or prompted in the reader) which are done out of the necessity of building upon a given past from those which can worked into a narrative in its original conception. Which is to say (ending where I began) that recons are most usefully thought of as narrative devices which occur only serialized works in which the past counts. When well done, they are examples of the artistic power and pleasure to be found in the elegant reinterpretation; but not all examples of artistic reinterpretation are retcons. They are a distinct subset.

With all that established, the next installment of The Official Retcon™ History of Retcons we’ll look at what is (to the best of my knowledge) the earliest significant example of a type 1a retcon. That essay has now posted and can be read here. And all of the entries of this series are here (in reverse chronological order).

Read Part Two

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And if I’ve gotten you interested in the general idea of the retcon, perhaps you’d like to give Retcon a try? It’s an ongoing serial that (among many other things) plays with some of the notions we will see in this series.

Learn More at the Retcon Home Page

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How can we imagine the United States becoming a decent country again? What would it take for the US to repair itself—not to become what it was; that is impossible; “The evil of Sauron cannot be wholly cured, nor made as if it had not been. But to such days we are doomed"—but to repair ourselves enough to function as a real country, and not the black hole of hopelessness into which we have collapsed?

I don’t mean “win the elections in 2026 and 2028”: that is undoubtedly necessary but is light years away from sufficient. I am talking about changes that could repair this country in a fundamental way—something that is itself a precondition for the elections of 2026 and 2028 (no matter how decisively won) to be anything but one more turn of the tide in the ongoing war. No: this is about politics, but it is much bigger than elections.

To understand what is needed, we have to first understand the problem. So let me sketch—in the broadest, most general terms—how I see the current American predicament, or at least that face of it I am discussing here.

The fundamental problem of imagining a viable future for our country is born out of a triple truth. The Buddha taught Four Noble Truths: let’s call these the Three Base Truths.

The First Base Truth is the fact that the entire conservative half of the nation has become utterly rancid and poisonous: authoritarian, hateful, unprincipled, evil: plumbing new depths of depravity, a Mariana Trench of cultural-political monstrosity. Their Dear Leader likes to talk about “shithole countries”; I don’t think there are any of those, but MAGA is a shithole movement that has made utter villains out of tens of millions of our fellow citizens.1 I’m not saying that there aren’t a few honorable conservatives who have seen MAGA for what it is and are trying to fight it; of course there are (Bill Kristol, David French, and Liz Cheney come to mind, among others). But they’re a handful, and most of them have been effectively drummed out of American conservatism at this point. It’s almost definitional: to be a conservative in America today is to support Trump, and to be a decent person requires, at a bare minimum, opposing Trump. How do you have a viable, functioning nation when some 35-40% of our countrymen have allied themselves—not just politically, but in their world views and beliefs and thoughts—with such monstrousness?

To be clear, while I am of course thinking here about the MAGA support for the recent state murder of activists in Minneapolis, I am thinking of a lot more too: while the murder of Alex Pretti has rightly taken center stage, Trump’s conduct towards Greenland and our long-standing allies (just last week!) is equally dangerous, and his corruption, his lies, his hatreds, his lack of principle and respect for the law, and on and on, are all things which must be decisively repudiated if we are to once again become a decent country. Trumpism is—as even the most moderate of voices have now conceded—a variety of fascism, and all of the elements that make up that fascism are the problem that makes the First Base Truth so dangerous and terrible. To deal with our present predicament, not only one or two aspects of the fascist habits of mind and action must be cast out, but all of them. It is not enough for fascism to be defeated or abandoned; it must be avowedly rejected by the vast majority of its erstwhile supporters for us to again become a decent country. (It’s a big ask.)

(And yes, the left has done some really lousy things recently too: but to compare them, to even hint that what the left has done and become might in any way justify what conservatism has become, is to lose all sense of reason and decency. Imagine a genuinely annoying—I mean really unquestionably and overwhelmingly irritating—woman who is murdered by her husband: to say “well, she was really annoying”, while true, is utterly repulsive, because the other side’s response was so overwhelmingly evil. That’s what it is to support, to even be tempted to support, MAGA because of woke. Woke is annoying:2 MAGA is murderous. The former is simply not something that can be dealt with until the ringleaders of the latter are brought to justice and the rest of them brought back to sanity; then we can turn to lesser things. There is finally no comparison to be made here.)

The next of the three truths which explains our predicament, the Second Base Truth, is that there always has been and will always be a large conservative faction in this country.3 It’s some combination of cultural specificity and human nature that is hard to untangle, but we don’t need to understand its origins to recognize its truth: conservatism, like progressivism, is deeply rooted in this country. We can and should want to turn vast numbers of our citizens back to moderation and liberalism: but we shouldn’t fool ourselves by imagining we’ll turn them all back, or even a sizable majority of them. Nor can we imagine (as so many on the port side of our political spectrum seem so tempted to do) that we will “simply defeat” them. No strong cultural tendency is ever so permanently defeated—a fact that we on the port side should at the present moment be very relieved to recall.

So while we are cursed with an utterly vile, poisonous conservatism, one getting worse by the hour, at the same time conservatism will inexorably endure within our country and culture. What we have to imagine, therefore, is a repairing of conservatism: turning it from what it has become back to something which at least believes in law and democracy and small-l liberal values and in working for the good of all Americans, something that will hold its leaders accountable to its principles rather than rewriting its principles to match its leader’s actions. Something antithetical to what it has become. It is a commonplace that we need to change minds, but we on the port side of the political spectrum don’t focus enough on the fact that in addition to converting as many as possible to leftism, it is also necessary to redeem those who will inevitably stay on the starboard side.

And that necessity brings us to the Third Base Truth, which is that while of course people hate to think of themselves as wrong, they can be brought to that, but only if they can continue think of themselves as fundamentally good in the process. We can acknowledge our errors, but only if we find a way to see ourselves as being somehow still ok—as having been understandably wrong, or as having been in some way redeemed for our errors. This is not just true of MAGA; it is true of people in general: our pride (famously the worst of the seven deadly sins) keep us from saying, from internalizing, that we were wrong, especially that we were utterly and vilely and truly wrong, unless we come up with some narrative to make it bearable—to think of ourselves as good people now if not before. We can only move forward once we way to live with ourselves with what we have done.

What this means in this context—and this is really the key point—is that MAGA will continue to find reasons to support this until we give them a way to feel good about themselves while abandoning it.

I know the left likes to imagine an eschatological victory which ends with justice and punishment and reform, but that is simply not a possibility here. I don’t mean with respect to MAGA’s leaders; foolish as I am, I continue to have hopes that Trump, Miller, Bondi, Patel, Bovino, Rubio, Vance and the rest, as well as the murderers of ICE and the many Eichmans who have enabled such an endless parade of horrors, might still have to face justice in fair courts of law. Certainly they should never be rehabilitated in the sense of ever again receiving honor or dignity or respect; above all they should never again be given any position of importance, not only in politics, but in anything. If cancellation is ever warranted, it is warranted for these.

But what about the tens of millions, maybe well over a hundred million, of our citizens who have supported this? If we are to again become a decent country they will have to abandon not only thsoe allegiances but also the habits that led them to those allegiances—the authoritarianism, the lack of principle, the disdain for both their fellow citizens and the world, their disdain for truth and decency, and on and on. Yet the burden of the Third Base Truth is that this can only happen if it happens in some way that lets them feel like they are good people, and that our country is a good country.4 Otherwise they won’t abandon the evil at all (for the most part, I mean; obviously some individuals will). If people can’t believe themselves good any other way, then they will persist in their evil and call it good.

So we have touched on the First Base Truth, the Second Base Truth, the Third Base Truth: but we have to complete the circuit and bring it all back to Home,5 and make this again a livable country. How could this possibly come to pass?

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Well, if what is needed is a way for large number of people to both recognize that they have supporting horrors and to move ahead thinking of themselves as good people, then it is fortunate that we have a long-standing cultural model for doing precisely this. We already have a cultural process whereby people who come to see that they are (or have been) loathsome and abominable6 to change and recognize their own depravity while still living with themselves, which is to say, while still feeling like they are (presently) decent folk. A cultural script allowing people to cut off the horrors in their pasts and move forward changed, even reborn, and be better while living with the reality of their histories. A cultural process which fits precisely our need: the Christian revival.7

Before going further, let me remind the reader that I am a Jewish atheist.

Now, calling (or anyway hoping) for a Christian revival is not uncommon nowadays, so before saying more about what I am envisioning I should first explicitly distinguish it from several other ideas of what that mean or why that might be necessary, images which are easy to jump to from the words “Christian revival” but which in fact are not at all what I am imagining. It is necessary to first block those misinterpretations in order to let the the actual image through.

First, I am not (of course) saying that it’s true that we’ve sinned and we need God—I am not, in other words, suggesting that this will have any metaphysical or theological or religious effect. I’m an atheist; I fully understand that Christianity is made up entirely of human stories created and believed for human ends. I think we need a Christian revival, but not because Christianity is true; I know perfectly well that it isn’t. It is simply that Christianity happens to provide a set of cultural patterns (or, if you will, cultural software) which happen to have evolved in such a way that I think they could, if we’re lucky, provide away out of our particular present predicament.

Secondly, I am not saying that we need Christianity because it’s the basis for our culture and it will provide cultural unity or any such national conservative balderdash. Our roots as a pluralist nation go all the way back: if we survive as Americans, it will be through devotion to American ideals like letting each person live their own way and that all men and women are equal, and that we are all endowed with the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Of course there are countervailing trends in our history: both the idea of America as a pluralist, liberal, Enlightenment nation and the idea of it as a Christian nation have real roots in our nation’s history. But it’s not that one is real and the other isn’t. We have multiple threads in our past, and what we need to do is strengthen the good and weaken the bad. So while I am hoping for a Christian revival it is not because I think it will be culturally unifying, or that we are “really” a Christian nation, or any such rubbish; I simply think it might have good effects. I find the conservative desires to unite America around being a “Christian country” only slightly less contemptible than the (similarly motivated) conservative desires to unite around being a white country.

And thirdly—and this is the interpretation which a left-wing, Christian friend leapt to when I tried to outline these ideas, so I know it’s a version at least some people will hear—I am not saying that there is a strong left-wing version of Christianity that can reach the hard-core Trump supporters. Don’t get me wrong: I think left-wing Christianity, while false as a metaphysics, is great as a politics; and indeed there are good politicians out there (gift link) working in that space, trying to turn Christians’ energies towards the, you know, actually Christian work of welcoming the stranger and feeding the hungry. More power to them. If we have a revival of that spirit in this nation, it would only be for the good. (If nothing else, we have desperate need for anything that can turn more people towards liberal ideas.) But to hope primarily for that is to ignore the Second Base Truth: even if there is a large progressive Christian revival, while it might do a lot of good it won’t help the (inevitable) large mass of still-conservative citizens find their way back to a decent conservatism. We have to repair conservatism, and not rely solely upon converting to liberalism.

So that’s what I am not saying. What am I saying, then?

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I am saying that we need people on a genuinely titanic scale—in the tens of millions—to change the way they think not only about politics and their neighbors8 and the world, but about their own pasts and what they have supported—what they have become. If we want to imagine a future history where the U.S. becomes a decent country again, we need to imagine a way for American conservatism to go from its current state to a decent one, which means imagining a route by which people who have supported Trump and all his works can thoroughly stop doing so while still thinking of themselves as good people. What could that be?

What else in our culture and history has ever saved such wretches as these but Amazing Grace?

I am imagining something like this: There will be an evangelical minister—a tried and true conservative, not someone that that we on the port side will like: they will probably be anti-gay, anti-trans, and pro-life at the very least, as well as still conservative in many other ways, ways that will cause many (will cause me) to see them as of the devil’s party. This minister will be struck by “a light from heaven” which asks why he persecutes God (in the form of the poor and the stranger), why he bears false witness, why he is filled with hate and lies. And this minister will realize that the politics they have fallen into is the politics of hell: and will not only repent but also will set themselves to call their conservative brethren to return—to decency, to principle, to honesty, to lack of hatred, to respect for law, to belief in democracy, and all that. Not calling on them to give up being conservative (because of the Second Base Truth) but in the name of being conservative. Such a minister would say that all the things conservatives once claimed to believe about the importance of the rule of law and truth and love for others and all that actually are important, but that they have been led astray and forgotten them. He would say—thunder, in the old revival mode that sill might have such power in a culture with even so poor a memory as ours—that you not only can be conservative and believe them, but that to be conservative you must believe them.9

It will be not only a lifelong and well-known conservative—that much is a bare minimum—but ideally it will be one who has very publicly allied himself10 with this regime,—who worked for it, or for ICE, or something. (I am hearing a lot about David Easterwood, a pastor who may also work for ICE: someone at that level is who I have in mind.) He will explicitly bewail his past actions and beliefs as antithetical both to conservatism11 and to Christianity. He will describe his support for Trump and fascism as a sin: but he will then declare that, glory be!, he has been washed in the blood of the Lamb and has changed his ways. He will believe it: and he will show others a way to abandon things that they know (on some level) are vile, while still thinking well of themselves.

And this movement would spread: other enterprising pastors would take up the call. People would call it the Third Great Awakening.12 And over time conservatism would change: even those who were not personally reborn as never-Trumpers would engage in some convenient amnesia, and have always been against Trump deep inside, or something. There would be prayers said to icons of Saint Ronald of Reagan. There would be bipartisan support for the legal prosecution of the worst malefactors of the Trump regime; perhaps, even, a few of those might plead guilty and use that as a hinge point to themselves adopt the teachings of the Third Great Awakening, Charles Colson style. We on the left will grumble about some premature redemptions, but if there are going to be real ones at anything like the scale we need, there will inevitably a lot of cheap and facile and insincere ones too. But enough would be real to make the change we need.

This is, of course, a dream—a fantasy. It almost certainly won’t happen in anything like the way I am imagining it. But what we need is for something like this to happen. Think of this as an existence proof: there is a way to escape the dilemma brought about by the Three Base Truths; at least we know that the problem is not in principle unsolvable.

I should emphasize that this post is not a call to action. Unless you happened to be a reader very different from most of those who read Attempts, there is nothing that you and I can do to push this along. If we who who already see Trump and Trumpism for what they are do so much as try it will discredit the effort from the very beginning. This must be an entirely indigenous movement arising entirely within the movement that is at present so vile. All we on the port side can do is to keep doing the other necessary work of opposing Trumpism with all our might and converting outright any we can to our side of the political divide (and fully welcoming any and all such converts). The more of this we do the better; perhaps we can go farther than we think. But it won’t be far enough. The rest will have to come from within the culture of the corrupted. All we can do about that is hope.

And, perhaps, pray.

Some who have read this far will be annoyed by my self-certain and sanctimonious tone. Sanctimony is indeed a bad thing, and a classic sin of the left—indeed, something has pushed people towards the right.13 Do I not worry that am speaking in a way that helped move many people towards their present (vile) politics? For that matter, how can I be so certain: do I not worry that I might be wrong?

Good questions all. I am not sure I can do anything with this dilemma but live in it.

What does one do when fighting genuine evil? Unless one is a thoroughgoing moral relativist, you must admit the possibility: in some fights the goodness is so much on one side that equivocation is not only unnecessary but is in fact itself immoral. If you are engaged in such a fight can you not say where you are and what you face? Does it count as sanctimony if what you are saying is, as a matter of fact, correct? I don’t know. But we have reached—we have long since reached—a point where not to say that the other side has become evil feels like lying. Perhaps we are now in a spot where any real truth must necessarily sound sanctimonious. We should try to be critical of ourselves but not at the price of blunting the truth about our opponents.

Ok, but what if it’s more than self criticism, what if it’s more than one imperfect side against a side without redeeming qualities at all? In other words, what if I am wrong?

Here, I think, I face a deep and familiar paradox.

We are all fallible. We all must struggle to avoid falling into certainty and the corruption it can wrought within us. The road to hell is proverbially paved with good intentions, and Bunyan teaches us “that there [is] a way to hell, even from the gates of heaven”. All of this is true.

But at the same time, if certainty and dogmatism is a road to hell, so is relativism and inability to recognize true evil. I think that both the left and the center have made many mistakes, both over my lifetime and over the course of American history: but the right has become outright evil. We can’t let the former blind us to the latter, or make us equivocate. Indeed, we can’t really correct the former without a sane right: which is what we need.

(Incidentally, this touches on an ambiguity I am not resolving in this essay, one revolving around a pair of questions. First, is the reality pointed at by the Second Base Truth, that a right-wing is inevitable (and thus that the most we can hope for is a sane right) an unfortunate reality which we must simply endure, or can the continued existence of the right, if sane, actually be a good thing? Second, is it possible for a sane right to exist for the long-term in a sustainable way, or does it inevitably corrode into fascism? I fear that I would say that in both cases it’s the latter: a sane right actually is a good thing, but at the same time the sanest of rights will (not inevitably but mostly) corrode into something toxic. Of course the same is probably true for the left, too. The struggles for moderation and liberalism should not be seen as battles to be won, but as gardening which must be ongoing: not a conflict but a process. At least as society now stands, threats from both sides of the political aisle will inevitably arise and must simply be averted, for they can not be permanently avoided.)

Kipling famously wrote that one should “trust yourself when all men doubt you,/But make allowance for their doubting too”; in the present case what we have to do is a task which has a parallel structure while being in important fundamentally different. We are not doubted by all, or even a majority; but like Kipling’s ideal, we must fight for and believe in our side with fierce conviction while making allowance for doubting too. We need to hold on to the pragmatist insight that one can be a fallibilist and still not fall into a skeptical vortex—something that is possible but very far from easy. Indeed, it’s almost as difficult as staying a moderate, liberal country which has sufficiently strong but sufficiently sane left and right wings to balance out the insights that each has without letting either slip into the depravity and authoritarianism that both can, at their worst, tend towards.

But to such days we are doomed.

Obviously the image I have painted here is fanciful; what I am doing is trying to imagine a way through the Three Base Truths to a Home worth living in, with the hope that reality will find some (no doubt different) way towards the same end. Regarding even that broader, vaguer hope I am not at all optimistic. But even the tiniest shred of optimism—which is to say, any hope—requires a belief in the possibility of a path forward. That is what I hope to have offered here.

So I cast this crumb upon the waters, with the hope that you who find it might at least derive from it some nourishment for the ongoing struggle; but also with the clearly foolish hope that maybe, somehow, some unimaginable and improbable chain of events somehow leads through some long, unfathomable chain of connections to help these fantasies, in some fashion, become true.

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1

It is important, I think, to remember the point David Frum made in a recent tweet, that the movement not only appeals to the already vile but corrupts its adherents:

Hollis Frampton (1936-1984) was an avant-garde filmmaker (and photographer)1 who died of cancer at the heartbreakingly young age of 48. He started out as a still photographer and then transitioned to making movies. He was considered a very important artist in his time; his work has attracted (and continues to attract) a lot of attention, including a recent book by the media arts scholar Michael Zryd, Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema (2023). He made art of a kind which seems to have vanished, not from the world (I am sure there are still people who make such works) but from the cultural conversation: strange—indeed deliberately estranging— non-narrative movies (and similar works in other media). Such artworks simply aren’t seen as important in the way that, fifty years ago, they still were.2 In that one sense, I suspect his art is even stranger today than it was in its own time: it bears a sort of strangeness that we are no longer braced to expect or primed to appreciate.

Frampton’s films are preserved in a Criterion Collection release called A Hollis Frampton Odyssey, a two-disc set which contains a large number of his movies. Among those included, naturally, is his best-known and most influential work, (nostalgia) (1971), a 36 minute, 7-second black-and-white film. (In addition to being included on the Criteria Collection disc, it is also, as of this writing, available to stream online.) 36 minutes may not sound lengthy, but (nostalgia) is, in fact the second longest film on the two-disc set, which contains a full twenty-four works, most of which are quite short indeed (the shortest is 1 minute, and a lot more are in the 3-5 minute range).3

(nostalgia) is one section of a larger work, a series of seven films called Hapax Legomena4 (1971-1972). For some reason, only three of the seven films are included on the Criterion Collection set—in addition to (nostalgia), Poetic Justice (1972, 31 minutes) and Critical Mass (1971, 25 minutes).5 But Frampton reassuringly said that the series “make up a single work composed of detachable parts, each of which may be seen separately for its own qualities”.6 The films are all strange: for instance, Poetic Justice—also presently online—is (like (nostalgia)) filmed from a single vantage point, and in the latter case is actually composed in a single shot, encompassing a table with a cactus on one side and a cup of coffee, and in between them a stack of paper with the script for a film on it: each page is sequentially shown, and you are invited to read the script over the course of the otherwise unchanging film.7

But, as I said, (nostalgia) is the best-known and most widely regarded of any of Frampton’s films; in 2003, it was one of the films chosen to be added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress—25 are chosen each year as “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant. The year it was added to the list other additions included Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969); White Heat (1949); Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), “arguably the definitive Depression-era musical”; a recently-restored “very early attempt by W.K.L. Dickson of the Thomas Edison Company to combine film image and sound”; and Tarzan and His Mate (1934), a “rather steamy pre-Production Code Tarzan film, generally considered the finest in the series”.

So what is this film (notalgia), and how did it make the list?

(nostalgia) has a very simple format. It displays a series of 13 single photographs, each of which sits on a burner while words describing the photograph are read over the image. Towards the end of the narration the burner is turned on, and the photograph is consumed. We stare at the ashes, and then begin again. Here is a shot from the film containing the third photograph in the sequence, which happens to be a self-portrait by Frampton:

And here are the words describing the image, read in the film (as taken from this very helpful transcript)8:

I made this photograph on March 11, 1959. The face is my own, or rather, it was my own. As you see, I was thoroughly pleased with myself at the time, presumably for having survived to such ripeness and wisdom, since it was my twenty-third birthday. I focused the camera, sat on a stool in front of it, and made the exposures by squeezing a rubber bulb with my right foot. There are eleven more photographs on the roll of film, all of comparable grandeur. Some of them exhibit my features in more sensitive or imposing moods. One exposure records what now looks to me like a leer. I sent that one to a very pretty and sensible girl on the occasion of the vernal equinox, a holiday I held in some esteem. I think I wrote her some sort of cryptic note on the back of it. I never heard from her again. Anyhow, photography had obviously caught my fancy. This photograph was made in the studio where I worked. It belonged to the wife of a friend. I daresay they are still married, but he has not been my friend for nearly ten years. We became estranged on account of an obscure mutual embarrassment that involved a third party, and three dozen eggs. I take some comfort in realizing that my entire physical body has been replaced more than once since it made this portrait of its face. However, I understand that my central nervous system is an exception.

In the course of these words, the photograph begins to burn:

All the elements of the film are designed to explore its theme of nostalgia. First of, of course, photography itself is deeply entwined with nostalgia, as Susan Sontag discusses in her classic work On Photography (1977):

…photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. An ugly or grotesque subject may be moving because it has been dignified by the attention of the photographer. A beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists. All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. (pp. 13-14)

The words also explore the theme. For instance, in the above -quoted description of Frampton’s self-portrait, there is an emphasis on the changes in his sself, from the original note that “the face is my own, or rather, it was my own” to the final comment about the (admittedly mythical) notion that every cell in the body is replaced every seven years. There are two different mentions of people whom he no longer sees—the girl to whom he gave an alternate version of this photograph, and the couple in whose studio the photograph was taken. Notions of loss and slippage are also predominant: there is the obscure incident which alienated him from the couple, as well as the “cryptic” note to the girl, neither of which we learn more about.9

And of course the burning of the images also explores the notion of nostalgia, with memories consumed before our eyes—but also, naturally, still there, since we can go rewatch the film if we wish.10

So that is the film: photographs and their verbal descriptions; the photographs’s portrayed destruction. No plot, unless you count the tiny fragments of story within some of the descriptions, and the indirectly portrayed Frampton is the only real character in the images. So far, so avant garde.

—Except that what I’ve just said above is incorrect in two different important ways. I have left out two elements of the film—one of which is arguably the central element of the film (in every description of it I have read it is the second of my omitted elements which is foregrounded). I suspect I could even be confused of deception, so important is the element I have omitted.

If you haven’t seen the film, however, nothing I have yet said is a spoiler in any real sense. If you want the experience of the film to be a surprise you should go watch it now, before reading the rest of this essay.—I am not saying, incidentally, that you ought to watch the film unspoiled. It’s not clear to me if the original audience was unspoiled, for instance—were they told this one key feature in the promotional material? In reviews? Or did it actually hit them unaware? I can’t say. Is a techcnique in a plotless avant-garde film real a “spoiler” at all?

But most later viewings of the film must have been spoiled, since as I said this element is usually the thing spoken of in talking about the film. () Certainly my first viewing was done with the knowledge I am about to impart. So I don’t know if it matters or not. And you can’t judge without knowing the secret I have been witholding, so you can’t really judge for yourself, either. You will have to leap unknown, either way.—But if you do want to see it fresh, do it before reading on:

What are the elements that my description above left out? There are two in particular, one which is less important (but still worth noting), and one which is central to the experience of the film.

The first, less-central aspect is that the voice-over, despite the first person (“the face is my own”) is not, in fact, Frampton’s voice: it belongs to a different avant-garde filmmaker, Michael Snow, who narrates the entire film: the “I” in the film is, always, radically deceptive.11 So the theme of “nostlagia” is, in a sense, further complicated by the fact that the “I” who speaks of remembering these things is not really the self who remembers them.—But while this is a nice detail, it’s not so central as to be definitive of the film.

What really stands out about (nostalgia), what every description fo the film highlights in its discussion, is this: the spoken words don’t align with the displayed images. Each picture is shown while the voice-over describing the subsequent picture is read. The film consists not of a series of described images, but of descriptions of photographs you have not yet seen while the photograph you have just heard described is first displayed and then destroyed. Thus to watch the film you have to live in two times simultaneously: there is the image you are hearing about, and then also, separately, the image you are seeing. You have to build up an image of the forthcoming image from the spoken words, while simultaneously looking at the image you are seeing and recalling the earlier words to seee any elements the description had drawn your attention to. (nostalgia), like nostalgia, is fundamentally a phenomenon of two different times overlapping.

For instance, remember the image of Frampton and the verbal description of it which I quoted above? Well, while you hear that ekphrasis read, what you are looking is not the self-portait, but rather this:

And that image, in turn, was deescribed to you wile you were looking at the first image of the film. Then, while you look at the self-portrait by Frampton, what you actually hear are the words describing the fourth image:

This photograph was made in September of 1960. The window is that of a dusty cabinetmaker’s shop, on the west side of West Broadway, somewhere between Spring Street and West Houston. I first photographed it more than a year earlier, as part of a series, but rejected it for reasons having to do with its tastefulness and illusion of deep space. Then, in the course of two years, I made a half-dozen more negatives. Each time, I found some reason to feel dissatisfied. The negative was too flat, or too harsh; or the framing was too tight. Once a horse was reflected in the glass, although I don’t recall seeing that horse. Once, I found myself reflected, with my and tripod. Finally, the cabinetmaker closed up shop and moved away. I can’t even remember exactly where he was, anymore. But a year after that, I happened to compare the prints I made from the six negatives. I was astonished! In the midst of my concern for the flaws in my method, the window itself had changed, from season to season, far more than my photographs had! I had thought my subject changeless, and my own sensibility pliable But I was wrong about that. So I chose the one photograph that pleased me most after all. and destroyed the rest. That was years ago. Now I’m sorry. I only wish you could have seen them!

So the burning takes on an added (if somewhat artificial) significance. The words desribing the image are gone by the time you see it: but then the photograph is destroyed too, so you can’t (notionally) go back and look at it to see how they match up. All you have is memory.

(Incidentally, in the decades after my first viewing of the film, my memory was that the sequence looped so that the first photograph shown (as the visual accompanying the description of the second) was described while the last displayed image was shown. But as I discovered (or remembered) upon rewatching the film, this is incorrect: the first image is never described, while the final description matches no image ever shown—and is therefore, perhaps, the most haunting of all.)

It seems likely that the initial audiences for (nostalgia) were at first baffled by what was going on, thrown badly off-balance by the mismatch between words and images, and struggled, as the film went on, to catch up. In fact I would guess that that was precisely the intended effect. At the same time, I strongly suspect that nearly everyone who has seen the film in the many decades since its initial release was fully aware of the film’s structure12 (it’s not usually treated as secret knowledge, and is probably more on the level of knowing that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a western before seeing that film) and were thus braced for it. Indeed, as I already noted, it is perfectly plausible that even the film’s initial audience knew very well what they were getting into. The vertigo of the film’s unexpectedness is something for which we can only have nostalgia—and is something which, like so much of what we have nostalgia for, may not ever have existed, and which we ourselves certainly never experienced.

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It is for good reasons a commonplace that artists should not explain their work. Yet artists do regularly violate this maxim, and on occasion we are lucky that they do. One such lucky case is in regard to (nostalgia): Frampton wrote some notes about his film13 in a piece called “Notes on (nostalgia)“, published two years after the film first came out, in Film Culture (Spring, 1972).14 On a first reading the notes on this strange film are themselves befittingly strange, but I also found them very illuminating about the film and how Frampton, at least, understood what he was doing.

Here are the opening paragraphs of the brief essay:

The narrative art of most young men is autobiographical. Since I have had little narrative experience, it seemed reasonable to accept biography as a convention, rather, however little information was available to me.

My subject, hoping abjectly to be taken for a man of his time, had practiced rigorous self-effacement for a decade or more. So I was forced into examining his leavings and middens, like an archeologist sifting for ostracizing pot shards.

Since he had once been myself, I knew exactly where to look....

I, at least, found the opening two paragraphs in which Frampton speaks of himself in the third person (”his leavings”, etc.) rather baffling: I simply could not understalnd what he was talking about until I hit the opening of the third paragraph and it suddenly snapped into place: Frampton was using the third person to capture his experience of his past self as a distinctly different person than his present one, and thus the “subject”, the “man of his time”, about whom he had “little information”, was his own former self. Understanding our former selves as (almost, or essentially) other people is a familiar literary theme, and once I picked up what he was doing using the third person to convey that estrangement seemed a perfectly reasonable literary device. It also explained a lot about Frampton’s film. Thinking of all of the pieces—the images and text—as leavings of a past person (a self he no longer was), makes its form comprehensible, just as the third paragraph of his essay clarifies the first two. A lot of the descriptions make more sense with that division foregrounded.

Why burning? In his notes Frampton goes on to explain that too:

Since I still shared some of his aspirations, I found the photographs I chose (as distinct from those I discarded) fairly embarrassing. So I decided, humanely, to destroy them (retaining the negatives, of course, against unpredictable future needs) by burning. My biographical film would be a document of this compassionate act!

That bit was, I think, disingenuous—the idea, presumably, was postmodern irony, but I think in this case he missed the mark. Obviously he was not embarrassed by the photographs (not really, or at least not sufficiently) since he filmed them, thus displaying them over and over again for as long as the film is viewed, thereby showing them to far more people than they might otherwise reach. So the notion of burning them due to embarassment is performative in the most facile and preening way. Not to mention the fact that if they were embarrassing, burning them is not a compassionate act towards anyone but himself—and not therefore, humble: the notion of his own humility is also preening (although here I think the postmodern irony is closer to the mark, albeit not the finest example of the form.

But ultimately it doesn’t matter, since there is, after all, a different good reason to include the burning in the film: namely, that it enhances the theme by showing the destruction of the past even as one recalls it. This purpose is so clear and so central to the film that I find it hard to believe that it was not in fact Frampton’s genuine motivation, with the bit about his embarrassment being only an ex post facto bit of humor.

One last section of Frampton’s essay I wish to draw attention to is what he says about the narration:

Then again, to lend vividness to the circumstances of a subject of no particular general interest, I determined to comment upon the photographs as if in the first person. And, finally, to obviate any possible confusion, I decided to have my script read by another party.

The postmodern irony is thick on the ground here. To say “as if in the first person” about a text which retells one’s own memories is funny; it also further drives home that sense of his past self as a different person which drove Frampton’s creation (or at least which he claimed drove it). Even funnier is the phrase “to obviate any possible confusion”, since obviously getting another actor to read his (first-person) words creates rather than obviates confusion. Unlike the bit about his own embarrassment, however, I think this bit of postmodern irony works well.

The key take-away from Frampton’s notes, however, is the division of the past self from the present person, which was not obvious (at least to me) from merely vieweing the film, and which does a lot to stabilize how I think about it, and what I think it means and accomplishes.

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What should we make of (nostalgia)?

There is a lot to like about it. The actual descriptions of the photographs are fascinating—elliptical, suggestive, odd. The photographs themselves are largely more ordinary, although I like a few of them a lot (including, interestingly, one that Frampton himself said he “despised”, the one above of the man in a picture frame holding a metronome.) I certainly found watching the film to be an interesting experience, and I think it is one worth having.

(But here we might pause to ask: why a film? Is it simply that that happened to be Frampton’s medium? In a God’s eye view, we can imagine the same words and images having instead been published as a book, with the descriptions of the images on the left-hand pages and the photographs on the right, misaligned as they were in the film so that each description described the image on the page’s reverse.15 It’s instructive to think of how reading such a book would differ from the experience of watching the actual film. A few things leap to mind: first, a book would omit the burning of the images which, as I said, does so much to develop the theme of nostalgia and the vanishing of the past. Secondly, the book would lack something which, in the age of DVDs, the film no longer lacks, but which it used to, namely, the availability of a ready way to flip back. Of course with a DVD you can rewind to relisten to the description of the photograph you had not yet seen when first hearing it almost as easily as you could turn back the page of our hypothetical book to reread the description of the photograph on its obverse, but with a film projected in the only way that films were available to be seen in 1971, this was not an option: by the time you saw the described image it had really vanished—unless you went and resaw the entire film again (if you even could). In this sense, perhaps a book would be less a traduction now than it would have been before the move to DVD—a change, really, in the very ontology of film as a medium. One might say that that change in ontology has already traduced the work so severely that its reproduction as a book would now do less damage to the conception behind the artwork than it would have done at its creation.)

So yes, there is a lot to like in the film. At the same time, it’s, well, strange. Now this strangeness, clearly, is the intended effect, so in that sense it clearly succeeds. But how many people seek out such strangeness in a film these days?16—I’m sure there are some! It presumably is, like everything else now, a subculture. And in the case of this particular subculture, it has probably never been very widespread at any point (when have avant garde films been popular?). Yet it was, I think, far more culturally central than it is now; and in a world where hierarchical and centralized cultural institutions with a more externally-ordered set of prestige criteria, that really mattered in a way that it is hard to even remember in our current nobrow world.17 One of the things that the prestige attributed to avant-garde art did was to get (some) people to sit through a film like (nostalgia)—to, we might almost say, have the interesting experience of that film whether they liked it or not. This sort of quasi-compulsion in culture had real downsides, of course, but it’s worth recalling that it had its upsides too: it is hard to imagine that many people sitting still for a film like (nostalgia) today,—hard enough that, while I was very happy to have reseen it, I am hesitant to strongly recommend it to anyone, at least not without a great deal of warning and preparation.

For that matter even I (who liked the film enough to devote so many words to it) did have one frustration in my experience viewing the film. I am tempted to call it a flaw in the film itself, but I think one might just as well say that it is rather a flaw in me, or even that it is a flaw in the entirety of our contemporary society in which I naturally partake. The frustration I am speaking of is that (nostalgia) is very slow. Let me clarify what I mean by that: I don’t mean that the text is read too slowly (I wouldn’t change that), nor that the burning of the images takes too long (that also seems fine). The entirety of the reading-then-burning process I would leave unaltered. But each time after an image’s burning the camera lingers on the charred ashes for what was for me a surprisingly long time before moving on to the next image, narration and immolation.

I’m not sure why Frampton does this. Did he seek to make you during the long pause remember what had just occurred, thus further highlighting the ‘nostalgia’ theme? Or did he perhaps just want a longer gap in time between the audience’s hearing the description and seeing the photograph which it actually described? Why did he want to slow down a film which, due to the nature of its format, would come across as slow even without these seemingly supurflous pauses?—Then again, it’s possible that only someone living more than fifty years after the film came out would experience it this way—I don’t recall this frustration from my first viewing of the film (although, of course, it’s been a long time). So while I can’t help but note that I think you could cut at least 5, and possibly as many as 10 minutes out of the film without loosing any word of the script, any glimpse at an image, or any moment of visible burning, at the same time I have to think that this impatience is a flaw in either me our our culture, that only in so hurried and rushed an age would these little pauses seem interminable. Certainly I strongly suspect that, had Frampton not died so terribly young,18 he would never have countenanced any cutting of his film, even if it wouldn’t eliminate any of its more obvious content.19

So what are we to make of (nostalgia)? The truth is, I really don’t know. Or rather, I suppose that the answer is that (nostalgia) is a superb piece of avant-garde art, but that I don’t know what avant-garde art as a genre or mode means in this day and age. We live in a time which seeks entertainment, not deep beauty; takeaways, not philosophical provocation; argument, not allusiveness; diversion and not meditation. We live in a culture which no longer has the structures of prestige on which, it seems, the very existence of an avant-garde depends. So what we are to make of (nostalgia) is entirely down to the question of what we make of the avant-garde as a whole. It’s a good example of that artistic mode: but that artistic mode which is itself now, in a bitter irony, a fitting subject for nostalgia.

If that is a nostalgia which you share, or if it is a strangeness which you would like to experience, then I strongly recommend the film.—If: but only if.

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Last week I published the thirteenth story in my mosaic narrative Retcon. Retcon is structured as a series of stories whose titles are in reverse-alphabetical order: the first story’s title starts with Z, the second with Y, and so on, down20 to the final story which shall begin with A. It’s an abecedary—a fun little artistic form with examples from ancient acrostic poetry to other SF works like Michael Swanwick’s Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary (2000) and Harlan Ellison’s story “From A to Z in the Chocolate Alphabet”—although, given the reverse order, perhaps I should rather refer to it as a zewhyexary, after the Tom Disch poem which is the only other example of the reversed abecedary which I can think of offhand.21 (It is not an accident that I quoted “Zewhyexary” in one of the previous stories—a story that is itself, in fact, an abecedary.) I myself would have coined not the term “zewhyexary” but something more like “zuyoxowry”, but since the coinage exists I suppose I shall stick to it (leading the latter, perhaps, to become a hapax legomenon) .

Because of this structure, some titles presented themselves early.22 Years ago I scribbled “Nostalgia” down on a list of possible titles to use for stories some day, and when in the early stages of planning Retcon I looked at that list, it leapt out at me as a very apposite title for a time-travel story, and one which suggested terrain I wanted to explore. So it became one of the first titles I picked for my current artistic project.

But when I wrote the title “Nostalgia” down on my list of titles to use some day, was it in imitation or forgetfulness of Frampton’s film? I, ironically, can’t recall.

Commercial announcement: “Nostalgia” is now available at fine ebook retailers everywhere, including Amazon, Amazon UK, Apple, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and Smashwords; you can also order it at my web site, where you can also pre-order the entire series if you are so inclined. An excerpt from the story is available here. We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay, already in progress…

Purchase (Frug's) Nostalgia

Why do I remember so specifically and clearly the first time I saw (nostalgia), down to its exact date?

In the spring of 1991, both my parents were working on projects with the word “postmodernism” in the title. My mother, then on leave from her teaching job at the New England School of Law and in residence at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, was writing an essay called “Postmodern Legal Feminism”. My father, teaching at Harvard Law School, was offering a seminar called “Postmodernism and the Law” (or something like that—it might perhaps have been, e.g., “postmodernism in the law” or something).

This was not particularly surprising. My parents had both been interested in postmodernism for years. This is true for postmodernism both in its artistic and its critical/theoretical sense—that is, both the artistic tradition that included writers such as Borges, Barthe, Barthelme, Calvino, and many others, as well as visual artists such as Cindy Sherman and Hollis Frampton, and also the academic tradition that includes a wide variety of theorists and writers and which is often also referred to as “poststructuralism”.23 This was, in a very real sense, the tradition that my parents brought me up in, and they had inculcated in me a love of both halves of that tradition. (I retain, very strongly, the love for the artistic forms that live under the name “postmodernist”; however, while studying philosophy in college, I was shown the way to fly out of the bottle of poststructuralism and have never been much interested in returning). It was in the course of being raised a young postmodernist,f or instance, that my father told me the story of the man who rewrote a book without ever seeing its text, happening to rewrite it word-for-word. In fact, he told me about a lot of postmodern art before I ever read or saw it: not only that of Borges, but that of Calvino, Cindy Sherman, and a great many others.

One of the pieces of postmodernist art he told me about was Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia). He told me (as I have now told you) how each photograph is shown with a voice-over describing the next image, and how the voice that speaks is not the I that actually wrote the words or took the photographs or directed the film. As a young lover of the postmodern, it sounded thrilling, and I wanted to see it. But in those days long before youtube and pro-human piracy, long before DVDs or the Criterion Collection’s rereleasing Frampton’s work, it was not an easy movie to see. Nor did I remember the name “Hollis Frampton”: I only remembered the film’s title, a title which, even then, long before I elbowed in on the action, was hardly unique to Frampton’s work. (In fact, my freshman year of college there was a Andrei Tarkovsky film festival and I went to see Nostalgia (1983) under the misapprehension that it was (nostalgia) (1971). It was a happy accident: I loved the movie and went to a lot more of the Tarkovsky films that fall.) So while I had heard of the film, and wanted to see it, I had never yet done so—never yet had the chance.

My father told me about his class as he was assembling and preparing for it and naturally, as one raised in the postmodern tradition, I thought it sounded superb. One of the things he told me was that he was going to show Frampton’s (nostalgia) during one of the class sessions. I asked if I could attend the class meeting in which he was going to show it (I was in college at the same school at which my father taught), and he said I was welcome to. So on April 3, 1991, late in the afternoon of that Wednesday, I went to my father’s class, and saw (nostalgia) for the first time.

I loved it. After class either I or my father had to depart promptly—I don’t recall which of us it was—so we couldn’t talk about the film (beyond the class discussion I had stayed to hear). That night, therefore, I phoned home in order to talk to him about it. But he wasn’t home; the person who answered the phone (a landline—this was, of course, long before anyone save Gordon Gekko had cell phones) was my mom. I’d last seen her in person three days earlier—she’d driven me back to my dorm after I had borrowed the family car to go see Paul Simon in concert—so that evening we only chatted for a minute, although, at least in memory, she would have been happy to stay on if I had not fairly quicklyrung off. I had somewhere to get to, or some homework to do, and said goodbye.—If I had known, of course, I would have stayed on much longer.

It was the last time I was to ever speak to my mother. The next night, perhaps 24 hours after we spoke, she was murdered. She was 49 years old—one year older than Hollis Frampton was when he died.

But by the time that, almost 35 years later, I was early in the process of sketching out my own work entitled “Nostalgia”, it occurred to me that the world had changed over the past 34 years, 7 months, and 2 days, and that it was probably easier to find both the name of the auteur (which I had yet again forgotten) and indeed the film itself (as it turned out to be), my father, too, had died: and I was left alone with my memories and my longing and my grief.

Given this history, I do not think that I can honestly recommend the film in any way that would be persuasive, or at least not that would sound persuasive to my own partial ears: while I did enjoy it the second time no less than the first, and while I do, in fact, think that it is a superb work of art that in other circumstances I would unhesitatingly recommend, I can’t shake the feeling that I might in this case think that only due to the feelings that for me accompany the film, the sorrow and joy that both arise from my parents (their absence, their memories);—in short, from nothing more than mere nostalgia.

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7

The script is conveniently online here. It’s not by any means a script for an ordinary film, either. First of all, the script describes what “you” do; thus it may be the only film ever shot in the second person (Although of course you could say it’s not, it’s simply an unproduced script for such a film; Ceci n’est pas un film à la deuxième personne). It begins by placing you in the film you are then watching:

#3. (M.S.) Room Interior. Open window. A Iliac Is seen outside. (Zoom In and drop to...)
#4. (C.U.) A small table below a window. A potted cactus, a coffee cup.

But then it has you wander off:

#10. (M.S.) Room interior. You enter, carrying a camera in one hand, walk to window.
#11. (C.U.) Your face In profile, looking through window.
#12. (M.S.) A lilac In bloom.

There is also what is perhaps the least erotic (although I suppose also least offensive) sex scene ever put on film:

#124. (M.S.) Bedroom. You make love. Outside the window are peacocks strutting on a turf green. (Dissolve to...)
#125. (M.S.) Bedroom. Love making. Outside the window are men and women in evening dress. (Dissolve to...)
#126. (M.S.) Bedroom. Love making. Outside the window are hyenas disputing a carcass, (Dissolve to.,,)

This goes on for 58 shots, the entire third section of the film. And remember, what you’re seeing is this:

They don’t make ‘em like this any more. Or, as I said, if they do, then certainly no one pays any attention to ‘em.

At one point in “Nostalgia” I break into what is almost a short stand-alone essay: indeed, I intend to prove (or concede) that it is such by excerpting it and publishing it here in precisely that format. It’s not that the essay is unrelated to the story; sometimes to tell a story you need to stop and essay an essay, and I believe this was true in this case. It connects in terms of theme, character, and even (in a way) plot. But it does also stand on its own, so I thought I would present it that way, too.

There are some slight differences between this and the version in the forthcoming story; I have both cut out a few passages and made one or two small (unmarked) alterations. Some of the changes are to avoid spoilers (a bit for “Nostalgia”, but mostly for the Retcon series as a whole); others are cut simply because they refer to other elements in the story (characters, incidents, etc) in a way that, standing alone its own, would be confusing or distracting. (It is part of a larger narrative, after all.)

But what remains should be readable by people who know nothing more about the story series. All you really need to know is that the story’s protagonist, an elderly Chinese-American man named Xu Ming (here often called “Lao Xu”, which is a nickname—it means, literally, “Old Xu”) is ruminating about what has been lost over the course of his lifetime. The first person narrator is mentioned in passing, but you need know nothing more about the narrator than that.—And that’s it, that’s all the background you need.

That, and the ongoing sorrows, crises and declines of our world, for which see any daily newspaper.

I hope you like the essay. And if you do, please consider checking out the novella, or the series as a whole. (For what it’s worth, I think the story would make a good jumping-on point, although if you try it & like it I would then suggest you go back and read the rest while waiting for the next one rather than just jumping on there.)

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As the years went on Lao Xu became increasingly preoccupied with the notion that his people, his tribe, was dying out.

He didn’t mean… either the Americans nor the Chinese, both peoples to whom he might be said to belong but neither of whom seemed in any imminent danger… No, for Lao Xu, the group that he identified with, whose passing he obsessively dreaded and worried over and bemoaned, were readers.

Everyone knew that reading was in a bad way. His wrist flooded him with notifications of articles by writers and academics and all sorts of others for whom reading was bound up with their very selves who were having trouble focusing. Who could not read as well as they used to. Among younger generations, reading as an activity was in free-fall; the reports from the front lines of schools and universities were not to be believed, which is to say, were unquestionably true and mind-numbingly horrible. He might not live to see it—he was old, after all—but he thought that younger people would live to see the end of reading.…

Lao Xu knew, of course, that his concerns were not new. Those who downplayed the threat did so by pointing to a long series of technological threats to thinking which had turned out to be false alarms. Plato, famously, had written that the invention of writing was destructive, that literacy would destroy our memory and weaken the mind, and that it is based on technology fundamentally alien to our nature. On the first point (the destruction of memory) we might even say that Plato was in large measure correct, albeit not entirely (Bruno postdated him by two thousand years). But what we knew—what Plato, masterful writer that he was, must have himself known, speaking of writing’s decline with the irony he so famously portrayed in his teacher and mouthpiece—was that we could not only bear the loss, but that we would find that the advantages far outweighed the disadvantages. That his new subspecies, homo legens, the reading human, was, ultimately, an improvement upon the old. Homo legens, which in early centuries remained rare and dwelt among those who were merely sapiens, but which, in more recent centuries, had come to predominate, and eventually almost supplant, their older rivals—never entirely, but almost, almost, almost.

And they were different. In his letter to me, Lao Xu quoted (of course) a book, Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong: “Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.” And those people, with that altered consciousness, were the people from whom Lao Xu had come… Come from not just directly, in that Ming and all of our parents were readers, but from the entire world: the world of homo legens, which made science and engineering and cities and archives and everything which made our project, our lives, our thinking possible.

But at the very moment of its triumph, yet another subspecies which Ming (with a nod towards Plato and a scramble for an online Latin grammar) came to call, at least within his own mind, homo speluncalis—arose. Multiplied. And now was on the cusp of displacing us as we long ago had all-but-displaced homo sapiens.

Did homo sapiens feel pangs when replaced—silently, as much by recruitment as breeding—by homo legens? Plato’s lament would seem to suggest as much. If we summoned them to the mind’s court, would some representative of homo sapiens, a person from a rich but purely oral culture, stand up and criticize us as usurpers, invaders, colonialists, despoilers? — If so, we would never know: for it was writing that let such cries be promulgated; indeed, in certain respects that sort of broad historical thinking and abstract reasoning was itself only enabled by homo legens, the institutions we had built and the ways of thinking we had developed. Even if some advocate for homo sapiens managed to use them, it would only be possible due to their drawing from the well which homo legens had so long dug.

And now the representatives from homo legens, the tides turned, wrote against the new upstarts, bewailing—as perhaps they once caused bewailing in others. Lonely sits the species that was once great upon the earth: we that were great among beings is become like a widow; our cheeks are wet with tears, our right hand withers.

Of course Lao Xu cheered on those who defended homo legens:—wished, indeed, to join them. And of course he could not… But while Lao Xu could not join them, he could and did quietly cheer them: but he was cheering, he knew, the losing side. Those who raised the banners of books in a world of screens and streaming and sound were losing, losing badly, and everyone knew it.

The thought that detained him, however, was the counterfactual question of what he could argue, if, through some unimaginable set of circumstances, he could not only join the argument, but get the representatives of homo speluncalis to sit still for the type of argument which (he feared) was the sole province of their predecessors. He wanted to claim that, in some objective sense, the life of homo legens was deeper, richer, better than those of their successors.

But on what basis could he argue this? The whole problem was that the differences between homo sapiens, homo legens and homo speluncalis were not only in ways of living, but in ways of thinking and in values: any pitch for any of them would necessarily be in the language of one of them. A written (let alone oral) plea to homo speluncalis would necessarily fall upon deaf ears, since all that can now be heard is the hissing of the flickers upon the cavern’s wall; and a plea in video form would be self-refuting. And even if one could somehow bridge the gap of medium and consider the matter in the abstract, the logical structure of such an argument would only be accepted by those who already ran in its channel.

No, for overdetermined reasons, Lao Xu could not possibly prove that the life of homo legens was better than that of homo speluncalis. He felt it with his whole being: but all he could do was watch it slip, with seeming inevitability, away. To watch what seemed to him to be the thing of the highest value slip into silence and absence and, perhaps worst of all, irrelevance.

But if he could not prove it better—if the values that made him say it was better were themselves downstream of the values at hand—why was he so certain it was true?

Because he felt it, and it was a matter of value not reason. Because his own reasoning was already weakening in the cave culture which, against his own will, he found himself. Because, as Spinoza famously said, all things wish to continue. So he, as… as an avatar and example of homo legens, wished for his people, homo legens, to live, to continue, to flourish, no less than he wished for himself to live: indeed more so, since his own death was as inevitable as any mortal man’s, whereas the death of homo legens was, or at any rate so strongly seemed, a contingency. And yet he was as helpless in the face of the dying of his people as he was in the face of his own increasingly palpable mortality.

All he could do was mourn.

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Thanks for reading. Here, again, are the links to buy the story: you can get it from me directly at my web site (where, if you wish, you can also pre-order the entire series, which comes with all the stories so far published and, in time, the remaining ones). You can also purchase a copy on Amazon, Amazon UK, Apple, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Smashwords, or any other ebook retailer.

Next week I will publish an essay on an entirely different work of art titled “Nostalgia”—or, more accurately, “(nostalgia)”. Subscribe now so you don’t miss it!

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Here is the blurb I wrote for the story; please remember that blurbs are one of my worst genres; or, as the ancient proverb goes, “never judge a story by its blurb”:

Two groups of time travelers return from missions to change the past, arriving at almost exactly the same time, and each returning from a world where what the other eliminated was present. How could this be? Surely one group or the other must have gone (if you’ll forgive the expression under the circumstances) first? The groups sit down to unwind this riddle—and end up posing several more in the process—and also describe the strange time and times they are respectively from. Come listen! Coffee, tea and muffins will be served.

And here is the cover I made for it:

Please go read the story! If you haven’t read any of Retcon yet, you might want to begin at the beginning. Either way, enjoy!

Read Retcon now!

Since a number of readers were interested in my last post about going on Mounjaro, I thought I would add a few more beats to the narrative, since there have been some significant developments which however are not quite enough for a full post.

The key point here was hidden in the following phrase from the previous post: “The biggest difference of this week was (alas for Ns of one) unrelated—I got food poisoning…”. That, it turned out, was completely wrong, as I found out when this particular N clicked up to 2, and I got almost precisely the same symptoms the following week on roughly the same time table viz-a-viz the timing of the shot. Not to dwell on the disgusting details, but I was utterly knocked out for a full day with intense nausea, etc. The first time had been so strong and so sudden that I had thought it must be food poisoning—even though I hadn’t eaten anything but leftovers that both another family member and myself had eaten a day or two before without any ill effects. But that was wishful thinking (as my son noted at the time). The recurrence proved it: it was side effects.

So the mental model I had shifted to for the side effects of mounjaro, which might have worked for some of them, were sadly not true for them all: this was not part and parcel of the beneficial effects: this was extraneous and sudden and terrible. Certainly my hopeful note in the previous post that the side effects had “abated” was utterly mistaken.

Six days after the second bout of I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Food-Poisoning!™ I had a follow-up appointment with my doctor. The good news? I had lost 12 pounds (getting from not-obese-but-close-enough-to-the-edge-so-as-to-be-able-to-lean-over-and-spit-down-into-it-if-I-liked to simply overweight), and the various worrisome test numbers looked markedly better. Counterbalancing that was the fact that it was costing me a full day of intense misery (not to mention the inability to do anything else), which totally sucked. Furthermore, the weight loss I had had was in fact too fast, to the point where it threatened itself to be unhealthy.

My wise doctor laid out the options and guided (but did not push)1 me towards the idea that what I should do is to pause the medication, wait a month or two, and then have a follow-up appointment where we could see where my weight was and what my test numbers were and re-evaluate based on those. It seemed like a good plan, and it’s what I’m going to do.

I will admit to disappointment at having to have stopped, for a number of distinct reasons: first, because GLP1 agonists seem miraculously good for all sorts of things, so it would be nice all things being equal to be able to tolerate them; second, because people tend to regain weight after going off GLP1 agonists and I like weighing less, even if it isn’t all that crucial; and thirdly and by no means least, because (as I wrote in the earlier post) the experience has been weird and interesting and I wanted to see where it was going. But I was also very much relieved not to take the next shot, because that last reason was only true six days a week, and was very, very much not the case on the seventh, and neither of the other two benefits outweighed the side effects.

The day after I was to take my next dose (but didn’t), my wedding ring, which had fit snugly on my finger2 for 28 years, 10 months and 10 days, slipped off. — Twice. — Once without my noticing it (I found it shortly thereafter). I will take to to a jewelers to see if they can do a temporary repair—temporary, because as sudden and strange as the weight loss (in my fingers!) has been, I am now off the mounjaro, and I can’t expect it to last. For the moment I am wearing it on a chain around my neck, and my wife is making jokes about my dropping it into Mount Doom. So this is a little coda of oddness to an odd three weeks that will—presumably?—be returning to normal soon. At least for a little while.

I will add further updates once (and if) there is anything to report.

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Once soap would ease off
the wedding ring
that’s bedded forever now
in her clapping hand.

And so was I.

I even made a number of attempts to lose weight in some sustained ways. In particular during the pandemic, when the fact that my being overweight (technically, in fact, obese) was a sufficient risk factor that it qualified me for an earlier vaccine, I tried to go on, not diets, but food plans, to get my weight somewhat under control, which actually lasted for a fair stretch of time, eroding somewhat but still in place until crumbling before the stress of my father’s final months. I’d even explored going on Wegovey at one point, just for weight loss, but (since it was just for weight loss) my insurance wouldn’t cover it. So it’s not like I wasn’t aware it was a problem, nor that I had never tried to mitigate it, nor even that I had never had any success in doing so. But I don’t know if I ever really took it seriously enough. I would want to say I did—I certainly would have said I did at the time, just as I know that I am going to die at some point in the next fifty years even if it’s a hard fact to bear adequately in mind—except that what an economist might call my revealed preferences didn’t really show it. I took it seriously in thought, but not in such a way or to such an extent that I adequately addressed it.

Until last January, when at my annual physical I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.

That, somehow, was a wake-up call. Returning home in a state of shock, I changed my diet instantly, adopting a diet food plan designed to deal with my new condition. Since that time (in particular since the time, a week later, when a very helpful nutritionist walked me through the guidelines and options), I have stuck to it rigorously, with only the tinniest variations when circumstances permitted nothing else, and keeping to it entirely 98% or more of the time. My focus was more about what I ate than how much I ate—I did eat less than before, but that wasn’t the main effort. The main goal was eating better: radically reducing carbs, making sure to eat protein with them if I did have any, significantly upping the amount of vegetables I ate, and limiting myself to one desert a month. I also began, some months later, exercising, and I have at least so far kept it up. All of which is to say that I was living in a healthier way than I had in decades, or possibly ever.

But I didn’t lose all the weight. I did lose some: I dropped down to the point where I was, technically, no longer obese, merely overweight (not by much, but a line is a line). But there I stopped. Which might have been fine—my blood sugars remained under control, which was the key thing. Except that a few other indicators, which were off due to the diabetes (as well as many years of obesity and poor diet, to the extent that those can be separated), were still not where they ought to be. On a follow-up visit with my doctor, she said the treatment for those remaining conditions (which, while not immediately life-threatening, did need to be dealt with) was to lose more weight. But what else could I do? I had changed my diet, begun to exercise: in theory I could try to limit my diet still further—there was that remaining one desert a month I could cut out, for starters—but I was afraid that if I pushed things any farther it would not be sustainable. If I took on more I might crack, and lose the substantial progress I had made. And my doctor agreed.

So she referred me to a specialist, who put me on Ozempic—or, more precisely, the slightly more updated version, Mounjaro, which as I understand is basically second-generation Ozempic. (This is, admittedly, not a technical understanding: they are related but different drugs. But that is how it seems to be being used, as an improved version of Ozempic.) That is, I am now on a GLP-1 receptor agonist.2

These drugs are all the rage. Perhaps in a few years they will be revealed to have been a fad, or perhaps they will have been replaced with better ones, or perhaps they will turn out to have some bad long-term side effects and been discontinued—who knows. (Another possibility, of course, is that they will simply last and become part of our common health repertoire, like antidepressants or medication to treat high blood pressure.) But for now they are au courant: a lot of people are taking them—a poll last year estimated that a fairly unbelievable 12% of the American public are on them—and a lot of people (not an identical set) are talking about them; it’s a topic of interest.

And being on Mounjaro, even for the first two weeks, has been a genuinely weird experience.

So I thought I would tell you what it’s been like for me. Fair warning: this is simply a personal narrative, nothing more. While my essays are of course personal (writing personally being, of course, the backbone of the essay as a genre), they usually tend to touch on broader philosophical or literary or political topics at some point; this won’t. And, of course, it’s just my experience: anyone who takes this or similar drugs will have a slightly different one; this is an N of one. It’s certainly not a scientifically grounded report on the Effects of Mounjaro, about which I am unqualified to speak. It’s just what it was like for me, nothing more. So if that’s not of interest to you (and I wouldn’t blame you in the least), you should stop reading now.3 Feel free to go dig through the archives if you want something with more intellectual meat on its bones. But in case anyone is interested—and as I said, this is a popular topic and drug these days, so I figures some people might be—here is what it’s been like for me.

To start with, I began it somewhere between a week and ten days late. It arrived mid-week, but I wanted to start it on a Friday on the advice of my doctor, who said that because of the side effects it was a good idea to start just before the weekend when one has more time for feeling under the weather. But then a day or two later I got my covid booster, and it (as it has before) really knocked me back for a few days, and I thought that I ought to wait and not throw yet another new drug at my body right away. So I waited another week (until the following Friday) before starting—this was something important to do, but not so urgent that it couldn’t wait a week, so I did. But then it was time.

So just under two weeks ago I went and got the medicine out of the fridge. For those of you who don’t know, Mounjaro and other GLP1 agonists are self-administered injections, given once a week. They are stored in the fridge, and then taken out an hour or so prior to use to warm up. I have already used an entirely different injectable medication for a number of years, so I was used to this process and I didn’t expect it to be any different. In fact, the shots were a little better designed—GLP1 meds are popular, and I suppose more design work has gone into the user experience—in particular having a clever locking mechanism that you have to disengage before use rather than just putting the thing next to your leg or stomach. But otherwise it’s similar: take off the cap, put it in one of the approved locations, and press. So that’s what I did.

And nothing happened.

At least, I thought nothing happened: I heard the clicking that is supposed to mean that the shot was going in, but I didn’t actually feel anything. When I inject my other medication, it feels like, well, a shot: like taking a long, thin needle and sticking it into my flesh. If you want a sense of what it’s like, take a pin and stick it a quarter-inch or so into your leg.4 It’s worth it, it’s not the biggest deal, but you definitely notice it. Here, I hadn’t noticed a damn thing.

Somewhat reluctantly, I pulled the needle up off my leg, wondering what had happened and what I should do.

And there was a small dab of blood on the spot where I had pressed it.

So, I thought, it had worked—at least a little. I wasn’t actually sure, however, if any medication had actually gone into me. I thought briefly that I should try it again: press it to a different spot and hit the activation button a second time. But what if it had worked? I decided, after a bit of hemming and hawing, to wait another week and then try again with the second shot . Maybe, I thought, I had pulled it up too soon. Next time I would hold it there longer, maybe reread the instructions to see if I was doing in wrong, one way or another make sure it really goes in: and if that didn’t work, I’d talk to the pharmacist, maybe even get a nurse to watch me do it and see what the hell I was doing wrong. So I decided to simply wait a week and try again with shot two.

It’s not like I expected it to do much right away. My doctor had explained to me that there are various doses, and you have to experiment to get the right one. If you look at the image above, you’ll see the three doses shown are 5, 10 and 15mg: those are, I believe, the available standard dosages. But I wasn’t even on those yet. I was starting out at 2.5mg: half of the lowest standard dose. This was, I understood (perhaps wrongly) designed to see how bad the side effects were, to get my body used to the medicine, and to let it build up in my system. After a month on that subclinical dose, I would have a follow-up appointment, at which my doctor would talk to me about the side effects, see if I was adjusting ok, and if all was going well would then prescribe for me a real medicinal dose: 5mg. That, she had said, might be enough, or it might not—we’d have to see. 2.5mg definitely wouldn’t cut it: she didn’t even write me a refill for that, since I would only be taking that dose for one month before going up. Overall, I had gotten the impression that GLP-1 agonists worked like antidepressants: they took a while to build up in your system, and showed their effects gradually. I didn’t really expect to see any changes in my appetite or weight or anything until I went up to 5mg at least.

But the next day I began to think that I had been wrong, and that the medication had entered my system and the I-can’t-even-feel-it pinprick had actually performed as intended and given me my first (admittedly subclinical) dose of the medication, because I began experiencing some of the classic side effects. Not everyone experiences them, and of those who do, some do only early on in their taking the medicine as their bodies adjust to being on it, whereas some get them every week for a day or so after the day they inject it, and (I think) some unfortunate souls suffer them continuously while on it. I wasn’t sure which category I would fall into; that was part of the point of starting me out at 2.5mgs, I thought. But the next day it seemed that I wouldn’t be in the “absolutely no side effects” category, because I spent the day feeling rather more nauseous than usual and burping a lot, both among the most common side effects. I found all this reassuring; it looked like the drug had actually gone into my system after all. I hoped that the nausea and burping would be an only-at-the-start thing rather than a every-week-as-long-as-I’m-on-the-drug thing, but at least I’d begun the lengthy process of getting my body used to it, and would be able to go up to an actually possibly-effective dose in a month.

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The first indication I had that the medication was doing something more than simply giving me side effects and getting my body used to the medication came that evening.

We had gone to dinner at some friends’ house. One of them had cooked a vegetarian stew, and she is an excellent cook, so the dinner was very tasty. I had also brought a salad, largely to be hospitable, of course, but also since, with my new diet, it helps to make sure that there will be some plain veggies around to make sure I am balancing my intake as I ought to be. I had a first fairly small helping, and then a second, and was reaching for the pot to have a third—it was really good, and I tended to eat more than I had yet (my diet was, as I said, more about quantity than quality), and I would normally have been still hungry after two modest portions. So I reached for the ladle…

And stopped.

It was the oddest feeling. It wasn’t that I was full, precisely. It certainly wasn’t that I didn’t want to eat any more in the sense that it wouldn’t have tasted good. It was that I just… didn’t want to, full stop. It felt like some strange program in my brain, as though I had been given a subconscious instruction to stop here and did. It didn’t feel like will, it didn’t feel like lack of hunger—although, as I thought about it, I wasn’t actually hungry any more: not full, but not hungry. It just felt like something clicking in my brain saying: that’s it.

It was like nothing that had ever happened to me before. I had certainly not always eaten until I was stuffed, or even until I wasn’t hungry, but I always could, and almost always wanted to. Now there was some strange barrier to it. Maybe, I thought, the drug had actually gone into my system after all.

But had it? I wasn’t even on a medicinal dosage yet—right? And anyway was that what it was supposed to feel like? I had gotten the impression that it would simply slowly dampen my appetite and that I would, more or less without even noticing it, eat slightly less over time. This was way more dramatic than that. So maybe it was just some sort of random neural firing for some unknown reason. It was too early to be the medicine. Wasn’t it? I felt somewhat unsure.

Then came breakfast the next morning.

When I had fully adopted the new diet in late January (that is, a week after my diagnosis, after my nutritionist gave me some good guidelines rather than the panicked system I had cobbled together immediately after the diagnosis and tried to follow the first week) I had adopted a new breakfast: plain Greek nonfat yogurt with fruit mixed in, berries by preference, but sometimes apples. This was a suggestion straight from my nutritionist: she had mentioned that as a good option, and it sounded easy. It wasn’t absolutely the only thing I ever ate for breakfast—sometimes when my family was having scrambled eggs I’d have those instead—but I’d guess that something like six days a week on average I’d have my by-now standard breakfast. So the next morning I got up, portioned out my breakfast, and sat down and ate it.

Or rather ate half of it.

Looking at the rest of my bowl, I didn’t want it. The notion of eating it almost sickened me. It wasn’t that I was full (although I certainly was no longer hungry): it was as if I had had an aversion therapy to eating, and the mere idea of eating was making me nauseous. I couldn’t quite believe it. But I stuck the plate with the rest of the breakfast in the fridge, and went about my day.

I wasn’t hungry until lunch.

At this point I emailed a close friend who had been on a GLP1 agonist for a few years, and who also happened to be trained as a medical doctor. After outlining the experiences I have just described, I asked:

Could this really be the Mounjaro affecting me this quickly? I thought it took a while to kick in… On the other hand I don’t recall this happening before. Could it be psychosomatic? What does psychosomatic even mean when you’re talking about a medicine that is supposed to have psychological effects?… Anything to share, either personal experience or medical knowledge or simply random opinions and speculations?

My friend emailed me back and said: yep, that’s the medicine. It is that quick. And that’s what it’s like.

It seems I had begun.

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Over the rest of the first week I had the very strange experience of being a stranger in a strange body. I felt all the continual sense of newness and uncertainty that one does in traveling in a foreign country, but just about what was going on inside me. It wasn’t scary—I felt (whether through natural inclination or a side effect of the medication) fairly objective about it, as though it were a scientific phenomenon I was viewing rather than a health issue I was experiencing. What it was was weird.

For breakfast I would typically have half, or maybe less, of what I used to eat—but a few days I didn’t eat breakfast at all, simply not being bothered. I found that if I wanted a snack, I should make myself half of what I used to eat for snacks; but also I have them much less often—either I have a snack and no lunch, or I have a small lunch but no snacks at all at least until late afternoon. Sometimes then I will have a snack—but whereas before I would have a bunch of vegetables with humus or peanut butter, now I will have one stalk of celery with peanut butter, or a handful of baby carrots with humus, and that will be enough. My dinners have been small too: I have begun getting them in a small bowl, because it helps me not serve myself too much—I have a great many habits about how to portion out food for myself I am having to unlearn quite quickly.

I have had (as I suppose most people have had) a few weeks in my life where I ate very little. The two I recall were one week when I was in high school while I was recovering from surgery, and once when I tried an elimination diet to see if it would help some medical conditions and thus ate nothing but rice for ten days.5 There are probably a few others I’m not thinking of—weeks I was sick or preparing for a medical procedure (it’s not a whole week but the days leading up to a colonoscopy are no fun). But only a handful. And those were all strange in some ways. This was an otherwise normal week—and I ate, not quite as little as I did in those weeks, but less than I ever otherwise ate. My wife, who is a thin, slightly-built woman who in general eats fairly little, said in amazement “I’m out-eating you.”

Only two or three times in the first week did I feel really hungry (in a way that I used to experience several times a day). In those cases I had a meal, but even then it was less than a normal meal, and then I would feel quite full. There were days when I ate very little altogether.

Even weirder is what it feels like to not eat, or not want to eat, or not be hungry. This is not all one thing: so far, it has manifested in a number of different ways. Sometimes I would simply not be hungry; sometimes I would be hungry but get full very quickly. Those were the experiences I was anticipating. But at other times I felt very mildly hungry, and like I could eat, but simply didn’t have quite enough motivation to do so. Often I would simply forget to eat—either it wouldn’t cross my mind at all, or it would do so only briefly, and then I’d get caught up in work and not do it. Still other times I would feel a slight desire to eat (say, a desire to eat something I oughtn’t)—but would then suppress the desire without any difficulty, far more easily than I would have before.

Stranger still were times when it felt like I was nauseous at the thought of eating—not like I was full or sick to my stomach, but like the entire notion made me feel queasy. It was, as it had been that first evening, like I had unknowingly had some aversion therapy to the process of eating and didn’t want to do it without knowing why. I think that this aspect has abated somewhat as I have gotten better at not taking too much and not eating too much out of sheer force of habit—all my old muscle memory when it comes to putting food on my plate or making plans for meals are now wildly out of wack. In general it’s been hard figuring out how to ladle out portions. I’m learning, trying to err on the side of too little: it’s easy to go get more, and feels lousy to have eaten too much. A good first stab seems to be half of what I used to eat: and even that I often simply don’t finish, not being hungry or simply not feeling like it or feeling like maybe the idea of eating made me ill.

I have still more descriptions of what it’s been like, and am genuinely unsure if these are different descriptions of the same phenomenon or a series of different yet closely-related experiences that I am describing. But I have felt, looking at food, both hungry and that if I eat another bite it will make me feel overstuffed. I have felt simultaneously like I want to eat and don’t, or want to eat and can’t. Sometimes I feel a bit queasy and genuinely can’t tell if I am hungry or too full: something is going on with my stomach but (foreigner as I am) I can’t tell what it means.

The side effects, mercifully, have abated somewhat. After the first day I didn’t feel much nausea. The closest I came was that there were times when I felt a little off in my stomach, and couldn’t quite tell if I were full or hungry; in those times I would tend to not eat. Or there were times when I would eat a little, and then all of a sudden feel full, even bloated, and feel slightly nauseous the way you might after a huge Thanksgiving dinner. But the fairly constant nausea didn’t return. There have been a few other side effects, but nothing too far out of the ordinary or worth dwelling on.

The burping was interesting. It happened only when I ate too much: if I was careful about what I ate I didn’t feel it at all. (I suppose this was true of at least a portion of the remaining occurrences of nausea as well.) But this didn’t mean it didn’t happen, because it was really hard to tell how much to eat. My old habits were useless as guidelines. Feeling so much less hungry made it hard to tell what to do too: I would tentatively eat a few bites, feel okay, eat another… and suddenly feel like I had eaten too much. By the end of the week the burping was better, but I think that was as much because I was better and figuring out how to eat as anything.

My general mental model of side effects are that a medicine does two separate things, effect A and effect B (or many different things, such that there are A₁, A₂… and B₁, B₂…, etc.), which are unrelated: you want A but not B but get both and have to decide if it’s worth it to you to get A at the price of also getting B. But at least for this medicine, for me, that is not how it has worked (save for that single opening day of nausea): side effects are entirely part of the main effect, and it is just part and parcel of handling how they manifest. It’s not that there’s suppressed appetite and burping: it’s that if I don’t figure out how to manage my new appetite, and go over (even a little over, which makes it hard to avoid), I burp. I have to learn how to work with the new, strange body I suddenly have. It’s something I’m working on.

One of the intriguing things about GLP1 agonists is that people have reported them as having other effects, too—other mental effects. In particular they are rumored to help with self control in other areas—focus, avoiding procrastination, that sort of thing. I obviously would never have gone on the drug for that purpose, but I was interested to see if it did anything. To be sure, my focus had been reasonably good in the weeks and months before I went on Mounjaro, but certainly far from perfect, and there have been times in my life when I slipped into truly ruinous internet addiction and the like. So I was interested to see if anything like that happened to me.

For that, however, I think the results are simply ambiguous at this point. I think that there has been some effect along these lines? But I am not sure: as I said, I was doing pretty well (but far from perfectly) before, and I have been doing pretty (but still far from perfectly) since. I think the “pretty well” is a bit stronger, and the exceptions a bit weaker? Maybe? But it is simply too hard for me to say. As time goes on I will try to pay attention to my attention, and see how it works, and if it’s better; if I notice any changes (for good or ill) I will either add them to this essay or (more likely) put them in a future sequel. For now the data is muddied, and I don’t feel I have a handle on what’s happening, or whether anything really is.

And as I said in the email to my friend, when the effect you are looking for is psychological in the first place, what’s medical and what’s placebo seems like a very tricky question—certainly in practice, and perhaps even in theory, too.

One final thing that may or may not be a mental side effect. One remarkable thing is that since I began my new diet in January I’ve had remarkably few cravings. Not none; and certainly I’ve wished intently that I could eat food that was in front of me that I shouldn’t eat. But overall it’s been reasonably manageable. But in the first week after I began Mounjaro I found myself on several occasions craving, really craving, chocolate. I have no idea why. I don’t know if it’s an odd side effect, or perhaps if it’s my body wanting some vital something it isn’t getting due to my reduced eating, or if it’s simply a coincidence. But it’s happened on a number of occasions, so I thought I’d note it.

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A week after I took my first dose I had a doctor’s appointment6 for an unrelated issue. As usual at these appointments, they weighed me when I first walked in—something I had always thought of, and indeed had sometimes in the moment jokingly referred to as, a ritual humiliation. But it was a ritual, and of course I participated as always: I put down my bag, took of my shoes, and watched the scale adjust.

It said I had lost seven pounds.

This seemed flatly unbelievable. I asked if the scale was reliable. The tech admitted that these things varied somewhat. I asked if they had another scale, and she obligingly took me around the corner to a different scale (of the same type), and weighed me on that.

Seven pounds.

The tech was unmoved, and ushered me in to the examination room for the further rituals of blood pressure, oxygen levels, pulse and temperature. Eventually, however, when I spoke to the PA, I mentioned this number to her. She goggled at me. “Really?” she said.

“Thank you!” I replied. “That is the response I was hoping for.”

She said that she would have thought two to three pounds would be reasonable, but seven was a lot. I don’t recall whether or not I mentioned that I was still on what I thought was supposed to be a subclinical dose.

That afternoon, I gave myself the second injection. Again, I barely felt it—I almost want to say I didn’t feel it at all. I held it there a long time, until all the clicking had stopped, and was again relieved to see a spot of blood in the spot I had used, framed by the indentation marks from the injector pen where I had pressed it into my skin.

When I went jogging that afternoon, I found—for the first time—that I had to keep hiking up my elastic-banned running shorts, which kept slipping down. My wife has told me to keep an eye on how my clothes fit, but for the most part that’s not something I’ve paid much attention to over the years.7 But this I noticed.

I wrote most of the above a few days ago, shortly after my second dose of the medicine. Indeed, I wrote a large chunk of it one morning after waking but before having anything to eat. Around mid-morning, however, I decided I did want at least a bite of breakfast, got up and made myself my newly usual sized breakfast of yogurt and fruit—half of what I would have had two weeks before, or less. At the same time, my wife came and got a few corn chips to munch on. Something about the salt and fat and taste of them smelled really good. In the old days (by which I mean two weeks ago) I would have rigorously refrained from having any, since I didn’t eat carbs alone any more, but boy did they smell tasty.

“Do you want one?” she asked. “They don’t have that many carbs.”

I hesitated. The temptation was strong, but I could have not. Still it did smell good. And surely one wouldn’t hurt. Right? So I picked up one corn chip and ate it. It was tasty!

But it was plenty. In fact, it was more than plenty: it was too much. I felt like Monty Python’s diner after the wafer thin mint. The burping, which as I’ve said had more or less subsided over the previous days, returned with a vengeance. I am sitting here, typing this sentence, burping like I had just gorged myself… on my half-breakfast and single, extra, wafer-thin corn chip.

This essay will post this afternoon, the day before my third dose. The second week has been much like the first. I continue to struggle with not serving myself too much and not eating too much—by which I mean one extra bite, as that often seems the difference between “fine” and “terribly bloated”. I continue at times to feel off in a way that somehow manages to be ambiguous between nausea, hunger, or and being overfull.

The biggest difference of this week was (alas for Ns of one) unrelated—I got food poisoning—although it compounded the effects of the medicine in some ways, and it was hard to tell whether the nausea and other symptoms were from the food poisoning, the medicine, their interaction, or both separately. The food poisoning was interesting in one respect: it was familiar. As I lay in bed, trembling with my stomach hurting violently, I didn’t feel the strangeness that I have felt otherwise on Mounjaro. That was being sick: not common (thank goodness) but not at all unfamiliar. It helped drive home the degree to which the feeling of being a foreigner in my own body is not the equivalent of other health problems or medicinal effects,8 but is genuinely something new, other, uncanny. After a night of disturbing dreams, I have awoken to find myself in a body that is almost but not precisely my own.

But strange and unsettling as this is, I am not scared of or reluctant to do it. It remains, above all, fascinating, in a way that the weird and the strange are. I am reminded of the standard of review suggested by philosopher L. A. Paul in her book Transformative Experience (Oxford, 2014), that

…you decide whether you want to discover how your life will unfold given the new type of experience. If you choose to undergo a transformative experience and its outcomes, you choose the experience for the sake of discovery itself, even if this entails a future that involves stress, suffering, or pain… that is, we choose to become the kind of person—without knowing what that will be like—that these experiences will make us into. (pp. 120, 123)

I don’t know if, in the end, being on Mounjaro will be a full-on transformative experience of the sort Paul discusses in her book (where she treats such examples as whether or not to have a child, choosing between two very different careers, and whether or not to become a vampire). It might be a bit small for that. But in any event, the same sorts of considerations apply, albeit less decisively since here there are other, simpler, more rational considerations which are preeminent, namely, health benefits, which is why I was prescribed the medicines, and why I took them in the first place.

But we do, ultimately, have say in these matters. The doctors can prescribe, but I am the one who has to inject the stuff into my body. I could even probably get a doctor to rewrite my desire into medical advice: depending on which of the many equally true sentences I say about the side effects, I could get them dismissed as bearable or taken as not worth the benefits. We like to think of doctors as judges who decide, and of course in many cases they are, but often they are not: and even when they are, we are often allowed advocates to press the case this way and that.

Of course I want to press on if I can: it is the doctor-recommended treatment for an ongoing health condition. And, like most overweight people, I would like to lose the extra weight for its own sake. But when I take my third dose tomorrow, I think one thing guiding my hand on the plunger of the needle will be a desire to see where this all goes, what life in the body that awaits at the end of it is like.9

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I need to go have a bite of lunch—although probably not any more than that.

Postscript. As I said above, this essay is a departure for me. I am not saying that my essays aren’t personal—a number of them have included a fair amount of personal narrative—but they usually aren’t merely personal this way. So let me know what you think. If there is interest—and if anything new happens, and not just more of the same—I will write a follow-up to this piece. If not, well, more essays (as well as stories) are in the works.

Thank you for reading. If anyone has their own experiences to offer, please leave them in the comments! And if anyone has any follow-up questions, I will entertain them in the comments.10

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That is the basic of this post: the story (a novella really, it’s over 28,000 words long) is available, go read it. There’s a lot more words, but none of them are as good as the words in the story, so only read on if you need convincing and/or have already read the story and are curious about some of the details that make up the margins of the story —no spoilers, just behind-the-scenes chatter. In fact, the first part is a general reintroduction to Retcon as a whole; if you remember about the series and just want the behind-the-scenes chatter about this particular installment, jump to here. (The most independently interesting, only-a-minor-connection-to-the-story section is here.)

But go read the story!!

Read Retcon series

It’s Been A While. Remind Me What This Whole Retcon Thing Is?

Retcon is my current major creative project, a mosaic story (that is, a story made up of smaller stories) projected to run for twenty-seven stories in three movements (think a series of a TV show or a particular run of a comic) of nine stories each. As with other mosaic stories, the individual stories build upon each other, but they also differ in focus (so the main characters in one will be minor characters in another, and vice-versa), in genre, in format, etc—a (hopefully) playful and fun variety.

As of this most recent publication eleven stories are now available: the entirety of movement one, Necessity, and the first two installments of the second movement, two, Contingency. Here’s a list of the stories so far:

Necessity:

1. Zero Second

2. Years Scattered Like Fallen Leaves

3. Xu Ming’s Second Time Down

4. While Unbeknownst to the Rest the Woman in the Yellow Dress Was Also a Time Traveler

5. Very Soon And Yet Still Very Far Away

6. Unless Another Escape to Tell Thee

7. Thus in Time Are We All Devoured

8. Screaming in Circles

9. Retcon

Contingency:

1. Quartet for the End of the Beginning of the End of Time

2. Paradigm Shift: Paradigm Slippage: Paradigm Boogie-Woogie

3. Ordinal Unknown (forthcoming autumn, 2025)

The stories started out as short stories—well, technically novelettes as professional writers reckon these things, but short stories to the general reader1—but all of the recent installments have drifted over to the realm of the novella.

Fine, but what’s the story about?

A fair question! Well, here’s the blurb I wrote for the series as a whole:

In 1951, a pair of scientists at Cornell University discovered time-travel. With the specter of the atomic bomb in the immediate background, they decided not to replicate Einstein’s mistake of informing the political authorities about something that might turn out to enable a terrible weapon to be built. Instead, they decided to set up a clandestine research program, investigating the phenomenon, while swearing all those who came to work on it to utter secrecy.

Forty years later, in 1991, a time traveler returns from forty years further into the future 2031 with some disturbing news: no traveler and no message has ever come from any later point in time than the moment at which that time traveler themself left: April 4, 2031, at 3:56 in the afternoon. No one knows why. All they know is that something must have happened to prevent anyone from traveling or messaging further back beyond that point—a point they come to refer to as “zero second”.

This is the story of what happens next… if “next” is the right word for a narrative which, in the way of things, is necessarily non-linear.

Obviously, in a long story—and this will fill three fat books once it’s done—the story is not about one thing all the way through, but that’s the starting point.

Wait, Do the Movements Have Titles?

Oh, you noticed that, attentive reader? Well, yes. This is a story in 27 stories, but it is also a story in three movements, and each of those have a title (which will be the title for the collections when, eventually, it becomes a trilogy of books. Someone who is good at marketing2 would have had a Title Reveal, but I never got my act together to do that, and sort of let them slip here and there—not so you’d have noticed necessarily, but enough that it wasn’t a Big Reveal. But yes, the movements have titles. The first movement as a whole is entitled Necessity. The second movement is entitled Contingency. And I will hold the third title back for a while, as a feeble and probably misguided attempt to do Marketing.

Did You Just Imply That There’s Going to Be a Print Copy at Some Point?

There will be: I will gather up each movement (nine stories each) and publish them as a trilogy of both ebooks and as actual print books. There will be a few extras in the collected volume, too. (Anyone who subscribes to the series as a whole will receive an ebook copy of the collected volumes as part of that subscription.)

When will they come out?

Well, I just was months and months late on a single !@#$% installment. I am not making any promises about the collected editions! The best I can say is: as soon as The Accident3 allows.

And when they do, volume one will be titled Necessity and volume two will be entitled Contingency.

Enough About This Series as a Whole, What’s This Particular Story About?

All right, I will again share a blurb, in this case the blurb to this specific story:

It's the same old story: Girl Meets Boy, Girl Looses Boy, Girl travels through time and meets herself, and Boy again, only it's not quite the same Boy, and… er, try again: It's the same old story: You're trying to change the world, but it's trying to change you, too, and it wins, and it's you that's changed and not the world, only you're part of the world so it's different, too, and watch the sexes of the Professor and Doctor because something fishy is going on there… er, take three: It's as easy as ABC: A is for Beginnings, B is for Fallback Options, C is for Average. Things are changing, and it's hard to find love and make the world better when standing on shifting sands. Same old story, right?

That blurb is—you might have noticed—terrible. (In general, I suck at blurbs.4) It’s main virtue, I think, is to be cute for anyone who reads it after reading the story: the precise opposite of what a blurb is to be. So let me just say this is a story about love and research in a time travel universe, and leave it at that.

Tell Me About the Cover

I have, of course, committed the sin of photocomics before; while I am mostly a penitent to this particular sin, I figured that one set of sequential images (among the 27 that will make up the covers to the individual stories) was not too much, and after due consideration I decided to “spend”, as it were, my one comics cover on this installment.

The reason is fairly straightforward. As I’ve said before, I tend to view the covers as illustrations less of the story per se than of the title—so that you can think of the entire work as a diptych, with one photograph and one story both on the same theme. Well, in this case the title— “Paradigm Shift: Paradigm Slippage: Paradigm Boogie-Woogie” was all about change, and a series of increasingly skew changes. So a comic seemed the best way to capture that:

The idea is to capture, in still images, a magic trick: a real rose is turned into an origami rose; the rose is set on fire; the flaming rose becomes a bird (in this case, our late, beloved pet lovebird, Snark, whose name of course also graces the name of the press which publishes both Happenstance and Retcon5). I am reasonably pleased with how the image came out, with one potential issue, namely, that I am not sure the image is quite as legible as I had hoped: in the third panel what you are seeing is a real rose, but in the fifth it’s an origami rose. But I fear that my beloved family (whose members collaborated on its construction) did it too well, and it looks too much like the rose. It’s supposed to look a tad artificial! (I hope, of course, that i am wrong about this.) In the future, I will make sure to engage sufficiently incompetent origamists for any such project I might embark upon.

Is There Some Funny Story About the First Epigraph(s) To This Volume?

Why, yes, there is, how funny you should happen to ask.

There are two (arguably three) epigraphs to this story. Here is the first one (or, depending on how you count, the first two):

Of true things, one knows the end and the beginning.

From the beginning to the end, one knows the truth of things.

— Two possible readings of a line from the reversible poem The Star Gauge by Sū Huì, translated by Michelle Metail & Jody Gladding

This will probably take a little explaining.

First of all, it is from a book by French author (and Oulipian) Michèle Métail, which was then translated into English by Jody Gladding under the title Wild Geese Returning: Chinese Reversible Poems. Métail’s book is a combination of analysis and discussion of the form and a selection of the poems, so the poetry is (presumably? I don’t think it’s clarified) an English translation of a French translation of (classical) Chinese poetry. (That’s why I described it as a joint translation.)

Reversible poems are this amazing cultural artifact. My sense is that they are enabled by the unusual structure and nature of classical Chinese—they are apparently possible in contemporary Mandarin (the book mentions that “a few examples of circular poems sometimes appear in journals, under the rubric of games or curiosities”, but adds that “they do not figure into recent official histories of Chinese literature.” The book, however, contains examples running from the fifth century up through the end of the Qing dynasty (1911). It is, frankly, amazing and cool that such things exist at all.

— But the very first such poem is the most amazing of all. The form was invented by a fourth-centurty poet named Sū Huì (also called in the book Su Shi, for reasons which are not quite clear to me, although confusingly enough there is a different Chinese poet from seven centuries later of that name). The later poems were “mere essays in the craft”, but Sū Huì created a flat-out masterpiece, which contains (depending on who’s counting) at least 200 and possibly as many as 12,820 different poems, when read in different (quite reasonable) orders. (It is worth recalling, in this context, that classical Chinese did not have a standard reading order, and could be written and read left to right, right to left, top to bottom, or bottom to top, so that all these orders were, in that context, perfectly natural.) Here’s a picture of the poems, with subsections highlighted in different colors. Note that this gives the entire poem twice, once on each side: the left side is in the simplified characters currently in use in mainland China, and the right side is in the traditional characters that Sū Huì would have written.

If you’re curious, the line I quoted two versions of (贞 物 知 终 始) is in the right-side purple section (near but not in the middle); it is the third of the four lines, counting from the middle out, which is to say the innermost of the two highlighted below:

I chose this epigraph because, of course, it fit the story, but I can’t deny that I was also swayed by the fact that the line could be read in two such different ways, which seemed appropriate for a “paradigm shift” story. I considered using a longer excerpt, but went with only the section that really fit the story I was writing. But here are two versions of the quatrain (i.e. the entire block of four lines that the single line is from):

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

From the beginning to the end, one knows the truth of things:
The beauty of a face is transformed by the despondency of the look;
The literati who leaves wanders far from the virtue of the sage;
In the pine that wastes away, one recognizes the cold of the year.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

The cold year is recognizable in the dead pines;
The virtuous sage is distinguished from the wandering literati;
The depressed look transforms a beautiful face:
Of true things one knows the beginning and the end.

— Two (of sixteen) possible readings of one section of Sū Huì's poem The Star Gauge, translated by Michelle Métail & Jody Gladding

Note that Métail does not give all sixteen possible options, but since each individual line can be read in only two ways, with the versions she does give you can reconstruct all sixteen possible readings. (Which, it is worth noting, is not every possible combination of two variations of four lines.)

In general, Métail gives only small, wonderful snippets of the poem. It is clearly not possible to present a full translation in a way that would read at all naturally. But since any given line has (I think). only two readings—the number of poems comes from the combinatorics of the different orders in which the lines can be combined—it should be possible to lay them out, giving two readings of each line, and then instructions for how one is reasonably able to combine them.

Métail’s book is wonderful and I recommend it to all.

What’s Up With the Second (or maybe third) Epigraph?

Here’s the other epigraph (I think of it as two, not three) to the story:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

I passed a stranger on the street
And from this one I'd never meet
Arose a world within my mind
Where we were lovers, souls entwined.
I saw us amble, arm in arm,
Just to taste air's early charm,
And saw in each routine day's kiss
An earthly scrap of heaven's bliss.
Then round a bend the stranger danced:
The world birthed from a second's glance
Dissolved into the mind's chill air
And left no mark but trace of care.

— W. H. Auden, unpublished fragment from some other time_β

This is, of course, not anything Auden wrote in our familiar time_β, but there is some version of time_β in which he did, and I have quoted it from that.

(This is not the first time I have quoted a verse which is not quite from the poet I have associated with it—the other is the epigraph to the story “While Unbeknownst to the Rest the Woman in the Yellow Dress Was Also a Time Traveler“, which no one has yet noticed, but which I admit I rather liked—and it will not be the last, either.)

What’s Up With The Sub-Section Titles In the Story?

It was fun, and (in several different senses) they fit. Beyond that, res ipsa loquitur.

Do The Sub-Section Titles Give a Clue As to How A (Reverse) Abecedary Will Have Twenty-Seven Parts?

Yes.

If you scroll back up and look at the story titles—particularly the first letter of each of the story titles—you will notice a pattern. If you then remember that this is a 27-story series (not a 26-story one)—three movements of nine stories each—then you might wonder how this is going to work. If you read the latest story, there is a Clue. (Or what’s more obvious than a clue? A giveaway?—one of them.)

Although if, before planning out this series, I had read Kathryn Schulz’s marvelous memoir Lost and Found—which of course I couldn’t have, since it was only published once the series was well underway—and, in the course of reading it, encountered this passage:

Until the late nineteenth century, the final character of the English alphabet was not the letter Z but a word: “and.” That word was written—on countless slates and blackboards and grade school primers—as “&,” so that the whole sequence looked like this:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z &

The twenty-seventh of those symbols dates back to ancient Rome, when scribes, resorting to cursive to write more rapidly, linked the two letters in “εt,” the Latin word for “and.”… It makes sense that this stray character got appended to the English alphabet. Students had to learn to read and write it, after all, and it was at least as tricky to form as R or Z. The fact that it represents an entire word was hardly disqualifying; so can A and I and even O (as in “O Come, All Ye Faithful” and “O death, where is thy sting?”). But the “&” did present a unique problem. If you recite the alphabet with it stuck to the end, as schoolchildren across the English-speaking world were routinely required to do, you sound as if you are leaving your listener hanging: “…X, Y, Z, and.” And what? It’s not true, no matter what old-fashioned grammarians might tell you, that you shouldn’t start a sentence with “and,” but ending something that way is a different story. To solve this problem, students were taught to use the Latin phrase per se, meaning “in itself,” to indicate that they meant the character, not the word. Thus instead of saying “X, Y, Z, and,” they dutifully said, “X, Y, Z, and per se and”—a phrase that, over time, grew blurry from repetition. It is our language, then, that turned the Latin “&” into the ampersand.

— Then I might have squared this particular circle differently.

Perhaps for another abecedary.

Like Métail’s book, Shulz’s book is marvelous and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

After, of course, you’ve read my story,.

You’re Going to Give Us the Links to Buy the Story Again Before the End, Aren’t You?

Of course:

You can buy it at my web site (where you can buy just the individual ebook or buy a subscription to the whole series, including all past & future issues), or you can buy it at Amazon (including non-US Amazons like Amazon UK), Apple, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and Smashwords.

Read Retcon now!

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