Flos Carmeli

June 30, 2008

A Little Later

from Venetia
Georgette Heyer

Beyond the stream lay the Priory itself, a rambling house built in Tudor times upon the foundations of the original structure, subsequently enlarged, and said to be replete with a wealth of panelling, and a great many inconveniences.

*****

". . . Fair Fatality, you are the most unusual female I have encountered in all my thirty-eight years!"

"You can't think how deeply flattered I am!" she assured him. "I daresay my head would be quite turned if I didn't suspect that amongst so many a dozen or so may have slipped from your memory." . . .

"Spiteful little cat!" he said appreciatively. "How the devil was I to recognize Miss Lanyon of Undershaw in a crumpled gown and a sunbonnet, and without even the chaperonage of her maid?"

"Oh, am I to understand then, that if you had know nmy quality you wouldn't have molested me? How chivalrous!"

Her first encounter with the infamous Lord Damarel goes none-too-well and so provides the reader with delights of the first order.

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Georgette Heyer

It is a shame that Mrs. Heyer's novels have always been marketed as "Romances," indeed, that she is considered the founder of that most infamous of romantic genres "the Regency romance," not because her stories are not romances, but because we no longer truly understand what is meant by the term and many potential readers are alienated both by the genre and its marketing. How many young men are likely to pick up a book with a bright yellow cover showing a young woman as though filmed through cheesecloth accepting a yellow rose from a young man in a rather too frou-frou shirtfront and jacket? There was a time in my life when I deprived myself of the enormous pleasures of reading Mrs. Heyer for reasons no better than these. And it is still a little embarrassing to be "caught" in the act of flipping through one of the Harlequin editions.

Thank goodness a trade paperback publisher has recently reissued much of Mrs. Heyer's work in editions that look much more like what Ms. Heyer has written--comedies of manners á la Jane Austen. Romance is the predominant thread and the binding glue of each of the stories, but they are crackling with with poise and pungent observations about the human animal--in love and otherwise. In the new editions, which features covers that look like portraits of the John Singer Sargent age, no self-respecting man will have any difficulty picking them up and reading them. Well, perhaps there is a lingering aura that is no so easily diffused, but the covers go a long way toward helping with the image problem.

I'd like to share a small portion of Venetia that gives you a sense of the snap and crackle of dialog and the undercurrent of a deep and sensitive intelligence that drives the work. Additionally, Mrs. Heyer does her research--her characters are always "in time, in dress, and on the right stage" as it were.

from Venetia
Georgette Heyer

"I can't, of course. What is it?" she returned, glancing at the volume. "Ah, Greek! Some improving tale, I don't doubt."

"The Medea, he said repressively. "Porson's edition, which Mr. Appersett lent to me."

"I know! She was the delightful creature who cut up her brother and cast the pieces in her papa's way, wasn't she? I daresay, perfectly amiable when one came to know her."

He hunched an impatient shoulder, and replied unctuously: "You don't understand, and it's a waste of time to make you."

Her eyes twinkled at him. "But I promise you I do! Yes and sympathize with her, besides wishing I had her resolution! Though I think I should rather have buried your remains tidily in the garden dear."

A castoff, a mere bauble of dialog that sets the story rolling and we know Venetia and the brother to whom she speaks. More than that we see an oxymoron--a gentle spitfire who knows a great deal, knows how to use it, and yet does not pull out all the plugs.

Georgette Heyer is a skilled writer whose works continue in print not because of a small population of readers of romance, or even because of a large population, but because the books are good--well researched, well written, witty, and sharply observant. I wonder how many men have already become acquainted with Mrs. Heyer dispite the nearly insurmountable difficulties of the schlock heaped on them by marketers who inadvertantly narrow the market rather than broaden it. I think Michael Dirda hit the nail on the head when he said in The Classics for Pleasure that the nearest things to Mrs. Heyer's novels were not the chain line of modern factory-produced romances, but the very different romances of Patrick O'Brien with Aubrey and Maturin. There is, I think, a good deal of justice in this comparison. While I have found the Aubrey and Maturin novels unapproachable because of the sheer odiousness of the main characters (or because of my finicky taste, more likely), I find Mrs. Heyer's company perfectly amiable--someone to take aside on a summer's rainy afternoon into the book nook or windowseat and spend a while chatting with. Someone who has much to say and says it both well and beautifully.

Man or woman, do not make the mistake of dismissing Mrs. Heyer as the queen and founder of the modern romance novel. You will be giving up a great deal if you do.

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June 29, 2008

Books Carefully Considered

Before loaded into luggage--see TSO, the wonders of that slender machine:

The inimitable master: The Ambassadors Henry James
The End of the Affair Graham Greene
Venetia Georgette Heyer
Arthurian Romances Chretien de Troyes (includes Erec et Enide, Yvain, Cliges, and Lancelot.

While here in Texas, I am going to try to seek out a half-price books and see if there might not be some Georgette Heyer (mystery and romance) on the shelf. Of particular interest The Grand Sophy, which I just re-read about in Michael Dirda's Classics for Pleasure. However, I'll probably snap up anything I can find.

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June 25, 2008

from The Ambassadors

The Ambassadors is one of three books acknowledged as "great" from Henry James's late period. With the other two Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, it made the list of the top 100 books of the 20th century. If it is like The Golden Bowl at all, I would say that it deserves its place among the top novels, probably more so than many others on the list. And my reading so far suggests that such praise is not unwarranted. Additionally, this book, at least initially, seems to have a somewhat lighter tone than either of the other two, or indeed, than much of James's work outside of the short story.

Here's an example.

from The Ambassadors
Henry James

"Ah, they couldn't have come--either of them. They're very busy people and Mrs. Newsome in particular has a large full life. She's moreover highly nervous--and not at all strong."

"You mean she's an American invalid?"

He carefully distinguished. "There's nothing she likes less than to be called one, but she would consent to be one of those things, I think," he laughed, "If it were the only way to be the other."

"Consent to be an American in order to be an invalid?"

"No," said Strether, "the other way round. . . ."

This conversation takes places between the protagonist, Strether, and the catalyst for the story Miss Gostrey. And it leaves little doubt in the reader's mind regarding Miss Gostrey's opinion of Mrs. Newsome.

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June 23, 2008

Reading List

Jesus of Nazareth Pope Benedict XVI
The Ambassadors Henry James
Say You're One of Them Uwem Akpan (a very talented Nigerian Jesuit writing about life in Africa today. Five stories about African children in appalling situations.

For more on Uwem Akpan (an interview that I haven't yet listened to): NPR Interview

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The Gabriel Hounds

Mary Stewart was one of my mother's favorite authors. I had nver read much of anything other than the Merline/Arthur books, but I had glanced through some of the books and formed a favorable impression of the prose in general.

Because I had spent some time with the Misses Archer and Sloper, I thought I had earned a little vacation from slow-going but enriching literature and spent it with three books--Agatha Christie's Appointment with Death, John Dickson Carr's The Man Who Could Not Shudder and Mary Stewart's The Gabriel Hounds. Perhaps more about these former two later. But for now--The Gabriel Hounds.

Mary Stewart, like Georgette Heyer, is one of those people capable of writing a "romance" which is engaging to whomever wishes to read it. The modern day "romance" elements of this book are slender indeed, confined to a couple of moments largely in the last twenty pages of the book. While I've seen her typified as a modern day "gothic" writer, nothing could be further from the truth--at least as far as this book gives evidence. She is a writer of suspense novels/mysteries set in exotic locations which she renders with an incredibly deft touch.

It is difficult to imagine a write more able to create atmosphere and setting with a lighter hand than can Mary Stewart. The Gabriel Hounds is set in Lebanon and Syria of the mid 1960s. Apparently, at that time, Lebanon was still a fairly pleasant place to visit. And the story takes place in the Dar Ibrahim, a palace located between the sources of two rivers--one of them being the river at which Adonis was killed by a wild boar.

The story centers around a visit made by a dutiful great neice to the eccentric aunt who inhabits this rambling wreck of a palace and all of the mayhem and havoc that ensues.

Given that this is my first encounter after the Merlin novels (about which I have mixed feelings), I have no doubt that I will be visiting Ms. Stewart more frequently in the future. This book provided an enjoyable respite and a few quiet moments with a very capable writer.

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Washington Square and The Heiress

We leave, for a moment, our discussion of Miss Archer, although, God willing and time enough, I do hope to return to it, and consider the case of Catherine Sloper, cellulose and celluloid. Washington Square is considered the first novel of the so-called "middle period" of Henry James's writing.

I was attracted to Washington Square by a recent trip to New York in which I was able to take in some of the historic sites. While I did not see the Washington Square arch by daylight, I had seen it on a previous trip. I was also attracted by the fact that it was the novel that immediately preceded The Portrait of a Lady and seemed to have some of the same concerns.

Catherine Sloper is the plain, dull, somewhat dimwitted unwed daughter of Dr. Austin Sloper, a complex, demanding, tyrannical figure of a father who dominates Catherine's life in the same way that Gilbert Osmond dominates the life of his daughter Pansy--possibly to similar effect. And that is part of what makes Washington Square such an interesting study.

At the beginning of Washington Square, poor, plain Catherine is approached at a party by dashing and handsome Morris Townsend. Out of the blue he comes to her and starts to be entranced by her charms. She is alarmed, never having recognized any charms within herself to charm anyone, and pleased. The courtship soon begins.

Within days, Austin Sloper is disapproving of the whole thing. The disapproval grows until he decides that he will disinherit Catherine if she continues the relationship. While this does not deter her, it does throw a monkey wrench into her relationship with Morris.

The subtle psychological complexity of the novel is thrown into high relief when one views The Heiress, a William Wyler film adapted from a play, in turn adapted from Washington Square. As the movie sets out, much is similar to the progress of the novel, but it is in the complicated windings of the ending that the rock-solid superiority of the book is brought forward. From this point on, let only those who have no intention of enjoying either continue, for here be spoilers.

In the novel, Catherine Sloper is ultimately jilted by Morris for whom her mere 10,000 a year is insufficient when he could have 30,000. As they plan their elopement, he leaves for a "California business trip" from which he does not return. Catherine stays on in her father's house, becoming a spinster. After a number of years, her father becomes ill. On his deathbed, he asks her to renounce her intention to marry Morris Townsend and she refuses. He alters his will and substantially removes her from it. Morris does return after the death of Dr. Sloper and he takes up where he left off, somewhat older, but not all that much the worse for wear. Catherine receives him once and then tells him to stay away.

In the movie, much of this dynamic is gone. Catherine comes to an awareness that her Father "doesn't love her" (doesn't value her and is constantly deriding her is more to the point). In the book, the realization is more like the latter. Catherine plans an elopement with Morris and embraces the idea that she will be disinherited by the disagreeable old man. In the book, the idea of being disinherited is a horror for Catherine, not so much for the sake of the money, but for the sake of the injury it will do her father and the family. While she celebrates the disinheritance with Morris, she plans their elopement that evening. Of course, he never shows up. In the course of a short time, Dr. Sloper dies, with Catherine refusing even to come to his bedside. He does not disinherit her (the cinematic Dr. Sloper being a good deal more compassionate and kinder than the literary Dr. Sloper). In fact, in the book, one gets the sense that Dr. Sloper is being almost entirely arbitrary in his "testing" of Catherine, relishing the challenge of wills more that being particularly concerned about how Catherine will turn out.

In due time (in the film) Morris returns and offers an excuse for not running away with her. Catherine appears to accept it and arranges to leave with him. When he returns to elope, she refuses to answer the door to him.

The two works have their own strengths and attractions. I doubt any but the most skilled and subtle director could have brought Washington Sqaure as it stands to the screen in the 1940s. Indeed, we needed to make it into the postmodern era before the logic of the ending could appeal and resonate with us. We have an nearly instinctive understanding of Dr. Sloper and Catherine and the dynamics of their relationship now. That James was able to see, understand, and chronicle all of this in the 1880s stands as a remarkable testament to his acuity as author. Catherine Sloper is "a type" who, as I implied, shows up again with Pansy in The Portrait of a Lady. We do not know that Pansy will come to the same end as Catherine; however, when she tries to exert her own will even a little, her father sends her away to a convent for additional "finishing."

But back to Catherine Sloper. The Catherine of the movie becomes hard, brittle, hateful, and harsh. She internalizes what she thinks of her father, not what her father actually was and did. She turns herself into the image she has made of him. In the book Catherine falls into a kind of dazed submissiveness. After Morris turns her down when she has come to terms with her disinheritance and offer to go away with him, she returns to her father and, essentially, shuts down. She becomes his companion in physical person, but her spirit is largely absent. She never deliberately hurts anyone, Morris included, but one gets the impression that she never engages anyone in anything more than casual conversation.

Washington Square is an amazing portrait in minature of profound psychological complexity, and, it seems to me, accuracy. Catherine Sloper is taken from hopeful debutant to reclusive spinster on a vector of her Father's making but only with her nearly complete cooperation and acquiescence. In some sense, Washington Square is even more "feminist" than The Portrait of a Lady, showing at once how subject a woman's life was to the life of the men around her and how that subjection profoundly colors her life, her interactions, and her person.

While I find the book a better exercise and a better piece of fiction, both the book and the movie have their own individual rewards--the rewards of the movie being Olivia de Haviland and Sir Ralph Richardson in some very fine performances.

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June 11, 2008

More About James

Yesterday's post was unsatisfyingly vague because I didn't want to disrupt the enjoyment of anyone who had not yet encountered this truly wondeful book. Let that serve as a warning to all who have not yet read it as they proceed into this post.

The Portrait of a Lady:Genesis of the Anti-Hero?

It seems reasonable that if Hamlet can be listed in the rosters of the anti-hero, so too can Isabel Archer. Like Hamlet, Isabel might otherwise be considered a tragic hero, but here "heroic flaw" pierces so deep and so profoundly divides her character that it is really impossible to sympathize with her dilemma. She has so thoroughly compromised herself with her uncompromisability that she is no longer emotionally accessible to the reader.

This last point is interesting. In a discussion with a friend the other day, he suggested that James never intended Isabel Archer to be emotionally approachable or even likeable. If indeed, this is an accurate reflection of James's intention, he succeeds admirably. If, on the other hand, the reader is supposed to be engaged by Miss Archer, James has failed miserably to make her engaging.

Looking through the Jamesian Canon, one finds a plethora of female characters in similar situation. Neither of the leads of The Golden Bowl is particularly attractive. Catherine of Washington Square is anything but likeable, approachable, or even in any real sense knowable. The principles of The Spoils of Poynton are so thoroughly offputting one is put in mind of Anne River Siddons Fox's Earth. The nursemaid of The Turn of the Screw is even more a ghost that the ghost she may not see. And Daisy Miller is made to be unlikeable start to finish--once she meets her end from one or another disease, the reader breathes a sigh of relief and moves on. The catalog is not exhaustive, nor is my acquaintance with James's work, but call this a working hypothesis. What is fascinating about James's work is how he manages to engage the reader without giving the reader a central figure who is particularly sympathetic or engaging.

In The Portrait of a Lady, the engagement comes largely from the characters that fill Isabel's world--Mr. Touchett, Mrs. Touchett, Ralph Touchett, Lord Warburton, Caspar Goodwood, Harriet Stackpole, Mr. Bantling (on the good side), the Countess Gemini (in the ambiguous mode), and Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle (on the bad side.) Pansy, Isabel's stepdaughter, seems to take after her stepmother in the realm of unsympathetic heroines. In a way akin to Catherine of Washington Square, the demur submissiveness of Pansy is an appalling spectacle to behold, and Isabel's inadvertent assist of this least attractive of Pansy's qualities is another point that deflects the reader's sympathies from Isabel.

In this swirl of interesting and mostly likable characters, Isabel stands out as something of a vacuum, a black hole of sympathy. Watch her interactions with others and read her interior monologue and the reader becomes become progressively chilled, as the realization dawns that one is in the presence of a committed egomaniac--a person without any outside anchor in reality to ground her theories and notions, and thus a ship untethered in fair weather or foul and likely to run aground at the first shoal.

And the reader sees this again and again as first she rejects the advances of Lord Warburton, and then of Caspar Goodwood, and even the gentle non-advance of Ralph Touchett, who is wise enough to understand that he is not even in the running. And it is through the kindness and thoughtfulness of Ralph that Isabel achieves the wealth to allow for her destruction. Ralph entreats his dying father to alter his will to leave a living to him and to his mother, but to settle the bulk of the estate on his cousin Isabel Archer. It is this wealth that precipitates the decline that occupies the second half of the novel.

Because she is now a woman of means, she becomes attractive to a pair of schemers (somewhat similar in mode to The Wings of the Dove, who proceed to plan her "demise." Madame Merle, whose name indicates "blackbird" in French, and whose name, the book notes informed me, is supposed to remind me of Madame Mertuil of Les Laiasons Dangereuses, is the primary instigator. It is her chance meeting with Isabel and her acquaintance with Gilbert Osmond that defines the action of the remainder of the book.

I must leave off at this point, and if I can, I will return to the declining action of the book. But, I have a quick trip to NYC and Boston in the interim, so I don't know where I'll be by the time my head settles.

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June 10, 2008

Henry James, Redux

More properly titled

Some Notes toward Coming to Terms with The Portrait of a Lady

The Portrait of a Lady is a difficult book to characterize; there is little in the way of plot or setting, and much about the interior lives of the characters, even if much of that is viewed from the exterior. Isabel Archer clearly occupies center stage and she presents her own difficulties to the reader. Frankly, it is difficult to like her and even more difficult to sympathize with her plight. The whole arc of the book can be described by the adage, "She has made her bed, now she must lie upon."

Why is Isabel Archer so difficult to like? The answer to this question probably boils down to the definition for a "tragic hero(ine)." A noble, otherwise likeable person, with one major fault. If fault there be in Ms. Archer it is an overweening pride. The bible instructs that "Pride goeth before a fall," (and after, as well, as anyone who has taken a tumble in public can testify). And fall she does, from a great and dizzying height.

And yet one is left with the impression than much of the angst and anguish of that fall is unnecessary--dictated only by the odd and hard pride that drives Ms. Archer. In fact, contemplating what has happened to her in the course of her marriage, she considers for a moment ending the pain by walking away, only to conclude that she cannot do so because then her error will be brought to public notice.

So where are we left with Ms. Archer? It's odd, her pride leads in two directions. In the beginning of the book, she is unwilling to be "tied down," to consider marriage because it would be a compromise of all the possibilities that seem to open up before her. She flouts conventionality and the "normal" way through life. Once she has abandoned her better judgment and entered into marriage, her pride leads her to cling to the conventional way of things so that her error and her shame will not be broadcast into the world. It is interesting the way in which this most primal of sins pulls Ms. Archer in two ways, never offering a moment of piece or tranquility. In her ascendant phase, she rejects the approaches of two men who really love her, breaking down in tears after she sends one of them away--tears of anger and even rage that she should have to tell him to go away. In her decline, she once again breaks down into tears when she realizes that her pride leaves her no way out of her dilemma.

Pride is the central issue of the book. It is the cross on which our heroine is hoisted, and it is such an ugly sin that many will look upon it and say that perhaps she deserves what she has made for herself. As in many of James's works, the heroine is not particularly attractive. We're told that she's beautiful and has a way about her that seems to fascinate men. But the reality is that to the reader she presents a rather formidable, stern, and completely self-interested facade that does nothing to provoke any sympathy. Hence, the book cannot really be viewed as a tragedy. No more can one view it as "realism" or "life as it is," because this life is so warped out of any possibility of viewing it as normal. All around her, she has examples of women who have stepped out of conventionality to live a life that is more compatible with their spirits, but she disdains these role models in favor to the model she has built in her head. And so, she condemns herself to a life of misery or at least a long pause on a possible life of happiness. More wicked and horrible than that, she has it within her power to free another trapped in the same web as she is, and yet she refuses to do it--possibly creating another life in the image of her own. Oh, how our sins come home to roost and how that roosting increases them and their effects.

I'll end this jumble of part I for now, because if I do not do so, nothing will ever see the light of day. But there is much to think about in the case of Ms. Archer, and perhaps these notes have provoked some of you all to look into for the first time or refresh your acquaintance with Ms. Archer if you had perhaps the pleasure of make such a friend earlier on.

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May 27, 2008

Unaccustomed Earth--Jhumpa Lahiri

It's unfortunate how being published in a certain place tends to shape what you write. Jhumpa Lahiri has had the mixed blessing of publication in The New Yorker, and the downside of that blessing shows in her latest collection of short stories.

The title is taken from Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom Ms Lahiri, in an interview published elsewhere lists as one of her influences. Her prose is still strong and lovely, her ability to sketch in people and place, remarkable. All that fails here is the relentless similarity of all of the pieces. Disaffected, alienated, spoiled, wealthy upper-class Bengali children spend much or all of their time in Ann Beattie territory--angsting over identity, wealth, lack of wealth, girlfriends, boyfriends, lack of communication, sex, you name it.

The charm of some of the earlier stories in Interpreter of Maladies is gone almost completely, replaced by a relentless parade of disaffected, unhappy, bratty Bengali offspring who are worried about their status in the world, their education, or any number of other things. The New Yorker patina of these stories (even if published elsewhere) is more a stain than a coating and I'm afraid it runs deep, so deep that I will be hard-pressed to bother myself with any more of Ms. Lahiri's brand of angst.

Perhaps this was present as well in the first collection--if so, I did not notice. But here the pressure was relentless and there was no escape from it. Ultimately, despite the beautiful writing, nothing is said that hasn't been said before and better, or that cannot be said in a way that provokes more insight or sympathy than Ms. Lahiri's characters can command.

Are there no Bengali's who have never shopped in Harrod's? Who have come to America and not had the money to get home? Are there no second generation Bengali's that have retained some sense of who they are? Who have some alliance with the past? Is everything wiped out in a single generation? If not, Ms. Lahiri has chronicled a true tragedy, but a tragedy of choice not of requirement.

Needless to say, I was profoundly disappointed by this book. While the prose still sparkles and jolts and the authorial command is impressive, the beat of the stories is a dead one--that poor old horse should be buried.

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April 30, 2008

The Last Secret of Fatima

This book is credited to Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone who did contribute the majority of the content; however the person responsible for the questions, the layout, and the structure of the whole is a journalist by the name of Giuseppe de Carli who seems to have an unfortunate flair for the sensational. The book takes the form of a full-length interview with some supporting documentation at the end and a foreward by Pope Benedict XVI.

As an interview, the book has its ups and downs. There are unfortunate and sometimes meaningless digressions; the final 15% of the interview section has nothing whatsoever to do with the title of the book, and appears to be meaningless padding designed to form a "book-length" study; for those not intimately familiar with everyday events in Italy, there are meangingless, enigmatic and odd references to events that may or may not be related to the main theme--I somehow doubt that the death of Oriana Fallaci has a whole lot to do with the Fatima secrets.

There are times when de Carli, either legitimately, or out of a perverse sense of journalistic sensationalism forces the points of the so-called Fatimists, insisting at points the Sister Lucia's true revelations had been suppressed, or that there was a fourth secret, or that the final secret did not concern Pope John Paul II. Perhaps these are just meant to clear away the will 'o the wisps that seem to flicker around the edges of this phenomenon.

What the book highlighted for me is the source of my distaste for the entire Fatima phenomenon. As is so often the case, it isn't the veracity or likelihood of the events in Fatima in 1917, but the claims and exaggerations and distortions made by those most partisan to the Fatima visions.

What does come across in the book very nicely is a sense of Sister Lucia as a person. One feels that she was a lively, tart, impish character who took guff from no one and who shot straight from the hip. At one point in the interview we see this:

from The Last Secret of Fatima
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone

After the Secret had been revealed, some people began to doubt the genuineness of the text. Lucia's Carmelite superior in Coimbra told her about this doubt: "They're saying that there's another secret." With a sigh, Lucia replied, "Well if they know what it is, then let them tell us. For my part, I don't know about any other secrets. Some people are never satisfied. Let's not pay them any mind."

A beautiful example of saintly saying-it-like-it-is.

The book does explore the last secret of Fatima. In addition, for those of us (like me) who knew virtually nothing about the Fatima event and aftermath, it sketches in the history and timeline of events. The revelation of the "secrets" of Fatima is a little odd, occurring as it does in 1941 and 1946; however, God works in His own ways and sometimes it takes time and courage to come forward with His truth.

One of the quiet gems of the book is a short theological commentary on the Fatima secrets and in particular the last secret by then Cardinal Ratzinger. In the course of this short (12 page) essay, Cardinal Ratzinger outlines the status of public and private revelations and provides an interpretive outline for the Fatima visions and their meaning for the world today.

from "Theological Commentary"
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger

The teaching of the Church distinguishes between "public Revelation" and "private revelations." The two realities differ not only in degree but also in essence. The term "pubic Revelation" refers to the revealing action of God directed to humanity as a whole and which finds its literary expression in the two parts of the Bible: the Old and New Testaments. It is called "Revelation" because in it God gradually made himself known to men, to the point of becoming man himself, in order to draw to himself the whole world and unite it with himself through his Incarnate Son, Jesus Christ. It is not a matter therefore of intellectual communication, but of a life-giving process in which God comes to meet man. At the same time this process naturally produces data pertaining to the mind and to the understanding of the mystery of God. It is a process that involves man in his entirety and therefore reason as well, but not reason alone. Because God is one, history, which he shares with humanity is also one. It is valid for all time, and it has reached its fulfillment in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Here, the man who was to become the Holy Father set out clearly the lines of demarcation. The essay continues with the same remarkable, succinct clarity and provides one of the deeply insightful high points of the book.

Overall The Last Secret of Fatima is a muddled, digressive, journalistic mess that nevertheless does cast a great deal of light on the phenomenon of Fatima and on the practices of the faithful who remain in line with church teaching. The book isn't for everyone, but it is certainly accessible to anyone sincerely interested in trying to separate the wheat from the chaff as far as Fatima is concerned. I'm glad I've read it because it has at once helped me to become both more informed about this small piece of Church History and more receptive and responsive to the Blessed Mother. In addition, it was a poignant reminder of how much I loved Pope John Paul the Great and how I look forward to the Church's revelation of God's will concerning his heavenly status. I won't say the same thing will happen for all who read it, but if you come looking for the truth, I think you may find a good deal of it between the covers of this book.

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April 25, 2008

By Way of Comment on My Present Read

I have, of late, had the sometime pleasure of the company of a young American woman of my acquaintance at luncheon. While the venues, cuisines, and surroundings of our après-midi repast were variable and dependent upon the circumstances and opportunities available to us, they have always been of the greatest pleasure and entertainment to me.

Miss Archer is at once a very determined young lady, but one also tinged with the streak of independence set firmly in the ground of a graceful and enhancing naiveté, which conduces to my enjoyment of our conversational aperitifs.

I've grown somewhat concerned because whereas her talk was mostly of the many men who saw her and implored her favors while she remained on the Touchett family estate, more and more I am hearing of a person of interest who seems to have netted our pretty little bird without her own knowledge. And the more I hear of Osmond, the more concerned I become, because it occurs to me that there is some information circulating about him that does not redound to his credit. While one can never take seriously what circulates on the street or even in the salon, it has been my distinct displeasure to make the acquaintance of another member of the pretty scene that Miss Archer has laid before me.

Miss Archer never fails of speak of Madame Merle in anything but the most glowing terms, expressing only admiration for this widow, who, as Mr. Touchett has observed on occasion lacks any blot whatsoever on her record. One must wonder about such a record--how recent it must be and what must have been, with some great aplomb, expunged from that on-going document. My own sense of Madame Merle is not nearly so flattering to that personage. There is something about her that is, perhaps subtle is the word, but I think wily is closer to the sense. She seems to fashion les tableaux to fit the needs of the moment, and one cannot help but wonder what those needs might be. Mr. Touchett himself has confided to me that she is a woman of great and unrealized ambitions—and perhaps that view has colored my own of her character. For all I know she may be as spotless as she appears to the casual observer.

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April 17, 2008

I Have a Theory

Like Miss Archer herself, I am filled with useless theories and baseless speculations. But it occurred to me, while reading The Portrait of a Lady that Henry James himself resides within the novel in the skin of Henrietta Stackpole.

Ms. Stackpole tells Isabel that she has no affinity for inanimate objects and she doesn't care to write home about places and mere scenery. Her interest is in people and how they interact and what they are. She sees, of course, with her own blinders in place. However, she does see.

Henry James, for all of his skill with character, lacks any sense of place or time. You read through the book not knowing what people are dressed in, where they are standing, what the scenery is like. Isabel Archer's entire trip trough London is summed up in a short paragraph of about three sentences. We have no opportunity to visit with her the British Museum, much less to sit a moment under those grand trees of Kensington Gardens.

Yes indeed, James makes short shrift of scenery and, indeed, almost any form of set decoration. And we have characters who wander about in a largely and mysteriously featureless world. It amazes me how bereft of this sort of detail the book is.

On the other hand, it simply isn't required for what Mr. James wishes to divulge to us. And so, in that sense, it is handled perfectly.

However, I have theory. . .

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April 15, 2008

The Wacky World of Henry James

As typified by two passages from the current read:

from The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James

Isabel was sure moreover that her mild forehead and silver cross referred to some weird Anglican mystery, some delightful reinstitution perhaps of the quaint office of the canoness.

*****
[Harriet Stackpole speaking with Lord Warburton]

". . . . I don't approve of you, you know; I feel as if I ought to tell you that."

"Don't approve of me?"

"Yes; I don't suppose any one ever said such a thing to you before, did they? I don't approve of lords as an institution. I think the world has got beyond them--far beyond."

"Oh, so do I. I don't approve of myself in the least. Sometimes it comes over me--how I should object to myself if I were not myself, don't you know? But that's rather good, by the wayl--not to be vainglorious."

"Why don't you give it up then?" Miss Stackpole enquired.

"Give up--a--?" asked Lord Warburton, meeting her harsh inflexion with a very mellow one.

"Give up being a lord."

"Oh, I'm so little of one! One would really forget all about it if you wretched Americans were not constantly remind one. However, I do think of giving it up, the litter there is left of it, one of these days."

"I should like to see you do it!" Henrietta exclaimed rather grimly.

"I'll invite you to the ceremony; we'll have supper and a dance."

Critics note that much of James's work is about this conflict between the Old World and the New World, with the New representing innocence and rugged individualism and self-determination (as noted in the character of Miss Archer herself.) Having not read sufficiently in his oeuvre to make such sweeping judgments, I'll accept the advise of the critics. If so, in these interchanges we see some of the downside of innocence and self-determination--a kind of naive arrogance that can pronounce with impunity on things it does not understand and look down upon all things foreign as "quaint" and "charming" or unlikeable institutions.

There is a price to pay for this sort of arrogance and previous reading has led me to believe that Miss Archer, much to her woe is to be brought up sharp against it.

Whatever the case, I'll keep you informed. And hopefully you can be as amused as I am.

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March 31, 2008

Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana--Anne Rice

Ms. Rice has produced yet another magnificent meditation on the Life of Christ. This book deals with the period just prior to the beginning of the public Ministry. As such, many of the incidents of the book are fictional recreations--meditations as it were on the Life of Christ in novel form.

While I really enjoyed, in fact, loved the first book, I greatly admire the skill and beauty of this second in the series. What Ms. Rice does with such aplomb is to give us a vision of the "second" side of Christ's sacrifice for us. In fact, she kind of opens our eyes to it. Christ not only did things for us, there were things He DID NOT do, all for us as well. And Ms. Rice deftly demonstrates the cost. For example, we have all read the word, "The foxes have their holes and the birds of the air have their nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head." What could this mean? Do we think He couldn't go to His mother's house and have a place to stay? Surely not. Then what are we to make of it? Anne Rice tells us--Jesus, though fully human and subject to all human desires, needs, and temptations, never takes a wife. This is NOT because He is not interested, but rather because it cannot be for reasons The DaVinci Code makes perfectly clear.

The book starts with a particularly ugly crowd incident in which two young boys are stoned to death because other boys accused them of homosexual involvement. Anne uses this to help us reflect on the fact that Jesus is a 30 year old man in a society that expects no bachelor uncles or unmarried men. This is a society that takes very seriously the Lord's injunction to "be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth." And here is a man who will have nothing of it. What are we to make of Him? James, his step-brother makes it quite clear when he compares Jesus to these young boys.

Throughout the story, we see Jesus, now older and subject to the expectations and anticipations of the society in which He lives, defying that society in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. He isn't married. He doesn't join the young men in their march on Caesarea. He has an awful lot of female friends, etc.

As the story progresses, we approach events we all know and understand from the Gospels. Here Ms. Rice makes some choices the some may take exception to in the ordering of the miracles He performs, for example. She choses the Gospel of Matthew as the "spine" of her story and presents the chronology there with additions from John, etc. And for those who didn't care for "speculation" in the first book, they may still find something to object to here--but that goes with the realm of fiction.

But we should be very careful. While Anne Rice is not writing a biography of Jesus, she has written something more than a piece of fiction. This work is like an extended lectio, a writerly meditation on the Life of Christ which she shares with the whole world As such, it seeks an understanding of Jesus and of His interior life that is only possible through deep reading and reflection on what we already know and through prayer. In a sense, the book is a kind of prayer, and extended and extensive meditation on Jesus and coming to and understanding of who He is and just what His life means. As such, Ms. Rice has done more than a thousand scholarly dissertations can do for some of us. I have read countless faithful and faith-filled biographies of Jesus and have not encountered some of the insights that I derived from this book. For that, I owe deepest thanks and appreciation to Ms. Rice. She opened my eyes to a dimension I never really gave much thought to--the Life of Christ as ongoing and willing sacrifice to bring the world to God. In giving up the woman He has come to love because it does not fit into the scheme of what He must do, He shows the ideal man bringing His passions into alignment with God's will. Jesus lives not so much for Himself, but for every person He encounters (all of us).

Add to all of these features supple and controlled prose that occasionally approaches the poetic, and you have a superb novel. I marked out three passages as examples of simplicity and power:

(I don't think there are any spoilers/surprises here, but read at your own risk.)

from Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana
Anne Rice

I held up my hands.

"We're made in His image, you and I," I said. "This is flesh, is it not? Am I not a man? Baptize me as you've done everyone else; do this, in the name of righteousness."

I went down into the water. I felt his hand on my left shoulder. I belt his fingers close on my neck. I saw nothing and felt nothing and heard nothing but the cool flooding water, and then slowly I came up out of it, and stood, shocked by the flood of sunlight.

The clouds above had shifted. The sound of beating wings filled my ears. I stared forward and saw across John's face the shadow of a dove moving upwards--and then I saw the bird itself rising into a great opening of deep blue sky and I heard a whisper against my ears, a whisper that penetrated the sound of the wings, as though a pair of lips had touched both ears at the same time, and as faint as it was, soft and secretive as it was, it seemed the edge of an immense echo.

This is my Son, this is my beloved.

All the riverbank had gone quiet.

Then noise. The old familiar noise. (pp. 176-177)

[Satan Speaking]

"Since you seem at best to be a sometime prophet," he went on in the same calm voice, my voice, "let me give you the picture. It was in a toll collector's tent that he breathed his last, and in a toll collector's arms, can you imagine, though his son sat nearby and your mother wept. And do you know how he spent his last few hours? Recounting to the toll collector and anyone else who happened to hear all he could remember of your birth--oh, you know the old song about the angel coming to your poor terrified mother, and the long trek to Bethlehem so that you might come howling into the world in the midst of the worst weather, and then the visit of the angels on high to shepherds, of all people, and those men. The Magi. He told the toll colleftor about their coming as well. And then he died, raving, you might say, only softly so. (p. 187)

I heard the flapping, the fluttering, the muffled beating of wings. All over me came the soft touch as if of hands, countless gentle hands, the even softer brush of lips--lips against my cheeks, my forehead, my parched eyelids. It seemed I was lost in a lovely weightless drift of song that had replaced the wind without true sound. And it carried me gently downwards; it embraced me; it ministered to me.

"No," I said. "No."

It became weeping now, this singing. It was pure and sad, yet irresistibly sweet. It had the immensity of joy. And there came more urgently these tender fingers, brushing my face and my burnt arms.

"No," I said, "I will do this. Leave me now. I will do it, as I've said."

I slipped away from them, or they spread out as soundlessly as they'd come, and rose and moved away in all directions, releasing me.

Alone again. [p. 200]

I've chosen three passages from near the end of the novel, and yet, I could have chosen any number of others. Ms. Rice has such fine-tuned control and such masterly rhythm and pattern that this could almost be poetry.

I've said before that we owe it to ourselves, to our Church, and to the world to support writers who support the faith. But more than that, we owe it to ourselves to support such works of fiction if we desire to see publishers print more such in the future. We owe it to ourselves to lavish the gift of such writing on the world (and incidentally ourselves) over and over again. Get this book from the library and read it. Better, go out and buy it and share it with others.

The two books of this saga will be for a long time on my list of favored gifts for those who know and love the Lord and for those who are beginning an acquaintance and do not yet really know who He is. Ms. Rice serves as a fine guide for those who dare not attempt the Gospels themselves. If these books could cause one-tenth the excitement, one-tenth the uproar of DVC, then they serve well the purposes of those about Whom they are written.

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March 25, 2008

The Sound and the Fury--William Faulkner

When I finished this book I thought, "What can I say about it that hasn't already been said a million times?" And I realized at once my frustration with writing about great works of literature. I have been given faulty examples. All too often people tend to explicate "texts," and mine meaning from them--sometimes, perhaps the meaning the author had in place. At other times, without doubt, a meaning placed there by the reader. The interpretation of The Sound and the Fury is not something you need from me. That's a fool's errand and I leave it to those who claim to know what the muse whispered into Faulkner's ear.

Reading for meaning is something like eating a sandwich for carbon. Properly done, we do not read merely for meaning, we read to live for a while in the world created by the words, to enjoy the company of the author's creations, and to make from the experience what meaning it may have for us, regardless of the author's inscrutable intent.

While I was in Boston I looked into a "Critical Edition" of Faulkner's masterpiece, seeking from it some key that would magically open up the world of the book. What I discovered is that Faulkner had as little notion of what he had made as most of the critics. When asked about the specifics--why so much shadow in Quentin's monologue, why this detail, why that--he was occasionally able to provide some insight. More often than note his explanation was mundane--something akin to "a blot of mustard. . . or a fragment of underdone potato."

But my service to you in this and in all future reviews, is not to tell you what the book means. That is constructed through the interaction of the person with the text. The contours of the story are set, but the meanings are interactive and multiple and my take on it merely one of many--one that I would enjoy sharing with others who truly enjoyed the book. My service to you is to tell you why and how you can enjoy this or any other book.

Faulkner creates a world far distant from our own with powerful thematic resonances into our own. Does the fate of Caddy, Benjy, Jason, Quentin, Quentin, Jason, Caroline, Dilsey, Frony, Roskus, T.P. and Luster really matter as a question of interacting symbols or enigmas on a page. Does a "text" really matter?

Here I would agree with the postmodernists--no, it doesn't. A "text" cannot matter. But a story, a novel, a poem--all of them can matter. They matter not in the necessary details of the events that form them, but in the dialog that occurs between author and reader.

Faulkner's story certainly tells us something about the decline and fall of one Southern Family. It is every bit as gothic and ornate and detailed as Poe's "Fall of the House to Usher," to which it may own some of its trappings. But it is distinctively Faulkner, giving prominence for perhaps the first time, to themes that he will revisit time and again--purity, incest, honor, time. . . the litany goes on an on. The parallels between this and other works becomes a set of profound harmonics. For example, Caroline ( a thoroughly deplorable and annoying character whose actions or inactions bring about much of the calamity of the novel) bears a sharp resemblance to Cora of As I Lay Dying in her inability to see just how wrong she is in the judgment of her own children. She comes to love the central engine of wrath and destruction--Jason Compson--best of all of her children. Or perhaps so she professes in her constant auto-invalided state to keep a kind of tenuous hold over her shadowy realm.

And that is the realm of Faulkner, the realm of dreams and shadows of promises and denials. Faulkner is the essence of the Southern Gothic. There is violence here without redemption. Some read into Benjy an innocence and a purity that suggest a Christlikeness. And yet, in my reading, that is the furthest thing from Faulkner's mind. Yes Benjy lives in eternity and every moment he has experienced is now and they all flow together in his mind. But Benjy isn't even the idiot of the title, although he is mentally retarded. Indeed, The Sound and the Fury isn't the tale told by the idiot Benjy, but the tale told by the entire doddering, etiolated, effete, impotent Compson clan as they come to embrace the destruction of everything they once held dear. Each person sings his or her own part in the chorus of this tale told by an idiot. If I were to pick a single character to be the idiot of the story I would probably choose Caroline Compson. (Even though, one could drawn some lines of similarity between Benjy Compson and Dostoevsky's Idiot Prince.) Indeed it is chiefly through her telling that the final destruction of the Compson clan is brought about.

So, why read this? Because of its sheer lucious prose, its sinuosity, its strength of theme and of vision, because it creates the vivid and continuous dream, it invites us into the world of the characters, it tells us a story about ourselves at times and our tendencies, and it shows us in the person of Dilsey the way out. The Sound and the Fury does not pretend to be about redemption, and yet redemption is offered in the person of Dilsey who tells her daughter Fronny at the end, "I have seen the beginning and the end." Dilsey is the one stalwart support throughout the book--if more attention had been paid her the precipitate destruction of the family need not have happened.

In Faulkner violence is violence, it is not revelation or epiphany or grace--in that Flannery O'Connor turned Faulkner on his head--rather it is the playing out of the Calvinistic vision of the gothic South. Violence in Faulkner is a sign that the person committing it is not among the elect. And The Sound and the Fury has its share of violence. As in most Faulkner works, much of it implied and off stage. Quentin's demise, Benjy's castration, Caddy's sorrowful marriage and life, Jason Compson the elder's death by dipsomania after he sees his one hope dashed to death in the Charles river.

Read The Sound and the Fury not because it is a masterpiece of modernism, of tone, of the Southern Gothic, not because it is the touchstone of much modern literature, not because it will reveal to you things you've never known and never seen--read it rather because it is a powerful story with interesting characters and much to tell you about them and perhaps about you. The meanings you make from your reading will tell you more about yourself than they will about what Faulkner has written. Faulkner provides us with a mirror (some might say a fun-house mirror). What we see in it is more about who we are than about what Faulkner was trying to get across. Authorial intent is largely unknowable, but authorial effect is directly experienced.

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March 24, 2008

Plus ça change. . .

plus c'est la même chose.

Oh my, but isn't it a day for the French?

Lunching with Mr. Faulkner and one of the most deplorable characters in the canon--by which I refer to Mr. Jason Compson the younger. But he has an observation that will probably sound a little familiar.

from The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner

I went back to the store. Thirteen points. Dam if I believe anybody who knows anything about the dam thing except the ones that sit back in those New York offices and watch the country suckers come up and beg them to take their money. Well, a man that just calls shows he has no faith in himself, and like I say if you aren't going to take the advice, what's the use in paying money for it. Besides, these people are right up there on the ground; they know everything that's going on. I could feel the telegram in my pocket. I'd just have to prove that they were using the telegraph company to defraud. That would constitute a bucket shop. And I wouldn't hesitate that long, either. Only be damned if it doesn't look like a company as big and rich as the Western Union could get a market report out on time. Half as quick as they'll get a wire to you saying Your account closed out. But what the hell do they care about the people. They're hand in glove with that New York Crowd. Anybody could see that.

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On Reading John Updike

I know, it's Easter and I should be doing Easter things, but after the greeting, there seemed to be very little to say on the matter that isn't better said elsewhere. And so I'm back to report on my latest reading and after some rumination may have thoughts about this season to share.

I've been reading John Updike again. This time the most recent collection of his nonfiction. I find him much less an icon of the degeneration of literature in his nonfictional avatar; however, one does get the idea that he values his opinion far beyond its actual worth. Reading through this collection it seems to collect every scrap of written material beyond his grocery lists and put them out there for all to read. Everything from a note to a magazine about a scene with a kiss to a short list of books to read about lust.

As usual, I'm interested by the sensibility behind the words. Updike is, without doubt, a cultivated and intensely interested man. He reviews a wide swath of what would be considered by most literature. He has neither the expansiveness nor the generosity of spirit of a Michael Dirda. But then a novelist as reviewer or critic enters the arena with an axe to grind and much of what he does in the way of review will represent that.

However, one great thing about Updike is that almost all of his reviews are at least mostly favorable. I think I read somewhere that he doesn't like to review a book if he didn't care for it. As a result, you get some luminous glimpses into the reading life of John Updike and into his very peculiar readings of some great books. Additionally, you get a sense of Updike's aesthetic--what might be better termed the aesthetic of the priapic. I note this because of one comment he makes in a review of Colm Toibin's The Master. He is gently chiding Toibin's implicit (and explicit) criticism of Henry James's "refusal" to come out of the closet. Updike points out that James lived during a time of bachelor uncles and unmarried men and that then, unlike now, not everything was centered around sex--there was a life beyond. This is almost hilarious, as Updike is one of two or three writers who have spent their entire careers convincing the rest of the world that everything does revolve around sex. While I find his brand generally less objectionable than Philip Roth's, I find it perhaps more destructive because it is powered by a sensibility infinitely more refined and more genteel than that of Mr. Roth. His prose can be fluid and enormously powerful, particularly in its description of the natural world. But. . . ultimately most of his stories center around his obsession and his obsession with getting everyone else to buy into his obsession.

All that said, reading through this massive tome is an exposure to a great many books and authors I might otherwise not encounter. There are introductions to great works of literature--most interesting here on some comments on Portrait of a Lady, which, to my way of thinking, presents things almost exactly the wrong way around. But then, that's one of the great things about a work of literature--it has as many readings as it has careful and sensible readers. And reading here some of Updikes comments, I discovered about the book something I was unaware of reading it myself--a view of it from another country.

The rewards of reading Updike are many. He does read good books. He reads good books well and tells you things about them that make you want to read them. The reader of Updike may not always agree with his conclusions or his reasoning, but will almost always enjoy hearing from a person whose own work is remarkable and whose comments on the works of others are generous, insightful, and informed by a sensibility that is congenial and warm.

While I'll never hear about Agatha Christie while reading Updike, I will hear about Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway, and other writers of this ilk. And I will hear about them from a point of view that is both alien and intensely interesting.

While I contend that John Updike is one of the few who have done more than his fair share in leading us to where we are in the arts and in society (I don't see him so much a chronicler as a pusher), and while I am often mystified with his typfication as a "christian" author, I find that I almost always enjoy myself in his company--most particularly in his company as he is talking about things that interest us both--books and the world of literature.

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March 17, 2008

No Coincidence-More Faulknerian Ruminations

Synchronicty, not coincidence.

Reading The Sound and the Fury and what should transpire other than a trip to Boston. Why is this remarkable? Well, I can't really tell you straight out without giving away much of the book; however, suffice to say that one of the main characters has something critical and large happen to him in Boston.

So, reading The Sound and the Fury during Holy Week when it occurs during Holy Week, and visiting Boston, the site of one of the main events of the book. Wow! What a tremendous experience.

I have more to share on this. But now a delightful little tidbit. Arrived in Boston, walked down to the commons, stopped in a small used book shop near Emerson College and happened to pick up a first edition of The Collected Short Stories of William Faulkner for less than it would cost me to pick up a paperback edition. Oh, how wonderful to be back in a city where literacy is valued, perhaps even treasured.

One last point--the soaps and lotions and shampoos in this hotel are all verbena-scented. I have to come to the chilly late-winter north to smell "The Odor of Verbena." If the significance of that is not clear, google the phrase in quotation marks.

May God bless all who read this during this Holy Week. Indeed, may He bless anyone who reads this every--so few are my readers, I can afford to cast my blessings far abroad.

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March 13, 2008

An Evocative Passage--Anne Rice

Anne Rice has published the second book in her extended novelistic meditation on the Life of Christ. The first, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt was an unalloyed success at conveying some of the complexities of the childhood of a man who "was like us in all things but sin." The second promises to be more of the same. I haven't read much of it, wishing to savor it in between passages of Gothic Americana (The Sound and the Fury). But I wanted to share a short excerpt from very early on that exemplifies the style that Ms. Rice has chosen for these works.

from Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana
Anne Rice

I looked at them, the two, lying there as if they were children asleep, amid the heap of stones, and not enough blood between them, really, not enough blood for the Angel of Death even to stop and turn and take notice of them.

Rolling, spare, simple, evocative, lush, and lovely. Trimmed down, to the point and carefully crafted. The story rolls on in sentence after sentence that exhibit this same quality.

I think one of the things that astounds me is this Anderson-like simplicity after the baroque excesses of the Witches novels, the Lestat sequence, and the Ramses book. Ms. Rice has taken care here to produce prose that seeks to evoke its inspiration--straightforward and still poetic, like many of the parables Jesus told.

While it isn't the Passion narrative (one is to hope that that is at least two books away) this will make for fine end-of-Lent reading.

I have said before, and will say again, undoubtedly, in a world full of Sam Harrises , Richard Dawkinses, and Philip Pullmans, it is a pleasure and a relief to come across a novelist who is trying to write something worthwhile and powerful for the reader seeking substance. This series is a departure from all of her previous material and as such, it represents a risk to her. Not much of one, as her other books remain in print and sell well and will support her for some time to come, but she risks her huge fan base and her continued profitability and ability to hand on to a publisher. Like Mel Gibson, she is fashioning a work that is demanded by heart and soul, and it is up to readers like us to support this work. I ardently pray that Ms. Rice's work affects the hearts and minds of some of the fans of the previous books and moves them to explore the beauty of Jesus Christ, Lord, Savior, Friend and Companion. If it is possible for you to do so, you might think of buying this book and sharing it with the next person you see reading Kim Harrison, Anne's previous novels, or other books which, while occasionally fun and entertaining, have as an end escape into unreality. What Ms. Rice is trying to create is an escape into ultimate reality.

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March 12, 2008

Odd Synchronicity

My reading of Faulkner brings me to The Sound and the Fury as Holy Week approaches. I don't see as mere coincidence the fact that the events of the novel (present day) occur during Holy Week of 1928. (Not that the present means all that much to Faulkner.)

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Reading List

As noted before, I went out to get and reread for the umpteenth time The Sound and the Fury. For some reason, perhaps the difficulty of following some of the narrtive threads, this does not stick in my head as well as some other Faulkner books (for example, As I Lay Dying).

I'm also going to start Anne Rice's newest addition to the chronicles of the life of Christ: Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Tom at Disputations gave it what I would call a glowing review. As one of the few parishioners of St. Blogs who really enjoyed the first, I am looking forward to this continuation.

Having just finished a book recommended by the Big Boss of my company--The Science of Success by Charles Koch, I determined that I needed to finish Geoffrey Moore's Dealing with Darwin--largely about managing innovation in companies. To be honest with you, I get very little out of such books except for reinforcement of what seem to me to be obvious truths regarding the state of business and how to run it. But then, if they were so obvious, it would seem unnecessary for anyone to write about them.

And finally, I will continue to trudge my way through the most difficult of the three parts of The Divine Comedy. I remain resolutely opposed to most of the Medieval notion of God, mostly because each era dreams up their own misconceptions of God and refashions Him in their own image. I don't know that anyone has come close to getting it right--but if we cleave to the vision of those closest to Him, we find a continuous and luminous thread of the truth that can serve to guide us onward.

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Light in August--William Faulkner

I'm sure you all must be sick-to-death of reporting on William Faulkner, and yet, I am not sick-to-death of reading and enjoying him. Indeed, as a result of finishing Light in August yesterday, I went out to the library and got Sound and the Fury. (I think I have at least one copy in the house, but it wasn't in the LOA series that I've collected and the shelves are a mess right now.)

What to say about Light in August? Well, let's say that it is one of the most accessible of all of Faulkner's works with some of the most powerful portraits of some of the most unpleasant people you're ever likely to encounter. It plays with time in the way that almost all Faulkner books do, taking place over the period of perhaps 1 week to 1 month, from the arrival of Lena Grove who observes a house burning when she arrives in the small town of Jefferson Mississippi to the end when Lena, escorted by her husband wannabe goes in search of the father of her child. The time encopassed in the book is something like 60-100 years--stretching back to the time of Colonel Sartoris, and perhaps before and moving into the present (late 1920s Mississippi.)

The story centers on Joe Christmas a person who may or may not be of mixed race descent. If so, his skin tone does not betray it and he needs to tell those around him that he is "half-black." He is the ultimately conflicted character, laying his conflict on everyone he meets and it is his actions that precipitate all the main events of the novel.

In fact, that's part of what makes the book so facinating. When it starts, you get the impression that you're going to spend a good deal of time with Lena Burden who is out looking for the man who is the father of her child, who left Alabama (probably when he realized that she was pregnant) with the promise of sending for her. After following her path a little way, we find it convergent with the story of Joe Christmas and the rest of the novel follows him.

There is no point in going into too many plot details. Suffice to say that the events of the book result in an indictment of racism that is as harrowing and as biting as that in Absalom, Absalom!. All of Joe's conflict comes from his own self-indictment for what in today's terms is utterly without stigma (Praise God!) and (1) may not even be true, and (2) even if true was nothing he had any control over. Being part black was nothing he could control and yet the virulanet internalized racism and misogyny that he develops turns what should be not-even-worthy of note (in today's world) into a crisis for Joe and the community.

What is fascinating in Faulkner is his obsession with and dexterity with weaving the past into the present. One example that struck me in this book is that one of the main characters--Joanna is a direct descendant of two people that Colonel Sartoris rides to town to shoot in The Unvanquished. These two were responsible for holding the polls open and encouraging or trying to encourage the blacks in the area to vote. They were buried far away from prying eyes because the son/father of the two though that they might otherwise be disinterred.

The intrusion of the past into the present is one of the themes that makes such rick reading in Faulkner because one gets the sense that he has his fingers clearly on the pulse of something that we have lost any real sense of--even though the truth of it holds today in the same way that it held in Faulkner's day. The present is the living extension of the past: shaped by it, informed by it, and ultimately pervaded by it, if looked at properly.

Faulkner's gothic obsessions get full play in this magnificent work. And it is, for Faulkner, relatively undemanding on the reader--requiring merely the attention of an ordinary novel to keep most of the threads straight. However, it is, as Frost would have it, "lovely, dark, and deep." And it is, as a result, most worthy of nearly any reader's time.

Later: I realize that I've put together a lot of words about Faulkner but have ended by saying very little of import. The problem is that anything I might say would deprive the prospective reader of some of the joy of discovery. Another problem is that I am not a particularly deep reader, pulling out symbols, signs, and meanings at every turn. Indeed, I prefer to enjoy what I'm reading and allow it to mean as it will at the time. Most authors simply don't spend that much time planning and putting these things into motion. And those that do (Rowling and her ilk) often don't produce work that stands up to any kind of scrutiny. It seems that more than 90% of great art is unconscious art--you feel your way around it and end up with a miracle. Authors who pontificate on their purpose either (a) miss the point that their purpose is often subjugated to a greater one if the work is good or (b) haven't written a work that supports the kind of scrutiny it would take to divine the author's purpose.

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March 10, 2008

Duma Key

Stephen King's latest book shows to good effect many of his strengths and some of his weaknesses. Let's start with the weaknesses. After putting the book down, I reflected on the fact that I don't know the people Stephen King portrays--people whose language tends, shall we say, to the salty side. More bluntly, the book is liberally laced with unnecessary and distracting vulgarities that neither give me a sense of character nor enhance my reading experience. They are so common that one finds oneself in the the position of beginning to filter them out. Another less-than-attractive aspect of Mr. King's work is his tendency to give us his opinions in the guise of a character's thoughts. I don't much care what Mr. King thinks of Mr. Bush, the war in Iraq, or the taste of ranch dressing. Moreover, these details are distracting enough to be remember because, once again, they neither advance plot not contribute anything to character.

All of that said, Duma Key is one of the best things Mr. King has written in some time. (Although to be honest, I can't compare it to Lisey's Story so I could be wrong in that evaluation.) The story centers around a man who suffers a traumatic head injury, the loss of an arm, and other injuries in the course of his work. (I was provoked to wonder about how much of what he relates in the book is autobiographical reflection given his own traumatic experience and recovery. No matter, it doesn't intrude or harm the story line--just reader speculation.)

He moves to a house on Duma Key, and the fun begins. Just as a point of information--Duma Key does not exist. When I first started to read, I associated the key with the Southern Keys; however, Duma Key is in a chain off the west coast of Florida near Sarasota and St. Petersburg. Once I got the geography straight, much else fell into place.

The story is a long meditation on the creative impetus and its ability to both heal and destroy the artist. The supernatural intrudes in the way expected in a Stephen King novel, and yet, it is much more subdued, much more subtle and only comes into strong play about two-thirds of the way through the novel. This is NOT a criticism--it shows a markedly altered and, I think, correct sensibility with regard to the use of the supernatural. This full length novel is much closer in spirit to some of the exquisite short works that Stephen King has given us. Reading it, I was reminded of the sheer joy and power of The Colorado Kid, probably a lesser-known but very nicely done King opus in the Hard Case Crime series.

The horror in this book is suggested to be Lovecraftian in nature, although such hints are very subtle, very light touches. The real horror is the horror all of us can understand--the loss of a child or the irrevocable and unspeakable alteration of a child through the growth and maturity process. We adjust to this naturally as time progresses, but King's living metaphor of the shifting sand-and-shell simulcrum at the end of the novel is telling.

I asked in an earlier note on the book whether or not he was taking some lessons or hints from his son Joe Hill. Given the prominence of place and the story-line importance of a certain heart-shaped box in this story, I would say that there are certainly mutual influences. Interestingly, King flips the metaphor on its head and the heart-shaped box in this novel contains the means of redemption and salvation.

The book is atmospheric, well-wrought, powerfully imagined, and written by a King at the height of his powers and sensibility. It's a shame that I find certain aspects of that sensibility appalling, but so it is. Nevertheless, for people who enjoy supernatural fiction, and for fans of Mr. King who were wondering if he would ever return to the heights of the early days, I would say that the chain of the last three books suggest that the answer is "Yes." He has returned to a height that he never occupied--one far superior to that of the early days--potentially that of a true literary master. Now, if only he could bring himself to not so liberally lace his prose with unfortunate vulgarities and unneeded opinions.

Highly recommended for a select audience.

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March 4, 2008

The Realm of the Inconstant

The first person we have speak to us from the realm of the Inconstant (the lowest and slowest sphere of heaven) is a woman named Piccarda. She is consigned to this realm because of her "inconstancy" to her holy vows of a religious. However:

from Paradiso
notes by John Ciardi

Piccarda was already a nun and living in her convent when her brother Corso, needing to establish a political alliance, forced her to marry Rossellino della Tossa of Florence. Various commentators report that Piccarda sickened and soon died as aconsequence of having been so forced against her will and vows.

It is this kind of reasoning that throughout time has bred atheists. Circumstances that we do not will nor do we consent to force us to actions that we would not take for which God, who created and allowed these very circumstances, then punishes or demotes us.

Piccarda had no choice in this matter. For much of medieval time in many places women were just a step (and a very small step) above chattel. A few extraordinary women did rise above these circumstances--but for the most part your lot in life as a woman was to do what the men around you told you to.

But in Dante's mind, a woman who against her will is forced to marry and is basically raped, is inconstant to her vow. I'm surprised she isn't in The Inferno for being false to her vow. Instead God in his infinite love and mercy says--"you were trapped by circumstance and by the situations my will allows, and couldn't puzzle your way out of it--so off to the lowest circle of beatitude and be glad I don't kick you downstairs."

Yuck! This is what I constantly run up against in Paradise. A strange sort of paradise it makes it.

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Beatrice--Snide and Smug

Here's an example of what I spoke of before. Beatrice speaks to Dante:

from Paradiso
Dante (tr. John Ciardi)

"Are you surprised that I smile at this childish act
of reasoning?" she said, "since even now
you dare not trust your sense of the true fact,

but turn, as usual back to vacancy?

Charming. Simply charming. There's nothing to inspire love and admiration like some smug, self-righteous, overly informed combatant smiling at your stupidity and then telling you so. I'm supposd to be enchanted/enthralled by this? Color me appalled.

Fortunately Dante's goal was not entirely to make me love Beatrice as he did. If so, his cause is utterly lost. Unfortunately, I perceive that this guide to the celestial realms will not be nearly so convivial as our guide through the other two. We can expect to be laughed at, lectured sternly, and variously assaulted and accosted as we try to enjoy the scenery.

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The Divine Comedy Act III

As often as I have read the Divine Comedy, I have found profound difficulty with the third part--the part that should be so compelling. It seems that all forward motion stops and Dante enters into a realm of airy speculation (mostly wrong) and cosmology that is both weird and vaguely uninteresting. The people in paradise maunder on and on about abstruse theological theories and oddities of the medieval sort. In short, it is the "most dated" and least "useful" of the three acts. And yet, I am sure that I am missing something in the reading. I am sure that as often as I have been through it, I have been left out of paradise through my own fault.

So I try again. And once again I am treated so some odd explanation of the spheres of the cosmos and to Beatrice (who if you ask me isn't some Divine avatar but a relentless and self-righteous harridan--see the end of Purgatorio. One is left to ponder what in the world Dante saw in this woman.

Not that the rest of the comedy isn't riddled with similar lectures, cosmologies, and oddities, but somehow amid the grotesques and the "poetic justice" they seem to fit in. If the realm of perfection is nothing other than an endless lecture series on the Divine glories, unless I become a completely different person (by which I do not mean simply abandoning sin and growing closer to God, but having something approaching a spiritual lobotomy) I think that the suffering there would be akin to the suffering of some of the souls in Dante's Inferno.

But then, why might Dante think that this endless lecture circuit is Divine? Perhaps because knowledge was so highly valued a commodity in a time when its dissemination was so difficult? Perhaps it was just that particular poet's mind? I don't know, but perhaps that is a focus to pay attention to as I try to ignore the lectures that get in the way of a tourists view of paradise.

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March 3, 2008

Hidden Humor

Where else, but in Faulkner. Light in August is an interesting study in neurosis and psychosis and how one feeds the other until disaster. It is also a repudiation of Calvinist fatalism, even though there seems to be that about it which suggests inevitability. But regardless of the dire and drear events, we have in the midst of them this:

from Light in August
William Faulkner

Presently the fire truck came up gallantly, with noise, with whistles and bells. It was new, painted red, with gilt trim and a handpower siren and a bell gold in color and in tone serene, arrogant, and proud. About it hatless men and youths clung with the astonishing disregard of physical laws that flies possess. It had mechanical ladders that sprang to prodigious heights at the touch of a hand, like opera hats; only there was now nothing for them to spring to. It had neat and virgin coils of hose evocative of telephone trust advertistements in the popular magazines; but there was nothing to hook them to and nothing to flow through them. So the hatless men, who had desert edcounters and desks swung down, even including the one who gound the siren. They came too and were shown several places where the sheet had lain, and some of them with pistols already in their pockets began to canvass about for someone to crucify.

But there wasn't anybody. She had lived such a quiet life, attended so to her own affairs, that she bequeathed to the town in which she had been born and lived and died a foreigner, an outlander, a kind of heritage of astonishment and outrage, for which, even though she had supplied them at last with an emotional barecue, a Roman holiday almost, the would never forgive her and let her be dead in peace and quiet.

In and among the solemn events, these flies in their brand new and utterly useless fire engine provide the kind of comic relief that Shakespeare (and probably a good many playwright of lesser compass before him) employed so effectively with the drunken porter in Macbeth.

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February 26, 2008

Reflections on Purgatorio

I feel obliged to start this discussion with the customary disclaimers. I don't claim to be a deep reader, one filled with wisdom and overflowing with information about Dante. I am, like most of you who read this, a reader--one who enjoys reading things that challenge me and provoke me. I find most readings of critiques to be highly worked up and overwrought--often I find myself doubting that any author would have so contrived and twisted the work they were completing to meet the gyrations of the critics. A critic lays a layer atop a work even though the seeming effort is to explore the labyrinth laid before them.

On the other hand, a reader sees the work from within the labyrinth. There may not be a complete sense of its design, nor may we see clearly all the elements that make up the patterns; however, we see clearly what is clearly spoken and we appreciate the work for that.

That said, let me start these reflections by sharing one line that really struck me. Bear in mind that the translation I am using, for a great many reasons, is the one by John Ciardi:

". . . the blessed wormwood of my agony."

It is strictly out of context, but it started the other chain of thought I wanted to share. This line is spoken by one in purgatory. Speaking of his wife's ardent prayers on his behalf, he notes that her prayers have lifted him already so high in purgatory, setting aside years and years of suffering that would otherwise be required for purgation.

But notice the way he refers to this suffering--"the blessed wormwood of my agony." The suffering is real--it is as real as the suffering in Hell, and yet it is not torment. Over and over again Dante makes the point that this suffering is gladly engaged in, indeed embraced by the souls themselves as they know the end of it in time. The Lustful souls in conversation with Dante stay strictly within their sheets of flame, and so it is throughout the Purgatory. The souls know that this suffering cleanses, this suffering purifies, this suffering leads to heaven.

Extend that a bit--human suffering, properly viewed and with a heart set on God's will is purgative. And that suffering be it "Nella's tears" (the wife referred to above) for the loss of her husband and for the sympathy with his suffering, or our own physical pain borne with the expectation of seeing God, is purgative not only for ourselves but for others as well. In the Christian context, suffering has meaning. But so too does the beatific vision. Those in purgatory do not needless extend their stay, reveling in their suffering and purgation. Rather, they move on to the beatific vision and to the enjoyment of the presence of God. This is where I part company with many of the Saints. While suffering is purgative, life is filled with enough--we needn't add to it through our own contrived mortifications that have as their end release from attachment. Properly lived, life has quite enough that should provoke us to give up the things we are attached to--the celice and the discipline are neither required, nor, it seems to me, within God's ordained will for us. He hands out the suffering we require--we need not add to it. And indeed, adding to it is contradictory to His will, it is clinging to purgatory when He has decided we need bliss.

Purgation happens. Life carries with it enough of heaviness. Little things like denying ourselves too much food or food of a certain kind--that isn't really suffering, or if it is it is suffering borne of our own selfishness and self-centeredness. People in India live very well without a Hershey's bar a day. Real suffering--not having enough to eat, losing someone we love, living through a terrible wasting disease with Death hanging over us--is not something we choose. It is something that with the grace of God we live through and by living through it contribute both to our own purgation and to the purgation of those around us. We are not saved singly, although salvation is individual and singular for each person. Rather, we are saved within the community, the entire Body of Christ is resurrected, not merely a cell on the big toe. Our own bliss in salvation comes in part from the knowledge that salvation is for all and we have worked for it through our many small works of spiritual and corporeal mercy.

Thus purgation can begin here as we abide in God's will, accept what life brings us, and relish God's perfect plan expressed through it. That doesn't mean we do not mourn or hurt. But it does mean that our pain has meaning both for us and for those around us. When we live through a time of suffering, we are in sympathy with those in Purgatory and we are spending a little of our own time there as we head for heaven. Suffering isn't to be sought out--it will find us soon enough. But once we have been found, bearing with the suffering through the strength of the One who saves us strengthens both us and those around us even though we do not necessarily see this effect.

One last point on Purgatorio comes from a provocative note by the translator in the endnotes. I will let it stand without further comment:

from "How to Read Dante"
John Ciardi

The Seven Deadly Sin for which souls suffer in Purgatory are--in ascending order--Pride, Envy, Wrath, Adedia, Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust. Acedia is the central one, and it may well be the sin the twentieth centruy lost track of. Acedia is generally translated as Sloth. But that term in English tends to connote not much more than laziness and physical slovenliness. For Dante, Acedia was a central spiritual failure. It was the failure to be sufficiently active in the pursuit of the recognized Good. It was to acknowledge Good, but without fervor.

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February 15, 2008

We Count Because He Loves Us

One of the things we most need to remember as we wander the paths of Lenten mortifications is that while we may be dust, we are, in the eyes of God, gold, platinum, or diamond dust.

from Death on a Friday Afternoon
Fr. Richard John Neuhaus

Again, St. Paul says God was in Christ "not counting their trespasses against them." Atonement is not an accountant's trick. It is not a kindly overlooking; it is not a not counting of what must count if anything in heaven or on earth is to matter. God could not simply decide not to count without declaring that we do not count.

But someone might say that, if God is God, he could do anything. Very well, then, God would not decide not to count because he would not declare that we do not count. And yet God's "would" implicates and limits his "could." The God of whom we speak is not, in the words of Pascal, the God of the philosophers but the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He is the God of unbounded freedom who wills to be bound by love. God is what he wills to be and wills to be what he is. St. John tells us, "God is Love," and love always binds. In the seminars of philosophical speculation, many gods are possible. In the arena of salvation's story, God is the God who is bound to love.

Because God is a Father, He looks upon us with love. What we are and what we want and what we do and how we go about it--all of these things and more matter to Him deeply. Because they matter, He cannot chose to make them less important by merely ignoring them--pretending they don't exist. And yet, while He wills that they matter out of His Love, He also wills that we all come home to Him--but only if we want to return. We stand in the place of choice in this matter--but His will is clear--love would not lose one. Not a sparrow can fall without it being known and counted and mattering. And if a sparrow matters, so much more so that creature who is in the very image of God.

So while we're wearing our sackcloth and ashes and bringing to mind how unworthy and terrible and what great failures we are as people, we would do well to remind ourselves that that is not God's vision at all. Those thoughts are not God's thoughts about us. Just as we would not think that a one-year old who stumbles and falls trying to walk is unworthy, terrible, or a failure, so too God does not regard us in such a way. Rather, His gaze is completely love--limitless, unconditional, eternal.

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February 13, 2008

Light on Obama

I make no claim to be a political pundit. I am not. I have no insider knowledge and, frankly, I don't have a horse running in this race. Seems to be the truth from the time I could vote. I also don't pretend to deep knowledge, deep reading, or a profound ability to identify the symbols and read the semiotics of ordinary life. All I will record here is a reaction--a reaction that came to me as I was reading Faulkner's superb novel Light in August. One of the many passages of interest is below.

from Light in August
William Faulkner

He now lived as man and wife with a woman who resembled an ebony carving. At night he would lie in bed beside her, sleepless, beginning to breathe deep and hard. He would do it deliberately, feeling, even watching, his white chest arch deeper and deeper within his ribcage, trying to breathe into himself the dark odor, the dark and inscrutable thinking and being of negroes, with each suspiration trying to expel from himself the white blood and the white thinking and being. And all the while his nostrils at the odor which he was trying to make his own would whiten and tauten, his whole being writhe and strain with physical outrage and spiritual denial.

Unfortunately, that's how I read Obama's entire campaign--a desire to become "black enough," whatever that might mean, while, in some ways, denying his actual heritage. He seeks to play the race card when he is in an absolutely perfect place NOT to do so. He need not make a big play for a small minority, but he would make a big play for the majority and drop the whole racial pretension thing.

I don't dogbird politics, but I've seen enough to know that I don't like the tones of the campaigns--any of them. Of all of them, this is the one I like the least because it depends heavily upon a polarization that is not healthy nor is it helpful. Obama is and can be and can claim legitimately black heritage. Heritage is not something either to be proud of or to be ashamed of--we have no control over where we came from or who we are at the start. But we do have some measure of control over what we do with the cards we have been dealt--what we make of our heritage. In Light in August Joe Christmas makes of his a trail of tragedy, unhappiness, and longing to understand himself. I don't think Obama will end up there, but sometimes his rhetoric and his positioning reminds me of Joe Christmas's struggle with identity and it saddens and appals me because that is not the way to move forward. Not at all.

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February 12, 2008

Amish Grace--Kraybill, Nolt, and Weaver-Zeicher

Let's dispense with the review--we would all do well if everyone would get this book, read it, and think about it. Even if some come to reject its propositions, it is worth facing them and thinking about them, particularly in Lenten time. The book is short, well-written, and a superb study and analysis of the Amish response to the Nickel Mine massacre that resulted in the death of 5 Amish schoolgirls and the wounding of an additional five. On the contents of the book, I have little more to say than that it moved me and really got me to thinking. It is the result of that thought, meager though it may be that I want to spend a little time and space sharing.

The book is primarily about the primacy of forgiveness in Amish theology (if the word theology can be used for something as diffuse as the traditions and practices of the Amish--from the book, I get the feeling that the Amish themselves would repudiate any such high-flown name for the thought behind the practice). One of the first points that occurred to me is that we all would do well to put a little more literalism into our reading of the Bible. The authors point out that THE central prayer of the Amish faith is the "Our Father" in its traditional protestant form (forgive us our debts. . ., for thine is the Kingdom and the Power. . . ). And they regard as a clause of chief importance in this prayer, "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." As Catholics we pray this prayer everyday at Mass, and every morning and evening in the Liturgy of the Hours. And yet I don't know very many Catholics who realize that the prayer is also a contract of sorts. The contract is reinforced by the verses that come immediately after it in the Gospel of St. Matthew.

Matthew 6:14-15

For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

The two verses that follow immediately upon the prayer emphasize one aspect of this all-encompassing prayer. When we pray, "Forgive us our debts (trespasses) as we forgive our debtors (those who trespass against us)," we are uttering the words of a contract, the essential word of which is "as." In the measure that we are willing to forgive, so we shall be forgiven. In some sense our forgiveness is contingent upon our willingness to forgive others.

For most people most of the time forgiveness doesn't seem to be much of a problem. Often it is easier to forgive trespasses against ourselves that it is to forgive trespasses against our loved ones. Put yourself in the place of the Amish parents in Nickel Mines. Would you have been able to forgive the perpetrator after only two days? Would you have been able to welcome his family into your house "forgive" them (read the book to understand this concept) and continue to do business with them? Would you have set aside part of the money flowing into the community to help rebuild your lives for the widow and children of the person who killed your child?

One of the points here is that no individual Amish person was called upon to do this. The forgiveness tendered was tendered from the entire community and as such was part of the mutual aid that the Amish offer each other and their neighbors in times of distress and disaster. The Amish community was able to forgive and thus the individual members of this community were able to express this forgiveness substantively. They were able to forgive because they understood that forgiveness is imperative and our own forgiveness is, in some mysterious way, contingent upon the forgiveness we are willing to offer.

The book also touched upon the difference between forgiveness, pardon, and reconciliation. And these differences are critically important--because the Amish could neither pardon nor have reconciliation with the culprit. They opted instead for reconciliation with the family. If this does not seem remarkable, I point to the long history the human race has of blood feuds and other "blood debts."

I have nothing profound to say about this matter. It is all said, very clearly, in the Scriptures. There are those who argue that the only one who can forgive an offense is the one who has been offended--in this case the girls who were killed. And yet, there is a sense in which forgiveness is communal, particularly when the community self-identifies as community.

The Amish are not one of the "once saved always saved" group of Christians. Rather, they seem to see their own forgiveness as contingent upon the forgiveness they offer. This makes them willing to try. One of the points of the book is that forgiveness is not easy--in fact, at times, "it takes a village." The forgiveness in the Nickel Mines community came because the community was committed to forgiving the offense, but that did not mean that it was easy for any inidividual or family. Over and over again, they pointed out that they had to forgive and forgive and forgive and forgive. This seems to be part of the meaning Jesus spoke when He said we must forgive our enemies seventy times seven times. In difficult situations, you forgive and still the bitterness and the desire for restitution arises. You forgive again, and still the human part of you hurts and desires some surcease from the pain--surcease we bring ourselves to believe that comes from revenge.

Forgiveness and community--community and forgiveness. There is so much depth here and so many parallels to our own faith and life. When you read about the Amish, you realize that their voluntary adult baptism and oath to the community very much parallels the entry into orders of our own religious. It is not for nothing that the Amish are the "Old Order." The promises made to renounce self and to serve God and others first are very reminiscent of the aspirations each of us would like to live.

So, these are some of the thoughts spawned by the book. It makes for good Lenten reading--thought-provoking, to some probably aggravating--but very much worthwhile and very much reinforcing what a real community is--both for good and for ill.

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February 4, 2008

The Greatest Gift Binka Le Breton

The Greatest Gift is a journalist's ardent attempt to capture the life of a person she obviously admires greatly--one of the sisters of Notre de Namur, Sister Dorothy Stang. Sister Dorothy spent much of her life serving the most poor and oppressed of the Amazonia region of Brazil. She died in the course of that service. I don't know if this technically makes her a martyr, because she didn't die for the faith, but for her activism on the part of the people she served--but I suppose that's a very, very minor point, because it was evident that Sister Dorothy clearly understood that her actions could result in her death and she continued to perform them despite this knowledge.

The author produces a strange and sometimes even bizarre assemblage of facts about Sister Dorothy. In addition, as with many journalists, she fails to apprehend the true significance of Vatican II, saying at one point:

from The Greatest Gift
Binka Le Breton

Vatican II, as it was known, formalized a movement that had been slowly growing as some members of the church began to reevaluate their whole way of being and living as followers of Christ. Known as liberation theology, this new thinking held that the Kingdom of God was here and now that that God's people were to work for social and political freedom and justice. Parishes were divided up into groups of laypeople known as base communities, where the emphasis was placed on empowering the laity to study the Bible, reflect on their day-to-day lives, and act in accordance with the liberating truths of the Gospel. Priests and nuns were abandoning both the Latin mass and their traditional dress. Inside church buildings, priests turned to face the people during the mass, inviting them to celebrate God's feast together, instead of turning away from the people to face God. The church was slowly relinquishing its absolute hold on power and was placing itself on the side of the poor and powerless.

Wow! I didn't know that it took Vatican II to unseat Pope Alexander VI. Needless, to say, this sort of misconception is distracting, but I don't sense any malice here, merely misunderstanding (a misunderstanding, I might note shared by many within the Church) of what Vatican II really meant. The book is filled with this kind of misunderstanding of the Church; however, the book does not purport to be about the Church, but about the efforts of one courageous nun in defense of the people she served.

The author narrates the story in the voices of the people who knew Sister Dorothy. This is refreshing and lively, but does lead to a certain disjointedness of narrative. That disjointedness is not necessarily a bad thing because it gives the picaresque effect of much of medieval hagiography--and that is what this book attempts to be--hagiography.

One story that stood out in my mind as exemplary of Sister Dorothy and her service is that when the Sisters first arrived in the small town where they would serve they were greeted by the Bishop. They had not had time to put on their veils and the Bishop was delighted. The sisters never afterwards wore the veil. The story stops here, but then is resumed a few pages later. One might assume that we had some sort of liberal bishop ready to upset all the teacups. A little later the author tells us why the Bishop was so pleased. It was the custom of the time for women to come to church and receive communion with their heads covered. The poverty of this region was such that most women could not afford a separate veil and so they brought a table cloth under which many of them would huddle. However, the table cloth was never large enough and there was a tussle at the ends to make certain they had their heads covered. By presenting his nuns without veils, the Bishop could send a clear signal to his impoverished parishioners that it was permissible to attend Church and worship God without wearing a veil. In other words, the action wasn't so much a comment on veils and their appropriateness as a pastoral action of a compassionate Bishop with an impoverished congregation.

Sister Dorothy Stang served her community as teacher and as representative. She went toe to toe with oppressive landlords and even sought out government intervention to prevent the intimidation and the constant displacement of the people she worked with.

There is much for the orthodox Catholic to object to--creation spirituality, and other heterodoxies that the ardent activist can readily run into, particularly in the place and serving the people that Sister Dorothy served.

By the time I reached the end of the book, I had little patience with Sister Dorothy's odd combinations of heterodox movements, but a profound respect for her abiding love for the people she served. When asked for a reflection on her life in Brazil, the author quotes Sister Dorothy:

"I have learned that faith sustains you. And I have also learned that three things are difficult. 1) as a woman to be taken seriously in the struggle for land reform, 2) to stay faithful to believing that these small groups of poor framers will prevail in organizing and carrying their own agenda forward, and 3) to have the courage to live your life in the struggle for change."

I came away from the book with a great respect for the person and work of Sister Dorothy Stang, a dislike for her odd notions regarding spirituality and preserving the environment (one need not resort to creation spirituality to have very good, very orthodox, and very Catholic reasons for wishing to preserve God's incredible creation), and a sense that with Sister Dorothy's death, we lost a wonderful, committed, compassionate advocate for the poor and oppressed.

If not a saint, the book paints a portrait of a woman engaged and fiercely loyal and dedicated to helping the poor. A woman, who despite some mistaken ideas about theology and God, nevertheless attempted to the best of her ability to live out the commandment she understood so clearly from Him: "Whatsoever you do unto one of these, the least of my brethren, that you do unto me."

So, prepare to grit your teeth through the misrepresentations (not malicious, but agenda driven) and misconceptions and misconstructions of the Church, and read about a woman who did her utmost to help to relieve the oppression and poverty of the people she worked with. Recommended with the caveats described throughout.

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January 30, 2008

Neither Fan Nor Detractor--On Oprah

I am neither a fan of Oprah Winfrey nor a detractor. So much of what she does has no direct relevance for my life. However, I have to admire a woman who not only encourages her audience to read difficult Faulkner books (Light in August, As I Lay Dying, and The Sound and the Fury), but also to understand and appreciate them.

Here is the website she set up to support the Faulkner reading experience. It includes short excerpts from "Faulkner Scholars" (I can't speak to their credentials) and essays and short pieces on Faulkner.

I always have to admire what is good but what need not be done in the name of commercial success. In this little thing, at least, Oprah gives back to her community and ultimately to all of us--because we all profit when people are moved to stretch beyond their own little realms.

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January 28, 2008

As I Lay Dying--William Faulkner

I finished As I Lay Dying last Wednesday and I've been thinking about it on and off since then. A few simple facts: it is by far and away one of the easiest of Faulkner's books to read; it was written, deliberately, as a tour-de-force, and features the voices/thoughts of some 15 or so characters; while you might wonder why all the voices, it isn't just a gimmick, it really is integral to one of Faulkner's points.

While I enjoyed this book and would recommend it as the second book one steps to in the scaffolded entry into Faulkner's world, I have to admit that most of my thought has been around one place where I felt the book slip out of Faulkner's control--Darl's fate.

Without saying overly much about this important part of the denouement, let's say that Faulkner's propensity for histrionics which would serve him well as a screen writer, shows clearly in Darl's final monologue. There really is no trigger for it, nor any real sense of its inevitability. It neatly rounds out the package of the distant and alienated, somehow supernatural intellect I wrote about last week, but it fails to satisfy because it does tend to be over the top. I hesitate to write this because much of my thought has been puzzling through this portion of the novel and trying to see what Faulkner may have been attempting and what I may have missed. As I've said before, I am not necessarily a very deep or profound reader and so things that are right there on the surface can sometimes elude me. Which is to say, don't take what is said here as a profound critique of the book--it is merely a surface impression.

One of the themes of As I Lay Dying is the mass of contradictions that each person is as a person. Add to that the meaning of grief and the meaning, purpose, and playing out of family life, and you have a robust and sometimes rollicking novel. Despite what may seem to be very down-beat subject matter, there are moments of high comedy--in fact, more than moments. Much of the book is hilarious, if sometimes darkly.

The book begins as Addie Bundren lay dying in her room. Outside the room her oldest son Cash, who might not be the brightest bulb in the Marquis, is plank by plank assembling her coffin, showing her each finished board as it is complete. Addie has extracted from her husband Anse a promise that she will be buried with "her people" in the town of Jefferson, some 8 to 10 miles away and across the river that marks the southern border of Yoknapatawpha County.

Addie dies early on and the remainder of the book is getting her to Jefferson to be buried. The trials start with Darl and Jewel returning late from carting a load of lumber, and continue with a three day delay in the services which results in the Bundrens not beig able to set out until after the river has reached flood stage and washed out several easy passages across.

And so it continues--an almost epic quest to return Addie to the lap of her ancestors. Through it we learn much of the family dynamics and discover that Addie's death is quite convenient for almost all of her family. Cash wants to go to town to buy a gramaphone, Dewey Dell has urgent reasons of her own for wanting to go to town, Vardaman wants to see the red electric train on display in one of the town stores, and Anse wants to get a set of false teeth. All of these ulterior motives drive the Bundrens to Jefferson and through a host of escapades in between, including a stop in Mottston that nearly gets them all landed in jail because poor Addie isn't holding up well. And of course, the trio, quartet, or quintet of winged heralds that accompany them through much of the trip.

Through it we learn about Addie and Anse's relationship. In fact, that is one of the most intriguing juxtapositions of the book. Addie's only narration comes well after she is dead and in sharp contrast to Cora's reflection on some past events that shed light on the family--why Darl so viciously baits Jewel, for example.

I may post more excerpts later, but for now, let this review stand. The book is vintage Faulkner--it is far more easily comprehended than almost any other--a veritable model of clarity compared to either The Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom! and a nice second step into Faulkner's world after The Unvanquished. I remember reading this in my senior year of high school and "getting" most of it; however, like all of Faulkner, I think it is better visited by an older, more seasoned, more patient, and generally more perceptive reader. The young reader is likely to be more derailed and fascinated by the literary pyrotechnics and tricks. I remember trying to write my own imitation of it after reading it all those many years ago. And in some ways, I am still writing my own imitation of it.

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January 23, 2008

A Little Knowledge

Having read the book before, I'm looking for signs of something different--something that brings Anse Bundren into the realm of the human and humane. And it's here and it's interesting and it is one of those things that makes one pause and go, "Hmmmmm."

from As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner

[Dewey Dell narrating]

Pa helps himself and pushes the dish on. But he does not begin to eaat. His hands are halfclosed on either side of his plate, his head bowed a little, his awry hair standing into the lamplight. He looks like right after the maul hits the steer and it no longer alive and dont yet know that it is dead.

But Cash is eating, and he is too. "You better eat something," He says. He is looking at pa. "Like Cash and me. You'll need it."

"Ay," pa says. He rouses up, like a steer that's been kneeling in a pond and you run at it. "She would not degrudege me it."

This from the man who in his own sections says:

from As I Lay Dying William Faulkner

[Anse Bundren narrating]

But it's a long wait, seems like. It's bad that a fellow must earn the reward of his right-doing by flouting hisself and his dead. We drove all the rest of the day and got to Samson's at dust-dark and then that bridge was gone, too. They hadn't never see the river so high, and it not done raining yet. There was old men that hadn't never see nor hear of it being so in the memory of a man. I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth, so doeth He chastiseth. But I be durn if He dont take some curious ways to show it, seems like.

But now I can get them teeeth. That will be a comfort. It will.

Addie's death gives him the excuse to drive to Jefferson, a day's cart-trip away to bury her, but also to pick up some false teeth along the way. The Lord moves in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform.

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Darl--The Strange One

Throughout the book Darl Bundren is typified as "the strange one." Cora Tull thinks he's a darling and the most precious of the group, the one who loves Addie best, but Darl is the agent provacateur whose actions propel much of the book.

Darl is also very odd in this collection of characters. Consider this observation from early on in the book:

from As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner

Jewel glances back, then goes around the house. I enter the hall, hearing the voices before I reach the door. Tilting a little down the hill, as our house does, a breeze draws through the hall all the time, upslanting. A feather dropped near the front door will rise and brush along the ceiling, slanting backward, until it reaches the down-turning current at the back door: so with voices. As you enter the hall, they sound as though they were speaking out of the air about your head.

It doesn't seem particularly remarkable until you've read a little way and realized that there is no other character in this book that speaks with such remarkable clarity, such breadth of vision. The sentences are clear, grammatical, not shot through with the normal difficulties of Faulkner's country folk--ranging from near incoherence to an obsessive-compulsive concentration on the single object of their attention. Darl, in contrast is placid, distant, clear. In fact, he may be among the clearest voices in any of the Faulkner that I have read--preternaturally clear.

This is brought home by the fact that Darl narrates the scene of Addie Bundren's death, even though he is, at the time, several miles away, helping his brother Jewel fix a wheel that has been broken while trying to transport some lumber in order to make some additional money. Moreover, Darl is also privy to the thoughts of several characters. Here he shares Dewey Dell's thoughts:

from As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner

She will go out where Peabody is, where she can stand in the twilight and look at his back with such an expression that, feeling her eyes and turning, he will say: I would not let it grieve me, now. She was old, and sick too. Suffering more than we knew. She couldn't have got well.
Vardaman's getting big now, and with you to take good care of them all. I would try not to let it grieve me. I expect you'd better go and get some supper ready. It dont have to be much. But they'll need to eat, and she looking at him, saying You could do so much for me if you just would. If you just knew. I am I and you are you and I know it and you don't know it and you could do so much for me if you just would and if you just would then I could tell you and then nobody would have to know it except you and me and Darl

And then he continues with a television-like viewing of the events around Addie's deathbed.

Darl knows things that have not been shared with him. For example, he knows about Jewel's parentage, about Dewey Dell's condition.

Distant, cool, and knowing, Darl seems to manipulate many of the circumstances of the novel. He is uncannily intelligent. The words he uses:

from As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner

Before us the thick dark current runs. It talks up to us in a murmur become ceaseless and myriad, the yellow surface dimpled monstrously into fading swirls travelling along the surface for an instant, silent impermanent and profoundly significant, as though just beneath the surface something huge and alive waked for a moment of lazy alertness out of and into light slumber again.

It clucks and murmurs among the spokes and about the mules' knees, yellow, skummed with flotsam and with thick soiled gouts of foam as though it had sweat, lathering, like a driven horse. Through the undergrowth it goes with a plaintive sound, a musing sound; in it the unwinded cane and saplings lean as before a little gale, swaying without reflections as though suspended on invisible wires from the branches overhead. Above the ceaseless surface they stand--trees, cane, vines--rootless, severed from the earth, spectral above a scene of immense yet circumscribed desolation filled with the voice of the waste and mournful water.

Who is this boy? Considering his upbringing and the schooling reflected in his siblings, how does he come to know the words "myriad," "Impermanent," "significant," among others?

Darl is one of the keys to the novel and one of the keys to what Faulkner has to say about family, community, grieving, and living again after grief. I don't know what that key will unlock--that remains to be seen. But he certainly poses a puzzle from very early on. This alien intelligence looks in to the events encompassing the Bundren family, manipulates them, and draws them into meaning and significance. What meaning and what significance remain to be seen.

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January 22, 2008

Faulkner, Hemingway, et al.

I always feel a little defensive and a little self-conscious when I'm reading books such as the ones I've posted about here recently. It may seem like I'm trying to show off. It may seem a little snooty or high-falutin'. I recognize that it may seem a little elitist.

That's why I thought it might be good to explore my motives in reading these books. My motives are really very, very simple. I'm enjoying it. . . a lot. The only good reason for reading any book that doesn't directly contribute to either spiritual advancement or betterment in some aspect of life-functioning is that you enjoy the reading.

I enjoy the challenge of reading Faulkner and I enjoy the ample rewards such reading bestows on the reader. There is something about encountering writers one was once forced to read for "edification" on one's own terms. Now I can read Faulkner without a bunch of people trying to judge how well I am reading Faulkner. I've already admitted that I am neither the best nor most profound interpreter of texts. I am not a super-skilled reader--I can only offer the meager embellishments I do here. But to paraphrase something I read last night on Sam's dance teacher's t-shirt, "When I read, I do not try to read better than anyone else, I only try to read better than myself." So the challenges--there are many types--sheer linguistic thickness (Faulkner), a stark and bald simplicity that may or may not contain hidden depths (Faulkner). characters whose vacuity and the emptiness of whose lives absolutely beggars the imagination (Fitzgerald), and so forth.

So, I will continue to read these along with other works interspersed. For now, I'm content with Faulkner. I may round that out by watching a series of Tennessee Williams plays and adding a dollop of Flannery O'Connor or the truly bizarre Carson McCullers, savoring for the moment the warmth of the tropics in the midst of the winter of my discontent.

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Faulkner Gives Gore a Helping Hand

from As I Lay Dying William Faulkner

[From the chapter narrated by Peabody the Doctor]

"Me, walk up, weighing two hundred and twenty-five pounds?" I say. "Walk up that durn wall?" He stands there beside a tree. Too bad the Lord made the mistake of giving trees roots and giving the Anse Bundrens He makes feet and legs. If He'd just swapped them, there wouldn't ever be a worry about this country being deforested someday. Or any other country.

Moments. Small moments of real humor along with many other moments. And more than this--perhaps something for tomorrow--Faulkner as one progenitor of magic realism? Consider the case of Darl, narrator extraordinaire. . . or rather, let us consider it together in the near future.

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Some Faulkner Moments

Once again, Faulkner's humor, mordant though it is, comes through in this story of the Bundrens.

from As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner

[Referring to Addie Bundren who lay on her bed dying as others are debating doing a lick of work to earn three dollars]

"But if she dont last until you get back," he says. "She will be disappointed."

*****

[And somewhat later]

His folks buries at New Hope, too, not three miles away . But it's just like him to marry a woman born a day's hard ride away and have her die on him.

As I Lay Dying is the story of the Bundren clan Addie (dying), Anse (ne'er-do-well layabout of a husband), Jewel, Darl, Vardaman, and Cash (her four sons, the last of whom is working on her coffin just outside the window and Dewey Dell (her daughter). Told through the voices of all of them, Cora and Vern Tull, and a number of other characters, Faulkner himself thought of it as a tour de force, the one book he would leave behind that would be remarkable and make a mark. However, in his introduction to a later edition of The Sound and the Fury, while he recognized its worth, he noted that when he first set pen to paper, he already knew the last words of the book--an experience that did not satisfy him the way writing The Sound and the Fury did.

I know that I enjoyed this book when I first read it in high school, but I suspect that it is likely to be a very different experience for me now. At least I hope so.

Later:--That famous note may have been associated with the introduction to the 1932 edition of Sanctuary, not The Sound and the Fury. Sorry.

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The Old Man and the Sea Ernest Hemingway

In my commitment to revisit some "classics" and reacquaint myself with them, I decided to take on my least favorite of the Big Four of the early twentieth Century. Full disclosure--I do not like to read Ernest Hemingway. Part of it may be the macho trappings and myth of Hemingway--the truth of which I do not know, but the extent of which colors my perception of Hemingway. While I think that Hemingway was radical in his excision of much of the excess of prose of the very early twentieth century (exemplified by James at his most orotund), I think he went so far that direction that his prose is almost self parody. It is so stripped down that rather than a lean lyricism it becomes a kind of drone instrument--the things one is supposed to pay attention to become so obvious and so overbearing that it is almost painful. For example, the old man's dreams of lions on the beach obviously have some deep and symbolic purpose and meaning. I shouldn't be able to pluck the symbol out so easily, but it recurs throughout the work--the symbols are obvious and occasionally odious. However, they are also sometimes lovely as in this uncharacteristic moment for Hemingway:

The strange light the sun made in the water, now that the sun was higher, meant good weather and so did the shape of the clouds over the land. But the bird was almost out of sight now and nothing showed on the surface of the water but some patches of yellow, sun-bleached Sargasso weed and the purple, formalized, iridescent, gelatinous bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war floating close beside the boat. It turned on its side and then righted itself. It floated cheerfully as a bubble with its long deadly purple filaments trailing a yard behind in the waves.

"Agua mala," the man said. "You whore." . . .

From where he sung lightly against his oars he looked down into the water and saw the tiny fish that were coloured like the trailing filaments and swam between them and under the small shade the bubble made as it drifted. They were immune to its poison. But men were not and when some of the filaments would catch on a line and rest there slimy and purple while the old man was working a fish, he would have welts and sores on his arms and hands of the sort that poison ivy or poison oak can give. But these poisonings from the aqua mala came quickly and struck like a whiplash.

The iridescent bubbles were beautiful. But they were the falsest things in the sea and the old man love to see the big sea turtles eating them. The turtles saw them, approached them from the front, then shut their eyes so they were completely carapaced and ate them filaments and all. The old man loved to see the turtles eat them and he loved to walk on them on the beach after a storm and hear them bob when he stepped on the with the horny soles of his feet.

One can't help but wonder reading this whether Hemingway himself might not have taken the same delight.

This book is a little less lean and a little less overbearing than some by Hemingway. A recent blog correspondent informed me that it was a favorite of John Paul II and so I thought to take it up again and see if it struck me.

My conclusion is that it is one of those books that you really have to be there to understand. For example, I couldn't care less about fishing. I wouldn't know a dolphin (fish) from a tuna to save my life. I could probably identify a marlin pretty readily, and flying fish seem pretty obvious--but I am sea-illiterate. I also have never experienced the kind of physical trial that is discussed in the book.

That said, The Old Man and the Sea has been referred to as Hemingway meets God. And I suppose one could read it that way. Certainly it is meant to be read that way. The trial takes place over three days--three days in which the weight of the world is borne on the shoulders of one man, in which the single striking simile for pain compares the Old Man's pain to the pain of a nail attaching flesh to wood. And there is this striking reflection on sin:

from The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway

But he liked to think about al things that he was involved in and since there was nothing to read and he did not have a radio, he thought much and he kept on thinking about sin. You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?

"You think too much, old man, " he said aloud.

But you enjoyed killing the dentuso, he thought. He lives on the live fish as you do. He is not a scavenger nor just a moving appetite as some sharks are. He is beautiful and noble and know no fear of anything.

"I killed him in self-defense," the old man said aloud. "And I killed him well."

The dentuso referred to above is the mako shark who makes the first strike at the old man's hard won prey.

In all the book is interesting, and one could force Christian symbols on top of it and read it in a way about the agonies of Christ--but I'm not certain that the text bears that full weight. I find it difficult to read that way even though the obvious comparisons are there--fisherman, cross, and nails.

While I enjoyed revisiting this classic, and while I would recommend it to almost everyone as a quick and light exposure to Hemingway without some of the trappings that come with The Sun Also Rises or A Farewell to Arms, it did not have great resonance for me. Nevertheless, I will think about it for a few days and regard it as a palate cleanser in between bouts of Faulkner. My next read--the remarkable As I Lay Dying.

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January 21, 2008

Absalom, Absalom!--William Faulkner

I have reached the end and let me from the start make clear how I felt about it. Once upon a time my top five list looked something like this:

1. Ulysses James Joyce
2. To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf
3. The Golden Bowl Henry James
4. Lord of the Rings J.R.R. Tolkien
5. Tom Sawyer Mark Twain
6. Portait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce

I don't know I had ever considered much beyond this list. Now, I have a new second place prizeholder--Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner. I don't know that anything will ever displace Ulysses for sheer strength of story, prose, imagination, and writing. But Absalom, Absalom! has all of that AND it has great seriousness of purpose.

And today is a remarkably good day on which to review it precisely because of some of the nature of that purpose. Consider for a moment the following: The Absalom of the title, greated in an almost biblical way by his father near the very end of the book, encounters the following moral dilemma: a man he knows to be his half brother wants to marry his sister. With a great deal of effort and thought, he is able to come to terms with this. What he cannot come to terms with is the fact that this man Charles Bon is also one-sixteenth black, and therefore, in the eyes of the south a Negro. And this the man cannot bring himself to countenance.

A stark portrayal of the ingrained class structure and racism of the old South, it is, at once, savage, funny, disturbing, and deeply moving. The story unpeels, layer by layer, you sometimes learn something in a cast-off or aside in a speech of another character--a key clue to what is happening in the novel is just tossed out there. Usually it is developed further, but not always.

Faulkner plays with time, memory, incident, and character in the book. A good third of it is "making up" what really happened because there are gaps that no narrator can cover. So it is with history--we connect the dots we see, but the line connecting them may be missing dots we cannot. And yet, we personalize history by the stories we make up in the interstices--the stories that make history make sense to us. These are not "what really happened," as in many cases we cannot know--but they are the hooks on which we hang what we know and then move on.

Absalom, Absalom! is one of the most difficult books I have ever read--it may even, at times be more difficult than Ulysses. But the difficulty stems only in part from the convolute and involute prose. Another part of the difficulty comes as you try to piece together the past witht he characters and try to come to terms with the issues that have no terms that are acceptable.

Faulkner was a staunch supporter of the rights of African Americans. His language may not seem to reflect his sympathies, but it does indeed, and the compassion and power with which he writes about issues that stain the Old South is remarkable. He manages to explain much about those of us who are fiercely proud of our Southern Heritage and fiercely ashamed as well. How can it be one in the same. Well, read the book as a sympathetic reader and find out.

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January 18, 2008

Southern to the Core

from "William Faulkner: Heart in Conflict with Itself" John D. Anderson

Intruder in the Dust presaged Faulkner's speaking out on integration. He argued in several public letters that southern blacks must receive equal rights, which led to harassment and threats by bigoted neighbors. However, his resistance to federal intervention to enforce those rights alienated staunch liberals. Faulkner's moderate liberalism angered everyone.

Found here

I'll have to read a biography to verify this, though I've no reason to doubt it. Faulkner is Southern to the core and this stand is only one of many that demonstrates it. While he wants to do what is right, he wants it to come not from pressure from above but from the hearts of those who need to "get right." No federal intervention, because Faulkner felt the weight of the past and what that weight did to his beloved South. While this won for an oppressed people their freedom, the Federal Government of that time did little to relieve the crushed south and the freed slave population of the plight that had been inflicted upon it by years of war and its concomittant poverty. So much so that the legacy remains with us to this very day, with Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi amongst the poorest states in the union though at one time they ranked with all the others. Faulkner could see no good in this mode of operation (about which one could argue the wisdom). Had the movement risen organically from the people of the South we might still have with us the moderate voice of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But had there been no intervention would anything at all have changed? One cannot tell, but if what is said above is true, Faulkner felt that the consequences would be more negative than positive, prolonging the agony of racism and bigotry. Who knows. Whatever the case may be--Faulkner shows himself in these opinions a true son of the South.

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Is Believing Seeing?

from Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner

while one part of him said My brow my skull my jaws my hands and the other said Wait. Wait. You cant know yet. You cannot know yet whether what you see is what you are looking at or what you are believing. Wait. Wait.

Often we see beyond the thing we are looking at and into the inference we are making from it. This is one of the very common problems in science--a scientist can reasonably confuse inference with observation when what he wants is strong enough. In fact, I would accuse some evolutionary scientists of this problem. They want so much to see evidence for evolution that their "observations" cease to be descriptions of the natural world and become descriptions of their inferences from the natural order. Thus we have a plethora of books for agnostic and atheistic evolutionists who leap from the observations of the natural world to the inference of chaotic origin, all the while making a case for it being observation.

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January 17, 2008

One More--Wash Jones on Bravery

Hi all, I'm sorry, I'm just enthralled with the last part of this book and I'd probably post the entire last fifty or so pages I've read had I the time and the right. Because I have neither, let me regale you with one more excerpt:

from Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner

'. . . Because you are brave. It aint that you were a brave man at one second or minute or hour of your life and got a paper to show hit from General Lee. But you are brave, the same as you are alive and breathing. That's where it's different. Hit dont need no ticket from nobody to tell me that. And I know that whatever your hands tech, whether hit's a regiment of men or a ignorant gal or just a hound dog, that you will make hit right.'

Bravery isn't the matter of a moment but a matter of the heart and mettle.

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More Humor

"He overheard them before he could begin to not listen. . . "

William Faulkner, Abasalom, Absalom!

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Faulkner's Humor and Moral Vision

Throughout most of Absalom, Absalom! Thomas Sutpen, a key figure, could hardly be called sympathetic. He seems at time little less than a monster. In the last third, or so, of the book, Faulkner spends some time telling us about Mr. Sutpen and how he came to be who he presently is. What emerges is a man who much conflicted attempts to make his own way in the world by his own constricted and convoluted sense of morality and ends up precipitating the entire action of the novel.

Throughout the book there are moments of high humor even within the tragedy, pathos, or sheer chaos of the action. One of these moments occurs in the passage sited below.

from Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner

And then the shrewdness failed him again. It broke down, it vanished into that old impotent logic and morality which had betrayed him before: and what day it might have been, what furrow might he have stopped dead in, one foot advanced, the unsentient plow handles in his instantaneous unsentient hands, what fence panel held in midair as though it had no weight by muscles which could not feel it, when he realised that there was more in his problem than just lack of time, that the problem contained some super-distillation of this lack: that he was now past sixty and that possibly he could get but one more son, had at best but one more son in his loins, as the old cannon might know when it has just one more shot in its corporeality. So he suggested what he suggested to her [Miss Rosa Coldfield], and she did what he should have known she would do and would have known probably if he had not bogged himself again in his morality which had all the parts but which refused to run, to move. Hence the proposal, the outrage and unbelief; the tide, the blast of indignation and anger upon which Miss Rosa vanished from Sutpen's Hundred, her air-ballooned skirts spread upon the flood, chip-light, her bonnet (possibly one of Ellen's which she had prowled out of the attic) clapped fast onto her head rigid and precarious with rage.

The description of Miss Rosa's departure in irate indignation (fully justified) is a marvelous limned-in portrait right down to the last phrase which, while probably modifying "head" can be seen as modifying "her bonnet," in which case we get, "her bonnet rigid and precarious with rage." Even her clothing revolts against Thomas Sutpen.

But encased here is Faulkner's statement about so many of us. And it is a statement wise and true, and most particularly true when we try to operate on our own. ". . . [I]f he had not bogged himself again in his morality which had all the parts but which refused to run, to move." The quandary of modern humanity--we have all the component parts of a morality, all of the right concerns, all of the proper foci, all of the will and the energy, and no ability to implement. The parts are all there but if they are not connected into one smooth-functioning machine, they are useless--they are but spare parts or the old washing machine on the front porch--they identify us as surely as our names or the clothes we wear, they tell something about us, but they don't even serve as window-dressing.

Faulkner makes this point time and again and the downfall of Sutpen is directly related to his inability to get his moral life in order and functioning. And this inability is directly related to the fact that the society he occupies has refused the moral norms of the world in the "peculiar institution" they cling to with such ferocity.

It's interesting--Faulkner loves the South--deeply. He is a true son of the South and yet he can have no truck with the nonsense (on either side) of the War Between the States. The South cannot be justified because it has a moral laxity and a patent offense to natural law. The North cannot because they are not fighting a war to release a people from bondage, but a war that many of them fail to understand at all and so their "bringing freedom" rains down destruction and chaos (see some of my posts related to The Unvanquished.) In a sense Faulkner gets it exactly right and encapsulates the love-hate many of us who are partisans of the South have with our native land.

But I digress--and I digress because Faulkner is one endless digression on matters of such grave importance that it is a pleasure to read and to absorb all that he has to say. Absalom, Absalom! starts out as a kind of mystery and quickly evolves into a complex tale of moral nightmare, evil, delusion, self-determination, and the destruction not only of the person who fall prey to this, but to everyone around him. Thomas Sutpen is a moral cancer in a society that hasn't a firm grasp or understanding of God and His purposes, and as such he is a nexus of destruction and endless unhappiness--perhaps even contributing to Quentin Compson's decision later in 1910 to commit suicide (only after, fortunately, he left us his part of The Sound and the Fury).

And just to seal the point, let me finish the passage quoted above:

And he, standing there with the reins over his arm, with perhaps something like smiling inside his beard and about the eyes which was no smiling but the crinkled concentration of furious thinking:--the haste, the need for it; the urgency but not fear, not concern: just the fact that he had missed that time, though luckily it was just a spotting shot with a light charge, and the old gun, the old barrel and carriage none the worse; only next time there might not be enough powder for both a spotting shot and then a full-sized load;--the fact that the thread of shrewdness and courage and will ran onto the same spool which the thread of his remaining days ran onto and that spool almost near enough for him to reach out his hand and touch it. But this was no grave concern yet, since it (the old logic, the old morality which had never yet failed to fail him) was already falling into pattern, already showing him conclusively that he had been right, just as he knew he had been, and there what had happened was just a delusion and not actually exist.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave. . .

And again, a light touch in a very serious matter: "(the old logic, the old morality which had never yet failed to fail him)."

And so it is with the man who refuses his redemption and attempts to acquire it by his own merits.

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January 15, 2008

More Bookselling Surprises

States Ranked by bookstores per capita:

1. Wyoming
2. Vermont
3. Montana
4. New Hampshire
5. Iowa

34. Texas

38. Ohio
39. Florida

47. California

50. New York

Now, one must keep in mind that the lower rank doesn't come from lack of bookstores necessarily but from plethora of people. For example Wyoming has 39 bookstores for a population of 507,000 people. New York has 437 bookstores for a populaiton of 19,227,000 people.

Florida has 635 bookstores for 17, 397,000 people. Ohio has 426 for 11,459,000 people.

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From Publisher's Weekly

Major Adult bestsellers of the year:

Adult Fiction: Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns 1,377,000
Adult NonFiction:Rhonda Byrne's The Secret 2, 947,000
Children's Ficiton: J. K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 7,740,000

Hmmm.

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January 14, 2008

Wow--Chew on That!

After a break to read Pillars of the Earth and The Undercover Economist (about which, perhaps, more later) I'm back to Absalom, Absalom! and the fragrant (or reeking) climes of Yoknapatawpha County, and the rise, decline, and fall of the Sutpen family, with Quentin Compson and his father (Intrusions of The Sound and the Fury). And here's what I stumble upon:

from Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner

Yes, granted that, even to the unworldly Henry, let alone the more travelled father, the existence of the eight part negro mistress and the sixteenth part negro son, granted even the morganatic ceremony--a situation which was as much a part of a wealthy young New Orleansian's social and fashionable equipment as his dancing slippers--was reason enough, which is drawing honor a little fine even for the shadowy paragons which are our ancestors born in the South and come to man- and womanhood about eighteen sixty or sixty one. It's just incredible. It just does not explain. Or perhaps that's it: they dont explain and we are not supposed to know.

And doesn't that last line explain a good deal of Faulkner?

Nevertheless, I revel in it, in a way that I cannot seem to do with Hemingway, Steinbeck, or other contemporaries (except perhaps Georgette Heyer and Agatha Christie).

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January 8, 2008

Books, Books, Books

As you can well imagine, my Christmas was filled with books. I set aside Absalom, Absalom! to pick up Pillars of the Earth but will soon return again to the comfortable and bizarre world of William Faulkner. I have Michael Dirda's The Classics for Pleasure which I will get to soon.

In addition, I used Christmas gifts to go out and buy books I would never consider getting for myself. So I ended up with The Landmark Herodotus which will sit alongside my Landmark Thucydides. I much prefer Herodotus to Thucydides as "fun reading"; however these editions make for fun and informative reading of either resource.

Also picked up The Undercover Economist who has a great deal to tell us about markets, economics, and how to buy coffee or groceries. Right now I'm reading a fascinating chapter about the auctioning of the electromagnetic spectrum as it relates to game theory.

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Pillars of the Earth--Ken Follett

I am not gaga over Oprah either way. I don't see her as the new messiah, nor do I see her as the apotheosis of evil. However, I do respect the fact that she leads many of her viewers to new and interesting books. While the majority of her bookclub were probably already readers, I can't help but wonder if her work hasn't encouraged some of the sluggish. The reason I mention her is that Pillars of the Earth was one of her book-club selections and that indirectly influenced my bookgroup's decision to read it.

I've tried to read it several times, in fact, I thought I had read it through once, but upon finishing the book I concluded that I never got much past the introduction. Most likely this was because the length of the book itself was daunting and I found other more pressing things to occupy my time with. I'm very pleased that at last I've found cause to read it.

The book is the story of the building of a Cathedral and the scheming, politics, and sheer human cussedness that surrounds it. Initially it appears to be the story of Thomas Builder and an assorted cast of characters, but it rapidly becomes a real pageant of people, places, and events during the turmoil of the reigns of Stephen and Maud. It ends during the reign of Henry II.

I have only a couple of minor quibbles with the book. One is with the author's tendency to sprinkle in sex scenes and a certain amount of vulgarity which, while probably representative of the time, had the effect of pulling me out of the story and into an analysis of why the author did what he did. The second is with an occasional bout of linguistic anancrhonism. For example, at one point a character hesitates from doing something because he thinks that the woman he is with will "make a scence." For whatever reason, when reading a book set in Medieval times, it is extremely jarring to have an introduction of this kind of thing.

Despite some infrequent questionable choices by the author, the book moves quickly and one comes to sympathize deeply with many of the characters. The story is logical, logically developed, and suitably reflective of life during chaotic times. It is a story of passionate intensity and devotion to a cause and it is the story of the growth of a town. It is, in some small way, also the story of redemption of several seemingly irredeemable characters.

Well worth while, but (for home-schooling moms) not for the kids.

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December 18, 2007

Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism

I'm disinclined to trust Mr. Weigel, largely because of his position on Iraq which I interpret to be "a just war is any war that I decide is just." But that evaluation in itself may be unjust. In his new book, Mr. Weigel continues to maintain that the Iraq war is a just war. He provides no evidence for this in the book, but then, that's not the book's purpose. So I start my review by saying that I was skeptical upon taking up the book and constantly challenging propositions as I read it. Nevertheless, I found myself persuaded to at least consider the points being made in greater detail. The book won me over and encouraged me to look again at what I held to be true.

The purpose of the book is to expose some thoughts about the present world situation and who the "enemy" is. The arguments made are clear, succinct, and compelling--reasonable articulations of the state and nature of "this present darkness." In fact, I found his arguments so compelling and so instructive that any interest I may have had in Mr. Paul as a candidate was driven out of my head. Not that Ron Paul is wrong on everything, but his pseudo-Washingtonian isolationism is deeply troubling. I would liken his policy to those of Neville Chamberlain--not exactly because Mr. Chamberlain was into appeasement, Mr. Paul seems to be heavily dedicated to capitulation. But I suppose that is an argument for another time.

In fifteen short articles, Mr. Weigel lays out a clear sense of what the present battle is about, how it must be fought, and how much depends upon winning and winning in the right way. An image that lingers with me from the book is the Churchill Poster with bulldog finger pointing at the viewer and the bald statement, "Deserve to Win." And, regardless of what the detractors and apologists for the left have to say, we do deserve to win--what we value and what we cherish are deeply human and humane values (when we're not busy supporting waterboarding and other atrocities). In fact, one of the points I took away from the book is related to this and encapsulated below.

from Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism
George Weigel

If, for example, Jews, Christians, Muslims, and agnostics ( as well as HIndus, Buddhists, and adherents of other religions) could agree that there are certain moral truths "built into" the world, built into us, and built into the dynamics of human striving--moral truths that we can know, by careful reflection to be true--then we would have the first build blocks of a philosophical foundation on which to construct, together, free and just societies that respect religious conviction. We would have, in other words, a rational, interreligious "grammar" and vocabulary with which to engage each other on questions of what is, in fact, the meaning of freedom, justice, and other aspects of the good.

This is a profound articulation of a primary truth, one that I've been trying to share with a very good friend for a very long time. We understand it as natural law--Mr. Weigel does not so call it here, and I think he does well not to do so, the term seems to confuse those not familiar with its technical meaning in philosophy.

The book is filled with small insights like this. Nothing radical, nothing monumental in each moment, but building to a strong sense of moral integrity. While I might take Mr. Weigel on his views regarding Iraq, by virtue of the thoughtfulness of this book, I find that I may need to spend more time with what he has to say about the matter and really evaluate it and understand it.

One other observation that is most welcome at this time is Mr. Weigel's unstinting support for research into and development of alternative energy resources particularly for transportation. When I first learned about Wahhabism and its centrality to Saudi Islam, and coupled that with the fact that we continually finance our own destruction through the energy dollars we pour into that nation, I concluded that something needed to be done. It's good to have the support of someone who is more thoughtful and less reactive that I tend to be.

In sum, the book is short, the thoughts are large, the writing is clear and well done, and the reader is amply rewarded for the investment of an hour or two with the book. Highly recommended, even if one stands in the camp opposite that of Mr. Weigel. His heavy reliance on Bernard Lewis helped to clinch the value of this work for me. That and his reasonable, moderated, equable tone go a long way toward making the arguments at least palatable enough to consider in greater detail. A nice, short introductory handbook to the nature of our present crisis.

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December 12, 2007

20th Century Ghosts

Excited by my recent discovery of Joe Hill's novel Heart-Shaped Box, I took up his book of short stories, 20th Century Ghosts. The collection leads off with what is probably the weakest piece, and even this did not disappoint in the slightest. What a superb collection of stories and what a tremendous range the author exhibits!

Stories range from the ghastly (such as the lead-off tale "Best New Horror," to the sublime, "20th Century Ghosts," "Better than Home," "The Widow's Breakfast," and "Pop Art." In between are all shades of eerie and horrifying--from the Bradburyesque "Last Breaths" to the Kafkaesque story of Francis, the boy transmuted into a Locust.

There isn't a bad story in the collection, but I'll detail a few of my favorites. "Pop Art," is the unlikely tale of an unfortunate boy born with a genetic defect that skips generations--he's inflatable. "My Father's Mask," is a wild, creepy, eerie, unforgettable tale in the line of Harvest Home and Bethany's Sin with a big dollop of "The Lottery" mixed in. The imagery and trajectory of the story are utterly unexpected and entirely predictable at the same time and the mix sends the reader completely off-balance at every turn. "20th Century Ghosts" refers to the ghosts of the silver screen and a theater, haunted by one particular ghost, whose gift is the gift of a life related to cinema. Beautiful. "Voluntary Commital" tells the tale of a young boy who is gifted with the ability to build, and build he does--out of cardboard boxes he builds a bridge to otherwhere. This story has a distinctly Lovecraftian flavor, and for those well versed in the lore even makes mention of one of those famous lovecraftian locations. But it is also so well handled that it isn't simply one more Lovecraft pastiche. The authors knows the lore and uses it deftly.

While many of the pieces fall in the realm of supernatural fiction, some are surreal, such as the tale of Francis who wakes up to find himself tranmorgrified into a locust, "Pop Art," and "My Father's Mask." In addition there is straight fiction--"Better than Home," is the story of a boy and his relationship with his father. "The Widow's Breakfast" is about riding the rails in the depression, loss and a subtle kind of redemption offered on both sides of the exchange. And there is a tale of high-school sweethearts meeting on the set of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead--both poignant and sweet.

Joe Hill has talent and remarkable control over his material. While Heart-Shaped Box may be strong material to start with, 20th Century Ghosts allows an entrée into his oeuvre that may be more pleasing and have wider general appeal.

This story collection is highly recommended to those interested in supernatural fiction, baseball (which seems to obsess Mr. Hill as much as it does his father), or just plain good writing. I hope that Mr. Hill follows the great start made in these books with a great many more both "straight" and "genre." I know I am eagerly looking forward to the next.

Next stop: Gentlemen of the Road, Michael Chabon's self-styled "Jews with Swords" tribute to the "Sword and Sorcery" genre. Although I rather suspect it may be lacking in the Sorcery realm.

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December 10, 2007

How the Greats Are Great

from Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner

That's all Miss Rosa knew. She could have known no more about it than the town knew because the ones who did know (Sutpen or Judith: not Ellen, who would have been told nothing in the first place and would have forgot, failed to assimilate, it if she had been--Ellen the butterfly, from beneath whom without warning the very sunbouyed air had been withdrawn, leaving her now with the plump hands folded on the coverlet in the darkened room and the eyes above them probably not even suffering but merely filled with baffled incomprehension) would not have told her anymore than they would have told anyone in Jeffeson or anywhere else.

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Heart-Shaped Box--Joe Hill

Who is Joe Hill and does it matter?

Rumor has it (and I consider wikipedia a source that is only a step above rumor) that Joe Hill is Joseph Hillstrom King, son of Stephen King. Joe Hill is the name he has taken in order to thrive on his own as a writer--something that was bound to fall through at one time or another. I admire a person who has the courage to engage in writing in the face of the enormous opus and craft of a parent's or a sibling's writing. In this case, Mr. Hill faces both Stephen and Tabitha King and has a brother, Owen King who is also a writer. With odds like these, it would be a hard thing to make one's own way in the world of fiction/literature. The attempt to do so can only be admired.

Synopsis--Or, at Least, as Much as I'm Going to Tell You Here

What is there to say about Mr. Hill's first novel Heart-Shaped Box? A difficult question indeed. The novel centers around an interesting concept--an aging death-metal rocker hears about a ghost for sale on one of the many E-bay clone sites. Given his collections of materials related to the occult and supernatural, he naturally needs to possess this item. Problem is, the person selling it already knows about the Rock Star's interest and is using that interest for purposes that must remain undisclosed. The story evolves out of the purchase of the dead-man's suit which arrives in the heart-shaped box of the title. Ah, but it isn't the only heart-shaped box in the novel and it is the interplay of these heart-shaped boxes that makes for some of the interesting possibility of the novel.

The theme, ultimately, is redemption through love. The love is not divine love (as many people have pointed out is also true for Harry Potter novels); however, all true, unselfish love, even broken human love for another, is a sign of divine love. (As St. John tells us, if we cannot love what we can see and hold, how do we begin to think that we can love what we cannot see and hold.) It is also a novel about learning how to love in the face of the vast indifference and sometimes active hostility of the world at large.

Supernatural Fiction v. Horror Fiction

I suppose Mr. Hill's novel is marketed as "horror." And to some extent that is a real shame. While there are horrific elements to the story, most of these are centered squarely in the realm of the human heart. Yes, there is a vengeful, vindictive, and almost unstoppable ghost out to destroy for his own purposes. But far more frightening are the human agents behind the havoc that the ghost ends up wreaking.

Ghost stories fall into a curious "between-land" of fiction. While the effect of some of them may be horrific, there are a great many in which the element of horror is secondary to the purpose of the story. Most famous among them is that seasonal gem, the literary jewel in the crown of our current festive season. There is nothing particularly horrific in the apparitions or activities of any of the ghosts in A Christmas Carol. So too with Turn of the Screw in which there may or may not be ghosts. And even so with The Haunting of HIll House. While the ghost story may enter the realm of horror at will, it isn't always, nor even necessarily frequently about horror. More often the ghost story is about connections--human connections. The ghost story is supernatural fiction that can touch on strains of true faith and religion. The themes of the ghost story allow one to examine the communion of saints and what that means as well as other aspects of faith, belief, and the supernatural world.

Supernatural fiction, fiction that focuses more on human themes--love, redemption, etc.--is in a sense a superior brand of horror fiction because it has purpose beyond entertainment or shock. There is an end toward which the entertainment pushes. And Mr. Hill's book succeeds on this level admirably.

Evaluation
While there are a number of distressing elements in the book--coarse language (but from coarse characters living a rough life), abuse, and other unpleasant realities that shape some lives, Mr. Hill uses them to good effect. What was most remarkable about the story is that I cared at all for the main character Jude Coyne, who, as we meet him seems nothing more that a superficial, self-obsessed aging death-metal rocker. In the course of the story we discover much about him and learn to like and even love and care about him and the other characters in the novel.

The core of the story is centered around the redemption of Jude Coyne. In some sense, there are parallels to A Christmas Carol in which the visitation of the ghost brings about a deep change in character. Now, the ghost in this novel is considerably more vindictive and destructive than any encountered in A Christmas Carol, but its purpose in the novel and in the life of the character is similar. In the presence of this ghost, Jude comes to realize what love is and how much he has experienced of it and taken it for granted.

While there is no overt mention of God, nor any strong indication of any religious theme, and while one cannot really interpret in any reasonable way the intentions of an author, there is a moment within the book at which one of the characters says that she is not afraid to die because now she knows that it is not the end, that there is something that comes after.

20th Century Ghosts

While Heart-Shaped Box is Joe Hill's first novel, and a compulsively readable one at that, it is not his first fiction. Most of what came before was a series of short stories, some of which are collected in the book 20th Century Ghosts. I've read only the first two stories in this collection, but they show the same aplomb, the same control, the same desire to explore important themes that the novel shows. While following in his father's footsteps, Mr. Hill steps out in ways unique to himself, and the promise of these stories and this first novel make me hope that we can expect a great many more from Mr. Hill.

Summary

For those who like ghost stories, malevolent ghosts, and plain, good writing, Mr. Hill has provided a superb novel. The language more controlled than some of his Father's middle works (seems that the elder Mr. King is gradually regaining control over his work that was patently missing from works such as The Tommyknockers). Joe Hill is a person of interest in the field of supernatural fiction.

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November 29, 2007

A Theory of Reading

Those of you who read this blog frequently know that I am neither a very profound or close reader. I don't spend my time thrashing through the text in search of subtexts, symbols, extended metaphors, semiotic signposts, hegelian dialectic, or any number of the other quixotic treasures hunts often engaged in by professional readers of literature.

Nevertheless, you might also note that I don't shy away from books, either great literature or not-so-great bestseller thrillers. LIke Michael Dirda (a hero of sorts) I enjoy all sorts of books for all sorts of reasons, and some of those reasons might help the reader understand what sorts of books. (Why nonfiction makes up such a small portion of my repertoire.)

For a book to interest me if must have compelling examples of one of three things--magisterial and innovative use of the English language to a purpose (even if the purpose is only pyrotechnics--and I don't think "deconstructing our sensibilities" ranks anywhere at all in a theory of purpose. Frankly, I don't need my sensibilities deconstructed, I'm perfectly happy with them as they are), great story, plot, characters, gimmick, or information that is highly useful to me.

If the book is of the latter form, I've come to expect very low quality prose--writers who have three handsful of thumbs when it comes to any sense of nuance or beauty in the language. And perhaps that is all to the good, because after all the intent is not to dazzle with prose but to convey information. Obviously there are exceptions to the expectation, and each of those is greeted with great joy on my part. (The most recent in my recollection was Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

The thrillers, mysteries, much of the science fiction, fantasy, and historical novels fall into the second category. If there isn't anything there for me in story, plot, gimmick, or character, it can all go away. I read innumerable thrillers and am often disappointed at the conclusion of them. For example, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Cloud have produced a long line of thriller from Relic to the most recent--the title eludes me now, and I read every one of them hoping that the conclusion will be somewhat better or more satisfying than the last such. Hélas, too often it is not so. The same was true for Dean Koontz, up until my fortuitous discovery of the Odd books (thanks Julie).

When it comes to literature, I experience another kind of handicap. Quite frankly, I don't much care what it says about the human condition or society or the plight of _________ (fill in the blank), or humanity's relationship with ____________. Ecclesiastes kind of nailed it, "There is nothing new under the sun." What I care about is the aplomb, finesse, panache, élan, you name it with which it is said. "Ozymandias" is magnificent to me not so much for what it says, which, if one thinks about it, isn't really a new or powerful message for our day--in fact, a true classic will breath out a truth that is for all time and is powerful because it is universal, and therefore, the particulars, the trappings, the environment are what I find compelling and interesting. Taking a recent example--does Faulkner have anything to tell me that is new or different about the human condition? Nothing that hasn't been said since Gilgamesh--but oh, what language he uses to tell me. What a magnificent, rolling, magisterial prose--imbued and soaked in the rhythms and intonations of that Jacobean Classic that has informed so much of English and American literature.

Does Jonathan Edwards have anything different to say to us from preachers and prophets from the time of Melchizidek on? No, not really. And yet those orotund phrases, that rhythm, that high and precise and colorful and powerful and authoratative use of the language. Images that grab the attention and hold it.

It is for these reasons that I find many of the supposedly great books largely inaccessible to me. Dostoevsky may be fantastic, but I am often reading him through a glass seven inches thick--the translator faced with the double bind of conveying the original authors intent and style, often leaves me astounded and exhausted with their own lack of command of the language into which they are translating. I've done some of this myself and so I deeply sympathize with translators, it's a darned difficult task. But the fact that I recognize that does not immediately make the work that I'm trying to read more enjoyable or accessible to me. The only language other than English that I have full enough command of to be able to say anything worthwhile about quality is French. And even there, I fail to see the often sited magnificence of Flaubert or Balzac, while I am still able to appreciate the works and stories in their original tongue.

The point of this--my enthusiasm for great works comes from my engagement in the way the story is told--not so much the elements of the story, which often are as old as the Greek Myths from which they spring. As such, I don't tend to be a profound reader, pulling apart the prose to reveal to the reader the clockwork ticking of the interrelated symbolism. In fact, if it is overt enough for me to notice it, I often find that it is mechanical in the extreme. When on first reading I can say to myself, that is a symbol, it is like a magician whose slight of hand is just a little too slow--the magic is gone and all I can see is the fumbling. Modern works, ironic in the extreme, tend to make a show, a parade of their endless symbols, references, and meanings tend to be spectacular show pieces of the technical skill of the author. (I'm thinking here of cute and coy ploys like the e-mail address in Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections --gaddisfly. Franzen so desperately wants to belong to that group of litterateurs associated with the Gaddis circle, it is pitiful to see.) Unfortunately, technical skill without heart doesn't give a reader much of a reason to read.

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NYT Picks the Ten Best of the Year

And, of course, I haven't read a single one of them.

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November 28, 2007

Compare and Contrast

A couple of days ago, I gave an excerpt from The Unvanquished which serves well to set against this excerpt from Absalom, Absalom!.

from Abasalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner

it was a summer of wistaria. The twilight was full of it and the smell of his father's cigar as they sat on the front gallery after supper until it would be time for Quentin to start, while in the deep shaggy lawn below the veranda the fireflies flew and drifted in soft random--the odor, the scent, which five months later Mr Compson's letter would carry up from Mississippi and over the long iron New England snow and into Quentin's sitting-room at Harvard. It was a day of listening too--the listening, the hearing in 1909 even yet mostly that which he already knew since he had been born in and still breathed the same air in which the church bells had rung on that Sunday morning in 1833 (and, on Sundays, heard even one of the original three bells in the same steeple where descendants of the same pigeons strutted and crooned or wheeled in short courses resembling soft fluid paint-smears on the soft sumer sky); a Sunday morning in June with the bells ringing peaceful and peremptory and a little cacophonous--the denominations in concord though not in tune--and the ladies and children, and house negroes to carry the parasols and flywhisks, and even a few men (the ladies moving in hoops among the miniature broadcloth of little boys and the pantalettes of little girls, in the skirts of the time when ladies did not walk but floated) when the other men sitting with their feet on the railing of the Holston House gallery looked up, and there the stranger was. He was already halfway across the square when they saw him, on a big hard-ridden roan horse, man and beast looking as though they had been created out of thin air and set down in the bright summer sabbath sunshine in the middle of a tired foxtrot--face and horse that none of them had ever seen before, name that none of them had ever heard, and origin and purpose which some of them were never to learn. So that in the next four weeks (Jefferson was a village then: the Holston House, the courthouse, six stores, a blacksmith and livery stable, a saloon frequented by drovers and peddlers, three churches and perhaps thirty residences) the stranger's name went back and forth among the places of business and of idleness and among the residences in steady strophe and antistrophe: Sutpen. Sutpen. Sutpen. Sutpen

One long paragraph, and still only half the length of the normal "period" of motion in the book. What is wonderful is the mechanism whereby we are moved from the here and now present of the novel (1909) into the world of 1833 and the beginning of the saga of Thomas Sutpen in the village of Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County. We move from the present smell of wistaria into the future (five months later) and then smoothly into the past in one long singing, rolling phrase.

The sentences are not difficult, but they are like Latin--before the real sense of each becomes clear, the entire sentence must be taken in and disassembled and the constituent parts placed in proper relation to one another. It is, undeniably, work. And yet it is a work that has such a fine pay-off--one comes to know the mind of the narrator and one enters the time and the world of Faulkner's fiction in a way that rarely happens in light fiction treating of similar subjects. There is substance here that goes beyond the status of "literature" or "classic" and enters the world of simply satisfying--solid, grounded and grounding, substantial--the author has authority (ever wondered about the similarity of the two words) and the world is authentic. To read Faulkner is to enter a world that is accessible in no other way (the same is true of every author worth his or her salt), but there is a pleasure in reading Faulkner that comes from acquaintance with a master. Too bad our early experiences cause us to shy away, often thinking that the work is beyond us or ill-conceived, or otherwise not available to us. In their enthusiasm and desire to introduce us into these new realms some of our early literature teachers do inestimable harm. But stop blaming them and avail yourself of the wonders of great prose despite those bitter early memories. You'll be glad you did.

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The Unvanquished

Having already begun the inextricably intertwined premier book of this civil war diptych (Absalom, Absalom), gives some perspective on this work of William Faulkner. This is, by far and away one of the most accessible of Faulkner's works. While there are some subtleties and complexities in the prose, the stream of consciousness approach is filtered through the mind of a highly educated adult, even in the early parts of the book which are told from the point of view of a child between the ages of 10 and 12.

The novel originated as a chain of short stories published during the time Faulkner was writing Absalom, Absalom, and people more knowledgeable about Faulkner as a writer and a person might say that this book is, in a sense, a inner response of Faulkner to the harsh portrayal of the south found in Absalom, Absalom. In The Unvanquished, the South comes out looking fairly good--not admirable in all respects and bearing the brunt of the responsibility for the horrors of the war. The main character, Colonel John Sartoris is, in some ways, the Civil War equivalent of a Mrs. Jellyby--his attention focused completely outwards toward the war and his own accomplishments within it, things at home are left to run more or less on their own, with the disastrous results which often follow when anyone shirks their primary responsibilities.

By turns poignant, touching, sad, hilarious, and horrifying (often within a ten-page stretch), the novel charts the progress of Bayard Sartoris (son of John), Marengo (his friend/brother/slave/servant), Granny, and a host of other characters familiar to those who have dipped into Faulkner's world before. We meet the ancestors of Quentin Compson, even if only peripherally, Colonel Tom Sutpen, and Ab Snopes, progenitor of the generally useless Snopes clan. In the trajectory of the stories we are able to compare and contrast the fates of Grumby (a man responsible for one major moment in the book) and Redmond (the man responsible for another, similar major moment in the book.)

The last chapter, "The Odor of Verbena," is often read as a separate short story and is a moving account of the real coming of age of Bayard Sartoris, made more powerful here by its juxtaposition with the story of Bayard, Ringo, and Grumby.

To get a sense of scope, in this one book, we learn about the Sack of Vicksburg and vicinity, the exodus of the Mississippi slave population with predictably disastrous results, Granny's mule trading--in which she confiscates, sells back, and reconfiscates a number of United States Army Mules through clever forgeries of an original licit document, Drusilla's stint in the Army in Virginia with Colonel Sartoris, her forced marriage to said Colonel as a result of the suspicious minds of the neighbors, and John and Drusilla's interference in the first (monumentall ill-conceived) reconstruction elections, Granny's assistance and support of the poor of Yoknapatawpha County, the utter destruction of the countryside as the Union troops withdraw from Mississippi, and a legion of other events. Most importantly one learns that, in Drusilla's words, verbena is the only scent that can overpower the smell of horses and courage.

The book is short, easy to read (for Faulkner), and powerful. It is the "up side" (and not much of one) of Faulkner's vision of the Civil War South. It provides an insight into how one can still find something to respect despite the fact that the war was fought for all the wrong reasons and for far longer than it need have done. (This point leads to a very interesting turn around in the course of the book in which at one point Bayard sees the wisdom of women as supporting and pushing the war effort forward, and toward the end sees that same wisdom as having given up on the war effort years before the men realized that they should have done so.) Read in juxtaposition with Absalom, Absalom it provides the positive print to the negative that is exposed in the latter work.

But the most powerful thing to come out of the book isn't about the South at all--it is about people struggling to be human and humane in the face of tremendous obstacles, difficulties, misunderstandings, and completely correct understandings. It is about the courage to defy expectations or fulfill them and how, where moral certainty is lacking, the circumstances must help us understand, how our circumstances help us feel the way to the (often incorrect) conclusion. It is a story about how we understand and fail to understand one another and how we can, despite ourselves and our surroundings, learn to understand each other better.

By all means, pick this up and read it. Faulkner is not so difficult as we might have come to believe from premature exposure in high-school or college. He is by no means easy and light reading; however, reading his prose is both a challenge and a deep pleasure and delight. It is a break from post-modernist brokenness and escapist fictional flights (against which, I should note, I have no gripe). Do yourself a favor and read it--not because it is good and classic and expected, but because it is enjoyable in a way that few other things are. There is here the enjoyment of accomplishment (having read Faulkner) and the enjoyment of a good set of stories well told, full of sound and fury, and yet signifying much. The tale told by an idiot is best saved for a time when one has become more acquainted with Faulkner by way of more accessible works.

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November 26, 2007

Reading List

The Unvanquished--William Faulkner. Faulkner, like Hawthorne, is notoriously under-read and his humor under-appreciated. Perhaps it is the difficulty of plumbing the depths of his prose. If so, The Unvanquished should prove a satisfying, if perhaps slight, entry point into his work. (I don't know whether or not it is slight, I'm not a Faulkner expert--and all of Faulkner works to one end any way, most of the works sharing a dynasty of characters, or even more importantly for a work of southern fiction a continuity of place. (I plan to follow up with Absalom! Absalom!, Intrude in the Dust, and the collected short stories. I've already read and really enjoyed The Sound and the Fury (much falls into place in the beginning of Benjy's first section when you remember that his sister's name is Caddie) and As I Lay Dying. (What I most recall with this one is Vardeman's assertion after Addie's death, or perhaps just prior to it, that "My mother is a fish." You have to read this mordant study to get it--it's one of those places where Faulkner is at his finest talking about the foibles of humankind.)

Map of Bones--James Rollins--I don't know why, but I don't find this book nearly as compelling as The Judas Strain or The Black Order. You'd think the theft of the bones of the magi would be a matter of great interest, but somehow it just isn't really compelling.

Soul Provider--Yep, you haven't seen a final review because I didn't want to rush through and end the experience of the book. It has been enormously helpful, insightful, and meaningful, taking the abstruse and difficult thought of ancient asceticism and applying it in a meaningful way to how we live our lives today. Truly a book to savor and enjoy again and again. I will never read St. John Climacus in exactly the same way again--which is a good thing--pawing through desert dust for a kernel of insight is hardly rewarding, but realizing that what is said has relevance for people who do not live in the same circumstances--that we're not pawing through desert dust, but walking through the living water of the love of God.

The Purgatorio--Dante. Don't know if I'll end up finishing it this month, as so little time is left, but I'll give it a try if other things move out of the way.

Lined up are a biography of Louis Mayer and other assorted delights from my local library and my personal collection. We'll see how it all works out.

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November 21, 2007

The Judas Strain

This is the usual piece of fluff one might expect from James Rollins. Highly inventive, highly imaginative, mostly well-written. Mr. Rollins composes the novels Dan Brown wishes (or wished) he could do. They are intricate puzzles that often combine disparate elements into a suspense/thriller that really takes off.

In this case, we combine cyanobacteria (incorrectly identified early on as slime-mold--but more about that later), Christmas Island Red Crabs, Cannibalism, Marco Polo, Angkor Wat, Angelic Script, and a few other ingredients into a thick ragout of the outrageous, unlikely, and yet highly plausible. In all of his books, this is Mr. Rollins's forte--the combination of highly disparate elements into a very enjoyable romp through the world. In this case, Washington D.C., Christmas Island, Angkor Wat, Hormuz, Istanbul, Vatican City, and probably other locations I've forgotten.

Now for the little down side--as Mr. Rollins's works become more popular, the editorial staff seems to back down and leave more of the raw writing. This shows infrequently, but unpleasantly in several sentences in the book. The unpleasantness is that they shock the alert reader out of the "vivid and continuous dream" of the prose just momentarily. Fortunately, Mr. Rollins is a better stylist than most thriller writers and only slips out occasionally. (I'm not counting the small hunks of exposition disguised as conversation--you've got to get that background in somehow when you're spanning the globe.)

The one place where I was most highly irritated occurred early on (as mentioned above) when cyanobacteria (which once were called blue-green algae) are confused with slime-molds. Slime molds are either a kingdom unto themselves, or a group of protists (depending on the taxonomy one is following). Cyanobacteria, as the name implies are bacteria--they are responsible for some of the oldest fossils on Earth.

Additionally, he attributes luminescent "milky seas" to cyanobacteria blooms. This may well be the case, I've not done enough to associate the two. However, much of my experience with such phenomenon is the result of a dinoflagellate--Noctiluca scintillans (see here. Anyone interested in my psychological well-being could feel free to cheer me up with one of these). In this case, the discrepancy may be that we are talking about different phenomena and I haven't seen the one described by Mr. Rollins.

These quibbles aside--for those in the mood for a fast-paced puzzle thriller that combines all sorts of interesting persons, places, and things into an interesting and compelling story, The Judas Strain could be your cup of tea.

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November 20, 2007

Kahlil Gibran--And I Thought I Was the Only Detractor

Amusing and effective pastiche/review at First Things.

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November 19, 2007

TheTipping Point

Malcolm Gladwell's book is a study in the epidemiology of ideas, fashion trends, and even trends in violence. From Hush Puppies in Manhattan night clubs to suicides among young teen males in Melanesia, from Sesame Street to cigarettes, this book is filled with interesting ideas and social psychology studies. From the rule of seven to the rule of 150, there are interesting ideas and suggestions about how an idea might propagate.

My problem with the book is that it doesn't dive deep enough. There are suggestions that this is the way things might develop, but there isn't enough substance. That may be an effect of what is being studied. In social psychology, one can never be absolutely certain of cause and effect; research is more often conducted along the lines of correlations. For example, the rule of 150 is supported by the fact that every major nation on Earth through time has organized its individuals into groups that do not exceed 150 at the lowest levels. There is a profound reason suggested for this; but I wonder how one would go about testing that reason.

What Gladwell's book put me in mind of was the need for a tipping point in many aspects of the political, social, and spiritual lives of Americans. I have a feeling that a great many marketing firms will be studying this book closely. I know that a good many people in my own company have read this book and have suggested it to others to read.

While it may become a weapon in the armament of marketing, it is also an interesting anecdotal appreciation of the spread of ideas. Whether or not it is substantial is a matter that must be left to more documentation or testing. Throughout the book, I was wondering whether what Gladwell was talking about was similar to the broad characteristics one could find upon reading one's own character portrait from horoscopes: you see something vague enough and say, "That's it, that's me exactly." And of course, the statements you are reading could describe anyone at all at some point in time. Gladwell's book struck me a little that way--interesting observations that never quite gel for me into coherent theory.

However, I enjoyed it tremendously, expanded my knowledge of the field and encountered the utterly fascinating essay by George Miller "The Magical Number Seven, Ply or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information." (It begins with the remarkable sentence: "My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer.")

Recommended for readers interested in social trends and social psychology. It makes fine, light, entertaining non-fiction reading for most.

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November 16, 2007

Gluttony--Wasichu

Whether or not Wasichu actually means "eaters of fat" or "the ones who take the fat," the myth of the meaning provides entry into today's brief exploration of Fr. Beck's book. The "eaters of fat" were those who were so all consuming that they ate at the expense of everyone else--immoderately and seemingly all-consuming, taking even the last, most precious of ther reserves.

from Soul Provider
Father Edward L. Beck

Gluttony, one of the seven deadly sins, can kill us not only physically, but spiritually as well. Saint John Climacus says: "Gluttony is hypocrisy of the stomach. Filled, it moans about scarcity; stuffed and crammed, it wails about hunger. Glutton thinks up seasonings, creates sweet recipes. Stop one urge and another bursts out; stop that one and you unleash yet another. Gluttony has a deceptive appearance: it eats moderately but wants to gobble everything at the same time."

The sin here is not only in the doing, it is is the inordinate desire even when the impulse is controlled.

I have a friend who has lost a large amount of weight; she has adhered especially closely to one particularly program of eating. She is justifiably pleased with how well she has done and she claims that food no longer possesses her. But in actual fact, it merely possesses her in a different way. Everything is oriented toward eating in this way--all thought is about the next meal or this meal and whether it conforms in every particular to the ideal. This isn't gluttony--but it is similar to how gluttony works. And gluttony, hasn't only to do with food. It has to do with any inordinate appetite for goods of any sort. Gluttony is when we rise from the breakfast table asking "What's for lunch."

A later quote from C.S. Lewis in Father Beck's book makes the point more clearly:

"Anyone who has watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating will admit that we can ignore even pleasure."

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Political Writing Revisited

The other day I wrote a short review of Ralph Nader's book The Good Life in which I said that it was disappointing but unsurprising; however, I'm unconvinced that I made my main point about disappointment because it was so lost in digression. And so, I'd like to revisit that in a more focused way.

Explicitly, my disappointment in Mr. Nader's book stems from the difference between stated objective and actual accomplishment. At the beginning Mr. Nader makes a powerful point about the necessity and obligation of the ordinary citizen to participate in the political and social world around them. In short, the ordinary person in the street is called upon to contribute to change. This is a powerful, wonderful, much-needed message. The book goes on to detail why such change is needed. Unfortunately, in so doing, much too much is made of those who are to blame for our present situation--and that blame is always thrown at anyone who disagrees with Mr. Nader and most of the time there appears to be in the implicit assumption of malice, conspiracy, or both. For example, the Republicans are out to deliberately oppress and create an underclass of the ordinary working person. While it may be true that there are some Republicans who might positively delight in such a prospect, I seriously doubt whether that is the express intention of the majority of Republicans, even powerful republicans, as they go about their daily duties. Why not look at the households of famous Democrats or liberals who hire and mistreat illegal immigrants routinely? I'm sure that the number of these is approximately equal to the number of Republicans whose deliberate mission it is to create an underclass.

In all political discussion of the present day, there appears to be an at least implicit assumption of ill-will or malice. This may be the case with all political writing through time, but I don't get the same sense from writers of previous eras. That may be because what survives to come to us today, survives because it transcends the tropes and diatribes of the time. It may, however, be indicative of the time, I do not have the breadth of experience to suggest the truth of the matter.

However, I do believe that it is possible to urge people to action on an issue without spending time blaming one group or another for the present situation. What does it matter who is responsible for allowing parking lots to be built on the watershed that directly feeds into the Everglades. The reality is that they are being built and will continue to be so until action is taken to prevent it.

Any effective action is by its own nature bipartisan any way. Yes, some laws are passed by a party, but those that stay in place are usually passed by a majority in both parties. The situation we are in is the result of input from both groups--it implies at least implicit consent from one group or another despite griping. (This goes, of course, only for true legislation, not for legislation from the bench, which seems almost impossible to overcome by any means allowed within the Consitution,)

My point is that civic action is a duty of all citizens. Involvement in the the political life around us is required so that we can inform it. It is the realm in which religion legitimately and purposefully enters into the social sphere. It is the intersection of "in the world" and "Of the world." and as such, helps to define that world for better or worse. As we choose to remain outside that interaction, society is deprived of the proper formation of conscience. Thus, there is a purpose to peaceful prayer outside of an abortion clinic, but no purpose to violent bombing of clinics or assassination of doctors who perform abortions.

My disappointment with the book stemmed from the fact that I was hoping to read about individuals who were working for the good life implied by the title. Instead, I'm told about how messed up life is and how it is all the result of Republican scheming to maintain and enlarge the underclass while exploiting the world.

Why is it not possible to engage in political discussion with an assumption of good will (if perhaps bad reasoning, or poor thought) on the part of all of those engaged. Why do we find it so hard to refrain from maligning the person rather than dealing with the idea? I think this is in part the same phenomenon that occurs when we drive and there are not longer people on the road, but cars. In the same way when we address people who hold ideas and call them idiots, morons, whoremongers, or whatever terms we use, we have placed a child of God within the vehicle of idea and have condemned them both.

By all means, bring every weapon to bear upon bad thinking. Help to correct the immoral or incorrect assumptions or bad data or other source of error in the thought of a person holding an opinion that differs from one's own. But my plea to all politicians and to all who would engage in political debate is to debate the ideas. Do not tar with one brush all people who self-label. All Republicans do not want to exploit migrant workers and toss them out of the country. All Democrats do not want to open the borders to all and sundry and allow the terrorists to overrun us. Why do so many writers write as if it were so?

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November 15, 2007

Memento Mori

Another powerful and beautiful reflection from Fr. Beck's book:

from Soul Provider
Fr. Edward L. Beck

Is it true that death gives meaning to life or, at least, informs life? Saint John Climacus writes, "Just as bread is the most necessary of all foods, so the thought of death is the most essential of all works. . . The man who lives daily with the thought of death is to be admired, and the man who gives himself to it b the hour is surely a saint." The knowledge of our mortality is therefore an incitement to live more fully. When we realize that we have a limited time to revel in the gift of human life, we are infused with an urgency that an endless life might not offer. There is only so much time to climb that beautiful mountain, or swim in that pristine ocean, or appreciate the sound to that bird calling to its mate. More significantly, our time with those whom we love is limited. Why waste the time with the nonessentials: family feuds that last for years, long-held grudges, opportunities at loving never taken?

The absolute certainty of death is something most of us look at (if at all) with a sidelong glance--perhaps detecting it most of the time in our peripheral vision. It would be better for all that if be faced squarely and clearly.

We know this--we don't face it. However, it is expressed beautifully in this song:

"Live Like You Were Dying"
Tim McGraw

He said I was in my early forties, with a lot of life before me
And one moment came that stopped me on a dime
I spent most of the next days, looking at the x-rays
Talking bout' the options and talking bout' sweet times.
I asked him when it sank in, that this might really be the real end
How's it hit 'cha when you get that kind of news?
Man what did ya do?
He said

I went skydiving
I went rocky mountain climbing
I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu
And I loved deeper
And I spoke sweeter
And I gave forgiveness I'd been denyin'
And he said some day I hope you get the chance
To live like you were dyin'

He said I was finally the husband, that most the time I wasn't
And I became a friend, a friend would like to have
And all of a sudden goin' fishin, wasn't such an imposition
And I went three times that year I lost my dad
Well I finally read the good book, and I took a good long hard look
At what I'd do if I could do it all again
And then

I went skydiving
I went rocky mountain climbing
I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Shu
And I loved deeper
And I spoke sweeter
And I gave forgiveness I'd been denyin'
And he said some day I hope you get the chance
To live like you were dyin'

Like tomorrow was the end
And ya got eternity to think about what to do with it
What should you do with it
What can I do with it
What would I do with it

Skydiving
I went rocky mountain climbing
I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu
And man I loved deeper
And I spoke sweeter
And I watched an eagle as it was flyin'
And he said some day I hope you get the chance
To live like you were dyin'

To live like you were dyin'

Another way of asking the same thing is, "Why wait for judgment to try to do what you know you ought? Then is too late." Our time is now. It can be intolerably brief, or it can seem like an eternity of waiting. Either way, if we live it knowing that it will end, perhaps it will serve to make us a little more patient, a little more tender, a little more willing to risk vulnerability, a little more inclined to take risks to help others. Think of how those we love could blossom, those with whom we work could grow into new possibility. What if I took my position as a manager seriously and used that position to truly serve others? Because our leaders, ideally, are in fact our servants. They blaze the trails for us and point the direction. They don't do all of the work, but they help clear the way for work to be done. Or, perhaps they would, if they lived in the shadow and foreknowledge of Eternity--knowing that this ends and afterwards comes Judgment. And perfect love casteth out fear--particularly fear of judgment because we do what we do not for hope of Heaven or fear of Hell, but solely for the love of God.

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How What is Divided Grows

I post two separate entries on Dante because while they abut one another in the poetry, they seem to go separate directions in thought. And this particular point is one that a lot of people have difficulty remembering because this world is so limited.

from Purgatorio Canto XV
Dante (tr. John Ciardi)

"How can each one of many who divide
a single good have more of it, so shared,
than if a few had kept it?" He replied:

"Because within the habit of mankind
you set your whole intent on earthly things,
the true light falls as darkness on your mind.

The infinite and inexpressible Grace
which is in Heaven, gives itself to Love
as a sunbeam gives itself to a bright surface.

As much light as it finds there, it bestows;
thus, as the blaze of Love is spread more widely,
the greater the Eternal Glory grows.

As mirror reflects mirror, so above,
the more there are who join their souls, the more
Love learns perfection, and the more they love.

If you visit colonial houses, you will often find on the wall sconces with convex mirrors or polished surfaces behind them. The purpose was to capture the light from a single candle and use it more efficiently. And so Dante's metaphor. Love that falls on a surface ready to receive it both lights that surface to the degree that it is prepared to be lit, and is "multiplied" to reflect from other such surfaces. Love, as we are well aware, does not diminish in the division, but paradoxically, multiplies. The metaphor of reflection is a clear and perfect trope for the activity of love.

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From Dante: The Remedy for Envy

Here, Virgil explains to Dante how to remedy the evil of envy:

from Purgatorio Canto XV
Dante (tr. John Ciardi)

"It is because you focus on the prize
of worldly goods, which every sharing lessens
that Envy pumps the bellows for your sighs.

But if, in true love for the Highest Sphere,
your longing were turned upward, then your hearts
would never be consumed by such a fear;

for the more there are there who say 'ours'--not 'mine'--
by that much is each richer and brighter
within that cloister burns the Love Divine."

In Heaven, as we will discover in continuing our reading, there is no zero-sum game--no, you do better so I do worse. St. Therese expressed it in a metaphor of flowers--some are lilies, some are roses, and some are the little buttercups that grace the feet of the most high, but all are loved equally and all are pleased to be what the Lord has ordained that they be. Our place in Heaven, whatever it is ordained to be, like our crosses, are uniquely made for us--no other person will fit into them. Nor will we be able to fit into that place designed for another. This is the economy of salvation and blessedness. We may not stand with Dominic or Francis, or John of the Cross. We may be rubbing elbows with people who we would disdain here on Earth. But there, we are exactly what God fashioned, corrected of all fault and flaw through the suffering of purgatory and placed exactly where we will do the most good for all.

Envy has no place on heaven; hence, it should have no place on Earth. Our object, in so much as aided by the Holy Spirit we can, is to make this world a true reflection of the kingdom of Heaven.

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November 14, 2007

The Good Fight--Disappointing but Unsurprising

I started Ralph Nader's book with the hope that we would get some really new insights and some new thinking. And I suppose that was just blind hope because I know where books like this always end up. While there was a refreshing element of the necessity of civic duty that goes beyond mere voting, and while there was some interesting information, Mr. Nader falls back on long-held beliefs and cherished anodynes.

I stopped reading the book when I slammed up against the tired and unconvincing old canard that access to abortion is the thin thread and sole shield against a decline in women's access to equal employment. I have no problem with the fact that there does still appear to be a glass ceiling in place in many corporations. I don't contest that there may be many places in which women are paid less than men for the same work. (People being people, they will do what they can get away with.) However, to tie the overall improvement in the condition of women to this one imagined "right" (or more properly--real right wrongly manifested) is to buy into the same tired old thinking--something Mr. Nader is asking us to stop doing even as he dishes it out.

The book is one long tirade against every republican after Eisenhower, with an occasional jab at some democrats as well. Given Mr. Nader's views, hardly surprising. But given his desire to have a critical thinking public involved in the issues, he sets a remarkably poor example. Time and time again, he falls back on the false or fallacious assumptions and conspiracy theories of adherents to far-left thought.

It's a shame, because there is a great mind here with important things to say. If he had stuck to his point--why citizen action is needed and where it has been effective, without wandering into the realm of who's right and who's wrong in political terms, he would have had a substantial book supporting the central thesis--the United States does need to have people who care as much about what happens in their communities as they do about what commercials will be shown during half-time at the Superbowl. I know such people exist, we just need to have a great many more of them trying to pay attention to what is happening in their own back yards.

For example, here in Florida community association routinely write in deed restrictions that force homeowners to support and grown the pernicious vine called St. Augustine Grass. This is despite the fact that it is a monoculture that requires an extraordinary amount of water to support. Given dwindling water tables and a drought situation (not as bad as Georgia's, but certain bad enough), this kind of restriction is simply out of order. This is one place where local citizens can get together and request a universal change to such deed restrictions. It isn't earth shaking or world changing in the large sense, and yet it is something we can do regardless of political affiliation.

What I would have desired more of is more of the inside story. For example, Mr. Nader details the actual events surrounding the famous McDonald's Coffee episode and the actual final award in the case. (Of course, given the other false things supported by a lack of critical thinking, I also wonder about the validity of the information supplied in this case). In my experience his caution about Corporate influence in American family life is salutary--but his own vision may be more paranoid than my own. And so on.

Mr. Nader's book, The 17 Traditions did a magnificent job of detailing important possible changes in American life in a way that this book manifestly fails to do. I would like to hear someone sound the clarion call for personal responsibility in American Civic life without turning it into the beating of the ancient drum of cherished causes.

Each of us has a worldview that corresponds to a greater or lesser extent to the reality that is out there. For an example, see the post below on poverty and the comment received. Obviously the two parties disagree based on the experience they have had with the question. Mr. Perry works out of his own knowledge and experience as do I, and working from these viewpoints, separate from a political affiliation, each can work to better the situation as he sees it. This is the important of personal involvement. See an issue and address it. Address it both through personal action and through involvement in politics to help change the underlying situation.

It is my personal belief that the interest in politics is exactly the reverse of what it should be. It seems that many people are intensely interested in politics at a national level (which are manifestly important as they set the base from which all other laws work); however, the greatest good is often accomplished in small local races where your concerns and interests can be better channeled into local changes that make small improvements in the local situation. Too often, the sheer magnitude of the national concerns and elections trumps these small individual issues. And I am speaking for myself. I don't know how my local commissioner is or even who the Mayor of the nearby city is. I don't know who represents me in the local government, and it is high time that I found out because I've waited too long for changes to come from the top down.

But this was about Mr. Nader's book. Despite some premises that i can find myself in agreement with, it is entirely agenda-driven and not really interested in inculcating a thing political body so much as it is a stirring example of unfocused and relatively unthinking demagoguery. I can only be thankful that Mr. Nader has made of himself such a nuisance that few people pay him any attention.

Definitely not recommended for any other than the die-hard Nader fan. Read The Seventeen Traditions instead and derive from it some interesting and helpful insights into how we can make lives better for our families.

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November 12, 2007

Another Country Heard From

from The Good Fight
Ralph Nader

Franklin Delano Roosevelt emphasized this in a message to Congress: "The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism:ownership of the government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power." We would do well to heed this age-old wisdom as we ponder why our corporate and political leaders assume more and more control over our lives and futures.

[and later just one memorable, highly evocative sentence]:

Society, like a fish, rots from the head down.

[And a last notion from a bit later]

This vulnerability results from the absence of an absorbed information base to provide a shield against artful propaganda and deception.

In one context or another, we are all powerless. The society is simply too complex. Contemplating participation in power in most contexts--environmental, political, social, economic, technological--invites anxiety. Yet, to throw up one's hands in defeat guarantees anguish and deprivation. Individual obligation absorb daily time and attention, of course, but ignoring our civic obligation, our public citizen duties, profoundly affects our daily lives as well.

In a sense, I am obliged to participate in these debates to the extent that I can. I can't participate in all equally, nor will much that I have to say be particularly astute or profound. However, it is part of my duty as a citizen to be concerned about things beyond my front doorstep. For example, I am deeply concerned that most of the civic associations in local communities are more concerned about lawns with brown patches than they are about diminishing water tables and corporations that want to siphon off water to create "bottled water" products. The crises in Georgia and in Tennessee (it is hoped that they are transitory) point to the importance of wise, careful, and considered use of water. Creating a perfect magnificent monoculture--one long golf-course of lush green is not among these careful uses.

But that is only one example that springs to mind as a result of personal experience with these type of deed-restricted communities. Perhaps, as a result, I should be working with my local government to put restrictions on what kinds of things deed restricted communities can regulate. In some communities nearby, for example, it is prohibited to xeriscape your property. It is outrageous that we put in place restrictions on the plants that grow naturally in environment, favoring instead highly fragile, laboratory developed strains of ground cover (St. Augustine turf is NOT grass but a low growing exceedingly thick and unfriendly green vine). A small, small issue, but one that is something I CAN act on.

And so, look around you. Is there something you can do in/for your community that you've not yet started to work on?

One final note from Mr. Nader:

And civic motivation can start with our personal experience, from which we derive the public philosophies that nourish and animate our consciences. It can start with family upbringing, or a jolting event.

I don't know about nourishing and animating the fullness of our conscience, but they certain inform and help us articulate those things that occupy the civic portion of our consciences. They don't require that we change who we are, but they do require that we act upon it.

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Sloth and Acedia

One of the worst things we face is a sense of boredom or the uselessness of doing anything at all. Father Beck addresses this:

from Soul Provider
Father Edward L. Beck

Someone's boring me. I think it's me.
--Dylan Thomas. . . .

In his famous 1978 Harvard commencement address, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn warned of the West's "spiritual exhaustion": "In the United States the difficulties are not a Minotaur or a dragon--not imprisonment, hard labor, death, government harassment and censorship--but cupidity, boredom, sloppiness, indifference. Not the acts of a might all-prevading repressive government but the failure of a listless public to make use of the freedom that is its birthright." If we are indeed a listless public, what has made us so, and what can we do to infuse our lives with new vigor?

We can do a few things. The authors I have just quoted suggest that boredom is an evil to be conquers it if leads to despondency, hopelessness, and ingratitude. Sloth is clearly the result of a refusal to celebrate the gift and potential of life. But there is another way to look at it. We can embrace boredom, hoping to transform it into something not boring at all. We have been convinced that we always need to be doing something to be happy, usually something other than what we are doing. So if we are driving, we can't simply be driving. We must also be listening to the radio or talking on the cell phone or doing both. Perhaps we are even listening to our 10,000-song iPod, the contents of which could last us our lifetime. What about simply listening to nothing instead?

The "art of doing nothing" has long been extolled by religious traditions. Nothing becomes something when nothing produces results that something cannot.The power of meditation is rooted in the power of nothingness. . . The reason for stillness in the midst of chaos is so that the chaos does not consume us. Stillness gives us distance from what we cannot see when trapped in the never-ending swirl of diversion. . . .

My only response is "guilty." We credit ourselves with "multitasking" when, what is actually happening is that we are not accomplishing any one thing with anything approaching the attention it requires. While I belong to an order that looks to cultivating silence, it seems that we've all bought into the idea of silence while doing something.

Silence, stillness, the embrace of the moment in which there is nothing in particular required of us is an art. We have difficulty, convinced by some inner prompting that such moments are "wasting time." But perhaps it is our railing against them that is the waste of time. Were we to realize that we are bored precisely because nothing is required of us at this time and rather than seek solace in a book, television, or endless iPod, we should seek solace in the silence, perhaps then we might make of boredom the gift that God intends for us.

Limitless diversion leads to limitless ennui, but a few moments of stillness, of letting the swirl and twirl of existence settle down--these have limitless potential--I need to become better at exploiting it.

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November 6, 2007

Dante's Purgatory

Two points from Ciardi's translation that I found fascinating and beautiful. At the end of Canto IX, Dante and Virgil enter purgatory proper, having spent the first part of the book in a place at the base of the mount called ante-purgatory. And the passage below describes the first experiences of purgatory:

from Purgatorio
Dante, tr. John Ciardi

The Tarpeian rock-face, in that fatal hour
that robbed it of Metellus, and then the treasure,
did not give off so loud and harsh a roar

as did the pivots of the holy gate--
which were of resonant and hard-forged metal--
when they turned under their enormous weight.

At the first thunderous roll I turned half-round,
for it seemed to me I heard a chorus singing
Te deum laudamus mixed with that sweet sound.

I stood there and the strains that reached my ears
left on my soul exactly that impression
a man receives who goes to church and hears

the choir and organ ringing out their chords
and now does, now does not, make out the words.

Which sounds should be sharply contrasted with the first sounds heard in Hell.

On another point, Ciardi makes the following note:

from Purgatorio Note to Canto IX
John Ciardi

I owe Professor MacAllister a glad thanks for what is certainly the essential clarification. The whole Purgatorio, he points out, is build upon the structure of a Mass. The Mass moreover is happening not on the mountain but in church with Dante devoutly following its well-known steps. I have not yet had time to digest Professor MacAllister's suggestion, but it strikes me immediately as a true insights and promises another illuminating way of reading the .

And I would add to that last line, of reading our lives in faith. Part of our Purgatory are the hours gladly spent here on Earth working out the scars and physical remains of sin in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Attended with proper reverence, attention, and intention, the Holy Prayer of the Mass advances us far beyond any other activity in which we might engage. Done in the proper spirit of confession and contrition for sins, the activity of Mass begins here on Earth what is completed afterwards by those who have not achieved God's perfection in Purgatory. And perhaps that begins to help us understand what Purgatory actually is.

One final, wonderful point. The efficiency and efficacy of Ciardi's notes are such that one is led to the following passge of Lucan's Pharsalia:

At this Metellus yielded from the path;
And as the gates rolled backward, echoed loud
The rock Tarpeian, and the temple's depths
Gave up the treasure which for centuries
No hand had touched:

Read the entire work--a recounting of Caesar's return from the battle of the Rubicon here.

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Repent

I particularly cherished the following experience recounted by Fr. Beck. It spoke to me intimately and provoked a line of thought that I had never really considered. We start as Father Beck is trying to avoid the eye of a modern-day John the Baptist in Time's Square:

from Soul Provider
Fr. Edward L. Beck

I maneuvered to get around him, but, seeming to sense that I was an unwilling convert, he would have none of it. He made a bee-line for me as I lowered my head and tried to get lost in the crowd that I now appreciated. He held a tattered black Bible that he massaged gently with his thumb.

"Do you know Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior, young man?"

He was standing right in front of me, blocking my passage. (At least he called me young.) I didn't answer, pretending I thought he was talking to someone else.

"You, sir, do you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?" he persisted.

I looked up, unable to ignore him any longer.

"What?" I said, though I'm not sure why, since I had clearly heard the question.

"Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus?" he repeated more forcefully. A woman bumped me from behind letting me know in her own not-so-gentle way that I was blocking the path.

"Yes, I do," I said. "I do, thank you." I walked around him and started to make my way down the street.

"Hey," he called to me. I looked back. "Isn't it wonderful?" His eyes were glowing.

"Not always," I answered truthfully.

I continued walking and was about a hundred feet from him when he shouted, "Well, then, repent, blue eyes, and it will always be.

I don't necessarily take the street-corner prophet at his literal word here, but it occurred to me that with a good deal more repentance, and a good deal less Steven, that personal relationship might be made more manifest to those around me. And a personal relationship with Jesus is next to useless if it isn't influencing the world around us. Perhaps what I need more of, then, is a spirit of continual repentance--heaven knows there isn't a day I go through that doesn't encourage me to confession before participation in Mass. I'm one of those who wishes that confession were offered moments before Mass so there would be some likelihood of making it to Mass before needing to get to confession again. I often wonder whether I've ever really managed to gain a plenary indulgence for any of the poor souls because the conditions are so rigorous. If Mass immediately follows confession and/or the action that merits the plenary indulgence, there is a remote possibility. Otherwise. . .

Repentance, it's not just a seasonal thing--it's a way to live, really live, a life.

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Detachment á la Beck

I have read about halfway through Father Beck's marvelous book and find a scattering of thirty or so tags--things I want to remember, things I want to share. By sharing, I remember better, but choosing among all the wonderful points is so difficult. In the chapter on detachment alone there must be ten or eleven vital points, but one of the most pointed in made in the story below:

from Soul Provider
Fr. Edward L. Beck

There is a classic Zen story about two celibate monks who are on pilgrimage together. As they approach a raging river, they see a beautiful, distressed young woman standing on the bank afraid to make the crossing. The yonger monk picks the woman up, put her on his shoulders, and wades into the river as the older monk looks on, horrified but saying nothing. When the three reach the other side, the monk puts the grateful woman down safely, and the two monks continue on their journey in silence. Hours go by without the two speaking. The older monk is obviously angry and upset. He finally looks at the younger monk and says, "How could you have done that?" "Done what?" says the younger monk, surprised. "How could you have carried that woman? You know we are to have nothing to do with women and yet you intimately carried her on your shoulders." "My dear brother," replies the younger monk, "I set that woman down on the shore of the river hours ago. Why are you still carrying her."

Of course, this passage speaks to more than mere detachment. It speaks to our habit of nurturing anger over perceived slights, over differences of opinion on religion that make no difference, on matters such as liturgical preference or any number of opinions held either rightly or wrongly by either side of a dispute on religious matters. One could say with almost equal equanimity to either side of the dispute on, say, women's ordination--"The church set that issue down on the banks of the river years ago, why are you still carrying it?" Because, most naturally, we cling to those things for which we feel we have the proper scope of righteous anger--just as does this monk.

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November 2, 2007

Renunciation

With merely the title of this post I have chased away half of the small audience that might drop by on a regular basis. Renunciation is not a popular subject--most often because it is not fully understood.

However, renunciation is one step on the road to union with God that we all can consider and that with God's grace we all can effect.

There is such a wealth of possibility in Father Edward Beck's Soul Provider, it is difficult to choose among the possibilities; however, for the purposes of supporting the main contention of the chapter, perhaps the conclusion would be most useful:

from Soul Provider
Fr. Edward L. Beck

Renunciation is therefore a kind of purification and asceticism that does not exist for its own sake but rather for the sake of higher goods. Thus, I renounce excessive use of alcohol so that I don't destroy my marriage or my work. Or I renounce consumerism so that I don't lose my soul to what money can buy. . . .

In view of John Climacus's Ladder of Divine Ascent renunciation lights us and frees us so that we can climb less encumbered, ascending without restraint toward the good. Renunciation exists for the sake of freedom. It liberates us and ultimately allows us to love more wholeheartedly. Who of us doesn't want that?

The man who renounces the world because of fear is like burning incense, which begins with fragrance and ends in smoke. . . . but the man who leaves the world for love of God has taken fire from the start, and like fire set to fuel, it soon creates a conflagration.

(Climacus Step 1)

Fr. Beck's book seems to be a very hard-headed, light-hearted, full-spirited survey of how to improve one's life with God. The advice given is solid, orthodox and complemented by insights from other religious traditions that both inform and help to bring out implicit aspects of each topic. Each chapter ends with a set of very hard, very pointed questions that allow the reader to reflect upon his or her own state with respect to the Ascent to God.

In coming days I hope to quote more from this book and to share more of Fr. Beck's insights. In the meantime, if this excerpt interests you, you might do well to seek the book out on your own and not wait for what small portions I might share.

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November 1, 2007

Present Reading

I have a large number of things going at the present time:

Purgatorio--I had started this much earlier, but then considered what rewarding reading it might be through this season during which we remember the faithful departed and are reminded of our responsibility toward them.

The Moviegoer--I read this novel by Walker Percy in the beforetimes, however, I have forgotten it completely and wanted to reacquaint myself with some of its contours. In short, I was wondering why it was though worthy of the National Book Award in its time.

Founding Father:Rediscovering George Washington by Richard Brookhiser and His Excellency by Joseph Ellis, probably soon to be joined by 1776 by David McCullough--All inspired by the inspiration and dedication of the Mount Vernon Ladies' Society--about which, perhaps, more later.

Soul Provider by Edward L. Beck--A book recently received in the mail and claiming to be something of a reworking of St. John Climacus' Ladder of Divine Ascent. I know only that indulging myself in a few lines of the introduction, I found myself lured in and enormously entertained by the first example in the book. Again, more later if time permits.

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The Rake

In this slight politcal story by William F. Buckley Jr. a deplorable character reminiscent of some of the worst aspects of Mr. Clinton and Mr. Kerry combined comes to his rightful and righteous end. I didn't know that Mr. Buckley engaged in the composition of fairy tales, high fantasy, or merely wishful thinking.

The chief character of the novel, the Rake, is a student in the university of North Dakota who gets his girlfriend pregnant, runs off to Canada to marry her and spend the rest of his life and political career ignoring that first marriage, engaging in a second and unfaithful to any. He has a dubious record in Vietnam etc., etc., etc.

While the book is well written, compellingly readable, and composed with the aplomb and deep insider knowledge that Mr. Buckley appears to have of our political system, it is a slight entertainment--neither profound, nor truly provocative. It tells one nothing more than one's own prejudice is willing to have confirmed.

Even so, for those who like political novels and even novels of manners, The Rake is a fine piece of entertaining reading.

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Envious Casca

(Warning: Oblique spoiler for the astute reader--I'm assuming most blogs are scanned so most people are safe.)

Georgette Heyer did not write only Regency romances. At some point in her career she wrote a number of mysteries in the classic tradition. Envious Casca is one of these.

As a mystery, it is fairly obvious from about midway through who was responsible for the crime. (In retrospect, properly framed, it is clear from the title alone who did it.) How the crime was committed is an interesting piece of work and ultimately revealed by one clue that becomes positively annoying in the frequency of its presentation--annoying more for the fact that it is so oblique than that it is an irritant.

The trademark work of Ms. Heyer is here in all of its glory--the witty observations, the incisive cutting through to the root of character, the dialogue, the description, the atmosphere. The writing is clean and clear and the characters marvelously drawn and well-assembled.

While Ms. Heyer lacks the incredible creativity and astute plotting that might mark out Dame Christie, Ellery Queen, or John Dickson Carr, she is one of those Golden Age writers whom I have too long neglected. (Even when I began to read her romances, I didn't give a second thought to the mysteries--partially because I had forgotten them.)

For a delightful light read in the classic mystery tradition, you could do worse than Envious Casca.

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Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Even though my agenda-detection device hummed through the entire course of this work by Barbara Kingsolver, I have to admit, I LOVED it.

What did I love about it? A great deal. In all, I can't argue with much of what Ms. Kingsolver points out in the course of the book. Our present food supply business is dangerously based upon a fragile monoculture that is controlled in large part by several industrial/chemical firms. One case of corn-rust and the food base is demolished.

Secondly, the lack of buying locally damages local farmers and as a result local communities. It imperils a ways of life that has been foundational in the structure of American Society from the founding of this country. But more importantly it does deprive each of us of some of the genuine pleasures that come from seeing a crop grow, of eating from the bounty of that harvest table, food that is freshly brought from the fields.

Thirdly, Kingsolver produces one of the most profound and wise arguments against the Vegan assault on sensibilities I have seen in a long time. That's right, she doesn't even let the vegan's off the hook.

Finally, while Kingsolver is committed to her line of action she is not unsympathetic to the plight of many who cannot afford to live in the way she describes. She is absolutely certain that the way of life she describes is a good one, the right one, and the one that would foster the good of the community and individual--but she doesn't rail against those who disagree or those who would be unable to commit to this much time and energy invested in the raising of food.

The book is a mediation on the miracle of eating with the seasons, of the richness of harvest and of knowing precisely where your food comes from and how it gets to table. It is an intimate history of eating, of food, and of community. There are touching and beautiful moments in the book and hilariously funny ones. One that I haven't mentioned in previous posts is the love-sick turkey who, as a chick imprinted on a human male. You have to read it to get the amusing and touching outcome.

One last point--on my recent trip, I was able to drive through some of the country that Barbara Kingsolver extols in the book, and once again found myself mysteriously drawn to a place that I have no claim on, but which obviously has staked its claim firmly in me. I hope to right more about that later.

In fine--Recommended. For those interested in food and in eating locally and in the slow food movement and in the expansion of the food market--Critical reading. But if you pick it up for any reason at all, just join in the enjoyment of the seasons, in the beauty of the feast, and in the miracle that is the cycle of food and life.

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October 17, 2007

My Next Book

After having carefully assessed my opportunities and market needs, I've decided on my next book. It will be nonfiction and have a title and subtitle something like:

Aerophobics: The Easy Six* Step program to end your exercise addiction

*'cause let's face it, twelve steps is WAAAAAAY too many.

First chapter--Put Don't Those Weights and Pick Up That Remote--how to get over your fear of sitting still.

I'm still working on the rest of the program, but I expect it to crystalize shortly, I'll just sit here a while and keyboard about it--the extent of the aerobics for the day.

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October 11, 2007

On a Very Pleasant Note

It is very satisfying to see someone as talented, capable, and interesting as Doris Lessing has actually attracted the Swedish Academy's attention. I guess I should note as well--how highly unusual.

I've always admired the contours of Ms. Lessing's fiction even when I haven't particularly cared for the story or the idea. A fine and interesting writer at all times.

Brava, Ms. Lessing, and well done academy (for a change).

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October 10, 2007

Roosters

from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
Barbara Kingsolver

In summer a young rooster's fancy turns to . . . how can I say this delicately? The most ham-fisted attempts at courtship I've ever had to watch. ( And yes, I'm including high school.) As predicted, half of Lily's chick crop was growing up to be male. This was dawning on everyone as the boys began to venture into mating experiments, climbing aboard the ladies sometimes backwards or perfectly sideways. The young hens shrugged them off and went on looking for bugs in the grass. But the three older hens, mature birds we'd had around awhile, did not suffer fools gladly. Emmy, an elderly Jersey Giant, behaved as any sensible grandmother would if a teenager approached her looking for action: she bit him on the head and chased him into a boxwood bush.

Ah, the ever-sensitive, ever-refined, ever-genteel male of the species.

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The New Woman

Okay. To start: Get it, read it, enjoy it!

Now the reasons:

Jon Hassler creates very real places. Take Jan Karon. Yank out a lot of the over-sentimental nonsense. Put in some hard-headed characters in need of some real redemption and work. Move it from the South to Minnesota. Make the main characters Catholic and show faith in real action and you have Jon Hassler's town of Staggerford.

Enter Agatha--main character for a good many of the Staggerford novels--now 87 and moving into an assisted living facility because of a mid-winter pipe-breaking trauma in her own house. Moving in and moving out. Living and loving and accessory to kidnapping, and you name it.

The novel reintroduces the reader (or introduces the reader) to the town of Staggerford and its many inhabitants--most of them not terribly eccentric or odd or notable for their tics and traits. Agatha, ex-principal of St. Isidore's Catholic School, unmarried and mentor to most, if not all of the town. John Beezer, the man who become attracted to the first person who says a kind word to him in new and unplesant circumstances. Lillian, Big Edna, Little Edna, and the entire panoply of those who gather in the support group started for her great-nephew who doesn't attend.

Warm and real and filled with gentle satire, real faith, real people, real incident, real sin, real repentance, real redemption, and real lack of redemption. Not everything works out to the good. Not everything works out for perfect happiness all around. Not everything is laced about with charm and beauty. Disinterments, disappointments, disillusionments, and unfortunately no disbarments.

Read it, and enjoy the simple prose and the real feeling of a small and simple town--complicated in its simple network of relationships and understandings. Jon Hassler has created a real place. Less visited perhaps than some better known, but equally worthy of our attention.

Get it! Read it! I'm certain you'll enjoy it.

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October 8, 2007

Tomato-anon

Too amusing to let pass, too lovely to leave alone.

from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
Barbara Kingsolver

Like our friend David who meditates on Creation while cultivating, I fell luck to do work that lets me listen to distant thunder and watch a next of baby chickadees fledge from their hole in the fencepost into the cucumber patch. Even the smallest backyard garden offers emotional rewards in the domain of the little miracle. As a hobby, this one could be considered bird-watching with benefits.

Every gardener I know is a junkie for the experience of being out there in the mud and fresh green growth? Why? An astute therapist might diagnose us as codependent and sign us up to Tomato-Anon meetings. We love our gardens so much it hurts. . . ."

And what is more delightful is that she goes on to this point to say exactly how it hurts, and it isn't emotional--it is physical. And here we take a lesson in love--love isn't a feeling, it is an act of will. In the garden, it is the act of will that causes us to pull weeds when we'd rather just sit down somewhere. In the world, it is the act of will that sends us to the soup kitchens, or merely to the CCD classroom, when for all the world we'd rather be reading our newspaper or doing . . . anything.

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Other Reading

In addition to the two that you hear much about here I have the following three on my stack and alternating:

Envious Casca Georgette Heyer--one of her mysteries, and while I'm not sure of its substance as a mystery, it is utterly delightful as a character study of some really unlikable people who Georgette teaches you to like--at a distance.

Come Be My Light Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta. More from this later--tomorrow perhaps. Humility, patience, obedience--we don't begin to know the meanings of the words. And reading this book only scratches the surface of a real Saint. Obviously, I await the solemn declaration of the Church, not leaping ahead to conclusions, but one cannot help what one thinks in the matter--I am so blessed just to read about her. All of you should be as well--get this book and read it, enjoy it, learn to live by it. There is much here to instruct anyone who is serious about following God.

The New Woman Jon Hassler--a Staggerford Novel. Think Jan Karon, take away some of the saccharine, make it Catholic and cold, and you've got Jon Hassler's Minnesota--a land vaguely similar to the Lake Woebegone of Garrison Keillor, but with a distinctively Catholic bent. This is the book our small book group decided would be next on the list. (Even though all of us were also reading or rereading Ralph Nader's magnificent The Seventeen Traditions--another highly recommended read.

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No Rash Promises

Shall I make today about how much Kingsolver I may post.

As I have said continually--there is unquestionably a strong agenda behind this book, but Kingsolver writes with such aplomb, humor, grace, and to some extent, even humility that one is invited in, not scolded (although some passages particularly in the sidebars can take on that tone.) For all who would approach it, I simply give the warning. I am not a partisan of much of the agenda, but I find it very easy to overlook amidst the glories of some of the story.

from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
Barbara Kingsolver

The steer that had contributed itself to the meatballs on our plates had missed the sign-up.* Everything else on the table was also a local product: the peas we'd just shelled, the salad picked ten minutes earlier, the strawberries from their daughter. I asked Elsie how much food the needed from outside the community. "Flour and sugar," she said, and then thought a bit. "Sometimes we'll buy pretzels, for a splurge."

It crossed my mind that the world's most efficient psychological evaluation would have just the one question: Define splurge. I wondered how many more years I'd have to stay off Belgian chocolate before I could attain Elsie's self-possession. I still wanted the moon, really--and I wanted it growing in my backyard.

When a narrative is peppered with such delightful personal asides, it is easier to take the main stream of the argument seriously--because one can see that the author does not take herself over-seriously. No dour, frowning, scolding, finger-shaking here--just story--how I did it, how you could do it, and why.

*The sign-up referred to is something that initially I had difficulty believing until my sister-in-law told my wife. It appears that the USDA for reasons known only to the bureaucracy has ordained in its wisdom that every chicken, cow, pig, duck, whatever found any any farm anywhere in the United States shall be fitted with an ID number and a GPS tag to be entered into the federal database of livestock. We've lived for centuries without knowing the whereabouts of every animal in the world, I wonder what emergency has ordained that we must know now. Refer back to Mark Twain--Ms. Kingsolver's farmer certainly does.

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The pre-Blessed Spirits

One of the truly wonderful things about Purgatorio is that Dante over and over again affirms that these souls who arrive on the shore of the island of Purgatory are already blessed. They arrive and proceed through at their own pace, a pace determined by their lives on Earth.

Among those moving very slowly on the shores of the island we meet Manfred:

from Purgatorio
Dante, tr. John Ciardi

My flesh had been twice hacked, and each wound mortal
when, tearfully, I yielded up my soul
to HIm whose pardon gladly waits for all.

Horrible were my sins, but infinite
is the abiding Goodness which hold out
its open arms to all who tun to It. . . .

No man may be so cursed by priest or pope
but what the Eternal Love may still return
while any thread of green lives on in hope.

Those who die contumacious, it is true,
though they repent their feud with Holy Church,
must wait outside here on the bank, as we do,

for thirty times as long as they refused
to be obedient, though by good prayers
in their behalf, that time may be reduced.

I quote this passage for several reasons. One is to give a sense of Dante's vision. Ciardi notes that there seems to be no real significance to 30 as opposed to say 50 or 100. In fact, except that it probably doesn't work in Italian 33 might be more apropos.

Another reason is that reading this one gets the sense of a need for real notes. What's this about twice hacked, what actually went on. In a section I didn't quote there is a mention of him being transported with "tapers quenched" after his death. Good notes are essential to any real understanding of these works. Either that or a fairly thorough understanding of the history of all the kingdom that made up Italy at the time of Dante--an expertise almost none of us command.

Finally I quoted it because it contains a line that I have borne in memory since the eighth or ninth grade when we were called upon to read Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. There is either in an epigraph or in a chapter proper, a quotation which, in the book, is a reference to the office set-up of Willie Stark, but which is reflected clearly here

Mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde

which is translated in that book As long as hope still has its bit of green. Here is is translated "while any thread of green lives on in hope."

For whatever reason, that line has stuck with me, and I scoured Dante several times looking for it. And this morning, it just popped out at me as I was reading. God's sheer grace and goodness and perhaps a message for meant for this day.

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October 5, 2007

Another Amusing Anecdote

One more from Kingsolver, and I promise to leave you alone

for the rest of the day at least:

from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
Barbara Kingsolver

No modest yellow blocks or wheels were these, but gigantic white tablets of cheese, with the shape and heft of something Moses might have carried down from the mountain. Serious cheesemaking happened here, evidently. A young woman in a white apron stood ready to saw off a bit of goat, cow, or sheep cheese for me. We chatted, and she confirmed that these products were made in a kitchen nearby. I was curious about what kind of rennet and cultures were used for these Middle Eastern cheeses. She answered but seemed puzzled; most customers weren't interested in the technicalities. I confessed I'd tried this at home.

"You make cheese yourself, " she repeated reverently. "You are a real housewife."

It has taken me decades to get here, but I took that as a compliment.

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Something Unexpected from Barbara

Yes, there is the dollop of food-ethics, or whatever you want to call it. But honestly, it's a lot better than a similar chapter in Ron Dreyer's Crunchy Conservative book. Ron's chapter made me want to run out and stuff myself with McDonald's simply to protest the smugness and enormous self-satisfaction of his work. But Barbara screams to me to join a world of delight--real pleasure in cuisine:

from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
Barbara Kingsolver

I understand that most U.S. citizens don't have room in their lives to grow food or even see it growing. But I have trouble accepting the next step in our journey toward obligate symbiosis with the packaged meal and takeout. Cooking is a dying art in our culture. Why is a good question, and an uneasy one, because I find myself politically and socioeconomically entangled in the answer. I belong to a generation of women who took as our youthful rallying cry: Allow us a good education so we won't have to slave in the kitchen. We recoiled from the proposition that keeping a husband presentable and fed should be our highest intellectual aspiration. We fought for entry as equal partners into every quarter of the labor force. We went to school, sweated those exams, earned our professional stripes, and we beg therefore to be excused from manual labor. Or else our full-time job is manual labor, we are carpenters or steelworkers, or we stand at a cash register all day. At the end of a shift we deserve to go home and put our feet up. Somehow,though, history came around and bit us in the backside: now most women have jobs and still find themselves largely in charge of the housework. Cooking at the end of a long day is a burden we could live without.

It's a reasonable position. But it got twisted into a pathological food culture. When my generation of women walked away from the kitchen we were escorted down that path by a profiteering industry that knew a tired, vulnerable marketing target when they saw it. "Hey, ladies," it said to us, "go ahead, get liberated. We'll take care of dinner." They threw open the door and we walked into a nutritional crisis and genuinely toxic food supply. If you think toxic is an exaggeration, read the package directions for handling raw chicken from a CAFO. We came a long way, baby, into bad eating habits and collaterally impaired family dynamics. No matter what else we do or believe, food remains at the center of every culture. Ours now runs on empty calories.

When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma f warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurtutring routines, the creative task of molding our families' tastes and zest for life; we receive in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable. (Or worse, convenience-mart hot dogs and latchkey kids.) I consider it the great hoodwink of my generation. . . .

"Cooking without remuneration" and "slaving over a hot stove" are activities separated mostly by a frame of mind. The distinction is crucial. Career women in many countries still routinely apply passion to their cooking, heading straight from work to the market to search out the freshest ingredients., feeding their loved ones with aplomb. . . ."

What I really admire about Kingsolver's book is that while there is undeniably agenda--very obvious in the passages above--it isn't the agenda that drives the passion of the book. The passion is food, eating right, and what that can do for family structure, community, and ultimately the nation as a whole. Eating locally, preparing your own, eating as a family, all of these have undeniable benefits at large. And Kingsolver doesn't spend her time being intolerably smug about how she can manage to make cheese and figure out what in the world to do with rhubarb--rather, she invites us in. Yes, she lectures us along the way with all of her favorite causes bristling at the edges. And yet, I don't really care, because the centrality of the story rings so true, is so solid, so clearly what many of us need in our lives.

In short, a delightful book--aggravating, but inviting--showing how it just may be possible for those of us with forty acres and a plow to move into a world of better eating and better cooking through a few small but serious changes in how we go about daily life.

Whereas Dreyer thrashed me about the head and shoulders with his moral superiority in shopping, Barbara invites me to go with her to a cheese-making seminar or to the market--a much more effective means of making converts. In short, despite the agendas I'm really enjoying the book.

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October 3, 2007

Mr. Roth, Again

Well, in the interest of fair play, I've become aware that someone likes Exit, Ghost and makes it sound like much more of novel and much more of an entertainment than I found it to be. Chacun á son goût.

(Please be aware there is an advertising screen before the main event.)

And later, the Hitchens Country heard from. Mr. Hitchens is famously irascible, and so it make for some reading perhaps more delectable than Mr. Roth's opus.

And yet another. I guess I wasn't so far out of the mainstream as I thought.

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Ms. Kingsolver's Amusing Moments

In this book, there are many. As the book is unabashedly about changing the way one chooses to eat, and because it relates so well to The Omnivore's Dilemma I'm finding myself enjoying it more and more as I read.

Like so many big ideas, this one was easier to present to the board of directors than the stockholders. Our family now convened around the oak table in our kitchen; the milk-glass farmhouse light above us cast a dramatic glow. The grandfather clock ticked audibly in the next room. We'd fixed up our old house in the architectural style known as recycling; we'd gleaned old light fixtures, hardware, even sinks and a bathtub from torn-down buildings; our refrigerator is a spruced-up little 1932 Kelvinator. It all gives our kitchen a comfortable lived-in charm, but at the moment it felt to me like a set where I was auditioning for a part in either Little House on the Prairie or Mommie Dearest

Throughout there are moments like these interspersed with observations about growing or raising food, what and how to eat, and simple facts about farming in America and, as I will detail in a future post, one serious danger of genetic engineering that never occurred to me.

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October 2, 2007

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle Redux

As I anticipated, there is a heckuva a lot of agenda in the book. However, I find most of the agenda congenial. Because I've grown increasingly suspicious of anything that represents itself as "non-fiction" there are some facts I would like to check out--particularly things like whether a patent on a genotype gives you the right to shut down nearby farming operations into which your patented genes have dispersed by air. If so, we all have a lot to be concerned about with the control of the eight basic crops in the hands of only four companies.

But I've also grown used to the fact that a specific wildly idiotic example is held up as the universal practice. I'm also suspicious of unquoted sources and innuendo.

Set that aside, the journey of a family to start to become part of the natural year and to eat as nature's table sets the banquet is utterly fascinating and often very, very amusing. Even if all of the political and agenda-driven stuff does not pan out, I think I will end up enjoying this book enormously.

Interesting to read this opposite Dante's Inferno in which we have a graphic representation of what happens to those who think only about their guts and what goes into them. Really, a very fine pairing, the two bring out the flavors of each other. The entree of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and the fine wine of Inferno.

I do suspect that Erik, amongst others would have strong sympathies with some of the ideas expressed in the book. (Eating tomatoes out of season, for example.)

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October 1, 2007

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

We have in this book by Barbara Kingsolver, along with the usual heavy dollops of a vaguely hard-left agenda (vaguely referring mostly to the rigor with which most things are considered) a wonderful story of people learning to live off of the land.

The book makes a nice accompaniment to The Omnivore's Dilemma, which I had wanted to read first, but alas, the library in its wisdom saw fit to deliver this one to me. Both focus at least momentarily on the predominant monocultures of the current farming world--corn and soy beans from which we derive all manner of starches and fats and additives. Some experts have suggested that the overreliance on HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) is one of the underlying reasons for the increase in American obesity and childhood obesity.

I know that parts of this book are going to be (pardon the pun) hard to swallow. I've read The Poisonwood Bible, which I found palatable through the first two thirds and wretchedly political for the last third. Within the first chapter, we have already offered to us two tiresome scientific "certainties." The first is that global warming has reinforced a drought in the American Southwest. While not denying the possibility, I await more structured scientific evidence rather than nightly news-reporter sensationalism. The second of these is the tirade against "genetically modified foods." Well, Barbara, and the host of you reading who gaze in horror upon the possibility, in point of fact nearly every food crop we raise has been genetically modified. Yeppers. That's what the domestication of plants about 10,000 years ago did. Human beings deliberately set about changing the genetic makeup of plants. The first chapter of The Omnivore's Dilemma, which is available on-line, makes this point with particular regard to maize. Once we stop gasping in horror, we can continue. There may be something wrong with the deliberate modification of plants through genetic splicing, etc. There is evidence that the pollen of some modified crops is damaging to Monarch Butterflies. And personally, I have the feeling that building plants with "systemic insecticides" isn't likely to improve their edibility for humans. You can tell me that they're safe all you like, but any plant that's built to poison what eats it--well, let's just say it doesn't seem like a wholesome idea. But in a book of agenda, and in a book in which the agenda "against" is, in fact, a subsidiary part of the whole, you can't really expect the author to take time out to rationally resolve all of the issues before continuing to tell you about how she and her family built up a farm and started to try to live off the land in the rhythm of the land.

But what you do get is by turns beautiful and marvelous:

from Animal, Miracle, Vegetable
Barbara Kingsolver

An asparagus spear only looks like its picture for one day of its life, usually in April, give or take a month as you travel from the Mason-Dixon line. The shoot emerges from the ground like a snub-nosed green snake headed for sunshine, rising so rapidly you can just about see it grow. If it doesn't get its neck cut off at ground level as it emerges, it will keep growing. Each triangular scale on the spear rolls out into a branch, until the snake becomes a four-foot tree with delicate needles. . . .

Older, healthier asparagus plants produce chunkier, more multiple shoots. Underneath lies an octopus-shaped affair of chubby roots (called a crown) that stores enough starch through the winter to arrange the phallic send-up when winter starts to break. The effect is rather sexy, if you're the type to see things that way. Europeans of the Renaissance swore by it as an aphrodisiac, and the church banned it from nunneries.

The earliest recipes for this vegetable are about 2,500 years old., written in ancient Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphics, suggesting the Mediterranean as the plant's homeland The Caesars took their asparagus passion to extravagant lengths, chartering ships to scour the empire for the best spears and bring them to Rome. Asparagus even inspired the earliest frozen food industry, in the first century, when Roman charioteers would hustle fresh asparagus from the Tiber River Valley up into the Alps and keep it buried there in snow for six months, all so it could be served with a big ta-daa at the autumnal Feast of Epicurus. So we are not the first to go to ridiculous lengths to eat foods out of season.

(So, I guess Rome had its own equivalent of the TVA--Tiber Valley Asparagus.)

These kinds of observations and insights, along with the gustatory inclusions, are likely to provide enough fodder to make the agenda, if not palatable, at least endurable. I'll let you know.

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Current Reading

Come Be My Light Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta
Envious Casca Georgette Heyer (Almost as delightful as her romances)
The Inferno Dante
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle Barbara Kingsolver

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September 28, 2007

Prayer is Sustenance

Last week, the book of Mother Teresa's private writings was published--Come, Be My Light. I suppose I should first comment on a subject that disturbs many--the publication of writings that Mother Teresa had expressly requested be destroyed. Thank goodness the Church knows a legacy when they see it, and recognizes sanctity in human form when we are graced with it. I think about the fragments of letter from St. John of the Cross, the pitiful number of them, and of the destruction of what probably amounted to a great many of them by St. Teresa of Avila as a way of detachment. What a tremendous loss for the entire world that destruction was. We have a lessened sense of the beauty of spirit and the warmth of St. John of the Cross. We're left with an image of austerity and sparseness.

Fortunately, that has not been allowed to happen with one of the great Saints of our time. A saint so great that she throws Christopher Hitchens into paroxysms of anger every time he casts a thought in her direction. (Talk about a man resisting conviction--a man who needs his atheism, his crutch every bit as much as he think those with religion do--a man who battles God daily in his attempt to remain squarely in unbelief--a man personally challenged by Mother Teresa.)

While there is much new in the book, much insight into things we had only small glimpses and hints of, there is also very much that is well-known and which reflects who she was publicly and consistently.

from Come Be My Light
Mother Teresa of Calcutta

Every Sunday I visti the poor in Calcutta's slums. I cannot help them, because I do not have anything, but I go to give them joy. Last time about twenty little ones were eagerly expecting their "Ma." When they saw me, they ran to meet me, even skipping on one foot. I entered. In that "para"--that is how a group of house is called here--twelve families were living. every family has only one room, two meters long and a meter and a half wide. The door is so narrow that i hardly could enter, and the ceiling is so low that I could not stand upright. . . . Now I do not wonder that my poor little ones love their school so much, and that so many of them suffer from tuberculosis. The poor mother. . . did not utter even a word of complaint about her poverty. It was very painful for me, but at the same time I was very happy when I saw that they are happy because I visit them. Finally, the mother said to me: "Oh, Ma, come again! Your smile brought sun into this house."

Consider the details of this little note--a room with a door so narrow and a ceiling so low that Mother Teresa--not exactly a giantess--could not fit through or stand upright. Those are straitened circumstances. And the thickness of poverty, so powerful you could feel it standing at a distance.

Now consider that Mother Teresa, pained by the poverty she can do nothing about, goes nevertheless because of the joy she can spread by her mere presence. That is a powerful witness to her obedience and to her love. I wonder how many among us would be willing to endure what is unthinkable to us for the sake of bringing joy to others--the word of God? I know for a fact that I am not there yet. Poverty frightens me. The impoverished frighten me in ways I can't begin to understand or articulate. There is no cause for fear, and yet, there you have it. I am not a saint, much less a Saint. Undoubtedly, that will come in time.

Much of the book focuses on the sharp contrast between Mother Teresa's inner darkness and her outward apostolate of spreading joy and the word of God among the poorest of the poor. It is filled with extravagances of love, and as such, it is a guidebook to love--to how to show profound and real love despite the fact that inside there is nothing but constant yearning, constant desire, constant longing for the infinite that seems to have vacated the space. Well, to give an instance:

Please pray for me, that it may please God to lift this darkness from my doul for only a few days. For sometimes the agony of desolation is so great and at the same time the longing for the Absent One so deep, that the only prayer which I can still say is --Scared Heart of Jesus I trust in Thee--I will satiate Thy thirst for souls.

If you have not already bought this book, you may want to consider it. At very least get it from the library and read it carefully. As with the works of St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, I have a feeling that I will be returning to this book again and again, to learn from the example of Blessed Mother Teresa-- a Saint I have been privileged to see, even if only from a distance.

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September 26, 2007

Exit Ghost

In this, supposedly the last of the Zuckerman books, the legendary priapism of Mr. Roth, noted in comments on the previous post regarding the book, is once again fully in display, once again to no particular effect and for not particular purpose that I can discern unless it is to unite thanatos and eros in the Freudian clich´ that was ancient when Freud was a baby. Zuckerman, impotent and incontinent from a radical prostatectomy spends the entire book trying to recapture the vigor of youth in the face of decaying faculties.

Problem is, it isn't even remotely touching. It isn't funny, it isn't ironic, mordant, incisive, acute, or even particularly observant. It is, unfortunately, pedestrian--a rehash of Roth from previous years including all of the very worst aspects of his obsessions.

The really terrible part of this is that there is some lovely writing, some moving and beautiful writing. At moments even powerful writing--as when he relates the tale of the Jews who escaped from Oslo to Sweden. But there are plot encumbrances that occupy far more space than they are actually worth in effect and an unfortunate obsession with a writer with a great and mysterious sin in his past. Finally, there is an absolutely incoherent paean to George Plimpton occupying far too much of the last section of the book.

My opinion--give this one a skip and go read the only book Mr. Roth wrote that seems to be relatively free of his obsessions--The Plot Against America, you may not care for the politics--but in that book Roth has many points to make about anti-semitism (as he does in this one) and its present vigor in our society. He raises awareness about important problems without the other spirits he seems so fond of.

NOT recommeded in any way for any one.

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September 25, 2007

The Joy and the Pain of Philip Roth

Philip Roth is one of those great American writers with whom I've always had a good deal of difficulty. And his most recent book is just a continuation of that difficulty. The question is more whether the difficulty is mine or if it is simply Mr. Roth's constitution.

However, I do want to raise a major point contra the current publishing mindset. The problem is exemplified in this passage:

from Exit Ghost
Philip Roth

I know it was on June 30 because that's the day that the female snapping turtles in my part of New England make their annual trek out from their watery habitat to find an open sandy spot to dig a next for their eggs. These are strong, slow-moving creatures, large turtles with sawtooth armored shells a foot or more in diameter and long, heavily scaled tails. The appear in abundance at the south end of Athena, troops of them crossing the two-lane macadam road that leads into town. Drivers will patiently wait for minutes on end so as not to hit them as they emerge from the deep woods whose marshes and ponds they inhabit, and it is the annual custom of many local residents like me not merely to stop but to pull over and step out onto the shoulder of the road to watch the parade of these rarely seen amphibians, lumbering forward inch by inch on the powerful foreshortened, scaly legs that end in prehistoric-looking reptilian claws.

There is amidst the lyrical and fascinating prose a blunder of enormous proportions, amplified by the fact that a modifier in the same sentence hints at the real relationships of turtles within the animal kingdom. Why is it that some editor allowed this to pass? For anyone even remotely acquainted with taxonomy, the mistake is jarring and annoying. Mr. Roth may have been trying to be poetic, or trying to enlarge the use of the word "amphibian" to encompass a larger sense of the "lifestyle" rather than the taxonomic level; however, as it isn't germane to the point of either the passage or the novel, the wise editor should have simply brought Mr. Roth up short and pointed out how very disorienting and alienating such an attempt is, particularly isolated in a single passage as it is. I suspect that it was merely a slip of the pen, and one that a useful editor ought to have made an effort to see fixed.

Another facet of Mr. Roth's writing that often disengages me is his insistence that the worth of a man is judged primarily, if not solely, by the correct and frequent functioning of those anatomical parts that define his maleness. This has been a theme from the earliest works, and it pervades much of Mr. Roth's writing. It is entirely possible that I have not completely understood what point Mr. Roth has been trying to make with it, if so, that is my failing. However, the obsessiveness of that theme in this novel has not made for enjoyable reading for me.

However, even in and among the ruminations on body parts that no longer work the way they once did, we occasionally find something lovely, such as this:

I simply asked him to tell me about her; what I'd gotten was a speech appropriate to the dedication of some grand edifice. There was nothing strange about such a staunchly tender performance--men who fall madly in love can make Xanadu of Buffalo it that's where their beloved was raised--and yet the ardor for Jamie and Jamie's Texas girlhood was so undisguised that it was as though he were telling me about somebody he had dreamed up in jail. Or about the Jamie I had dreamed up in jail. It was as it should be in a masterpiece of male devotion: his veneration for his wife was his strongest tie to life.

This is gorgeous, even if spoken ironically, and with a post-modern cynicism most unappealing (however, I find it difficult to read the passage in that light). And from it you can read the obsession of the present work. Mr. Zuckerman is in lust with Jamie. And lust is the closest that any character in a normal Roth novel seems capable of coming to love--the only defined thing about Nathan Zuckerman is his desire that comes without any strong emotional underpinning. And so, we have the Philip Roth novel. Now, perhaps Mr. Roth's point is to satirize these attitudes. But there is a sameness and a plodding dullness surrounding that sameness that suggest that the attitude is truly the authors and not a conceit or a feint. Again, that may be a cursory misreading--if so, I'm not the only one who is inclined to such misreadings.

Finally, the political discussions in the book are a nauseating concoction of intolerant leftist political ideation. In this book they are so extreme and so blatant, that for the first time I have wondered if Roth might not be poking fun at the intolerance of the oh so tolerant portion of our society. (Interestingly, I agree with some of the political assessment in the book, I just find them too narrowly focused. Everything said about Mr. Bush and his regime could be applied, one long tarbrush to most of the regimes post Roosevelt I. And in the diatribe painting all of this, we pass lovingly over the administrations of the nearly saintly Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. I, like Zuckerman in the book, but for reasons quite different, am nearly completely uninterested in politics as a whole. I think I saw a great deal too much in the time I spent with my mother on Capitol Hill. Just a clue for you all--there are no Mr. Smith's in that gaggle--at least there weren't--I shouldn't exclude the possibility that some have showed up in the interim--but my impression is that things have rather gone downhill since my heyday.

So, while Mr. Roth's prose is elegant at times and interesting, his obsessions rapidly become tedious, and of the remaining "great figures" of recent American writing, he is one whose work is most colored by the person he is. It seems endlessly and repetitively autobiographical, and obsessed with what it means to be a man. Possibly obsessed because his characters really have no idea whatsoever. Nevertheless, there are things that are lovely, thoughts that are worthwhile, strands that are worth pursuing and occasionally prose that is sparkling, bright, and exemplary of very fine writing.

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September 21, 2007

Rainbows End

Vernor Vinge's teenage bildungsroman is this year's Hugo winner for best science fiction novel of the year. I have to admit that I haven't kept up with science fiction the way I used to do; however, I did find this an enjoyable read.

Vinge builds a very believable near-future world in which computers dominate the landscape. There are "wearables" which respond to gestures and overlay mundane reality with "all the colors of the wind." Vinge makes these devices very likely, very believable, very complex, and best of all very comprehensible. Unlike Gibson and his ilk, who rely upon sheer confusion for much of their effect, Vinge is committed to making his world real.

In this world cures have been found for most common ailments, including many types of dementia. Our hero has been returned from near-death to the appearance of a seventeen year-old boy. And with his return to health, also his return to an absolute tyrrany of emotional abuse. His son puts a stopper in it and Robert Gu, our hero, gradually adjusts and joins an international Cabal designed to preserve the integrity of libraries. However, this plot is simply a cover for another deeper plot that may or may not involve artificial intelligences, international conspirators, and a plot to subjugate the world's people by a clever juxtaposition of (literally) viral memes.

Characterization is fine, although we never get a sense of Gu as both old and young. His perspective is always one of being older. There is no resolution to one of the central emotional points in the book, and several hints and asides are left completely unresolved.

Overall, an interesting fun read for those who like their science fiction Cyber.

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September 12, 2007

America Alone

Given that I don't care for political books, I find myself always wandering down strange by-ways when it comes to reading them. America Alone by Mark Steyn is one of those--a book-length diatribe? rant? discussion? neocon apologia? I don't know what to call it; however, I do know that I enjoyed it for the most part and it raised in me an awareness of certain points that I either chose to ignore or was deliberately keeping at arm's length because the implications of them were too frightening to deal with on an everyday basis.

Steyn's primary thesis in the book is that Islam, far from being a religion of peace and love, is in fact a religion wrapped up in a legal philosophy encased in a political system. It is, indeed, a transnational identity that eschews the boundaries of state and government and sets its priorities quite differently from the rest of us. Frankly, that is something I have admired in Islam. Above all else is service to Allah, period. This is more important than state, region, nationality, or any other variable you can think of. It is, in fact, the incarnation of "Seek ye first of the kingdom of God and His righteousness."

The problem with modern Islam is that it has been more or less willingly hijacked by extremist sects that we fund, and of recent date, fund more richly through our reliance and purchase of Saudi oil. (Let's not consider the other politically undesirable despots and monomaniacs we support through this reliance--I'm thinking of Hugo Chavez, amongst others.) Wahhabism, an extremist and some might say anti-Islamic islam was born, fostered, and continues to be nurtured and exported from Saudi Arabia in the form of huge endowments and grants to mosques and madrasses the world over.

Steyn makes the analogy that while the wahhabi's of the world are a very small part of Islam, the present Muslim approach to them is akin to that of the German people who had nothing to say in his rise to power. Of course, like most of the book this is a generalization, one can find Islamic groups that protest the hijacking of their faith in such an extremist manner; however, they seem to be small and relatively little known. If you search on Google you can find anti-terrorist Islamic groups. Reading some of these sites one gets the impression of a wan sort of main-line protestantism of Islam. That is we encounter clearly "We support the separation of religion and state." But one needs to examine this sort of statement in the light of Steyn's thesis about the nature of Islam to understand how radically it differs from "People for the American Way" and other such anti-Christianizing groups. A statement of this sort from a Muslim site repudiates the political, transnational goals that seem to be part and parcel of wahhabi Islam.

I'm no expert and not qualified to give anything other than an opinion on this book, which I found by turns amusing, frightening, and aggravating. Aggravating because Steyn conflates all sorts of disparate interests into one "progressive" package--pandering to Muslims is done by people with "granola mobiles" or tendencies toward feminism, homosexualism, or other common appurtenances of the "liberal" agenda. So while raising awareness of legitimate concerns regarding apparent Muslim trends, he spends a good deal of time taking potshots at people holding liberal ideas and values.

Nevertheless, the central statements of his thesis are interesting and compelling, thought hardly news. Europe is slowly being extinguished under a tide of high Muslim birthrates and immigration and a literal death spiral in the birth rates of developed nations. Now, in one sense, this is an example of one's chickens returning home to roost; however, given the wahhabi attitude toward the cultural accretions of groups other than Muslims, one must wonder seriously about a Louvre in the control of even a "moderate" Islamic state. What happens to the Parthenon, the Roman Ruins, and even Chartres under the benevolent enlightenment of the wahhabi regime.

Of course, these thoughts are secondary entirely to the societal and human toll of this cultural transformation. One does begin to wonder. However, Steyn's book, roundly trounced by one of the Princes of Arabia is certainly worth taking a look at. You might be surprised, chagrined, annoyed, offended, or experience all of these at once. But hopefully, you might come away with additional information and additional matters to explore to become more cognizant of the implications of some of our societal and personal choices. The whole book, although not intended to, does reinforce the concept that no sin is entirely or even mostly personal. Every personal choice affects the society around one. And this was one of the notion behind the renaming of the sacrament "reconciliation." The harm of our sins goes far beyond ourselves, disrupting and tearing the fabric of society to such an extent that i becomes unrecognizable, indeed, eventually it dies of this soul-sickness. But then, "The wages of sin is death." Personal and societal.

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September 11, 2007

Interesting Reading

The thing about diatribe is that one can be smoothly carried along in its rampant and all-encompassing embrace. It is unsettling, leaving one to wonder how much is truth and how much is rant. But it occasionally breaks forth in a moment of pristine brilliance.

from America Alone
Mark Steyn

Most mainline Protestant churches are, to one degree or another, post-Christian. If they no longer seem disposed to converting the unbelieving to Christ, they can at least convert them to the boggiest of soft-left political clichés, on the grounds that if Jesus were alive today he'd most like be a gay Anglican bishop in a committed relationship driving around in an environmentally friendly car with an "Arms Are for Hugging" sticker on the way to an interfaith dialogue with a Wiccan and a couple of Wahhabi imams.

The sheer volume of the rant carries it along. The tone is clear and in one sweeping blow condemns the morally insensate and the morally neutral. Environmentally friendly cars are not a sign of dissolution. In a saner society they would be a sign of rehabilitation. It is when the cars replace any core of belief, any strength of conviction, any moral center that they become problematic. And yet, diatribe doesn't allow these distinction to be made. Nevertheless, as a rant goes, this one is both amusing and, unfortunately, close to the truth for a good many mainline Protestant Churches today--and that is a shame because it is the loss of a great and powerful tradition and voice. It is a diminishment, a weakening, a loss of the gospel truth--the only thing we have that is worth holding and sharing.

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In Memoriam

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
--George Santayana

As opposed as I am to the war in Iraq, as much as I may question its authenticity as a meaningful action against terrorism, as much as I may find myself pondering the question of its "justness," I also find within it a profound statement of the conviction that we are simply not going to roll over and take whatever treatment the world has decided we have merited.

Unlike the Spanish election, America has not capitulated. We can debate whether or not we have taken the correct steps to confront those who would gladly deprive all of the freedoms many in the past have died to preserve; but then, we have the freedom to engage in that exchange of ideas.

For better or worse, September 11, 2001 marked a watershed--a determined advance by a small group of highly active and motivated insurgents into the heartland. For a brief time we awoke and we responded as was just and proper--we sought out the root of the problem and attempted to destroy it.

We have not been successful, not for lack of trying but because there is no root. Rather there is a mycelium--a network--small and invisible--that at any time can give rise to yet another fungal bloom. A dandelion is relatively easy to confront, mushrooms much less so.

September 11 does not justify any and all actions, but whenever we pause to question what we are doing and whether it is right, the memory of it should add weight to the reflection. September 11 was a declaration on the part of a very small part of the world that they have no intention of tolerating or respecting anything outside of the range of their political and religious philosophy.

We make a serious error when we attribute this strain of thought to an entire group. And we make a serious error if we think this strain of thought justifies the deprivation of any group of people any part of the rights guaranteed by our law; that way also lay defeat.

Rather, we need to be aware, enlightened, and seriously determined to move forward in the defense of the freedoms we have had handed to us on a silver platter. We are a privileged people living in a hard time.

from The Crisis, December 23, 1776
Thomas Paine

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.

Atheist, he may have been, but what he said then stands now; and today gives us pause to remember it.

We do an injustice to those innocent people who died that day if we ever forget the truths that made this country great. They were not soldiers, they were not martyrs, they were our friends, our families, our colleagues, our co-religionists--people we loved and whom we remember today--people whose lives give great weight to any battle we wage to prevent further such outrages. These innocent people we must not forget, for in so doing, we put the lives of a great many others at risk.

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September 5, 2007

The Monk Upstairs

The second novel in the series by Tim Farrington has most of the same shortcomings and virtues of the first. First tick off the transgressions--marriage, divorce, and remarriage without benefit of divorce, a certain haziness with regard to Rebecca and religion, use of contraception--not by the nominally Catholic Rebecca, but by Mike, the former Monk himself.

But the story is lovely if incomplete and oddly shredded around the edges. There are many events with no resolution, many mentions of things that seem to have no focus or purpose. For example, Phoebe, who has the ability to see only some people clearly sees Mike the Monk and Rory the Stoned Surfer very clearly, but almost no one else. What is the meaning of the equivalence in her vision? Why is the kitchen torn up in the first chapter, mentioned throughout the book, but never brought to repair? Why does Mike get so hung up on cremation, but continue to recite psalms in some version that is either the Douay Rheims or a poor imitation?

While I enjoyed both books, I have many reservations about both of them. Some of the focus on prayer is sharp and interesting--revealing. But most of the story is a froth of chaos, The author's purpose is not to present Catholic teaching, and yet in a book about a former monk, one would hope for a little more clarity on precisely what the Church teaches--there is none. The Author freely mixes archaic versions of scripture with contraception--lighting votive candles with marriage without benefit of annulment.

As much as I enjoyed some aspects of these stories, I can't recommend them. They are however an inspiration in that true prayer can inform a book and become even the matter of a book without the book becoming dull and pedantic. And perhaps that was Mr. Farrington's purpose--to lure people into a life of prayer; however, the lure is itself tainted--tainted to the point where the goal itself probably cannot be achieved.

But then, I shouldn't allow opinions on the matter of doctrinal correctness to interfere with my vision of the author. Shouldn't, but for good or ill, I'm afraid I do, and so my lack of endorsement here.

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September 4, 2007

From the Follow-Up

Despite my lukewarm review of The Monk Downstairs, I have continued with The Monk Upstairs. The passage below comes from a letter written by our monk, now a step-father, about teaching his step-daughter's communion class. (Let's not talk about divorce and remarriage in the Church--I'll get to that in my review.) Despite the errors, there is much good to be derived from reading.

from The Monk Upstairs
Tim Farrington

It is a dauntingly difficult and delicate balance, and there is no way around the fact that for a child of that age, all this amounts to a sort of bait and switch anyway. With this first communion they are beginning a lifetime diet of a love so deep that, God willing, they will be strong enough to just keep walking into it when they realize that the torn and broken body, streaming with blood, nailed to that splintered wood on all those fearful icons, really is their own as well, that Love really does go through that death, and the Word through that suffering flesh, in order to be made real in this terrible world.

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August 31, 2007

The Monk Downstairs

In this novel by Tim Farrington, a monk, Michael Christopher, comes to live with Rebecca and her daughter Mary Martha in an in-law apartment that Rebecca has just refurbished.

The novel is beautifully written and seems to have moments of real insight into deep prayer. I've noted some of the here.

Alas, for those strengths, I'm afraid that what I expected did happen all too readily. Being a novel for larger public consumption, it catered to that whim. Mr. Farrington falls into the all-too-male habit of confusing satisfied lust with love and the couple no sooner brush hands with one another than they are entangled in bed.

If Michael is exemplary of the modern Catholic conscience, it is little wonder that we are facing the crisis we are in the Church today. He performs a baptism that does little more than mock the sacrament (a point he acknowledges later when he is reluctant to perform a more somber sacrament).

Rebecca, on the other hand is nearly schizophrenic in back-and-forthing regarding religion and faith. We're told she's lukewarm and seeking, and then she turns maniacal with Michael takes her daughter to a church to pray. And then she's back again asking him to perform a sacrament, although he claims to have no ability to do so (even though there is no indication that leaving the monastery has deprived him of his faculties as Priest).

Add to this various subtle errors regarding Catholicism that should not come from the mind and pen of a monk--for example, at one point, Michael speaks of "leaving celibacy" when, in fact, he has left chastity. Leaving celibacy is not a sin in itself, if the vow has been lifted; however, leaving chastity is always a sin. But then Mike isn't too clear on the notion of sin.

One is led to wonder whether Michael's dark night of prayer might not be more a result of his sinful and overweening pride and self-assurance rather than deep immersion in the life of prayer. All indications seem to point that way. I don't think it's possible to experience a dark night of deep prayer while one is in the midst of major sins. Although St. John of the Cross points out that we can't know and that God's grace is mysterious and makes all things possible.

At any rate, the writing is fine, many of the points about prayer are good, and the story was interesting if more than a little off-putting. It does show me that many male writers seem to have no notion of romance that does not center on the genitalia. A shame, this could have been a superb witness. As it stands, it is possible that someone who is not aware of Christianity or the power of prayer or the depths to which prayer can go may pick this up and derive from it an impetus to move further into prayer. Others will have a greater acquaintance with some good aspects of Christianity from it--so it is possible to have a good effect. Unfortunately, from point of view of faith, the novel is gravely flawed and so I can only give a half-hearted recommendation to it.

What a shame--it was building up to a superb novel--and had our main characters one iota of restraint, one moment of holding back, this novel could easily have flowed into the next in which the two get married. I've started reading that one and I only hope that it is better in matters of morals than this one.

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August 29, 2007

The Emptiness of Prayer

We have long known that Blessed Mother Teresa went through a long dark night of the soul. I don't know that anyone knew its extent or depth, and shortly we should all be privileged to be able to find out. Privileged, I say, because such things are the substance of the life of faith and if we ignore them, we do so at our peril. More importantly, they are things that any person of deep faith is likely to experience. Likewise, they are things that ordinary sinners experience all the time. The two have different causes and sources, but the end result is similar. In the case of the sinner, the darkness is troublesome and not peaceful--something fought against, struggled against. In the case of the Saint--well, I wouldn't know that yet.

All of this in preface to a marvelous little passage that says it quite succinctly.

from The Monk Downstairs
Tim Farrington

My mind is a stretch of barren country and swirling dust; my heart has shriveled to the size of a dried pea. But this is all my private comedy. The emptiness of prayer is deeper than mere despair. Preparing us for a love we cannot conceive, God takes our lesser notions of love from us one by one.

Have you really never seen it, Brother James, somewhere in the grim efficiency of your industrial meditation? Have you never once seen all your goodness turn to dust? I tell you that until you do, all your prayer is worse than useless. It is gears of greed, grinding. Love is not fuel for the usual machinery.

What is remarkable is that this is in a work of "light" fiction-- something little more than a romance--what is it doing there? How did the author get it there without sounding preachy and overbearing? What is his point?

I suppose if I sustain my reading, I shall find out the answer and I hope I'll be pleased with it. Either way, I'll let you know.

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August 28, 2007

More Crossover Wisdom

More derived from reading Buddhist books. I should note a caution here--Buddhism is not something that everyone should approach or that the person young in his or her Christian vocation should look into extensively. There is a seductiveness to doctrine and idea, and particularly to the very appealing notions in Buddhism that allow us to overlook certain intrinsic difficulties with the dogmatic side of the religion.

I present here parallels in Buddhism. They are parallels. Buddhists and Christians do not share the same faith structure nor even, in any meaningful sense, the same cosmology. Nevertheless, we are adjured to take what is good among all the good things in the world, and Buddhism has much in it that could strengthen a Christian vocation. For example:

from Cultivating Compassion
Jeffrey Hopkins

In order to value the time we have--to cherish it--it is important to reflect on the certainty of death and the uncertainty of when death will be. In meditation, contemplate: "I will definitely die--as will all of us--but I don't know when I'm going to die. It could be at any time!" Such reflection puts a value--a premium--on the present, on the time you have.

Be prepared and aware of death which comes as the end. An awareness (though not a constant fear) of the end can inform the entire life in ways that bring forth the potential for sanctity. St. Therese of Lisieux has a passage that parallels the above, though not in its memento mori aspects. She notes that all our sorrows are in the past which cannot be rectified or in the future, which we have not seen, but the authentic Christian life is lived mindful of the present, which is all that we have. That is the "premium" of focusing on the end--a realization that every moment is precious, valuable, and important. God blesses us with time--we don't know how much--so it is better to count all the time in the moment and not to look into far futures that may not exist. Not to worry oneself over things that cannot be controlled, but to focus attention on those things which are within our control.

Before continuing to a final point, it is useful to reflect for a moment on a passage immediately preceding the one quoted above.

The actuarial tables say that males as a whole will live so many years and females as a whole will live so many more years, but such figures are irrelevant with respect to any specific individual; if you're going to die next week, it's a hundred percent chance you're going to die then. It's not a such and such percentage that you might live to be seventy-eight. If you are to die on the road today, it's a hundred percent certain you'll die on the road today.

Having quoted the first passage, in which there is nothing objectionable to Christianity, I deftly ignored the sentence that begins an exposition immediately following. I will note it below:

"Since it is obvious that the body and possessions are left behind, on need to put more emphasis on consciousness."

I'm intrigued by this statement as it seems to imply that consciousness does not pass away and if consciousness is the Buddhist equivalent of a soul, that goes without saying. But nothing I've read suggests this to be true. Consciousness is incredibly important in Buddhist thought because of karma. Every conscious act is at once the ripening of one of the potentialities of karma and the setting of new potentialities. And again, we can draw parallels, but this emphasis on what we would lightly read as aspects of the self can be misleading.

Now, to do justice, we must recognize that Buddhists do not think that Mind (consciousness) is equivalent to "self." And so to assume that what is meant by the common usage of the word consciousness is what is meant when discussing Buddhism is an error. However, it is an easy error that can easily lead astray. Hence my recommendation that Buddhist texts are not for everyone. There's too much there when read with the literalist, rational, western mind can be misread or mistaken for something other than what is actually meant. Better, if one is likely to stumble into this trap, to stay out of that forest entirely.

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August 24, 2007

Another Moment

Another quotation from a book I continue to enjoy.

from The Monk Downstairs
Tim Farrington

Rory, at least, had faith in UFOs. What sort of spiritual sustenance was she offering her daughter? What cosmic certainties? The tepid Catholicism of her own childhood was more like a lingering headache than a source of strength. She had picked for years at the smorgasbord of Californian spirituality and come away hungry. She felt her frustrated need for ardor as a burden and her longing for depth as a kind of dull pain.

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August 23, 2007

Gorgeous

I hope the rest of this novel continues to be as inspiring and lovely.

from The Monk Downstairs
Tim Farrington

We expect God's presence to be thunderous, spectacular, monumental; but it is our need that is so large. The real presence slips past our demands for spectacle. It slips past our despair. Not just like a child--sometimes it is a child. She walks down the blistered steps to where you kneel and says the simplest things. She is entertained by butterflies. She has opinions about unicorns. She does not seem to care that you are ruined and lost. She does not even seem to notice. Find an earthworm in the neglected loam and she will make you feel for a moment that your life has not been wasted. Name a flower and she will make you feel that you have begun to learn to speak.

I don't know why I'm so bowled over by this, but I am. It is gorgeous and it is true and it is something I suppose I need at this moment--something that we all may need from time to time--indication as to where to listen to hear the still, small voice.

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The Seventeen Traditions

Previously, I posted a brief excerpt from the book. Those who have followed the career of Ralph Nader from consumer advocate to presidential candidate will probably relish much of what is here; it gives clear insight into the political thought of Ralph Nader and by extension the Green Party he nurtured and which in true schismatic fashion rejected him.

I'm not keen on some of Mr. Nader's political thought. I think he has an acute eye for the plight of the weak, except for the weakest among us and then he falls into the trap that all too many seem to accept: compassionate tyranny of the visible.

Now that I've made something of full disclosure, I can say more about the book. I loved it. There is a warmth, a humanity, a passionate and compassionate interest in people and in things that informs the whole books. Above all there is a sense of a strong and loving family, a tightly knit family that allowed for solid structure and complete freedom within the structure. Parent encouraged the children to reasonable disagreement and argumentation on major issues of the day. Ideas were proposed, discussed and debated, and children were asked to think and consider not only their opinions but the consequences of their actions and the effect of their actions on others.

In this autobiographical advice book, Ralph Nader exposes seventeen traditions that informed him as a person and kept his family functioning as a family. These range from "The Tradition of Listening" to "The Tradition of Scarcity" through to "The Tradition of Civics." In each section the involved reader can learn from the experiences of Mr. Nader within his family life and perhaps adapt some of these laudable traditions into his or her own family life.

What I derive from this is a picture of parents that loved and respected their children and their society enough to conscientiously and deliberately raise those children to be thoughtful, considerate, kind, and well-meaning people. They raised children of strong opinions with strong wills to stand behind those opinions and a no-nonsense approach to politics, society, and life. Respect and love, love and respect: these abound in the book, and the warmth that exudes from these moments is considerable, deep, and full of abiding compassion.

In other words, I enjoyed the book, a quick but memorable read and a thought provoking work for any person who is raising a child. While I often disagree with Mr. Nader, I respect him and I respect the thought he has put into his opinions. I think there is a strain of unalloyed idealism that is probably errant--the neo-rousseauian affliction of the modern liberal climate, but sometimes that can be a breath of fresh air. Erroneous, but not any more so that the Calvinist condemnation of humanity that is sometimes the legacy of the cultural right. We are neither nobel savages nor "utterly depraved," but beautiful, broken children of God--capable of tremendous good and horrendous evil--sometimes in the same person.

Highly recommended for all audiences.

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August 20, 2007

True Humanity

from The Seventeen Traditions
Ralph Nader

"What is the true value of ethnic identity?" I remember him observing once. "Culture, humor, variety and a common sociability facing life. And, of course, the pleasure of having one's own cuisine. When it come to politics, though, a broader humanity should replace ethnicity."

When it comes to politics do we allow a broader humanity to replace ethnicity, or do we rather focus on the differences, the exclusions, the us v. them syndrome? Loving people is the first requirement of those who would serve God, loving them as they are, where they are, in their present circumstances without regard as to how they came by these circumstances. Loving without judgment, without intent to place ourselves over them by our love. Loving them with Christ's love, not the feeble thing we humans sometimes put in place of it.

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Compassion and Christianity

One of my frequent frustration with Christianity (although not especially with the Catholic Church, which as a teaching body does much better than the Body of Christ tends to do) is the lack of focus on the duty of love and on compassion in general. Too often different Christian groups are so busy arguing the merits or faults of their doctrines that they tend not to put those doctrines into practice. Try finding a Christian book about compassion and compassionate treatment of others. This tends to be left to the Buddhists, and so, for refuge, I sometime find myself turning there to learn what their great teachers taught.

Reading Cultivating Compassion by Jeffrey Hopkins, I stumbled across this "daily exercise" in compassion. The following prayer, mantra, reminder (call it what you will) is to be brought to mind six times a day:

I go for refuge to Buddha, his doctrine, and the spiritual community until I am enlightened. Through the merit of my charity, ethics, patience, effort, concentration, and wisdom, may I achieve Buddhahood for the sake of all beings.

This has few parallels in Christian prayer--although the Prayer of St. Francis comes to mind. And because I don't find myself taking refuge in Buddha, I would need to change the prayer:

I go for refuge to Jesus, his doctrine, and the mystical body until I am made holy. Through the merits of charity, ethics, patience, effort, concentration, and wisdom, may I achieve holiness (Saintliness) for the sake of all beings.

What good is personal sanctity if it does not better the lives of those with whom we have the closest relationships?

The Church hits this theme time and time again, but because we are the people we are we tend to regard these teachings with suspicion. Mention Social Justice and see how many good and faithful Catholics look at you askance. If you hear talk about a preferential option for the poor, it is likely to remain just that--talk. How often have we been stirred by understanding these teachings to actually make the lives of some other person better? Often the preferential option for the poor is left at the foot of the altar as the congregation goes out to play parking lot derby. Not only do we not internalize the teachings, much of our behavior suggests that we reject them entirely.

I was musing this morning as I drove my car in to work how much better things might be if every car was equipped as mine is. I have a hybrid civic, and one of the ways you can configure the instrument panel is to give you feedback on your driving to see how certain behaviors help to conserve gasoline and increase milage. As a result of these readouts, I have seen large changes in my behaviors behind the wheel, and coming with those changes, I have experienced a completely different attitude most of the time when I drive. Other drivers don't become obstacles or problems, but people in their cars, just like me, just as scatter-brained as I sometimes am, just as courteous as I can sometimes be. When I see a person driving foolishly, sudden starts, screeching stops, I think about how they might be different if they understood the effects of their actions.

Compassion, understanding that all people at heart want the same things we want for themselves and for their children. Compassion is one of the roots of charity--when we look at people in all their strengths and weaknesses and see ourselves.

Jesus taught compassion through His words and works. The Church extols and sets up institutions and groups to cultivate compassion. Dorothy Day's Catholic Workers are one such group, but far less radical and far quieter are the innumerable Martin de Porres or Vincent de Paul societies that are part and parcel of our Church.

But compassion isn't just for the church or just for a meeting--it is part of a way of life--living in Christ's love, being Christ's heart for the salvation and redemption of a world gone astray. That is part of the imitation of Christ to which we all are called. That is the root and source of sustenance for Christian compassion.

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August 5, 2007

Revisiting Break, Blow, Burn

Some time back I reviewed Break, Blow, Burn by Camille Paglia and remember being put off by some of her idiosyncratic choices for modern poetry. Perhaps I focused too much attention on that.

Ms. Paglia has a distinct voice, self-assured, self-assertive, urbane, and elegant. Her personal opinions have the solidity of the throne of God and she expresses them as though they were edicts passed down from the time of Moses. She triumphs the artistry of Stevie Nix while decrying the depredations of the European post-structuralists.

What she says deserves attention, not because she says it does, but because her voice has an authority that comes from deep engagement with the materials she studies. Agree or disagree as you will, one thing will be certain--you will be perfectly clear on what you are agreeing or disagreeing with. Ms. Paglia's prose is bereft of the academic apparatus of most critics. And for good reason, "Good writing comes from good reading. Humanists must set an example: all literary criticism should be accessible to the general reader. Criticism at its best is re-creative, not spirit-killing." And so the criticism she tenders in this book fits that pattern she assumes for criticism in general.

One might argue with some of the re-creations--for example, the excessive rhapsodic waxings on William Carlos Williams and on Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock," can strike one as overwrought and grasping at straws. But then, her passionate enthusiasm for these works deserves our attention. Perhaps we overlook something that might well be worth consideration. Perhaps there is something here that we must learn from an enthusiast disguised as a critic.

But I picked up the book , once again charmed into reading by the beautifully fashioned introduction in which Ms. Paglia sets herself up as pedant and tour-guide in a whirlwind cruise through English poetry from Shakespeare to Joni Mitchell. And her first stop is what gave me pause and begged for a more gentle reconsideration of the book:

Sonnet 73
William Shakespeare

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Of the great bard's sonnets, one of the more melancholy and searching--bleak as a desert and therefore refreshing in a way that only truth and emptiness can be.

Ms. Paglia goes on to point out matters structural: The three quatrains are single sentence-metaphors each applied to is subject and accumulating into the final couplet. Matters linguistic: you can identify each by the presence of the phrase "in me." And matters symbolic--"bare ruined choirs" being both the life of the poet and the destruction of Henry VIII. Here, perhaps because of her own attempt at making a secular scripture, she may not have as full a reading as might be possible were she to plumb the depths of Shakespeare's faith. She asserts that, "There is no reference to God or an afterlife. Consciousness itself is elemental, an effect of light and heat that dissipates when our bodies are reabsorbed by nature." Here she follows the fatal flaw of her mentor Harold Bloom, who cannot seem to see that Shakespeare, far from being a secularist, was deeply spiritual, and the threads of this poem speak both to the fate of the human person, but also to the fate of that subject to the human person. "Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang," is indeed the work of man--the attempt to drive out God and replace Him with what man hath wrought--the Reformation religion.

But enough. The point here was two-fold--to present a kind of apology for the first review and to present this lovely sonnet. And it was slanted more to the second. When I opened the book and saw it there I read it. Then I read it again. Then I read it aloud. Then I read it again. Then I read Ms. Paglia's enlightening gloss of it. And then I read it again, recognize the partial truth of Ms. Paglia's interpretation. But also realizing that in three pages she could hardly do justice to the tight compression of this gem of the English language.

So do yourself a favor. Go back up to the poem and read it. Really read it. Don't let your eyes cascade down it. Stop at each word. Say it out loud. Say it slowly. Then read it quickly. Then force it into it's iambic pentameter and see where the stresses fall (this indeed is part of the amazing genius of Shakespeare--not only did he use Iambic pentameter, he also used the meter to undercut or enhance the message and meaning of the words resting upon that base. And if you don't think this is any big deal, try it yourself.)

Shakespeare is a place to start. But as I thought about it, what if one were to approach scripture in the same way. Read it, read it again. Read it out loud. If it's poetry try singing it, or letting it roll in a rhythm of poetry. Try rephrasing it. Listen to it in all those ways and you will be astonished at what may come through for you. Words you've heard more times than you can count come alive--they breathe and make new strong-fashioned art. No wonder Shakespeare so easily confuses atheist academics who wish to make of him a secular scripture. He had himself internalized these rhythms of the language and used them in a way that at that crossroads of time and art turned him into an archetype. No wonder George Bernard Shaw spent all of his time despising Shakespeare, always concerned that he would never escape the Bard's long shadow. And indeed, he did not.

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July 31, 2007

One Last Point

Barclay's short study is filled with many rich and meaningful observations. It's impossible to choose among them without also saying that you must read the whole thing. Nevertheless, there are some things that all might benefit from. And for those Christians among us whose inclination is to deride or demean or otherwise detract from other Christians, Barclay has this observation:

from Barclay's Commentary on the Letter to the Philippians

There is a lesson for us here. Paul knew nothing of personal jealousy or of personal resentment. So long as Jesus Christ was preached, he did not care who received the credit and the prestige. He did not care what other preachers said about him, or how unfriendly they were to him, or how contemptuous they were of him, or how they tried to steal a march upon him. All that mattered was that Christ was preached. All too often we resent it when someone else gains a prominence or a credit which we do not. All too often we regard a man as an enemy because he has expressed some criticism of us or of our methods. All too often we think a man can do no good because he does not do thing in our way. . . . Paul is the great example. He lifted the matter beyond all personalities; all that mattered was that Christ was preached.

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July 29, 2007

Richard Aleas

Richard Aleas is apparently the author of a number of short stories. He has produced his first two novels for Hard Case Crimes, and this diptych, featuring the same detective is exemplary of the most noir of noir.

Hard Case Crime is devoted to producing those noir novels that center mostly around revenge and lose women. About half of the line is reprint, featuring the highlights of past years, and about half in new Noir. Richard Aleas falls in this second category.

His first novel for Hard Case, Little Girl Lost features the usual bag of noir tricks--sleazy surroundings, violent crime, and uncertain identities. There's double and triple crosses, and of course a bevy of femmes fatales.

His second, Songs of Innocence, is a very hard book and is as dark as noir can get. It virtually guarantees that we won't see this detective again. Although anything is possible, I suppose.

The prose of both books is really nicely done, hard-boiled, noir, and yet intelligent in a way few of these kinds of books manage. Indeed, Hard Case has done a nice job of finding some fairly intelligent stories all round. You read these noir and you get a real sense of what it means to transcend the genre.

So, if you like detective novels AND you like noir with difficult subject matter, these books may be of interest to you. If not, you've been warned and you might want to visit the gentler realms of the Golden Age, or perhaps wander through the fields of Angela Thirkell--no mystery at all.

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

No spoilers, I promise, for those who are lagging behind.

Hmmm. Well then, what is one to say? She did manage to wrap it up--something that given the number of lose ends at the end of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince I had wondered how she was going to manage in a single volume.

After all, Half-Blood Prince was an entire volume devoted to the finding of a single horcrux. Given that only two or three of the seven had been found and destroyed, one wondered how the remaining four would be found and put to rest in a mere 750 pages.

And that apart from resolving Snape good or evil, and any number of other tangles.

But she managed it--and as far as plot goes, I think Rowling is amazing. To plan the intricacy of these seven volumes with the care that she must have done--truly an amazing feat.

It is a shame that Ms. Rowling does not hold up well as a prose stylist. At times when she's trying for rhapsodic and lyrical, we get merely painful and awkward. But then Agatha Christies, who was serviceable at prose, excellent at plot, suffered a bit in the characterization realm. So not all writers are equally adept at all aspects of writing. We take them as they come, and Ms. Rowling has woven one of the more memorable sequences of stories in a long time. Her detractors (exorcists and others included) aside, Ms. Rowling's work has an interest, a durability, and a solid spiritual foundation that should encourage generations of young readers to continue their perusal of her work. Despites its flaws, I do not think that this is a flash-in-the-pan, but destined to sit on the same shelf as Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time and C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia--not that it has the profound substance of those two works, but in guided reading and careful analysis, there is much here to educate young people. It may occasionally come in soundbytes: "Will you choose the good or the easy?" but it is there nonetheless.

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June 26, 2007

Some Notes on Francine Prose

I've heard the name, I've never read a book by her until now, and I'm struck with the impression that that is probably a real shame.

Reading Like a Writer subtitled A guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them is every bit the splendid guide that the one might think.

The first, most impressive thing Ms. Prose does is to encourage the reader to slow down and to read carefully and deeply--to savor the book that they are reading. Problem is, as good as that advice is, it's terribly difficult to follow in a book as fine as this. I've tried, believe me, I've tried, and I've succeeded to the point where I haven't devoured the whole thing in a day. Nevertheless, I've failed.

Ms. Prose offers some pointers and some pointed advice contradictory to much you may have heard about the writing life. In addition, she provides observations on the academic life that are wonderful. For example:

fromReading Like a Writer
Francine Prose

Alternately, I would conduct a reading seminar for MFA students who wanted to be writers rather than scholars, which meant that it was all right for us to fritter away our time talking about books rather than politics or ideas.

*****

You can assume that if a writer's work has survived for centuries, there are reasons why this is so, explanations that have nothing to do with a conspiracy of academics plotting to resuscitate a zombie arm of dead white males.

*****

Part of a reader's job is to find out why certain writers endure.

Ms. Prose goes on to inform us that contrary to what we were often taught in school, our job as readers is not so much to form an opinion about a book as to thoroughly explore it and enjoy it. Sometimes these two things come together, but more often than not, we allow the inner critic to rob us of some of the joy that can come from sitting back and letting the writer lead us where he or she will. Throughout the book there are references to writing as music or art; the writer as a conductor who orchestrates all the pieces of a work to result in the grand finale, a coda that encourages a slowing of pace and a gradual dimenuendo.

I haven't finished the book yet. But its advice is helping me enjoy the enforced slow pace of reading Georgette Heyer. I am far better able to appreciate some of the subtleties of prose, plot, and character even if in a frothy, light-hearted romp.

If you are interested in writing or reading, this book is an important must-have for your collection.

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June 21, 2007

Another Amusing Moment

Please forgive me, I have so little time of my own of recent date that I snatch a second here and there to regale you with what amuses me.

A conversation regarding a duel from

Powder and Patch
Georgette Heyer

"I shall write an ode!" threatened Philip direfully.

"Ah no, that is too much!" cried De Vangrisse.

"And I shall read it to you before I engage. Well?"

"It is a heavy price to pay," answered Paul, "but not too heavy for the entertainment."

And having been "graced" with a sampling of Philip's poetry earlier in the novel, I must confess to sharing de Vangrisse's sentiments. Although my reaction might ahve been more, "L'horreur!"

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Request for Enlightenment

Unfortunately with my present obligations reading goes very slowly, so I'm still maundering through Georgette Heyer's delightfully literate Regency Romance Powder and Patch. However, I've stumbled on something that I can't seem to google my way out of and so I ask for my reader's help.

What, pray tell, does it mean when one has "gold-clocked stockings." For the longest time I thought it meant stocking with gold pocket-watches embroidered on them. But that doesn't seem to make sense because they come in all varieties-pink gold-clocked stockings, red gold-clocked stockings. Have I misinterpreted the meaning?

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June 18, 2007

Opus Dei

In a word, this book by John Allen Jr.--superb. Out in hardcover last year, this year's paperbound version has a bonus that makes it worth looking into--an introduction in which John Allen proposes, and largely proves the following controversial proposition: With the possible exception of Pope John Paul II, Opus Dei never had a better friend than Dan Brown.

The central notion there is that the calumnious inventions of Mr. Brown forced Opus Dei into a more open stance and posture than had hitherto been the case. Up until Mr. Brown's Opus, Opus Dei had largely ignored the world, its seductions and trappings. As a result a cloud of misunderstanding, misapprehension, and downright horror and disgust had built up around the group. Mr. Brown simply portrayed Opus Dei as the next in a long line of caricatures extending from Henry VIII down through Matthew "Monk" Lewis and others of more recent vintage.

Setting aside the content of the preface, with which I was duly impressed, the book itself is a masterpiece of even-handed journalism. There is no muck-raking, no dwelling on the macabre and fascinating world of mortifications, in short, as I've come to expect from Mr. Allen's works--no agenda. What is here seems to be a fairly equitable and veracious recounting of the facts of Opus Dei--its found, practices, and mission. He helps to untangle such knotty threads as exactly what is a "personal prefecture," and why is it such an innovative and useful approach for this group.

Truth to tell, there is much in Opus Dei with is very appealing. None of it unique to Opus Dei, nor much of it particularly new. The sanctification of life through ordinary work well done, the emphasis on the family as the unit of religious life, and other such points have been made by other groups through time. Even the idea of bringing the contemplative life to ordinary people and making them part of the greater mission of the Church is as old as the Church itself. But what is new is the approach, the charisms, and the institutions of this group within the Church.

If you do not know enough, but have heard the rumors and the detractors, it's a good time to get the facts. That some are discontent with the group and its practices comes as no surprise. That some abuse some of the disciplines prescribed by the group, is simply part and parcel of a human institution. However, knowing the facts, the good and the bad, makes it possible to decide whether Opus Dei holds any appeal, any attraction, any possibility of strengthening one's attachment to God.

High recommended.

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June 14, 2007

The Charms of Georgette Heyer

The following excerpt from her relatively early novel--a version of Pygmalion:

from Powder and Patch
Georgette Heyer

He even refused to buy a wig, but wore his own brown hair brushed back from his face and tied loosely at his neck with a piece of black ribbon. No powder, no curls, unpolished nails, and an unpainted face--guiltless, too, of even the smallest patch--it was, thought Cleone, enough to make one weep. Nevertheless, she did not weep, because, for one thing , it would have made her eyes red, and another, it would be of very little use. Philip must be reformed. since she--well, since she did not dislike him.

Gentle irony and subtle humor in prose that is not uncomely and sometimes rises to Austenian heights--Georgette Heyer a much underrated, underread master of the historical romance. It's a shame because there is much fun to be had with Ms. Heyer's magnificent novels.

Interestingly, the roles are reversed here and Philip wants to be loved for Philip

"Little Miss Cleone will have non of you an you fail to men your ways, my son. Do you not know it? What has that dainty piece to do with a raw clod-hopper like yourself?"

Philip answered low.

"If Mistress Cleone give me her love, it will be for me as I am. She is worthy a man, not a powdered, ruffled beau. "

I guess, as the saying goes, we shall see.

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On Chesil Beach

It has taken me a while to decide how I feel about Ian McEwan's most recent book. I finished it some days ago in a flurry of distaste, or perhaps better disgruntlement. Reflecting on it since then, I have changed my mind and decided that my reaction was shaded by how I wanted the book to be and the possibilities I saw in the characters. Unfortunately, I did not write the book.

And I say unfortunately advisedly because it is very much a book I would have like to have written. It is beautifully understated and very controlled. The action takes place essentially in one evening--the wedding evening of a young couple who have gone to the beach for their honeymoon. The subject is the anxiety that is brought to a moment when two inexperienced young people are about to become experienced.

Interestingly, as I started to read the book, I was under the impression that it dealt with a couple in Edwardian times. As I continued, I discovered that it actually begins in 1962. Now, I haven't any basis to reflect on the attitudes of 1962; however, this portrayed quite a different picture than I had conceived of for the time. There are phrases in it like "before it was a virtue to be young" and other such attitudes that I wouldn't have placed so late in time. And yet, perhaps it was so.

The ending. . . ah, the problematic ending, where everything comes together and flies apart--as I said at the start, it isn't what I would have had the book be, and yet there is a post-modern logic and a pre-modern sensibility that informs it and dissects it in a way that is subtle and pointed. I don't know whether I like it yet; however, it is clear from the beginning, foreshadowed throughout, and the obvious capstone on the tale. One cannot fault the story for being consistent.

If you want to read a beautiful, sensitive, incisive, study and deconstruction of the post-modern attitude, you could hardly do better than On Chesil Beach. Obviously, given the theme, recommended for adults only.

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June 7, 2007

Google Books

Google books provides a search that doesn't merely give you key word associations, but allows you to search the entire text for a phrase or word. In addition, you can use the advanced search to carefully limit how the search is conducted and how it is displayed. If you set the parameters accordingly, the results of the search can be a downloadable PDF.

Bill White has been touting this for some time and rightly so. You do have to become fairly expert at searching if you want to avoid a frustrating experience; however, the resources that become available to you as a result are enormous. And given the partnerships that Google is forging, those resources are likely only to become larger.

Yes, I know we love our books, but welcome to the digital age--PDFs are not the most comfortable volumes in the world, and yet the vast universe of things they make available to us may well be worth a little trouble. And in a proper time there will be some clever maker of PDAs who will do the Sony E-Book thing, producing a paperback sized eInk readable screen--who knows what other wonders await?

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June 3, 2007

The Children of Húrin

I have been a long-time admirer of the ability of J.R.R. Tolkien to weave a story. I loved both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings despite some misgivings about both the implicit theology of the works and of much of the writing (most particularly the poetry.) The same problems hold true for this book, only more so.

The Children of Húrin is a long narrative cobbled together from the bits and pieces of a variety of writings--many of them previously published. Christopher Tolkien took upon himself the task to creating a coherent narrative of the whole story and he has done a very fine job.

The problem I have with this book is that it is as though Tolkien were thumbing through the Index of Folklore and Mythology and pulled out some random threads that he then inserted and interpreted with a ruthlessness that may have served the first age of Middle Earth, but doesn't leave the reader satisfied. The net effect is to create a lay, book, story, or what have you in which evil unequivocally triumphs over good. Perhaps only temporarily, but resoundingly, thoroughly, and disastrously. And this is a strain in Tolkien I don't quite trust. He seems to have greater confidence in evil than in good.

At the end of Lord of the Rings the triumph of good leads to the destruction of nearly everything good. Lothlorien is abandoned, the Shire is overrun with foulness, and the elves all leave Middle Earth.

It is naive to assume that the triumph of good means good results for all; however, it is equally naive to assume that evil consistently betters good.

Okay, my quibbles aside, how is The Children of Húrin. For a cobbled-together story it is quite readable and very entertaining. The tale is a bit disjointed, and perhaps because of its origin has bits and pieces that seem extraneous to the main point--but even these extraneous moments are of high interest and so perhaps extraneous only in the sense that we do not have the fuller story that might have resulted had Tolkien ever been led to finish it himself.

The story is told in a convoluted difficult diction that is orotund and epic but doesn't approach the turgidity of some sections of The Simarillion. Overall, once one gets used to the effects of the language, it flows smoothly in its course and helps to create the atmosphere.

So, net recommendation--certainly for Tolkien completists, and perhaps for those who want some insight into the Earlier ages of Tolkien's mythos without the investment of a huge amount of time and energy. But for those who have not found Tolkien easy going, this certainly will not change their minds

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May 23, 2007

Historical-Critical Method

I was pleased to read this in the preface to Jesus of Nazareth by our Pope Benedict XVI.

from Jesus of Nazareth
Pope Benedict XVI

. . . The first point is that the historical-critical method--specifically because of the intrinsic nature of theology and faith--is and remains an indispensable dimension of exegetical work. For it is of the very essence of biblical faith to be about real historical events. It does not tell stories symbolizing suprahistorical truths, but is based on history, history that took place here on this earth. The factum historicum (historical fact) is not an interchangeable symbolic cipher for biblical faith, but the foundation on which it stands: Et incarnatus est--when we say these words, we acknowledge God's actual entry into real history. . . .

The method is a fundamental dimension of exegesis, but it does not exhaust the interpretive task for someone who sees the biblical writings as a single corpus of Holy Scripture inspired by God. . . .

We have to keep in mind the limit of all efforts to know the past: We can never go beyond the domain of hypothesis, because we esimply cannot bring the past into the present. To be sure, some hypotheses enjoy a high degree of certainty, but overall we need to remain conscious of the limit of our certainties. . .

Indeed, . . .some thirty years ago led American scholar to develop the project of "canonical exegesis." The aim of this exegesis is to read individual texts within the totality of one Scripture, which then sheds new light on all the individual texts.

Methods go only so far as the intrinsic limitations can carry you. It is impossible to examine the infinite with anything less than the infinite; however, when looked at from a great diversity of view points, the Infinite comes more clearly into focus than the view of any one school can possibly allow.

I don't do exegesis as such, but every time I pick up the Bible, I recall that it is the passionate narrative of God's love for all of His people. There are certainly themes and variations, but it is the constant, underlying strain of love that guides my reading of any biblical text. God is present and God is telling you that He loves you. Strain to hear this and you cannot go wrong in reading the Scriptures.

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May 22, 2007

Reading List

Not that it matters, but look for reviews here in the near future of Pope Benedict XVI's new book on Jesus and perhaps a couple of mysteries--one hard-boiled in the manner of James M. Cain, the other a historical from the time of the stripping of the Altars in England.

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The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Despite the cover sound-byte from Philip Pullman, Mohsin Hamid's newest book is well worth the attention of anyone interested in good writing.

It is unique: I can think of nothing to compare it to. However, some of its thematic elements are distantly related to V.S. Naipal's A Bend in the River and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to which there is a direct reference in the text.

The story is told as a first person narration of the main character, Changez to an unnamed American who is visiting Pakistan for reasons unknown. As the narration unfolds we learn that Changez came to the United States to attend Princeton. Upon graduating he lands an really fine job with a very exclusive firm and an American girlfriend. And then--9/11, a date that substantially translates Changez's notion of who he is.

The story is deeply personal and highly involving. The language is simple, a long loop of narration that makes one wonder if the man ever shuts up--there is patter for everything--and yet, even so, one does not wish for him to be quiet. The story reveals the core of nationalistic feelings that we sometimes don't even know we have and it shows in quite a different light our own feelings and actions in the present day. Not necessarily so much an indictment, but a personal view, the book is likely to anger some. For me, it was a window into a world I have never even thought about.

And most interesting of all, is the "fundamentalism" of the book. I dare not say more because it would deprive you of one of the pleasure and one of the essential themes of the work--the dual "heart of darkness" at work in the narrative.

For those interested in good writing, a compelling story, and insight into one view of what happened 9/11 and subsequently, I couldn't recommend a better, faster read.

Highly recommended for all.

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May 15, 2007

Ten Prayers God Always Says Yes To

Despite the awkwardness and Jabez-like overtones of the title, this new book by Anthony DeStefano (who also wrote a superb little book titled A Travel Guide to Heaven) is a useful reminder of who we are in Christ.

I know I'm late to the party reviewing this, and I probably have nothing to add that you haven't already heard except, perhaps, I found enough of this book provocative that I ended up quoting small sections of it at a recent day of reflection talk I gave about St. Therese of Lisieux.

Ostensibly written for those still seeking or perhaps a bit green in the faith, there is much inthis book for every Christian regardless of his or her vintage. There are reminders here of truths that we live but often do not sufficiently articulate--therefore truths that are often lost on us.

In a bid at crossing the ecumenical divide, Mr. DeStefano does not quote rafts of passages from the Church Fathers, nor does he cite anything outside of biblical sources, although without doubt he could have done so easily. Indeed, his short reading list is crammed full of Catholic writers from Aquinas to de Caussade, and every source he sites, from Randy Alcorn to E. M. Bounds to Dwight Moody is worthy of the attention that he gives it.

This is the book for the young in faith and for those who need to be reminded of the many things they have forgotten or do not consider often enough. It is a superb, small, readable book with great rewards for every reader.

Highly recommended for all readers and as a gift to persons ambivalent about the Catholic Faith. No question that upon reading this they might be more ready to recognize Catholics as true brothers and sisters in faith.

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May 7, 2007

Books, We Have Books

In the past week, I've received four books, two of which I intend to discuss here without further amplification, two of which I hope to write more extensive reviews of.

The first of those that I will not belabor is a biography of Mother Angelica called, appropriately enough, Mother Angelica by Raymond Arroyo. Mr. Arroyo might be considered Mother Angelica's foremost proponent, supporter, and friend. He prepared a book I reviewed earlier of her sayings, and from my point of view, that way by far the more interesting book--a purely subjective judgment. There is nothing wrong with the style or writing of Mr. Arroyo's book, nor is there anything intrinsically wrong with the subject. When I have more time, I may return to it. However, Mother Angelica simply does not captivate me the way she does some of those who admire her. I have for her a certain amount of admiration and respect, but, unfortunately, no real interest, so a biography is lost on me.

Even so, I dipped in at a few places and found some fascinating details about goings-on in EWTN world as well as information about Mother Angelica's early life.

If you are an admirer of Mother Angelica, you'll probably find this book to your taste. And now that it is in a paperback edition, you'll probably also find it within your budget.

The second book that I'll touch on briefly is by a person whose writing I would like to like more--Scott Hahn. He has produced another opus Reasons to Believe, written in his characteristically irritating evangelical preacher/motivational speaker patois. As with all books by Scott Hahn, it is packed with useful information if you're interested in apologetics or even in simply understanding your own faith better. It is peppered with the personal, which makes it accessible and acceptable reading. Even so, it is thoroughly documented and clearly annotated. There is a wealth of information for those who have an easier time with his prose than I do. Having had my share of the evangelical set, I'm not particularly enchanted with its arrival in Catholic prose; however, once again that is a completely subjective view and does not reflect in any way on Mr. Hahn's ability to clearly express central truths of our Faith. My chief difficulty comes not from the main body of the argument, but from the titles that are pithy, catchy, motivational-speaker types of mnemonics that drive me to distraction: "The Mass of Evidence," "You Have the Rite to Remain Repentant." "Soar All Over." That said, there are far fewer of them in this book than in previous and I have high hopes of being able to place the blinders on sufficiently to get through the rest of it. When he's not making bad puns as part of his patter, the prose is clear, convincingly argued and well-supported.

Two books that I hope to have more to say about later in the week: Anthony DeStefano's Ten Prayers God Always Says Yes To, which, despite its title, is NOT a Catholic version of "The Prayer of Jabez." Also Frank J. Tipler's The Physics of Christianity. I can't tell you how excited I was to receive this latter--I had read some time ago Tipler's The Physics of Immortality and came away somewhat perplexed and feeling like I should have paid more attention SOMEWHERE in school, but I wasn't precisely sure where. However, the main thrust of the book was utterly fascinating.

Below I include a short, intriguing excerpt from the new book because I think it expresses so well my own thoughts about this very subject:

from The Physics of Christianity
Frank J. Tipler

[After a discussion of an electron as a "quantized, relativistic, fermion field, Mr. Tipler continues:]

Similarly, everyone has an image of "God," but to really understand what God really is and how He could interact with the universe, one must use a theory beyond everyday commonsense physics. Contrary to what many physicists have claimed in the popular press, we have had a Theory of Everything for about thirty years. Most physicists dislike this Theory of Everything because it requires the universe to begin in a singularity. That is, they dislike it because the theory is consistent only if God exists, and most contemporary scientists are atheists. They don't want God to exist, and if keeping God out of science requires rejecting physical laws, well, so be it.

My approach to reality is different. I believe that we have to accept the implications of physical law, whatever these implications are. If they imply the existence of God, well then, God exists.

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April 17, 2007

My Life with the Saints

The charms of this book by Father James Martin, S.J. are numerous.

It is simply written. It is deeply personal. It combines autobiography with biography, Fr. Martin's life with the lives of the Saints who have come to mean a great deal to him. In it we learn both about Father Martin and about how the saints can come to have meaning in our own lives.

Father Martin writes about Saints--Bernadette, Francis, Dominic, Ignatius, and about saints, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Pedro Arrupe, and others. In doing so he emphasizes the aspects of the lives of holy people that appeal to him. He emphasizes the dual role of saints--example and intercessor.

As I read through the book I thought about my own list of people who had influenced me and who I hope, are interceding for me constantly at the Father's right hand--St. Therese, St. Teresa, St. Teresa Benedicta, St. John of the Cross, St. Benedict, St. Augustine, St. Charles Foucauld, St. Thomas More, St. Edward Campion, St. Robert Southwell. I also considered those not yet recognized by the church, or possibly never to be recognized by the Church, and yet whose influence has been profound--Walter Hilton, the author of "The Cloud of Unknowing," Thomas a Kempis, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, my