Camera quality, classics, QR codes, cutting the grass, and Kraut revolutionaries in Illinois
Weekly digest, July 12, 2025
Another busy week, another great big grab bag of a digest. I don’t see a clear through-line in any of this material but it’s all interesting and thought-provoking. I hope y’all will find something good to read here.
Apropos
Dang internet. They don’t care whose lives they ruin.
—Hank Hill
What’s going on
Of interest
Here’s a short piece on Stonehenge—“generally supposed to be the remains of an ancient Druidical temple”—from Edgar Allan Poe, published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in 1840.
Here’s a great short piece from
about one of my favorite topics: cinematography as storytelling texture: “28 Days Later Reminds Us That Sometimes Movies Should Look Like Crap.”28 Days Later was shot on the prosumer Canon XL1, a 3-CCD Mini-DV video camera that was light and portable and, by comparison with even older iPhones like mine, ridiculously low-resolution.1 This was both a practical and artistically purposeful choice. Riffing on a Letterboxd review taking on people who complain about the cinematography (“yall want everything shot on a red epic, huge yawn”), Jeremy writes:
For those of you who don’t work or play with cameras, Red is a digital camera company that became somewhat of an industry standard over the past couple decades because of how closely it can replicate the quality of 35mm film. The Red Epic was released in 2010 and was used to shoot lots of big-budget fare like Prometheus, The Hobbit, Flight, The Amazing Spider-Man, Lone Survivor, The Great Gatsby, and a handful of Marvel movies.
That collection of titles is a telling one, I think. Because technically they all look flawless. But oftentimes, when your product appears to be flawless, it’s not very interesting or memorable either.
Yep.
I’ve always loved movies that use the camera to add texture to the story. I love Anthropoid’s 16mm cinematography, Saving Private Ryan’s bleach bypass and myraid other tricks, and Captain Phillips’s differentiation of settings using digital (back home in the US), 35mm (aboard the ship), and 16mm (Somalia). Good cinematography is like carefully selected vocabulary in a novel.
I actually used one of these for the first two or three years we lived in our current house and every word here is true. Our yard took an hour to an hour and a half to mow and I would often use that time to listen to a podcast (I remember one of Hardcore History’s episodes on the Sino-Japanese War in this context) or an audiobook (From Russia with Love comes to mind)—or I would leave the earbuds inside and just enjoy the whirring of the blades and the soft snip of the grass.
An additional virtue of the reel mower: My kids loved it and often joined me outside, and because it produced relatively little noise I could talk to them as I worked.
Until it got shot down by new provost Jennifer Airey yesterday, with the corporate speak reason that the college needed to “go in a different direction.”
Shameful but unsurprising. Read the whole piece.
What is generally less appreciated is that the Union Army enlisted more than 500,000 immigrants, mainly Irish who had settled in the Northeast and Germans from the Midwest. That latter group formed a key Republican constituency- liberal refugees from the Revolutions of 1848 who looked askance at the feudal South with its preening, slaveholding gentry. If one includes children of immigrants from the waves that arrived in the 1830s, the Union Army may have been almost half foreign or first-generation American; only a minority of soldiers were native-born whites from multigenerational families.
Read the whole thing, especially those parts dealing with Richard Taylor.
When I teach Western Civ II and reach 1848, I introduce my students to the “Heckerlied,” a genuinely blood-curdling German revolutionary song named for Friedrich Hecker. Following the failure of his particular front in 1848, he fled to Illinois as one of “the 48ers” and led a regiment in the Union army during the Civil War, one of many such “lifelong political radicals who sought to use the War Between the States as a hopeful prelude to wider world revolution.”
Take a minute to listen to the “Heckerlied” and consider what it means that men like this thought they could continue their levelling project in the US.
At First Things,
writes of the fallacy of regarding one’s religious and public lives as separable—an especially tedious posture of the political classes.At his blog, Alan Jacobs notes the irony of “an essay about the decline of reading that features either a misreading or non-reading of a passage from Plato’s Phaedrus.”
At The Critic, Marcus Walker relates the story of receiving the Eucharist at a large unnamed London place of worship, where he had to scan a QR code for the order of service, and argues against the intrusion of the digital into sacred space:
The secret of Christianity is that it is corporeal, it is physical. The sacraments cannot be imparted virtually, no matter how hard some tried to tell us they could in lockdown.
The truths being explored are not 30 seconds long; they were millennia in gestation and found themselves written in a series of books where the themes overlap and interplay and form over the course of a narrative that takes us “from the first days of our disobedience unto the glorious redemption brought us by this Holy Child” (as we say at Christmas).
All the tools of modern media might be employed to reinforce this story, but at its core is a book, a meal of unleavened bread and wine, the coldness of water and the warmth of the laying on of hands.
In World War II-related YouTube, the Tank Museum looks at the history of the Tiger and Tiger II and considers what the point of this expensive, complicated upgrade was and World War Wisdom takes a very close look at the excellent costuming of Fury, which is not only period-correct for the final weeks of the war but tells you subtle things about even minor characters.
YouTuber Moviewise takes Ryan O’Neal’s notorious reaction to bad news as a chance to consider the way a good performance can save bad—or potentially cheesy—dialogue.
The latest on the blog
I wrote briefly of Elmore Leonard’s travails in bringing LaBrava to the screen with a special focus on the commiserating letters he received from two other crime writers who had no love for Hollywood.
I examined the weird publisher’s note in the 75th anniversary edition of The Martian Chronicles.
I wrote about how Jane Austen uses the art of writing—and Emma Woodhouse’s obstinate rejection of obviously good writing—to illustrate moral character.
From the blog archives
Related to World War Wisdom’s piece on Fury, here’s my look at three books by vets that informed my writing of The Snipers. Fury always brings to mind Paul Fussell’s observations on uniform and cleanliness in the book quoted here.
Long ago I wrote about different sets of “rules” for writing laid down by Elmore Leonard, George Orwell, and CS Lewis. Per my piece on Emma yesterday, the move a writer rails against these the more you can be sure they produce crap.2
Speaking of which, Ursula Le Guin once took an obvious swipe at Leonard, accusing him of pretension and phony machismo. I wrote about why that’s false.
Currently reading
Cooler than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard, by CM Kushins
A Deadly Shade of Gold, by John D MacDonald
The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkien
Prayer for Beginners, by Peter Kreeft
Freaky Deaky, by Elmore Leonard3
Recently acquired
The White People and Other Weird Stories and The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories, by Arthur Machen
A Purple Place for Dying and The Empty Copper Sea, by John D MacDonald
By the Pricking of Her Thumb, by Adam Roberts
Lieutenant Hornblower, Hornblower and the Hotspur, and Commodore Hornblower, by CS Forester
Until next time
Thanks for reading!
After a summer spent working on a film crew, I bought a Canon DL2, which was not of quite the same caliber as the XL1 but about as good as it got in digital video at the time. I’m now astonished at how bad the quality is when I revisit the stuff I shot on that camera.
“But Orwell breaks his own rules!” “But Leonard doesn’t even follow his own rules!” If you can’t see the artistic flexibility explicitly built into both sets of “rules,” your reading comprehension could also use some work. See my Ursula Le Guin piece linked above.
“Reading.” Revisiting this for the first time since 2018 via audiobook. Great commute listen.