1. This week’s personal reading was largely Flannery O’Connor, in all her dense, opaquely-grotesque images of grace. She operates on a high, inaccessible plateau of authorship in which the reader is required to make a firm commitment to not only follow her often intense prose and plots, but also to take the time afterwards to look back and decide just what it was all about. The reward is that you usually find yourself mulling them over for a long time afterwards and digging out interesting ideas.

2. One this week was The Geranium, in which an old Southerner relocates to New York so that his daughter can care for him. He hates it there, doesn’t remotely fit, and the only thing that reminds him of home is a faded geranium that sits on the the windowsill of the apartment opposite, which he spends most of his days sitting and looking at. His daughter cares for him in a dutiful rather than loving way, and the only person in the city who offers him some genuine kindness is a Black neighbor…whom he doesn’t want kindness from, as from his perspective it’s further demeaning. A grimly haunting image of grace offered and rejected.

3. Another was The Barber, in which a college professor becomes obsessed with explaining his sophisticated political views to his crass, simple-minded barber and his friends, only to find that, despite the fact that he’s clearly more intelligent than they are, he keeps getting humiliated by the exchanges and ultimately comes off worse than they do.

In summary, Miss O’Connor is well worth reading, though be aware that she’s a diamond level course; you read her, you’re expected to put in the work to figure out what she’s driving at. It’s usually worth it.

4. Speaking of stories, I have very little interest in Five Nights at Freddy’s; haven’t played the games, don’t care to, know a bit of the story and premise, and don’t intend to see the film. However, watching the Pitch Meeting for it, I couldn’t help exclaiming over some of the choices; the guy spends his days sleeping trying to find more details in his dream (that’s stupid to begin with)? The animatronics befriend the little girl? The lore gets dumped by the lady cop?

It’s not that I care much about FNAF, it’s that this seems to me to be such an easy, straightforward formula; a guy takes a job as a night guard at an old kid’s restaurant. He starts to notice the animatronics are moving, discovers hints of something horrible that happened there, and tries to uncover the mystery while surviving the automatons. You could do it with an extremely small cast and budget and make a really fun slow-burn horror, where the creatures become more aggressive as he learns more about what happened, more people get roped in, etc.

So why fill it up with all this nonsense and take what seems to be the least interesting approach to it?

That seems a common trend these days, where filmmakers or writers take a premise full of potential and opt for the most boring and trite approach possible.

5. Reading the Constitution is fun, as is reading the Federalist vs. Antifederalist debate, especially with two-hundred and thirty-odd years of hindsight. Though the interesting thing to me is how both sides generally seem to miss many of the actual problems (e.g. the question of who is going to enforce the Constitution upon the government, the question of whether states can opt out after once opting in, etc.) in favor of things like arguing over the proper size of the House of Representatives (at least Madison rightly points out that there is no certain answer to that question) and complaining that the Senate will become an aristocracy and generally playing the game of “I’m more democratic than you!”

(Though one anti-federalist was kind of dead-on that Impeachment would become more or less an impotent threat, though not quite for the reasons he argued)

Federalist 10 is a good example, where Madison goes on about factions, how to prevent factions getting power, and so on, when half of his arguments are stating the obvious (he spends several paragraphs establishing that you can’t prevent men from forming factions, which, if it’s necessary, speaks more to the kind of political fantasy land his opponents were living in than to his own brilliance), then concludes that the size and scope of the United States will prevent any one group from forming a national faction over any one issue…which he argues in the process of a national debate over a particular issue affecting the whole nation. And he completely misses the deeper danger of one side labeling the other side a ‘faction’ and thus illegitimate.

6. Generally speaking, the more I read of the Founding Fathers, the less impressive I find them. Oh, they’re very intelligent and educated, and definitely miles above most politicians who have succeeded them, and once we get past Revolutionary rhetoric and into the nitty-gritty of pounding out a government there’s a lot of good stuff about how to make a Republic that actually works. But they overall strike me as being completely wedded to their own notions of government and humanity and unable to engage with opposing views or the complex nitty-gritty of real life application. Obviously that varies greatly among that large body of men, with people like Washington, Hamilton, and possibly Adams being better at it than people like Jefferson, but that’s the overall impression I’m getting.

7. My classical history course is approaching the Peloponnesian War, and this week I introduced them to a historical pattern: that usually there’s a great clash of civilizational visions that results in the rise of a particular empire or dominant power, which rules for a while, and then is destroyed in some kind of bloody convulsion. The Persian Wars leading to the rise of Athens, followed by the nightmare of the Peloponnesian War that smashed it (temporarily) is a classic example, as is the Punic Wars leading to the rise of Rome (though I suppose the ‘bloody convulsion’ could be either the civil wars or the post-Roman collapse, depending on your point of view). You could also point to the Napoleonic Wars for the dominance of the British Empire, which ends in the First World War, and the Second World War leading to the rise of America and the Soviet Union on the world stage. Not that everything fits into this neat formula, but it does seem to be a pattern.