The Homebound Symphony
The Homebound Symphony
Alan Jacobs
I am — let me take a deep breath — the Jim and Sharon Harrod Endowed Chair of Christian Thought and Distinguished Professor of the Humanities in the Honors Program of Baylor University. I’ve been at Baylor for eleven years and before that taught for three decades at Wheaton College in Illinois. I was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama. I’ve been married for forty-four years and have a grown-up son. I am an Anglican Christian.
Latest Posts
What If Our Ancestors Didn’t Feel Anything Like We Do? – The Atlantic: But as a historian trying to comprehend feelings, [Rob] Boddice can’t stand those cute Inside Out characters. Because not only do we imagine other people to have the...
The People Outsourcing Their Thinking to AI – The Atlantic: James Bedford, an educator at the University of New South Wales who is focused on developing AI strategies for the classroom, started using LLMs almost daily after ChatGPT’s...
Almost everything that makes this collection worth reading happens between 1962 and 1964, with 1962 being the year when Kenner and Davenport are maximally stimulating of each other’s ideas — as I think this post demonstrates. Much later...
As you all know, I don’t typically post about politics, but this post by my old friend Noah Millman: brilliantly illuminates the profound ethical failures — the abdications of ethical responsibility — that underlie many of the...
An essay I have long meant to write bears (will bear, might bear) the following thesis: The last great masterpieces of the modernist epic are an anthropologist’s memoir and a work of literary criticism: Claude Levi-Strauss’s Tristes...
Hugh Kenner to Guy Davenport, 27 April 1962 (I:99): Yes, machines evolve, as Disney knows. His art utterly germane to a machine biology. The clue to decline of silent film was switch for 24 f.p.s., with introduction of sound. Before...
I don’t know what’s happening elsewhere, but in the Honors College here at Baylor — or rather among those of us who teach the humanities — it’s been fun to see what we’re doing to banish the LLM demons. Most of us are incorporating a lot...
From my biography of C. S. Lewis, The Narnian: There was a bright spot in the Lewis home during at least part of the war: her name was June Flewett, and she was one of the many thousands of children who were evacuated from London and...
The Museo Mario Praz in Rome is the home of the great art historian and critic named, you guessed it, Mario Praz (1896-1982). Though Praz took degrees from Bologna and Florence, he was born in Rome, died there, and in between was a...
When I’m trying to decide whether I want to watch a movie, my first step is to ask this question: Do I want to watch a movie that looks like that? I know from long experience that I have strong responses to the visual Gestalt of a film,...
In one of my classes we’re about halfway through The Brothers Karamazov, and we had an interesting conversation yesterday in which we tried to sort through what Ivan means when he says he has a “Euclidean mind.” One of my students...
Dorothy L. Sayers had written ”Kings in Judaea,” the first play of a series she had been asked to write for the BBC Children’s Service, in the autumn of 1940, the project fell apart when Sayers refused to make changes demanded of her by...
Forty years ago, I attended a conference of literature professors at Christian liberal-arts colleges in which the keynote speaker was an esteemed Christian journalist, tasked with giving us advice, I guess. Whatever his task was, he...
Jesse Singal posted the other day about an academic named Peter Coviello who denounced David Brooks for saying something silly when in fact Brooks was outlining a position that he disagrees with. (Follow the link for the details). Singal...
I’ve tried all the major note-taking apps in the Apple ecosystem. For some years, starting more than a decade ago, I used Simplenote, then Drafts, then Bear. I used Ulysses for a while, though that’s really more of a text editor than a...