The author is not dead: One of the most influential and misguided works of criticism in the twentieth century was Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author.” Barthes argued that the author was a bourgeois invention and that intentionality was a way of claiming something (a text) that was not one’s own. John Farrell argues in Variations of Authorial Intention that intention is a central if complex feature of all literature (and, of course, all communication): “Farrell denies that the text of any literary work is self-sufficient, having slipped away from the author and no longer under the sway of her intentions, whatever they may have been: ‘When we read literary texts it is people we are trying to understand — people under varying historical circumstances. It is their creative actions we are trying to appreciate, not mere collections of words. These actions come to us having already made their impact on many other people in intervening generations who have inflected them in their own ways. Dealing with people as historical agents is uncomfortable, difficult, exasperating; making judgments about them can be even more so.’”
Speaking of intentionality, if you’ve seen 2001: Space Odyssey, you know that the ending is weird—really weird. Stanley Kubrick avoided explaining it whenever he was asked about it, except once, it turns out, in an interview for a Japanese documentary that was never released. The footage was sold on eBay in 2016 and recently posted on YouTube: “I’ve tried to avoid doing this ever since the picture came out,” he says. “When you just say the ideas they sound foolish, whereas if they’re dramatized one feels it, but I’ll try…”
How the Crusades were won: They were not a failure, Philip Jenkins argues, but a “critical” success: “The Christian Crusades of the Middle Ages are today deployed for a wide range of political and rhetorical purposes—to make claims about the Church’s betrayal of Christ’s teaching, the evils of European imperialism, or the inextricable link between intolerant religion and ghastly violence. Any or all of those claims might be justified. One problem, though, distorts virtually all modern discussions of those seminal events. Contrary to common assumptions, the Crusades were neither a miserable failure nor an exercise in futility. Despite some defeats, their victories were extensive, enduring, and critical.”
“Innocent until proven guilty, but only if you can pay”: How America’s bail system traps poor people in jail.
The lessons of James Finley’s Merton’s Palace of Nowhere: “Merton was Finley’s novice master during his ‘some six years as a monk’ at Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky. While it would be easy for Finley to fall back on his years of access and proximity to Merton in offering his readers compelling interpretations of Merton’s thoughts, he avoids this lazy credentialing. Instead, Finley quietly and astutely pulls from Merton’s writings for the ‘underlying thesis of this work…that Merton’s whole spirituality, in one way or another, pivots on the question of ultimate human identity.’”
The strange hybridity of nineteenth-century Iranian art: “Later Qajar painters like Kamal Al-Molk were journeying toward a mastery of European academicism while Western artists were turning back toward abstraction. No wonder it is so hard to look at Qajar art: we feel that history is travelling constantly in the wrong direction.”
A Reader Recommends: Some of you, I’m sure, know and love Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, but if you haven’t read it, you should. Matthew Mittiga writes: “One of my absolute favorites, and a book that I re-read about once a year. While some people may not be a fan of science fiction, this post-apocalyptic novel set in a monastery a thousand years after nuclear Armageddon works on so many levels. For me, it was my Catholic identity set in a terrifyingly familiar yet destroyed world, a treatise on the nature of man and the potential (or impossibility) of salvation, and a masterpiece of the axiom ‘history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes’.”
Essay of the Day:
The discovery of “the only intact library known from the classical world,” which included 2,000 charred papyrus scrolls, in the 18th century was one of the greatest archeological finds in history. The only problem? The scrolls were unreadable. That has changed thanks to an unlikely scholar:
“Seales, who is 54, has wide-set eyes beneath a prominent brow, and an air of sincere and abiding optimism. He’s an unlikely pioneer in papyrus studies. Brought up near Buffalo, New York, he has no training in the classics. While European curators and textual scholars yearn to discover lost works of classical literature in the Herculaneum scrolls, Seales, an evangelical Christian, dreams of finding letters written by the apostle Paul, who was said to have traveled around Naples in the years before Vesuvius erupted.
“Seales came of age in the 1970s and ’80s—the era of early video games, when big-dreaming Californians were building computers in their garages—and he was a techie from a young age. With no money for college, but with a brain for complex mathematics and music (he played violin at his local church), Seales won a double scholarship from the University of Southwestern Louisiana to study computer science and music. Later, while earning his doctorate, at the University of Wisconsin, he became fascinated with ‘computer vision,’ and began writing algorithms to convert two-dimensional photographs into 3-D models—a technique that later enabled vehicles such as Mars rovers, for example, to navigate terrain on their own. Seales went to work at the University of Kentucky in 1991, and when a colleague took him along to the British Library to photograph fragile manuscripts, Seales, captivated by the idea of seeing the unseeable, found the challenge thrilling.
“The British Library project was part of a ‘digital renaissance’ in which millions of books and hundreds of thousands of manuscripts were photographed for posterity and stored online. Seales helped make a digital version of the only surviving copy of the Old English epic poem Beowulf, using ultraviolet light to enhance the surviving text. But working with the warped, cockled pages made him realize the inadequacy of two-dimensional photographs, in which words can be distorted or hidden in creases and folds.
“So in 2000, he created three-dimensional computer models of the pages of a damaged manuscript, Otho B.x (an 11th-century collection of saints’ lives), then developed an algorithm to stretch them, producing an artificial ‘flat’ version that didn’t exist in reality. When that worked, he wondered if he could go even further, and use digital imaging not just to flatten crinkled pages but to ‘virtually unwrap’ unopened scrolls—and reveal texts that hadn’t been read since antiquity. ‘I realized that no one else was doing this,’ he says.
“He began to experiment with a medical-grade computed tomography (or CT) scanner, which uses X-rays to create a three-dimensional image of an object’s internal structure. First, he tried imaging the paint on a modern rolled-up canvas. Then he scanned his first authentic object—a 15th-century bookbinding thought to contain a fragment of Ecclesiastes hidden inside. It worked.
“Buoyed by his success, Seales imagined reading fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which include the oldest biblical writings ever found, dating to as far back as the third century B.C., sections of which remain unopened today. Then, in 2005, a classicist colleague took him to Naples, where many of the excavated Herculaneum scrolls are displayed at the National Library, a few steps from a window with a view across the bay to Vesuvius itself. Seared by gases at hundreds of degrees centigrade and superheated volcanic materials that in time hardened into 60 feet of rock, the distorted, crumbling rolls were believed by most scholars to be the very definition of a lost cause.”
Photos: Afriski
Poem: John Poch, “The Iberian Lynx”
Note: I’ll be traveling tomorrow and Friday. See you on Monday.
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