Category: Culture

The church sees rot everywhere but in itself


“Tintern Abbey and Elegant Figures,” by Samuel Colman, 1780-1845

Conservative minds are obsessed with institutional decay. They can’t stop writing books about it. To the conservative mind, change is an existential threat, as though the Dark Ages were a utopia that we must return to.

Do you remember William F. Buckley Jr.’s famous quote? “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop.”

Consider Niall Ferguson’s The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die. Or consider another book that is regarded as a classic among conservatives, Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. I have not read these books (nor am I going to).

The church knows that people are leaving it, particularly young people. The American church knows that, in Europe, secularization is decades ahead of secularization in America. Church people see where it’s going. Though there are those in the church who can reconcile religion with social change, most church people cannot. Those with conservative minds cannot conceive of the possibility that the church itself might be a two-thousand-year-old problem that society is finally beginning to solve — by ditching the church. Instead, the Manichean mind (which can only see the church as good), believes that the decline of the church reflects (and is actually caused by) a surge in the wickedness of the world. They believe that they are in a culture war, and that they are losing. Their panic and their desperation is leading to debate among the faithful about the church giving its blessing to ugly tactics to try to stop the losses. The tactics aren’t new, but the blessing would be.

It is shocking to observe that it isn’t just Trump voters in flyover country who are in on this. It’s also theologians and Christian intellectuals.

The Atlantic is alerting us to what’s going on with a piece published this week, What a Clash Between Conservatives Reveals. Alan Jacobs, the author of the Atlantic piece, is drawing our attention to an article published last month in First Things, “America’s most influential journal of religion and public life.” The article is by Sohrab Ahmari, a converted Catholic of Iranian descent. Ahmari writes:

Civility and decency are secondary values. They regulate compliance with an established order and orthodoxy. We should seek to use these values to enforce our order and our orthodoxy, not pretend that they could ever be neutral. To recognize that enmity is real is its own kind of moral duty.

I believe this translates to: Christians should make use of incivility and indecency if that’s what it takes to “enforce our order and our orthodoxy.” If I’m reading it correctly, then isn’t that the evangelical rationale for seeing Donald Trump as having been sent by God?

As Jacobs makes clear in the Atlantic, not all conservative Christians agree with Ahmari. Still, it seems to be taken for granted by all conservative Christians that we of the “secular left” are not “playing fair in the culture wars.” This unfairness from the secular left is never explained.

In any case, a mind that believes that it has not just the right, but a duty, to enforce its notions of order and orthodoxy on the rest of us — whether with or without civility and decency — is a mind that is too primitive for a discussion about fairness. A mind like Sohrab Ahmari’s can believe that he’s defending the church. But what he’s really doing is driving the better people away, hastening the rot.

Tone, irony, snark, and smarm


H.L. Mencken. Portrait by Carl Van Vecten, 1932, Library of Congress

To see similarities between snark and gun violence is wrong of me, I admit. Both are epidemic. But one is deadly, and the other merely wounds. But I had been thinking about two different posts that I might write here, one on snark, and the other on shooting guns (forthcoming, later). In that state of mind, I came across a long piece in this morning’s New York Times by Gregory Gibson. The piece is A Gun Killed My Son. So Why Do I Want to Own One?

The piece is beautifully written. It reflects the soul-searching and self-awareness that the author has gained in his years-long quest (it definitely was a quest) to come to terms with the senseless, wasteful death of his son, a college student. But, if you read this piece, don’t expect a clear conclusion wrapped in vellum and tied with string. It’s a lot of questions with few, if any, answers.

So it is with irony, snark, and smarm. A lot of culture pieces have been written on these three things in the past twenty years. You can take sides if you want, just as you can take sides on the heated subject of gun control. Or, like the author of the gun piece in this morning’s New York Times, you might see that, the closer you look at the subject, the more complicated it becomes.

The cultural warfare over irony, snark, and smarm started around 1999 with a young man named Jedediah Purdy. We first heard about Purdy in a New York Times article, “Against Irony,” that was published on Sept. 5, 1999. Not long after that, when Purdy was only 24, his first book was published, For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today. Almost overnight — among the literati, anyway — the subject of irony became a battleground, like gun control. There were those who wanted to (and did) rip the liberal and kind-hearted Purdy to shreds with snark and irony. And there were those (like me) who have followed Purdy’s career ever since.

It was more than ten years later when Purdy took a direct hit from a nuke dropped on him by Tom Scocca. The piece was “On Smarm,” published at Gawker in December 2013. It’s a long piece, and Scocca expends quite a few paragraphs to take Purdy apart with snark. I’ll quote only the first and last paragraphs here:

First paragraph:

A Fable From the Age of Smarm: Once upon a time, in the high hills of West Virginia, there lived a young man named Jedediah Purdy. Jedediah was fond of animals and of taking long walks through the woods; he liked to eat fruit that was not entirely ripe. His parents had gone into the hills to get away from electricity and the corruptions of civilization, to raise their children apart from “the hollowness of mainstream living,” as the New York Times Magazine put it. They built their own home and slaughtered their own pigs.

Last paragraph:

Jedediah Purdy is now a professor at Duke Law [later Columbia] and has been a visiting professor at Yale Law, the school at which he got his own J.D., after he graduated from Harvard, after he graduated from Exeter. For this, pigs were butchered. Such are the fruits of renouncing the mainstream.

Personally, I find Scocca as irksome as Scocca finds Purdy. But I must agree with Scocca that irony — and even its weaponized version, snark — can serve (like guns) a noble and defensive purpose if in the right hands. However, no background check and permit are required to employ the weapon of snark against people. Anyone can do it.

Scocca reminds us of the enduring power that snark and irony can have when discharged by those who are morally sane and gifted as writers:

One curious fact about this long view is that it’s quite untrue. I can’t recall ever, unless compelled by duty, rereading a Malcolm Gladwell article. What I have reread is Mencken on the Scopes Trial, Hunter Thompson on Richard Nixon, and Dorothy Parker on most things—to say nothing of Orwell on poverty and Du Bois on racism, or David Foster Wallace on the existential horror of a leisure cruise. This belief that oblivion awaits the naysayers and the snarkers shouldn’t survive a glance at the bookshelf.

If it’s true that there is no defense against an idiot with a gun other than a non-idiot with a better gun, then it’s also true that there is no defense against an idiot with snark other than a non-idiot with better snark. Though I have done my best to stay away from places (and people) in social media where the snark flies like bullets, not infrequently I still find myself caught in the crossfire, or hit with a stray round of snark. What do I do? I fire back almost as a reflex. I’m a sharpshooter when it comes to snark.

But I do wish to draw a line. Just as we (we Americans, anyway) live in a gun culture, we also live in a snark culture. But, for the sake of our mental health (and our relationships), we’d better have some safe space. We all need people in our lives who not only will never use irony and snark against us, but who also will come to our defense.

I have spent a great deal of time over the years editing not only what I have written myself, but also what others have written. Post-Purdy, I have developed an editing mode that I call “snark detecting.” Most of the time (and here I find myself agreeing with those whom Scocca berates as smarmy) I find that snark and irony greatly weaken a piece of writing. I often quote a friend who is a very fine writer as saying that there is no sin for a writer worse than insincerity. Except for those emergency occasions when some snarky idiot needs to be lit up, outsnarked, and taken out of action with superior snark, I think we’d all do well to employ our snark detectors and edit out the snark.

Writers and editors often talk about tone. But we are all writers now, because we all use email. Tone can be difficult to control. When writing anything that could be touchy, I try to take the time to reread what I’ve written just for tone. For example, consider this line, which is taken from an actual business email sent to me relating to a publishing project:

Do we need to talk, again, about division of labor?

Note how the two commas around the word “again” change the tone from reasonably neutral to remonstrative and slightly snarky. Yes, I took offense (though I did not respond with snark).

I have a not-exactly-tacit agreement with one of my friends to never use irony with each other, let alone snark. In fact, several years ago, when in a casual remark he employed a touch of irony (not against me, though) I didn’t understand him and had to ask him what he meant. Irony-free zones, I would argue, are necessary for our mental health.

If I have a conclusion, it’s about where I draw the line. I detest irony and snark. These days, irony is as inescapable in our popular culture as snark is in our political culture. (In popular culture, think of “The Big Bang Theory” — all snark all the time, and anti-intellectual snark at that. It was almost violent in its snarkiness. I didn’t find it the least bit funny.) Occasionally I hear couples snark at each other in public, as though we as a society are normalizing the Big Bang theory of relationships. I think to myself, there goes a relationship that is in its last season. Intimacy and supportiveness cannot survive against snark, though society can. And regardless of what it says about me as a person, anyone who snarks at me on Facebook (or at an auto parts store) can expect a blast of snark in return, aimed right between the eyes, because civility is no defense against snark (no matter what they say in smarm school).

If snark was fatal, as guns can be, then I would be pretty dangerous. But I would like to think that I also know when not to use it. I carry snark as a concealed weapon. Outside our safe spaces, where snark flies like the bullets of angry and unstable white men, you never know when you might need it.

An aside: In searching the Internet for photos of one of America’s greatest curmudgeons, H.L. Mencken, I was surprised to find the one above. He is sitting at a piano (who knew?), with an open book of music. A little Googling shows that Mencken was a pianist, and that he played regularly with a group of musicians who called themselves “The Saturday Night Club.” They got together to drink and play music. What is that piece of music on the piano in front of Mencken? No matter how much I zoom in, I can’t read the title. But it looks like German to me. The arrangement is clearly for voice with piano accompaniment. My guess is that it’s a book of Schubert lieder. Knowing that Mencken was a musician helps, I think, to understand why Mencken’s snark and irony were so beautiful and so effective as cultural and political commentary. He was an artist at it.

Season 8, episode 2 (updated)

Ken Ilgunas and David Dalton are reviewing each episode of the final season of Game of Thrones. Check the “Game of Thrones” category to list all of these posts.

David:

Mornin’, Ken …

Well, was I ever wrong last week. I expected treachery at at Winterfell. But I didn’t realize that we were right on the edge of battle. So instead of treachery we got a series of very tender goodbyes, as well as the long-awaited scene between Jon and Daenerys. I’m afraid that, next week, we’re going to be writing a bunch of obituaries. It’s Brienne whom I’m most worried about.

You predicted last week that Jaime will die in the arms of Brienne. I wonder if it mightn’t be the other way around — that Brienne will die in the arms of Jaime. Foreshadowing in Game of Thrones often doesn’t mean what we think it means, but it seems to me that Brienne’s death is all too clearly foreshadowed. Jaime makes her a Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, providing her with a deep sense of gratification for all her selfless sacrifice and sublimated love. Podrick, revealing a very fine voice, sings a sad song, “And she never wanted to leave.” A different voice picks up the same song as the titles roll. The song is a dirge. It was heartbreaking.

I rarely make predictions about Game of Thrones, but if the day is saved in the coming battle, then I think that Brienne will do it.

As a matter of drama, I can imagine a better job of giving viewers a stronger sense of hopelessness and impending doom. Still, we are clearly to understand that the characters all believe that they may be living their last hours. The series’ long investment in rich, complex, lovable characters is now paying dividends in the kind of scenes we got in this episode. Some of what happened was obviously going to happen — for example, Arya and Gendry. But there also were a great many subtle touches where the love between the characters is loftier than the ripping off of costumes, such as the looks that Brienne and Podrick were giving each other just before Jaime knighted Brienne. Clearly they know each other very well, and they have told each other many things. It’s hard for me to imagine Brienne without Podrick, or Podrick without Brienne. Next week’s episode is not going to be easy to watch.

It was Bran who had the plan, with Bran himself as bait. Let’s hope that Bran’s plan will work.

Where was Varys? How could he have been overlooked? Is he away and up to something?

I had assumed that the great battle with the dead would be postponed until the last or next-to-last episode. If the great battle comes in the third episode, then that will leave three more episodes for struggles among the remaining characters, plus some denouement. A long epic deserves a long denouement. It should be the sweetest part of a good story, as long as the writers follow the rules of classic storytelling — and I greatly hope they do.

Ken:

Morning David. My god, that was a good episode. I’d go so far to say that it was among the best episodes. Almost all the actors nailed their little scenes, as short as they were. [Jamie and Brienne on the training grounds; the three Crows; Sam and Jorah; Arya and Gendry all glistening with sweat by the forge (their sex scene, not so much); Dany and Sansa; Dany and Jon; and one of the briefest was among the bestest: Sansa greeting Theon, and later them lovingly looking upon one another over a bowl of soup–that’s a perfect example of how so much can be done with so little.]

And of course the fireside scene! This sort of scene is what GoT was missing last season. Last season, the dialogue on the expedition north of the wall seemed too chummy and forced. The dialogue at the all-star conference in Kings Landing seemed so stilted and dry and humorless and full of tiresome exposition. It could have been a grand scene, but it was lifeless. Here, by the fire, we heard good stories, saw a lot of character, and felt the atmosphere with the characters: enjoying with them a bit of wine and warmth before the storm to come. And we were reminded of what they’re all trying to save: the best of their civilization, as all of these characters exemplify honor, loyalty, justice, forbearance, and compromise.

It was only natural that it ended with a moving knighting ceremony and a song. It was the little moments that won the scene, like the mischievous and warm smile Tyrion gave to Pod upon handing him an overflowing cup of wine. (Side note: There were a few other great smiles in the episode, including Gendry’s titillated grin upon watching Arya skillfully fling daggers.) (Extra side note: Verys’s presence at the fireside might have been inappropriate because, although he is a virtuous character, his career in espionage might have subtracted from the purity of the gathering.)

At this point, the show is moving confidently toward the end, with far more poise than I anticipated, and I’m glad to admit that I may have been wrong to have doubted the writers two blog entries ago…

Some stray thoughts…

– A friend once pointed out to me that GoT battle scenes are almost always creative. This is certainly true: think of the tightening circle in the Battle of the Bastards, where everyone was getting trampled to death, or the cool ways the Night’s Watch fended off the attack against the wildlings at the Wall. We’re bound to see some really interesting battle scenes. But I’m struggling to imagine how all the moving parts will interact. We have the forces at Winterfell vs. The Dead vs. Cersei’s mercenaries. What will the battle sequence be?

– I’m also interested in what they’re going to do with the remaining four episodes. (This season has six.) The first two episodes were set-up episodes. I’m guessing the next two will be epic war episodes, with whom and versus whom, I don’t know. And then maybe we get two more as an epilogue, or as denouement, as you say? Doesn’t this all seem a bit rushed to you? If this is one of the biggest battles in this world’s history, shouldn’t it take up more than 1-2 episodes? I wouldn’t mind three. I wouldn’t even mind a whole season set aside for military maneuvers, though it’s easy for me to suggest such a thing when I have no responsibility for the CGI budget. I fail to see how, in a few epilogue episodes, we figure out who’s the real ruler, how to deal with Cersei, and then send off the surviving cast members with a few goodbyes. There’s a lot to fix in Westeros other than the zombie invasion, right? I would have written for 10 episodes.

– You can’t go wrong with a summarizing lullaby scene, in which we get quick vignette scenes of characters set to the tune of pretty music. I love that shit. It works every time. Braveheart did it well. So did The Wire. They could end the series this way.

– Where is winter, exactly? They’ve been saying winter is coming for 8 seasons now, and there’s pretty much the same amount of snow on the ground.

– I feel the plan to lure the Night King toward Bran is a bit too convenient. The Night King should know that the Living People know that killing one of the White Walkers kills all their followers. I feel like the show is making it a bit too easy for itself to resolve a difficult plot conundrum (a million zombies versus a small castle).

Death prediction possibilities for the next two episodes: Theon, Jaime, Brienne, Jorah, Hound.

Another friend’s prediction/question: Could the dead in the crypt come to life?

More unaccounted for characters: Edmure Tully, Arya’s wolf Nymaria, Meera Reed, the fire witch from Mereen, Robin Arryn.

Unanswered questions: When does the Hound get to take on the Mountain? Will that scorpion dragon-killing contraption make its way north? Is Bronn being commissioned to kill the Lannister brothers the lamest and most predictable story this season? What’s with the Night King’s fascination with his spiral body flesh designs? Who is Azor Ahai?

Updates:

David:

Was it Josh who thought of the dead in the crypt being revived? It’s a brilliant insight. And the more I’ve thought about it, the more I think that’s what’s going to happen. The setup is just too perfect. And how like Martin to set up, at the very beginning, something that doesn’t figure back in until many books (and episodes) later.

Still, everything happens with a twist. What could the twist be? Maybe the Winterfell ancestors knew of this possibility, and maybe there is something — maybe something magic — that protects the Winterfell crypts or otherwise alters the outcome? Why does Winterfell have crypts in the first place? Isn’t it the only castle that buries its dead that way?

I am terrified of the next episode…

Ken:

I wish the insight was mine, but yes, it was Josh’s. I am positive something nasty will happen in the crypts. There were at least three occasions when someone said something like, “It’ll be safer in the crypts.” Which means it’s definitely not safe in the crypts. You’ll remember that Tyrion is one of the few high profile characters assigned to stay in the crypts, so there’ll be some heroics for him to carry out.

And I think you’re correct to think there’s something else about the crypts that we don’t know. Didn’t the youngest Stark have a strange, ghoulish draw to the crypts? Didn’t the three-eyed raven in young Bran’s dreams lead him down there? There could be some magic power or long-dead ancestor that might hold special significance. I believe it was “Bran the Builder” who built Winterfell in a different epoch.

What are some of the wildest theories we could propose? Could it somehow explain the origins of the Night King? Might the dead be seeking nothing short of a resting place (or the ability to rest)? Could the Night King be a Stark? (The Night King does have a strange relationship with Bran, and he has a tendency to stare with wonder at Jon Snow). Some people have proposed that Bran’s ability to travel back in time and change events might play into these last episodes (the way he influenced a young Hodor, who’d eventually “hold the door”). Some have even proposed that the Night King is Bran and the only way to kill the Night King will be to kill Bran. (I picked a few of these insights up from The Ringer’s GoT podcast, Binge Mode, specifically their episode titled, “Our Seven Biggest Questions Ahead of Season 8.” It was so good, and they were so geeky, I actually had to stop listening because they may have been taking away some of the fun of coming up with my own predictions, or the joy of simply being startled by missing something obvious, such as the coming crypt twist. From now on, I’ll probably stick with our own flawed analyses.

Binge Mode: Our Seven Biggest Questions Ahead of Season 8

Game of Thrones: Season 8, episode 1

Ken Ilgunas and David Dalton are reviewing each episode of the final season of Game of Thrones. Check the “Game of Thrones” category to list all of these posts.

David:

Mornin’, Ken…

I greatly enjoyed this episode, and what struck me is how the moral middle ground of former seasons is gone. Now the forces of good and evil are lining up as the surviving characters choose sides — good people at Winterfell, wicked people at King’s Landing. It put me in mind of a hymn:

Once to ev’ry soul and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, some great decision,
Off’ring each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
‘Twixt that darkness and that light.

(The words were written in 1845, by James Russell Lowell, as a protest against both war and slavery. The hymn is sung to the hymn tune Ebenezer, which is very much in a minor key.)

Consider poor, poor Theon, who was tortured by living in a moral vacuum as much as he was tortured by Ramsay Snow. Now Theon, having rescued his sister and feeling a bit better about himself, will go to Winterfell to fight with the forces of good. Even Jaime had to choose sides and joins the good people at Winterfell — though the first person he sees is Bran. (I’m hoping than Bran will forgive Jaime for knocking Bran off the tower because Bran foresees that Jaime has a part to play. And would Bran be the Three-Eyed Raven if he had not fallen?)

There is a huge imbalance, though. In the wicked south, we have only Cersei, Euron, and a new sellsword. And how much longer can Euron survive until Cersei orders him snuffed? Unless Cersei cooks up something new, the ingredients of drama (including characters) are now scarce in King’s Landing. Will Cersei have to rotate uselessly in dramatic circles for a while, the way Daenerys once circled in the desertlands waiting for her next cue? If not, how will Cersei stay in the thick of things? Who is there to even engage her in dialogue, since we’re all as tired of Euron as Cersei is?

Whereas at Winterfell we have a great surplus of characters all cramped up in inadequate accommodations. Thus we can expect treachery at Winterfell. But who will betray whom? Daenerys is now the character in the most awkward position. Jon Snow is suddenly the biggest obstacle to what she regards as her right and her destiny — the throne. Daenerys is faced with the choice of either great sacrifice or great cruelty. It is Sansa who is most critical and who expresses the most discontent with the present situation. Arya is an enigma and a wild card.

Though many reunions were had and much exposition was exposed in this episode, we still have many things to wonder about. Any character who is still alive can be assumed to have a critical part to play before the end. Where is Melisandre? Why was Gendry brought back after a long absence? What work do two of my favorite characters — Brienne and Podrick — still have to do? How will Tyrion and Varys get back into the thick of things? Is Sam superfluous now? Is it meaningful that Yara chose to go back to the Iron Islands?

One character, though, has risen to the top of the dramatic heap — Bran. Bran now supplies much of the plot’s remaining mystery. Isaac Hempstead Wright has grown up in this role. I believe he was 12 years old when the series started. Now he is 20 and is as perfectly cast as any character in the series. All the wise old maesters are dead, but Bran is now wise. The transformation of Bran is one of the most beautiful surprises of the entire series. I would not be surprised if Bran upstages Jon Snow hereafter.

I’m not going to make any guesses about where it’s all going. I remain convinced that George RRRRRR Martin and the HBO writers still have many shocks and surprises up their sleeves and that they’ll pull this thing off in the end. I’d say they’re off to a great start with the season opener.

One piece of foreshadowing continues to needle me: When the dragon gave Jon Snow that funny look, what did it mean?

An aside: The New York Times has a piece this morning about how GoT tourists in silly costumes are flooding Northern Ireland, oblivious to the area’s real history. Jeekers, people. Get a life.

Ken:

Hi David. I thought this was a rock solid beginning to the final season. We are primed for small personal dramas. (Will Arya and the Hound fully reconcile? Will Arya and Gendry have the show’s final romance?) And we are primed for the big picture political dramas. (Who will be the ultimate king or queen of the seven kingdoms?) Some stray thoughts and questions….

• Euron Greyjoy has tested our patience long enough. I sense that Cersei will double-cross him soon and keep his ships. You’re right: Once that’s settled, there’s not much else for her to do, apart from move her military machine. Might we get a good Martin-esque twist if Cersei uses her political talents and maliciousness for good? Her collapsing under her own treachery and deceit seems too simple, but sometimes that’s how things play out, too.

• Yara Greyjoy is going to take back the Iron Islands so Team Dany will have a safe haven should things go wrong with the zombie war. Does this mean that such a course of events is inevitable?

• There are countless things foreshadowing the demise of the Dany-Jon love affair. Verys says “Nothing lasts” as he looks down on them. The dragon gives Jon an odd look when Jon and Dany are making out. (I think the dragon’s saying to Jon, “You better think about what you’re doing.”) And Dany seems like she’s properly smitten (you have some special word for this, I remember, which sounds like “luminescence,” right?) [Note from David: Limerance!] whereas Jon is more hesitant. (Romantic unreciprocation spells disaster!) As for who takes power… Jon has never cared for titles, just what’s right and just. It seems most appropriate for him to allow his allegiance to Dany to persist (even if he’s convinced of his superior claim), but the show seems to be moving in the direction of Jon taking over eventually, and it would be too weird for them to do that as one half of another incestuous couple. The most reasonable solution to this is Dany dying in a moment of sacrifice, and Jon taking power only when he’s called to. The person in the middle of all of this is Tyrion, who is firmly on Team Dany, but who has lost favor and who has a soft spot for Jon. It’ll be interesting to see how he navigates the situation.

• Acting award of the week goes to Sam Tarly. So many relatives die on this show. So many people are reunited after years apart. When the main characters learn of deaths or are reunited, their reactions are sometimes weak, and the acting job is uninspired and half-assed. (Think of those YouTube videos of military fathers returning home to their teary, jubilant children—that’s how real people react.) The actor playing Sam gave everything he had, and I think he found a nice balance between grief and indignation. On the other hand, Arya’s emotional reunion with Jon seemed forced and forgettable.

• I do think the show is still missing some of its old Martin magic, and we see this most clearly with the absence of good humor. Martin is a very funny and clever writer. Think of all the Verys/Tyrion/Little Finger dialogue from the early seasons. A lot of that snappy, funny dialogue came straight from the books. Now we have just a few poorly crafted testicle (or lack of testicle) jokes. They have squandered poetic opportunities, too. Think of when Jon asks Dany how to ride a dragon. “Nobody does,” she says, “until they ride a dragon.” She could have quoted a fabled line from a dragon-riding ancestor, or shared a metaphor about riding the wind, or something of the sort. (PS: Why don’t they make some sort of dragon seat for the riders? It looks impossible and dangerous to hold onto those wobbly dragon spinal spikes.)

• House Glover has it coming to them. Count on them getting sacrificially obliterated next episode.

• Great dragon ride! That’s an amazing use of scenery (as you pointed out last week), and it’s a great character-building scene, as Jon begins to embrace his Targaryen side.

• Random thought of the week: It’s way too late, but I wish the show had incorporated a character or two representing the lowest classes (i.e., the ordinary people). Sure, there are lots of characters who have risen to be warriors and advisors with merit, but I’d like a few characters who are firmly stuck at the bottom, and who look at the people of the great houses from afar and from their hovels, because that’s what it would have been like for 99% of the people in such a time.

Main characters that are unaccounted for: The Red Woman, Brienne and Pod, Daario Naharis (please no), Jaqen H’ghar.

Next big character to unexpectedly die: Onion Knight

Unanswered questions:

Are we going to have a sit-down convo with the Night King, or is he just an evil force of nature without soul and complicated motivations? I feel like we need a little more explaining about his motivations…

What will be the form of government in the end? Still a straight up monarchy?

Are there no caribou or moose for the dragons to hunt? Just barnyard animals?

Will there or will there not be elephants?

Predictions: Jaime will die in the arms of Brienne.

David:

Speaking of humor, some of it went right over my head. This morning’s review in the New York Times mentions these lines:

Tyrion: “The last time we spoke was at Joffrey’s wedding, a miserable affair.”

Sansa: “It had its moments.”

Game of Thrones countdown

Since its beginning in 2011, Ken Ilgunas and I have made a tradition and a sport of watching and subsequently deconstructing each new episode of Game of Thrones. If Ken was here, we watched it in the evening and started our “Thrones talk” at breakfast. If he wasn’t here, we did it in email. As literary confederates, there are many things about which we are in complete accord. But that’s not always the case.

To prepare for the final season (which starts at 9 p.m. Sunday, April 14, on HBO), we each re-watched the previous season, Season 7. Our discussion of the re-watching follows, lifted from email. Hereafter we will “co-blog” each episode of the final season, hopefully by the Monday after each episode.

Ken:

Morning David. You’ve told me you just binged Season 7. As you know, I had some issues with the last season (which I’m sure I’ll get to), but I’m curious: What were your impressions, and what do you think we can expect from Season 8, the final season?

David:

Yep. I binged, and I was transfixed. Two years was enough to make it fresh again, though of course I remembered most of what happens. Somehow the flaws that we’ve discussed mostly melted away. What stood out in re-watching were the incredible quality of the dialogue, the perfect casting and brilliant acting and directing, the settings, the photography, and the detail. Brilliant dialogue, of course, requires more than just the dialogue. It can occur only with strong characters inside a good story. The sibling spats are brilliant — Jaime and Cersei, Sansa and Arya. (There is something particularly vicious about sibling spats.) Another remarkable thing about the dialogue is that it’s just as good whether it’s dialogue about war and affairs of state, conducted by the powerful; or taunting and ribbing by the lowly, as in some of the dialogue while the zombie-retrieval crew were laboring north. I believe I have only one strong complaint. That’s the zombie thing, which I continue to see as an un-original selling-out to a fad, and the tail-end (I hope) of the fad at that. It’s a shame to mar something so original with more zombieness.

Anyway, as for the flaws, I’m a pushover when it comes to suspension of disbelief, as long as the story is not in the here and now. I rarely binge. But re-watching Season 7 put me into a trance.

The New York Times had a piece about how Northern Ireland is now overridden with GoT tourists. Having hiked the Scottish Islands with you since we first watched Season 7, it all looked familiar (and even more beautiful). I’m just glad that all that tourist traffic isn’t descending on Scotland, because those coastal vistas work best when they’re clear of everything but sheep. I paid much more attention to the settings while re-watching Season 7. The settings are incredibly powerful. You’ve heard me say many times that certain kinds of stories can be told only in certain kinds of settings. The example I always use is that the moment a writer chooses to set a story in the American South, it’s a given that somebody is going to be repressed, oppressed, and miserable, and that the story will revolve around social and family conflict and whether key characters can or cannot be true to themselves. It would be much harder to tell a story like that in San Francisco, or Paris. Part of the genius of HBO’s GoT is that the producers understood the importance of epic settings, and they had the budget for it. Now we’ve got those places on film forever, though I hope those places never change. When the producers of Star Wars took us to Skellig Michael, I suspect that it was because Star Wars had to hit the new standard for settings set by Game of Thrones. What a good way to use a big budget! My TV no longer seems big enough. To top Skellig Michael as an epic setting, you’d have to get out among the stars — another setting in which epic stories can be told. Some settings enlarge us; some settings knowingly cramp us and suffocate us. Compare “Angela’s Ashes,” a very different Ireland from Skellig Michael or the seascapes of Ulster. My larger point is that, in HBO’s GoT, story and setting are brilliantly matched. It may be easier to appreciate those settings in a second watching, when the characters and dialogue don’t demand our full attention.

Now I just hope that the final season doesn’t let us down and that we end up happy and satisfied, with another epic for a lifetime, like Star Wars. If that happens, then it will be your curse to watch John Snow (a few years younger than you) and the other characters grow old, as my generation had to watch Luke Skywalker (a few years younger than me) and Leia grow old. These are stories that provide a mythic framework for our lives.

The New York Times also had an article about how GoT is a new economic model for television, with a budget that would have been unimaginable not long ago. Let’s hope that that model continues … as long as somebody can come up with stories worth that kind of telling.

Ken:

Your cheery take is heartening to read because I hope you’re right and I’m wrong. I’ve re-watched Season 7, and my second watching confirmed my original impressions: It is by far the worst GoT season. I say this for three reasons:

1. The fast pace of the season is out of step with the slow pace of the rest of the series. One can now travel across Westeros instantaneously (whether by horse, dragon, or boat) when, in a previous season, it would have taken a whole season for a character to move from A to B. They are practically teleporting. This isn’t me just quibbling about suspension of disbelief issues. The “slow storytelling” of GoT was one of the things that set GoT apart from all other shows. These were great opportunities for character development, and they made long-awaited path-crossings cathartic or dramatic (like the Hound vs. Brienne). The Jon-Dany introduction could have been a bit more exciting if they took an extra episode or two to cover Jon’s sea voyage.

2. The plot became bonkers. I know this is fantasy, and I’m prepared to generously suspend my disbelief with dragons and fire magic, but the expedition north to capture a zombie to bring it back to King’s Landing doesn’t work on many levels.

3. The dialogue was substandard. In previous seasons, we had interesting pairings of characters. Now, they just shove a bunch in the same room, where they jest and prod and deliver quippy one-liners. The scene with Jon and Dany in the cave was appallingly neat, and corny. The dramatic Jaime “death” and rescue scene, after the battle with the Dothraki, was beneath the writers’ standards. There was little character development. About 85% of the dialogue was exposition, reminding us of everyone’s past, their relationships with one another, and their plans for the future. What happened to stories about their lives or the relaxed and clever banter, such as the Verys/Tyrion banter, which was so good? This all exposes the writers’ need for good George RRRR Martin dialogue, which they no longer have access to.

I say all of this with deep respect for the writers, producers, and actors, and of course Martin. GoT, as a TV series, belongs in a tier of its own, and GoT episodes, during quiet parts of my last eight years (as sad as this sounds), have been some of my intensest emotional events. I fear the show has lost its Martin magic, and I truly fail to see how they’re going to wrap up all storylines, win the war against the White Walkers, and provide satisfying epilogues for the surviving characters—all in a shortened final season. I worry that the season will only be the movement of chess pieces, followed by gory CGI fests. There are only a handful of relationships to be mended; there aren’t many more secrets to be learned; there aren’t many dramatic character reunions to be staged; there are no new love affairs to be consummated.

I think GoT is going to live out the fate of 2007 New England Patriots, who had a perfect 16 win, 0 loss season, but who flubbed it in the Super Bowl against the Giants. I worry a dissatisfying finale will make the preceding seven seasons irrelevant and un-rewatchable. No one wants to be more wrong than me.

Updates

David:

Here is a critic in The Atlantic who agrees with you. Whereas I am in denial:

The Old Thrills of Game of Thrones Might Be Gone for Good

Ken:

I agree with everything he says, 100%. In ways, we wrote the same column, but his was far better. Indeed, I felt the same thing about the Littlefinger plot. The Stark sisters plotting against one another was ridiculous. We saw Littlefinger’s death a mile away…. I envy your denial!

David:

Your case is strong, and I will concede and throw in the towel and wail and gnash my teeth if it comes to that. But I also have to hope that the HBO writers and producers are smart, are aware of these dangers and past mistakes, and that they also have access to George RRRRR Martin, who I think would not hesitate to tell them what he thinks, even if his contract binds him to public silence. I do think that stories are safest in the hands of a single inspired writer whose only product is words rather than zillion-dollar productions.

May the force be with us.

Would you like for me to append a link to this piece as an update to our post?

Ken:

Sure, that’s a good piece.


The Old Thrills of Game of Thrones Might Be Gone for Good

The ontological wilderness

Philosophy of Physics: Quantum Theory, by Tim Maudlin. Princeton University Press, 2019. 234 pages.

Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity: Metaphysical Intimations of Modern Physics (third edition), by Tim Maudlin. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 298 pages.

John Twelve Hawks was clearly troubled, and I don’t blame him. (John Twelve Hawks is one of my favorite science fiction writers. I’ve written about him here several times and reviewed his books. Just search here for “twelve.”) I follow John Twelve Hawks on Facebook. He had posted a link to an article in the MIT Technology Review. The terrifying headline on the article is: A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality. He made this comment about the article:

“Some philosophers are drawn to the the idea that humans are organic robots that make decisions determined by our own biology and environment. I think these ideas let us off the hook for the real choices we can make in our lives. A variety of experiments have shown that people who think they aren’t free feel that it’s okay to hurt another person. ‘Un-freedom’ becomes an alibi. So my day-to-day assumption is that objective reality might not exist, but assuming that it is encourages us to live responsible, compassionate lives. Please feel free to tell me that I’m wrong!”

Actually, academic philosophy has a word for humans as organic robots. That word is zombie. You can read the article on zombies here in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The zombie concept (as much as I detest zombie movies) is a useful concept in thinking about what it means to be a conscious, not to mention a decent, human being. If we are not zombies, then what is it in us that makes us something else?

It happened that I had just finished laboring my way through these two books when I came across John Twelve Hawks’ comment. I cannot follow most of the math of relativity and quantum theory. But I do think that I have a tenuous grasp of the gist of it. I have read a lot of books like this, and I imagine that John Twelve Hawks has, too (as would any science fiction writer who is worth the ink). If John Twelve Hawks was troubled by the suggestion that there is no such thing as objective reality, I was horrified. We are living in an era in which many people feel that they are entitled to their own facts and their own reality. Do we really need to embolden fools with the notion that cutting-edge physics is on their side?

Tim Maudlin probably is the leading philosopher of physics. Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity is a standard textbook in this area. I knew that Maudlin would rip to shreds the idea that objective reality might not exist. I worried that, if Maudlin even bothered to respond to the piece in MIT Technology Review that it might be a long time before he got around to it. But I was wrong, because (as I discovered from Googling) Maudlin was all over it immediately. The Daily Nous is a place where academic philosophers hang out on line. Several philosophers of physics wrote responses, including Maudlin. Here is a link to Maudlin’s response, which has the headline If There Is No Objective Physical World Then There Is No Subject Matter For Physics. Here’s the money quote: “Objective reality is safe and sound. We can all sleep well.”

On what grounds does Tim Maudlin say that objective reality is safe and sound? To answer that question, you’ve got a lot of reading ahead of you. Modern physics is so strange that many physicists actually believe that all possible futures are real, and that a whole new and slightly different universe is created every time some tiny particle undergoes “quantum decoherence.” This is called the Many Worlds Interpretation. Maudlin thinks that’s bunk. For what it’s worth, I do, too. I would say that the reason the minds of many physicists are drawn to the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) is that MWI returns physics to a kind of determinism. The alternative to determinism is spooky, and they don’t like spooks. It was Einstein, I think, who first used the phrase “spooky action at a distance.” For what it’s worth, I like the idea of a spooky universe.

I am by no means qualified to actually review these books. But I do want to argue that, when these mysteries in physics are eventually resolved, it will be the most important new knowledge in our lifetime (if we are lucky and it happens in our lifetime).

If Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity could be boiled down to one key point, I would say that it’s this: Spooky action at a distance is real. Get over it.

Philosophy of Physics: Quantum Theory is a survey of current candidates for a grand unification theory that can reconcile the contradictions between relativity theory and quantum theory. We seem to not be getting any closer, really. (And I’m not getting any younger.) These theories are largely incompatible. Physicists and philosophers of physics are polite to each other in their books. But online they can be a bit snarky about theories they disagree with.

But you don’t have to be a physicist or a philosopher of physics to choose sides and root for the spooks. You could even come up with your own theory, though you’d have to provide the math to support it.

I confess I have a sneaky suspicion about where it’s all going. I like to play with the idea that there is nothing here. Maudlin actually comes very close to the temptation of that idea himself, in the conclusion of Philosophy of Physics: Quantum Theory (page 221):

“This possibility makes it tempting to deny the existence of any fundamental particles at all. If particles exist, the thought goes, there must at any given time be a definite, exact number of them determined by the number of distinct trajectories. But in a state of ‘indefinite particle number,’ no such exact number exists, so there can’t be any particles at all. Instead there is a field that can, in particular circumstances, act in a more-or-less particle-like way.”

That there is nothing here is by no means a new idea. In Eastern philosophy, as John Twelve Hawks would know, it is called maya, a kind of light-and-magic show. But that cannot mean that anything goes. Yes, the spookiness seems to be real. But nevertheless the universe remains strictly governed by its mathematics. Much of that math physicists already know. But the biggest piece remains elusive. As for maya, I am not very interested in what ancient philosophy says on the matter. They didn’t provide any supporting math. I only want to know what physicists ultimately figure out.

A Place to Call Home

Last night I finished watching the first season of “A Place to Call Home.” I can’t believe that I didn’t discover it sooner. It is superb melodrama and a superb soap opera. It’s perfectly cast and beautifully filmed. The dialogue is magnificent, some of the most intelligent dialogue I’ve ever seen in a TV series.

No one ever accused me of being up to date on matters of entertainment. I go for the good stuff, not the new stuff. This series, which went through six seasons and 67 episodes, premiered in 2013 and ended in 2016. I watched it on DVDs from Netflix. It also can be streamed on Amazon Prime Video (with an extra charge), and it’s included with a subscription to Acorn TV.

Here’s a link to a trailer on YouTube.

The story is set in 1953, in Australia. The traumas of World War II linger. Like two other great soap operas — “Downton Abbey” and “Upstairs, Downstairs,” the central setting is a big house. But around the big house live an array of complicated characters with complicated pasts and complicated secrets. It’s an Australian production created by Bevan Lee. It’s a period piece that beautifully evokes the 1950s. Keep your hanky handy.

I won’t be going hungry for good television for a good while now. In addition to five more seasons of “A Place to Call Home,” I need to re-watch the previous season of “Game of Thrones” before it returns with the final season in April.

Lily learns to listen

What? No cat videos lately? What good is all this digital stuff if we can’t aim it at our pets?

The abbey’s organ used to terrify Lily. She would run to her most secret hiding place at the faintest sound from the organ. She still does not like sound that is too loud. But now, whenever the organ is being played, she sits on a nearby table and listens as she looks out the window. I’m pretty sure that she enjoys it. Back in the days when I had a dog and a piano, the dog would come and lie under the piano whenever I played. Animals do like music.

That’s the abbey organ in the video above, but it’s not me playing. It’s a MIDI (electronic keyboard capture) performance made by an unknown organist. I have pretty much the complete organ works of J.S. Bach in MIDI format.

Proper stir-fries at home: Is it even possible?


Tofu, fried rice, and mixed vegetables

Stir-frying is such a good way to make low-carb suppers that, for months now, I’ve been having stir-fries for supper three and even four days a week. I had been using a large nonstick skillet, with heat much lower than professional Asian cooks use. I’ve gotten very good at skillet stir-fries, so good that it was time to up my game. That means using a wok, not a skillet.

Not long ago I saw a Lodge cast iron wok in a variety store up in the mountains. The price tag said $99.00. The wok was beautiful, almost magical. I petted it for quite some time but decided not to buy it. The price was just too steep.

Then when I got home, I checked Amazon. Amazon Prime sells the very same Lodge wok for $49.90, shipping included. I ordered it immediately. It’s a shame to cut out local merchants and buy from Amazon. But why should I make a $50 donation to a store that’s willing to overcharge its customers so badly?

The wok comes pre-seasoned, but after I took the wok out of the box I spent a few hours seasoning it a bit more, just to be sure that nothing would stick (and partly to pet it). Nothing did.

Though I have had many good, authentic Chinese meals in San Francisco and New York, and even though I survived a few days in Bangkok with nothing to eat with but chopsticks and soup spoons, I have never watched a professional Asian cook use a wok. YouTube to the rescue. (But be careful — there are also plenty of wok videos made by people who have no idea what they’re doing.)

The amount of heat that professional Asian cooks use is terrifying. Their wok stoves are like blast furnaces. Not to mention that all who are concerned with healthy eating try to keep cooking oils from overheating and smoking, because smoking oils produce carcinogens. If you do some Google searches on this subject, you’ll find several online discussions about just how high heat really needs to be for decent wok cooking at home. The woks of professional Asian cooks may reach 900 degrees F, I understand. Some foodies say that 650F is the minimum. Some claim good results at 450F. But even 650F is too high for my comfort. The smoke point of avocado oil is 500F. That’s my limit, insofar as it’s possible to control the wok’s temperature at every instant of the cooking process.

If you watch YouTube videos of Grace Young cooking in a wok, she is definitely not doing a fire show. She is the author of The Breath of a Wok, which I have ordered. I believe her book is the best-reviewed book written by an Asian for non-Asian cooks using domestic cooking apparatus.

It’s going to take weeks or months for me to get the hang of wok cooking and to figure out where the sweet spot is between a Cantonese fire show and low-smoke home stir-fries. But, even on my first attempt, though I produced a little smoke, the results were like magic. The Chinese call it wok hei, translated “the breath of the wok.” That’s the taste of fire and smoke. Asian fire-show cooks even get short flashes of fire inside their woks while they’re cooking. Don’t try that at home.

I quickly realized that you don’t have to have flash fires in the wok to get (at least some) real wok hei flavor. My first stir-fry did indeed taste like fire. The taste was primal. It was like something that had been cooked outdoors, over a fire, 900 years ago. That’s wok hei.

A friend said (in a text message) that woks are a Platonic sort of cooking vessel. That’s a good way of putting it. The word primal also keeps coming to mind. There is something ancient about the wok, about the cooking process, and about the flavors that you can get. My electric range seems to get hot enough. But if at some point I decide to experiment with murderously high heat, I’ll use a high-powered gas-fired cooking tripod outdoors on the deck.

All the work of wok cooking is in the preparation, because you have to have everything lined up and ready to go. Once you actually start cooking, it’s over in minutes.

The Lodge wok is very big and very heavy. Before you buy one, you might want to figure out where you’re going to store it. I’ll probably store my wok in the oven most of the time. On my electric stove set to high, the 12-pound wok takes about nine minutes to heat up.

Making a wok meal is an hour of patient washing, drying, and slicing followed by a few minutes fire and frenzy.

The long, winding road to Denmark


A festive business dinner in Denmark with a technology team from the San Francisco Chronicle and employees of the Danish company CCI International. That’s me in the black shirt, second from the right. The year is 2002.

The curmudgeon H.L. Mencken left us a rich legacy of fine quotes. One of his best is about Puritanism: “The haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy.” Mencken is entirely right. A moral suspicion of happiness and a duty to endure earthly misery “to lay up treasures in heaven” is a theological proposition that is inseparable from all forms of Christianity, whether Catholicism, Protestant Calvinism, or fundamentalism. Evangelicals who pursue “prosperity theology” do make one and only one exception. That exception is for rich people, who get to lay up their treasures on earth as well as in heaven.

I have been thinking about Denmark lately because Paul Krugman has mentioned Denmark in two of his recent columns. One column is about the misconceptions of conservatives. The other column is about “fanatical centrists.”

Krugman on conservatives’ horror of what they call “socialism”:

“What Americans who support ‘socialism’ actually want is what the rest of the world calls social democracy: A market economy, but with extreme hardship limited by a strong social safety net and extreme inequality limited by progressive taxation. They want us to look like Denmark or Norway, not Venezuela.

“And in case you haven’t been there, the Nordic countries are not, in fact, hellholes. They have somewhat lower G.D.P. per capita than we do, but that’s largely because they take more vacations. Compared with America, they have higher life expectancy, much less poverty and significantly higher overall life satisfaction. Oh, and they have high levels of entrepreneurship — because people are more willing to take the risk of starting a business when they know that they won’t lose their health care or plunge into abject poverty if they fail.”

Krugman on the perpetual wrongness of fanatical centrists:

“But I’m not talking about the left. Radical leftists are virtually nonexistent in American politics; can you think of any prominent figure who wants us to move to the left of, say, Denmark? No, I’m talking about fanatical centrists.”

It’s a standing joke — with a lot of truth in it — that travel turns people into liberal Democrats. American conservatives can get away with lying about Europe and the Nordic countries because so many conservative voters know so little about the world. You can find many sources on the Internet that compare how Americans vote to whether they have a passport, for example, here. I will not concede that my saying such a thing amounts to economic snobbery. Many of my rural, Trump-loving neighbors drive enormous, gas-guzzling vehicles that cost more than $50,000. Many of my rural, Trump-loving neighbors also have enormous travel trailers that can be pulled only by enormous trucks. The median household income of Trump supporters in the 2016 primaries was about $72,000, well above the national median of $56,000.

Ignorance of the world is a choice.

Before I retired, I did business for some years with a Danish company that builds publishing systems for newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle (where I worked). I have made two business trips to Denmark. It is remarkable what the Nordic countries have accomplished. They always rank near the top of lists that measure happiness, trust, equality, and civic freedoms. Meanwhile, the United States is moving backwards, like other places in the world where the rich call the shots. Increasingly, though Europe has its own troubles, Europe feels like a refuge from American backsliding. It’s no wonder that so many people talk — maybe only half seriously — about leaving the United States. A recent Gallup poll found that a record number of Americans want to get out. The reason: Trump.

My recent trip to Scotland has made me resolve to get to Europe more often, though considerable frugalities and economies are necessary to make travel affordable on my fixed retirement income. Shortly after I arrived in Edinburgh back in August, Ken asked me if I was culture-shocked. Heck no, I said. I feel more at home here than I do at home. I meant it, too.

Still, I am not ready to throw in the towel on the United States. I am reluctant to make predictions, but, so far — especially now that Democrats have retaken the U.S. House of Representatives and the law takes it course — I believe we are approaching peak Trump. Trump is going to be brought down by the law, taking the Republican Party with him. Americans insisted on finding out the hard way (we liberals tried to warn them!) what billionaires and Republicans do when they get power. Rural white voters will continue to glorify a hell largely of their own making. But voters in the American suburbs, in the 2018 election, showed their remorse for falling for Trump in 2016. That won’t happen again. California and New York are leading the way. The suburbs are coming to their senses. Boomers will soon be leaving the world in droves, just as they entered. Young people see the world in a very different way. All roads now lead to Denmark. And we will all be happier for it.

Note: The Mencken quote is sometimes given as, “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, is having a good time.” I don’t know which is more accurate.