There are two book reviews in the June 7 issue of the New Republic that may be of interest to Commonweal readers. The first is “The Border Crossers,” Peter E. Gordon’s terrific and comprehensive review of John Connelly’s book From Enemy to Brother:  The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965. Connelly is a frequent Commonweal contributor, and an excerpt from his book appeared in our March 24 issue: “Nazi Racism & the Church: How Converts Showed the Way to Resist.” (Another Connelly article relevant to this book, and this review, is his 2008 piece “Reformer & Racialist: Karl Adam’s Paradoxical Legacy.”)

According to Gordon,

It is one of the central lessons of Connelly’s book that the bonds of empathy that made Nostra aetate a historical possibility are far more fragile, and less expansive, than one might care to imagine…. The history of Nostra aetate, writes Connelly, may stand as an instructive lesson on both “the sources but also the limits of solidarity.”

The book sounds fascinating; the review itself is good material for reflection. Here’s Gordon on Connelly’s exploration of the phenomenon of “border crossing” — the conversion of Jews to Christianity, and their vital role in overcoming Catholic anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism:

Although he readily acknowledged his Jewish heritage, [John] Oesterreicher insisted that his efforts to dismantle Catholicism’s tradition of anti-Jewish prejudice represented the genuinely Christian vision.

But it is the major thrust of Connelly’s book that this was not so: Christian empathy toward Jews did not spring spontaneously from Christian sources, he argues, nor did it spring from Judaism. It emerged instead only from the experience of crossing, such that the other could persist within the new self. The Church, Connelly suggests, would not have been capable of coming to this vision without the curious doubling of identity that was brought into its sacred walls from those who, by birth or by faith, would have once been considered outsiders. And if this is true, then the facts of Oesterreicher’s biography hold stronger explanatory weight than his own statements to the contrary. The transgression of borders may leave marks that even the transgressor will not care to acknowledge.

Gordon also comments insightfully on Connelly’s recourse to Scripture:

As a historian, Connelly tries as much as he can to avoid making theological statements of his own—but occasionally one catches sight of a different scholar, who seems drawn to Scripture as the moral standard by which the actions of the Church may be judged deficient. Connelly never openly acknowledges the use of this higher measure, as it would stand in conflict with the imperatives of modern historicism, for which there can be no transcendent norm. But history is only enriched when it opens itself to other modes of thought. This, too, is a kind of border-crossing, and its conflictual energies may help to explain the considerable drama of Connelly’s book.

The other review I’m recommending goes deeper into Scripture scholarship: “The Jew Who Would Be God” is Peter Schäfer’s take on Daniel Boyarin’s The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ. Schäfer (author of The Jewish Jesus: How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other) accuses Boyarin of too little research and too much conceit:

He does not even bother to mention the relevant literature. Instead he pretends to have invented this wheel, and attributes the discovery of the pre-Christian binitarian Jewish theology to himself.

Much careful chapter-and-verse analysis follows, which you may read for yourself. Allow me to skip ahead to one more pithy assessment from Schäfer of The Jewish Gospels:

Boyarin’s book leaves the reader irritated and sad. It has very little that is new to offer—and what appears to be new is wildly speculative and highly idiosyncratic. Even judged by its commendable intentions—to win over dogmatic defenders of the perfect uniqueness of Christianity or Judaism—it is disappointing. As the younger Talmud professor in the acclaimed Israeli movie Footnote says to his hapless student, “There are many correct and new aspects in your paper—only what is new isn’t correct and what is correct isn’t new.”

Which allows me to offer one final internal recommendation before you head off to the New Republic: Rand Richards Cooper’s review of Footnote is here.

[Please read Edward Wheeler’s fine reflection before you read this.]

Two thoughts on democracy and community. First, GK Chesterton says somewhere that tradition in the democracy of the dead. Second, the rap group De La Soul rightly proclaims, “Neighborhoods become ’hoods when people ain’t neighbors.” We can’t take democracy seriously if we don’t take tradition and community seriously. And in order to take these seriously, we also need to take history and hope seriously. Thinking about Moses is a good place to start.

Among their myriad gifts, the essays in Marilynne Robinson’s latest collection, When I was a Child I Read Books, stress the importance of stories and the importance of imagination. The stories we tell about ourselves form who we are and how we relate to others. By necessity, our stories are selective, and one reason to read is to broaden our sense of the limits of our own stories. In the West, the Biblical narrative is one of the most important stories we have for understanding who we are and how our communities have formed. And Moses, needless to say, plays a big role in the Biblical narrative. In two extraordinary essays – “Open Thy Hand Wide: Moses and the Origins of American Liberalism” and “The Fate of Ideas: Moses”  – Robinson helps us understand the Pentatuch anew. “Moses (by whom I mean the ethos and spirit of the Mosaic law, however it came to be articulated) in fact does not authorize any physical punishment for crimes against property. The entire economic and social history of Christendom would have been transformed if Moses had been harkened to only in this one particular” (101). Robinson’s Moses is not the Moses of conquest or punitive laws. Her Moses is the protector of the poor. And as for the supposedly punitive and blood thirsty ancient Israelites, Robinson reminds us, “Every negative thing we know about [the Israelites in the Old Testament], every phrase that is used to condemn them, they supplied, in their incredible self-scrutiny and self-judgment. … The preserved and magnified their vision of the high holiness of God by absorbing into themselves responsibility for their sufferings, and this made them passionately self-accusatory in ways no other people would have thought of being” (111).

Such self-scrutiny is in short supply these days, alas. Read the rest of this entry »

Awhile ago, I wrote about David Stacton’s The Judges of the Secret Court. Stacton was an incredibly prolific and versatile author: he wrote historical fiction and poetry, Westerns and murder mysteries, even some gay pornography. In a 1963 Time article, Stacton was listed as one of the ten most promising young American writers of the time; others on the list included Ralph Ellison, Philip Roth, John Updike, Joseph Heller, and Walker Percy. Fate has not been kind to Stacton. His novels have long been out of print, and few people (including myself) have read anything beyond The Judges of the Secret Court.

Stacton fans now have reason to hope, however. Several of Stacton’s novels have now been made available through the Faber Finds imprint, which Faber & Faber has launched in the hopes of “bringing great writing back into print.” Two of Stacton’s novels–The Self-Enchanted and A Fox Inside–are now available in print-on-demand or ebook format, and more titles will appear in the coming months. (Thanks to Robert Nedelkoff for the heads up.) Faber Finds already includes hundreds of books, everything from W. H. Auden’s edited collection of Nineteenth-Century Minor Poets to H. G. Wells’s Utopian novel Men Like Gods to Lionel Davidson’s Kolymsky Heights. It’s a wonderful initiative, one that will hopefully give neglected writers like Stacton a chance to find new readers.

Marilynne Robinson is an eloquent polemicist. I nod in agreement with her prose even as I half wonder over the target of her attacks. Every essay in her new collection, When I Was a Child I Read Books, asserts the mystery of divine creation and admits no place for the reductive force of modern “scientific” atheism. Amongst other things, she redefines Calvinism, offers a contrarian view of the strictures of Mosaic law, and dispels Eastern establishment condescension towards a Western upbringing. Many of her paragraphs offer sentences that might serve as “points for meditation.” My subject here is human nature, which I will define for these purposes as the difference between a world in which there is a human presence and one in which there are no creatures more like us than the apes. Marilynne Robinson, much like her narrator, Rev. John Ames, in Gilead, is a superb monologist.

Her essay, “Imagination and Community,” won me over in its first paragraph. “Over the years I have collected so many books that, in aggregate, they can fairly be called a library. I don’t know what percentage of them I have read. Increasingly, I wonder how many of them I ever will read. That has done nothing to dampen my pleasure in acquiring more books.”

Here I found a declaration that confirmed in me the joy of buying and possessing books: as if in a purchase one acquired not just the substance of the book but established an intimacy with its author and its characters. Robinson is not writing about collecting or acquisitive greed, but community; in the filling of bookshelves with volumes we are expanding our connections to others. “I would say, for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly.”  A little later she goes on to say: “I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.”

I puzzled over this quotation: “We live on a little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself.” All the force of this assertion lies in “articulable” for language, she argues, is the great communal enterprise; in making articulate the imagination we build community in our lives: “the more generous scale at which the imagination is exerted, the healthier and more humane the community will be.” What Robinson doesn’t work out is the relationship of the community of language users to “reality itself.” Is she asserting that we make sense of the world we perceive only in the functioning of our language? If so, this is a profound rhetorical assertion: her essays then, in welcoming us into her extended community, seek to establish a sense of reality by articulation of her vision. These essays, as they are exercises in the imagination, determinedly, are “real” refusals to reduce the human to the material. Her great novels, Housekeeping, Home, and Gilead, do this more so. To understand writing, fiction and essays both, in this way is to understand language sacramentally – an outward sign of the conferring of grace

In Gilead, John Ames reflects on his role as preacher. He says, “A good sermon is one side of a passionate conversation . . . There are three parties to it, of course, but so are there even to the most private thought – the self that yields the thought, the self that acknowledges and in some way responds to the thought, and the Lord. That is a remarkable thing to consider.” So they are, the essays in When I Was a Child I Read Books.

In Rose Tremain’s historical novel Restoration, two characters discuss the importance of background to a painting’s overall effect. Even in a portrait, where the viewer’s attention is drawn primarily towards a single central figure, background is crucial:

[the background] must flatter. More, it must lend permanence to the life of the sitter, no matter how brief his actual existence may turn out to be … a picture must be composed so that no part of it is ‘dead,’ so that, wherever the eye wanders, there is interest, whether it is in the detail on the hilt of the sword or a minutely rendered rowing boat on a distant Arcadian shore.

In discussing the relationship between foreground and background, Tremain isn’t just speaking of painting; she’s also talking about the historical novel. We read historical novels, after all, not just to experience the actual or imagined existence of their characters, but to see how these characters grow out of—and, in interesting ways, depart from—their particular historical moments. In other words, it’s not just that we have interest in the “detail on the hilt of the sword”; these details are part of the reason that we read historical novels in the first place. Hence the complaints of anachronism that have plagued the genre since the time of Walter Scott: “Jacobite hilts weren’t like that at all!”  Read the rest of this entry »

I have been rereading Anna Karenina ( the Constance Garnett translation) and had to stop over a chapter that connected a recourse of novelists and theories of mind. The scene is one in which Anna’s husband, Alexey Alexandrovitch, visits a lawyer (unnamed) to begin divorce proceedings. The lawyer is carefully described: [he] was a little, squat, bald man, with a dark, reddish beard, light-colored long eyebrows, and an overhanging brow. He was attired as though for a wedding, from his cravat to his double watch-chain and varnished boots. His face was clever and manly, but his dress was dandified and in bad taste. Now this seems indirect style, that the judgment of the last line is that of Alexey Alexandrovitch (not of the narrator’s) who is acutely aware of his exposing his own dignity to ridicule – hinted at earlier in his reluctance to have his name publicly announced in the lawyer’s reception room. Disapproval and condescension suffuse the description.

The tension, that arising from Alexey’s forced need to open his inmost grief over his wife’s infidelity to a lawyer beneath him in station, works itself out in a peculiar snapping up of moths and a telling dance of the eyes. The lawyer precedes his discussion with Alexy by surprising him with an adroit capturing of a moth: The lawyer, with a swiftness that could never have been expected of him, opened his hands, caught the moth, At the end of the interview, in the one moment we have access to the lawyer’s inner thoughts, he says to himself that he gives up catching moths, finally deciding that next winter he must have the furniture covered with velvet, like Sigonin’s. His abandonment of one sort of predatory delight is occasioned by that of another: the lawyer, we gather, anticipates the size of the fees that he will capture from having Alexy Alexandrovich in his hands, in a reversal of positions of authority. Moths seems particularly suitable images here: they threaten domestic fabric, their harm comes by expectation, the change to velvet upholstery (financed by the expected fees) will obviate the need to be vigilant.

The capture of moths brackets a technique everywhere evident in Tolstoy: the revelations of the face and eyes, that is the communication that occurs without words in conversations and this chiefly mediated through the eyes. As I was reading this, I happened to see an episode of Charlie Rose’s show that focused on the brain, in particular the psychology, neurophysiology and the genetics of autism. In the course of the discussions, the researchers gathered around Rose’s table agreed that the chief manifestation of autism is the inability of one so affected to create a mental map, a theory of mind, for those with whom they have relationships. Quite simply those with autism do not look in the eyes of another person and cannot anticipate the path or greater map along which a conversation might go. Hence they remain disconnected, isolated, not able to enter properly into dialogue.

Almost as a complete reverse of this is the technique so effectively used in this scene by Tolstoy. Consider the following excerpts:

Alexey Alexandrovitch, following the lawyer’s movements with wondering eyes . . .

Alexey Alexandrovitch glanced at his face, and saw that the shrewd, gray eyes were laughing, and seemed to know all about it already

The lawyer’s gray eyes tried not to laugh, but they were dancing with irrepressible glee, and Alexey Alexandrovitch saw that it was not simply the delight of a man who has just got a profitable job: there was triumph and joy, there was a gleam like the malignant gleam he saw in his wife’s eyes.

He let his eyes rest on Alexey Alexandrovitch’s feet, feeling that he might offend his client by the sight of his irrepressible amusement. ,

he went on, stealing a glance now and then at Alexey Alexandrovitch’s face, which was growing red in patches.

“It may be obtained if you give me complete liberty of action,” said the lawyer, not answering his question. “When can I reckon on receiving information from you?” he asked, moving towards the door, his eyes and his varnished boots shining.

The force of the power struggle and the defeat of Alexey Alexandrovitch is expressed not so much in the dialogue but in the recognition of the meaning of the look or the gaze. In this the whole hierarchy of class structure, the sense of humiliation and of triumph, and the vulnerability of Alexy Alexandrovitch are revealed. The latter’s attitude towards his wife is conditioned by the eyes. He sees Ana as the lawyer sees him. The two characters have clear mental maps and theories of mind that allow them to understand each other beyond words. And then the dancing moth of domestic destruction can go on flying, and its processes work to their tragic conclusion.

I have a letter published in the June 2012 Harper’s, regarding the Elisabeth Badinter article I blogged about here a while back. I sent 700 words and they published 70. Chopping up letters is an editor’s prerogative—and I should know—so I’m not put out about that, although it would be nice if more of the published words had come directly from my letter, or if the point I was making had been preserved a bit more faithfully. Since that post of mine prompted many comments, I thought I’d share the letter in full here. It’s a rewrite of the blog post, but I think it does a better and more concise (though obviously not concise enough) job of making my point – which is not “How dare Elisabeth Badinter say mean things about breastfeeding/La Leche League!” but rather “This essay is so cheaply provocative and poorly argued that I’m surprised Harper’s published it.” (That’s why I wrote about it here at Verdicts; it’s the journalism I was criticizing.)

The letter is after the jump. A couple other observations first: mine is one of four letters published in response to Badinter’s article. The first and longest is, appropriately, from a La Leche League leader, pointing out some things Badinter got flat wrong about the organization. The fourth is from someone who thinks Badinter’s piece was “excellent” but didn’t go far enough. And the second makes half of a point I read several places, including the comments on my post, in response to the article. I say “half of a point” because the letter begins, “Badinter neglects to mention that the infant-formula industry stands to lose much of its $8 billion in global annual profits if women abandon the bottle for breast milk.” True enough. But the reason this is particularly relevant to Badinter’s piece is that—as commenter Sarah Blain noted here—“The author is an advertising billionaire, heir to and partner in Publicis, Nestlé’s advertising agency.” The letter Harper’s published did not point that out, at least not as edited. I confess to finding that slightly fishy, since they must have received at least one other letter making that connection (if women like Blain followed through on their promises), and there was no shortage of comment elsewhere on the conflict of interest behind The Conflict.

That connection did not initially strike me as something Harper’s should have felt obliged to disclose when they published the essay – there are a couple degrees of separation between Badinter and the infant-formula industry, and it’s not as though she needed that connection to motivate her to write some contrarian claptrap about mothering. The financial benefit, after all, is pretty direct: underinformed prattling about breastfeeding might sell formula, but it definitely sells books. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a relevant point. It certainly helps me understand how Badinter came to approach the subject of breastfeeding from the angle she did. (As Blain put it: “There are so many interesting things to say about mothering infants, but when Bandinter talks, all I hear is ‘buy Enfamil.’”) One of the odd things about the essay was that she wrote as if it were established that bottle-feeding is the normal way to nourish a kid, and breastfeeding was some weird thing a bunch of women invented in the ’50s to make mothering harder. Her perspective is very much that of the aggrieved formula manufacturer: “It seems to make little difference,” she sniffs, “that there is now a wide variety of formula available, that it is more and more like breast milk…” Well, it does make a difference for her argument, in that it demonstrates that even formula companies now admit that “breast is best” and that breast milk should be given priority as a matter of health, not just parenting style.

And then there was that bizarre quotation from “AlternaMoms.com.” As I wrote in my blog post, I had never heard of or seen that website when I read the essay. I did finally look it up, and it’s not exactly the Huffington Post. It is, as you might expect from the name, very low-tech and low-profile. Why would Badinter ever have found it in the first place? Perhaps it has something to do with the “I boycott Nestle. Ask me why” button featured on the homepage? (That button, by the way, leads to a broken Geocities link. Yes, Ms. Badinter, you really have your journalistic finger on the pulse of modern motherhood.)

Anyway, as I said, my letter is below (first as published, and then as written). The magazine world and the blogosphere have moved on, because Time, ever classy, is marking Mother’s Day with an even more provocative and totally clueless cover story about breastfeeding. I will send you over to my sister’s blog to read more on that, since this is really her beat. I love her suggestion for an article that might actually be worth reading: “WHY CAN’T WE GET OVER OUR BREASTFEEDING HANGUPS, WHICH ARE TRUTHFULLY FAR CREEPIER THAN BREASTFEEDING?” Word.

My letter as published in Harper’s: Read the rest of this entry »

Henning Mankell, the Swedish mystery writer, appears to have brought his dark, gifted and melancholic hero, Kurt Wallender, to a tired end. One wonders if the burden of success – and the Wallender series has been very successful – increased the desperation with which the detective in the Ystad police force approaches the solution of his last case. Mankell has, over the course of ten Wallender novels, established himself as far more than a writer of police procedurals. (His web site details his other books, his work in the theater and his social activism in Mozambique and South Africa.) His dedication and creativity appear inexhaustible, just as Wallender heads, exhausted, to something like oblivion. How does a writer continue to sustain such a success as Wallender in terms of the expectation of readers?

My reading life will suffer a real loss now that there will be no more of Kurt. The complexity of his character, developed over so many books, his unsparingly revealed weaknesses, and strengths, and the dense family web of relationships in which Wallender operates push the genre into serious fiction. Renewing his acquaintance (Almost ten years separate this Wallender title from its predecessor.) brought home just what good company Mankell provides.

The plot of The Troubled Man centers on a missing persons inquiry; Haken von Enke, who is to be the father-in-law of Wallender’s daughter, disappears. Haken has had a long, apparently distinguished naval career, and just before his disappearance confesses to Kurt, in most ambiguous terms, a fear for his life just as he is about to conclude an investigation into espionage that had occurred some twenty or more years before. The disappearance leads to the suspicious death of Haken’s wife, lengthy interviews with Haken’s former naval associates, a trip to Berlin and an interview with a former CIA operative. All this results in a deviously complex story of spying and counter-spying, one that ends in surprising – and bloody – revelations. As is every “who-done-it,” the energy of the plot comes from the procedural, the clues sorted, the interrogations made, the puzzle pieces to be fitted, but this novel is as much a meditation on mortality and life’s significance as it is about deceit and betrayal.

Wallender is troubled: he suffers from lapses of memory, from acute diabetes that sends him into shock. The great love of his life, Baiba, makes a last, surprise visit to him, announcing her own imminent death, The single assurance in these grim days appears in his granddaughter and his increasingly strong relationship with his daughter Linda. But here too, his former wife, Mona, intrudes as she collapses more and more under the weight of her addiction to alcohol. Without giving the climactic scenes away, I can say that the story’s conclusion is a decision about a life’s achievement, the accounting for what one has done and failed to do, in the time allotted.  Again, the burden of discovery and concealment falls on Wallender, who struggles, despite his successes, with the larger failure of his bodily frame.

There is a grimness in the final few pages; the valediction is an assertion of privacy, almost a warning to the reader that any more novels about Wallender would constitute a breach in confidentiality. Leave him alone, Mankell says. He refuses to offer any more to a demanding public, and he makes an assertion about the integrity of his own creation. There is in this something entirely understandable and something that points to other burdens, particularly the art of writing fiction. It appears to Mankell as a god-like power to create life, sustain it, and then, at will, end it.  These final paragraphs stamp the Wallender series and lift it to a consideration of the limits of realism and the nature of artistic creation. We are forced to ask in the largest sense, “Who done it?”

Written by the sixteen-year-old Mozart with a libretto by Pietro Metastasio, “Il sogno di Scipione” was performed by the Gotham Chamber Opera at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College, April 11-21. I caught the next to the last performance. According to the conductor’s notes (Neal Goren), “The vocal writing is far more virtuosic than in any of Mozart’s other work, even such throat-twisters as Mitridate, which was composed one year earlier. Two of the tenor roles and all three soprano roles call for effortless high C’s and relentless vocal agility. I can think of no other opera in the entire repertory with such uncompromising technical requirements.” That didn’t stop the director (Christopher Alden) from putting his very young singers through all sorts of acrobatic stage business as they sang their endless da capo arias, quite beautifully too. One gorgeous soprano (Marie-Eve Munger) changed her entire outfit down to bra and panties six or seven times during one of her numbers. The only moment of rest in the opera was during the overture. From the start you see a handsome, young dude sleeping (Michele Angelini, our Scipio). Then you realize there’s a beautiful woman in bed with him. Toward the end of the overture you realize there’s a second woman in the bed. They’re the goddesses of Fortune and Constancy come to woo Scipio. While Fortuna sang her florid clothes-changing aria, Constanza (Susannah Biller) silently did a whole yoga routine (very creditably!) and Scipio humped a pillow. One of the tenors (Chad A. Johnson) played a one-legged war hero, the ghost of Scipio’s ancestor, Scipio Africanus, I imagine. All the time he was flopping around the stage (even with only one leg he was required to do a heck of a lot of “action”) I couldn’t figure out how he/they did it. It was only at the curtain call that I realized that he really is one-legged! Or was it all merely un sogno or via some high-tech whizardry?

Mozart wrote the opera in 1771 for the ordination to priesthood of his patron, Sigismond, Count Schrattenbach, but poor Siggie died before he could be ordained. Mozart then offered it for the installation of Archbishop Colloredo, but it apparently wasn’t accepted. (Imagine such entertainment today, let’s say, for the celebration of Cardinal Dolan’s elevation to the College of Cardinals.) The world premiere of “Il sogno di Scipione” was in Salzburg in — get this — 1979! It was wonderful to see so many young artists so accomplished as singers and actors. Ironic when the operatic audience here and elsewhere is generally so old. Is that supposed to cheer us up or fill us with envy?

Higher education is much in the news these days. The New Yorker has an article about Stanford’s relationship with Silicon Valley. Frank Bruni worries about philosophy majors finding jobs, and Charles Morris worries that college is becoming a luxury item. In the latest Commonweal, Denis O’Brien reviews Andrew Delbanco’s latest book. (Delbanco’s book was on my to-read list before I read O’Brien’s review, and the review only made me want to read the book more.)

Part of our problem in talking about “college” is that it has become an umbrella term for a vast array of post-secondary education. A student studying information technology at a land grant Midwestern state university is in college, as is a student studying art history at a small liberal arts college in Iowa. Students enrolled in two-year associate degree programs to become physical therapy assistants are in college, as are students enrolled in four-year business degree programs at Catholic universities in the northeast. Colleges are public and private, residential and commuter, sectarian or non-sectarian, for-profit and not-for-profit. I think this diversity is a great asset, and it makes American higher education unique in the world. Yet we should be clear students who attend these various schools are not looking for the same thing in their “college experience.”

Of the four different educational scenarios I’ve just presented, my guess is that the most difficult one to justify is the student who chooses to study art history at a small liberal arts college. Indeed, if your reason for attending college is to get a “good job” afterwards, spending a significant chunk of your college education studying the Parthenon frieze or the competition for the doors of the Florentine baptistry or the shift from abstract expressionism to pop might seem like a waste of time and money. Given the high cost of college, people need good reasons for choosing a broad liberal arts education. (And here, when I say “broad liberal arts education,” I mean studying English literature or classics or biology or mathematics or history, subjects that are not direct training for a career.)

The best justification I’ve read for such a choice comes from Mark William Roche’s book Why Choose the Liberal Arts? (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010). Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Harris (author of Pompeii, The Ghost Writer, the Cicero trilogy, and others) has published a new novel, The Fear Index, which is as much a primer in hedge funds and computer controlled algorithmic trading in stocks as it is an engrossing thriller. The particular conflict that the book raises is not science fiction. Harris confessed in a PBS interview that the premise of his plot, that a trading program should scan corporate reports, financial columns and other business news to detect any mention of worry, unease, expectations of loss, or panic and use these as the basis of trading, was not simply his invention; it was old news. He had been preempted by real life practices.

Alex Hoffman, the beleaguered protagonist, is a brilliant computer scientist who develops a program (VIXAL-4), an example of “autonomous machine learning,” that produces a thinking machine that learns and makes decisions on its own – ultimately beyond the control of its creator. Sound familiar?  Harris cues the Frankenstein subtext in an epigraph to one of his chapters. Succeeding epigraphs from Darwin’s Origins of Species and The Descent of Man indicate the evolutionary struggle of the survival of the fittest, now taking the form of organic life against machine intelligence. Alex’s financial program trades on fear and then teaches human beings to fear, computes to maximize profit, and then disposes of the human agents who get in its way, its creator being the foremost. The impossible speed with which it makes calculations lends it a superlative “calculating” intelligence (artificial, but the more ruthless for this reason). The further irony is that it is invariably  effective in making money – the purpose of its creation.

There is an intriguing ironic parallel between Alex, the program’s creator, in his apparent mental imbalance, and the program’s strictly rational and utterly “mad” decisions. Approaching the apocalyptic and fiery conclusion to the novel, I heard echoing from Kubrick’s “2001” past, “Open the pod doors, Hal.” Alas, there is no compliance or grotesque rendering of the “Daisy, Daisy” tune to soften the response.

To be sure there is much more to the book than the complexities of computer trading. Alex faces many “fear factors” including an attack on his life, a conspiracy to steal his electronic identity and the possible loss of his adored and adoring wife, Gabrielle. The assault upon his marriage places Alex in an impossible situation, attempting to explain to Gabrielle betrayals that only he could have authored, but about which he knows nothing. Her defensive reaction has Alex glimpsing his creation’s deleterious effect, poisoning both the idealism of his mathematics and the trust in their relationship; what is most human is at risk from what is most artificial. Alex is victim, strategist, fugitive and misunderstood hero in the course of the novel’s convoluted plotting. He struggles for his life in a knife fight with an “on-line” partner in death, and manages to avoid the programmed machinations of a descending elevator. The plot also offers us, as an alternative perspective, Inspector Leclerc, an aging laconic Swiss detective who attempts to trace the source of the crimes against Alex as well as Alex’s own criminal acts. He witnesses with the reader Alex’s suicidal act (and survival) in the concluding inferno. Leclerc is excluded, finally, from real understanding. Alex’s self-sacrifice, the reader understands, is undercut by the parallel survival of his self-declared nemesis, his creature, VIXAL.

The pace of the novel, the elements of suspense and surprise, make it compelling reading. Its premise appears frighteningly familiar in these days volatile markets driven by increasingly powerful (and independent) forms of machine intelligence. Harris leaves the reader waking up on the day after, none the more secure in the belief that “it” is over. Somewhere, not too far in the background, machine “life” computes to its own survival.

Forty years ago, I sat, afternoon after afternoon, for almost two years, in the Upper Reading Room of the Bodleian Library. I was purportedly pursuing literary research (I had done the serious work before lunch, honestly!), but really I was reading novels that were loosely connected to the time encompassed by my thesis. “Calling up” books, waiting for them to be fetched from the stacks, and then opening what proved almost consistently to be first editions, evoke a golden time that nostalgia paints deceptive sepia.  The catalogue at that time had the form of large folio ledgers, divided at some arbitrary year (I do not remember which.) because the original set of ledgers had simply filled up. Even opening their pages could be perilous for the entries on long rectangular strips of paper, especially the older ones, were often loosely attached and fluttered to the floor. How to replace such an errant entry? Read the rest of this entry »

At the suggestion of Matthew Boudway, I recently picked up G. A. Cohen’s If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? I’m glad that I did. Besides having a superb title, Cohen’s book is perhaps the most philosophically sophisticated, morally persuasive analysis of inequality that I’ve ever read. Read the rest of this entry »

What is it that makes a reader become interested in a really rather unpleasant character, especially when it’s the central character, even sometimes the narrator, of a work of fiction? The obvious examples that spring to my mind at least are the awful Bendrix in Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, Tony Soprano, Sherlock Holmes or even Hannibal Lecter. There are of course pretty dreadful specimens with whom we connect out of pity or self-recognition, like the unspeakably self-obsessed George Costanza of Seinfeld fame, and in this case humor is his salvation. Not bad for someone with no sense of humor at all. And before you stop me, there are female counterparts aplenty, starting from Emma Bovary and Hedda Gabler, moving on to the Wicked Witch of the West, Velma in Chandler’s Farewell My Lovely and Mrs. Danvers in du Maurier’s Rebecca. Some of these characters exercise the kind of hypnotic fascination of a cobra, perhaps, but they all have interest. Most of them dominate the places in which they appear, though they are not the least bit admirable.

I am posing this question as I try to make some sense of why I, like so many others, find Edward St. Aubyn’s protagonist, Patrick Melrose, so fascinating. With the recent publication of At Last, a five-novel sequence comes to an end. The first four were Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope and Mother’s Milk, the last one a finalist for the Booker Prize. They tell the story of moments in Patrick’s life, as a small child, a befuddled heroin addict, an alcoholic and a middle-aged man struggling with his Mrs. Jellyby-style mother giving away his inheritance to a shady New Age Irishman named Seamus. They take place in a world of social privilege and snobbery, and now in At Last his mother’s funeral provides the context for the faint stirrings of a possible resolution. Read the rest of this entry »

W. H. Auden’s poetic sequence “Horae Canonicae” has the subtitle, “Immolatus vicerit.” These words come from the sixth-century Latin hymn Pange Lingua Gloriosi Proelium Certaminis. They mean, “Sacrificed, he will be victorious.”

“Horae Canonicae” gets its title from the Church’s canonical hours, and each of the sequence’s seven poems refers to a specific, fixed time of prayer: “Prime,” “Terce,” “Sext,” “Nones,” “Vespers,” “Compline,” and “Lauds.” In Auden’s poems, Christ’s Passion is remembered in a way that can only be called sacramental: the Paschal sacrifice is re-presented, made living and painful and triumphant, once again.

“Prime” begins by representing the joy with which we meet the new day. (Auden throughout the sequence uses the first person—“I” and “we”—to indicate that the narrative he tells is about all people.) Cleansed of our nighttime thoughts, “recalled from the shades to be a seeing being,” we feel free of willfulness and self-consciousness: “The world is present, about, / And I know that I am, here, not alone / But with a world and rejoice.” We are like Adam, seemingly unbesmirched by sin or regret: “Still the day is intact, and I / The Adam sinless in our beginning, / Adam still previous to any act.”

This Edenic state, however, cannot last. To move out of bed is to move into the world of will and action, and therefore into the world of sin:

I draw breath; that is of course to wish

No matter what, to be wise,

To be different, to die and the cost,

No matter how, is Paradise

Lost of course and myself owing a death.

As we read “Terce,” corresponding to the 9:00 am prayer, the looming specter of death becomes more real. The hangman sets off for work, confident in his abilities even though he doesn’t “know yet who will be provided / To do the high works of Justice with”; the judge goes to the courtroom, not clear “by what sentence / He will apply on earth the Law that rules the stars,” but knowing that such earthly judgments will be required of him. Though the hangman is uncertain of precisely who will be punished, though the judge doesn’t yet know what legal measures he will find to enforce this punishment, they both know one thing—that punishment will happen:

[Each] knows already that, in fact, our prayers are heard,

That not one of us will slip up,

That the machinery of our world will function

Without a hitch, that today, for once,

There will be no squabbling on Mount Olympus,

No Chthonian mutters of unrest,

But no other miracle, knows that by sundown

We shall have had a good Friday.

Sinful and weak, we demand a sacrifice, and this is what guarantees that we will in fact have a Good Friday. In “Nones,” the 3:00 pm hour devoted to remembering Christ’s death, we will deny our complicity in the murderous sacrifice: “All if challenged would reply / —“It was a monster with one red eye, / A crowd that saw him die, not I.” But we will know that this isn’t so, that we are as guilty as the actual executioners: “The hangman has gone to wash, the soldiers to eat: / We are left alone with our feat.”

Today, the Church looks hopefully towards Easter, when “we, too, may come to the picnic / With nothing to hide, join the dance / As it moves in perichoresis, / Turns about the abiding tree.” At that moment, we will experience “the instant of recollection,” and we will know the “plot” and “meaning” of the sacrifice.

But, Auden says, we are not there yet. What we do today is remember. Today, we remain at Calvary: “Shaken awake, facts are facts, / (And I shall know exactly what happened / Today between noon and three).”

This weekend brings a momentous decision: To watch, or not to watch, Season 2 of “The Killing”? Anyone who forged through the first season of this AMC police procedural (a remake of a Danish hit) last year is probably still fuming about the lack of answers in the final episode. For weeks, we had been watching the stubborn and slightly self-destructive Seattle detective Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos) plod around the city—often in the pouring rain—as she attempted to solve the murder of high school student Rosie Larsen. We had glimpsed the light at the end of the tunnel: Following an ingenious bit of gumshoe work, a culprit had been arrested! Justice had been served! Detective Linden was on a plane to sunnier climes! And then, the episode’s final minutes—with fiendish glee, it seemed—subverted that resolution, saddling us with questions we have now lived with for almost a year.

 According to The New York Times, AMC’s head of original programming has promised that the whodunit will be wrapped up—really and truly—at the end of Season 2, which begins this Sunday. Of course, even if we trust his pledge, there remains the fact that “The Killing” has so far been a real downer of a program. Many of its elements—the red-herring clues, the multiple suspects, the sleuth with personal problems, the law-enforcement turf battles—are detective-story standards. But has there ever been a police procedural that focused so intensely on the grief of the victim’s family? In Season 1, scene after scene conveyed the Larsens’ pain: We saw Rosie’s parents suffer as they planned her funeral and suffer as they debated whether to clean out her room and suffer as they fielded detectives’ questions. We saw Rosie’s younger brothers suffer, too, as their pain-deluged parents ignored them. (In one heartbreaking scene, the boys, getting their own breakfast, wondered whether they dared eat some of their dead sibling’s favorite breakfast cereal.)

 The cinematography made the saga even more depressing: Season 1 was shot in blue tones that made each image even more lugubrious than it might have been otherwise. The police headquarters, in particular, might have been dredged up from the bottom of the Slough of Despond. All in all, “The Killing” strays far from the escapist-puzzle mode that is the default option for the mystery genre. And yet….Yes, I admit it. I will watch Season 2. The lingering suspense from Season 1 is just too strong. But listen, AMC: Don’t count on me for any Season 3.

The paperback edition of David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published The Pale King has just been released. At the top of the front cover, the publishers have let us know that the paperback contains “four previously unpublished scenes.” Over at the Millions, you can read one of these unpublished scenes in full.

As I mentioned in my review at the time, it’s a bit of a misnomer to call The Pale King Wallace’s “last novel.” More accurately, it’s a collection of writings unified (barely) around a set of themes: boredom and its relation to transcendence, consciousness and its relation to crippling self-doubt. As such, The Pale King is an excellent introduction to Wallace’s work—it’s the one book I would recommend to someone who hasn’t read Wallace before and wants to give him a shot—and the excerpted scene on the Millions is itself an excellent introduction to The Pale King. It gives you a sense of Wallace’s wildly inventive syntax, his ability to add clause upon clause upon clause so as to make sentences that don’t so much build towards a conclusion as uncoil and recoil endlessly; it illustrates Wallace’s abiding interest in the specifics of Midwestern culture and geography (“Peoria and Lake James and Pekin were corn, Decatur and Springfield soybeans for the Japanese”); and, finally, it shows Wallace’s concern, despite his famous stylistic experimentation and intense authorial self-consciousness, for achieving “exacting care and metal-minded clarity and precision.” In fact, it’s one of the many wonders of Wallace’s writing that he is able to achieve such care, clarity, and precision not in spite of his postmodern tricks but through them.

Anyway, the paperback edition of The Pale King is well worth the investment, both for those who don’t own the hardcover and even for those who do.

Sometimes things are hidden in plain sight. I haven’t blogged for a few weeks because the books I’ve been reading have either been disappointing (Stephen Greenblatt’s Swerve), endless (Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem: a Biography, which is superb, but I’m barely half way through it), or predictable (Harold Bloom’s latest on the King James Bible. I’m enjoying it, but, well, basta Bloom).

Yet the extraordinary books I’m privileged to teach have been in front of me the whole time. Right now, my students and I are discussing Soren Kierkegaard’s masterpiece Works of Love, which, I would argue, is one of the most important discussions of love in the western canon. Kierkegaard structures the book as a series of essays that interpret Biblical passages about love. As Lent gives way to the Triduum and Easter, and Christians prepare to celebrate the love of God shown in the death and resurrection of the Son, Kierkegaard’s words are particularly timely. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week’s New Yorker contains a typically wonderful short story by Alice Munro. (Here it is; subscription required.) “Haven” tells the story of a young girl who is forced to live with her aunt and uncle for a year during the 1970s after her parents go off to teach in Ghana. The move from one household to another is a culture shock. The narrator’s parents, who lived in Vancouver before leaving for Africa, are liberal both in religion (they are Unitarians and believe, the girl says, “that every person has his own idea of God”) and in lifestyle: they encourage religious discussion, afford the women of the house a real voice, and generally maintain an environment of “intellectual seriousness and physical disorder.”

Things are altogether different with Aunt Dawn and Uncle Jasper. There, grace is said before every meal, without fail. There, the house is clean and crisp, with “bright sterling spoons and forks, polished dark floors, comforting linen sheets.” There, gender roles are defined quite clearly. Jasper is a doctor, and Dawn is a housewife; he talks, and she listens; “the house was his, the choice of menus his, the radio and television programs his,” while the cleaning and the cooking are hers (with help from a maid named Bernice). At one point, the girl tries to sum up the feel of the household: “‘Haven’ was the word. ‘A woman’s most important job is making a haven for her man.’ Did Aunt Dawn actually say that? I don’t think so. She shied away from statements. I probably read it in one of the housekeeping magazines I found in the house. Such as would have made my mother puke.”

In an essay trumpeting Munro’s brilliance, Jonathan Franzen praised the writer’s “rhetorical restraint” and her “almost pathological empathy for her characters.” Given these gifts, it should come as no surprise that Munro challenges the easy binaries—liberal versus conservative, lively versus stultified—laid out above. We come to see that an orderly house “could be quite agreeable,” even if this agreeableness comes at a cost, and that charitable intentions can unwittingly hurt others. (As the narrator says, “I had not approved of my parents’ going to Africa. I had objected to being dumped—my word for it—with my aunt and uncle. I may even have told them, my long-suffering parents, that their good works were a load of crap.”)

Munro even succeeds in humanizing the bullying Jasper. At one point, after being served a dissatisfying meal, Jasper quietly expresses his disapproval and then makes himself a peanut butter sandwich: “he had eaten [all of the meal] before pronouncing his verdict. So he was propelled not by hunger but by the need to make a statement of pure and mighty disapproval.” This is Jasper at his worst, domineering and uncaring.

But even here, Munro forces us to reconsider the situation: “It occurs to me now that something might have gone wrong at the hospital that day, somebody might have died who wasn’t supposed to—perhaps the problem wasn’t the food at all. But I don’t think that occurred to Aunt Dawn—or, if it did, she didn’t let her suspicion show. She was all contrition.” The conditional—“might have”—is a distinctively Munrovian tense, and “Haven” is shot through with “maybes” and “perhapses.” Munro’s fiction is obsessed with what might have happened, both in the sense of lost opportunity (characters constantly think of how their lives might have turned out differently) and in the sense of the ultimate mystery of other people: we can never know what other people are thinking or feeling, a fact that should lead to sympathy and forgiveness.

This isn’t to say that Munro explains away all wrongdoing. Regardless of why Jasper reacted in the way he did, his actions hurt Dawn, and this is a fact that can’t be ignored. Rather, Munro reminds us that people are more complex—both more culpable and more deserving of forgiveness—than we normally imagine.  This is something that Munro’s stories have been teaching us for a long time. “Haven” is further proof that Alice Munro is one of our best best living writers.

Harper’s is trolling. And who can blame them? Nothing like a salvo in the “mommy wars” to boost your readership. The article title on the March cover certainly caught my eye: “The Tyranny of Breast-Feeding: New Mothers vs. La Leche League.” It’s an excerpt from Elisabeth Badinter’s forthcoming book The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women, and what bothers me about it isn’t the perspective. I expected to be at least a little sympathetic. No, what bothers me is the article’s sloppy argumentation—the way it tries to push buttons without bothering to build its case. (The official name for this, as I learned from the New Yorker, is “contrarian feminism.”)

Some necessary background, for those of you not up on the latest in high-stakes parenting debates: In the West right now, breastfeeding is officially in. It’s the doctor-recommended way to be a good mother. And exclusive breastfeeding (that is, no source of nourishment but mother’s milk) until the sixth month is the gold standard. Experts agree it’s best for baby to drink the milk specifically manufactured for that baby, but it’s not so easy to achieve, at least not if you, as a mother, intend to do anything else during those six months. I can say this with some authority because my seven-month-old son was one of those lucky “EBF” (exclusively breastfed) babies for the first six months of his life. He still nurses a lot more than he eats solid food, and I’m here to tell you that keeping him nourished and happy is wonderful and rewarding and exhausting and hard.

A generation or two ago, by contrast, breastfeeding was definitely not in. Babies drank from bottles, and the way you knew you were a good mother was by monitoring how many ounces they consumed. Nursing babies had become something only weirdos and hippies did. Enter La Leche League, a group formed in the mid-1950s by a group of women who wanted to nurse their babies and offer support to other like-minded moms. They’re the villains of Badinter’s essay. Read the rest of this entry »

The Illuminated Easter Proclamation, illustrated by Deacon Charles Rohrbacher

Liturgical Press, 2011; $79.95

I’ve long been intrigued by the phenomenon of exsultet scrolls. The medieval practice, found principally in Southern Italy, of singing the exsultet from a richly illuminated scroll, brought together visual and musical arts in an incomparable way. (You can see an example here.) In exsultet scrolls, the illustrations are painted upside down, so that as the scroll unrolls over the lectern, those close enough to see can enjoy looking at the pictures right side up.

Scrolls, unfortunately, are notoriously hard to manage for modern people unaccustomed to handling a rotulus. To unroll a scroll over a lectern at the right pace while singing is a feat of dexterity you wouldn’t want to charge to just anybody! We are much more comfortable turning the pages of a book. Thus, the idea of adorning a book from which this splendid text could be sung at the paschal vigil seems a natural development. Sadly however, no such illuminated ritual book for the exsultet has been published in modern times (to my knowledge)—until now. Read the rest of this entry »

Literary critic James Wood has an interesting post up on the New Yorker’s website this morning. In it, he writes that Rick Santorum’s environmental stance is “coherent only within a theological eschatology” that is distinctively Protestant in nature; to Wood, Santorum sounds less like a 21st-century Catholic than “like an eighteenth-century American Puritan.” Here’s a taste:

So when Santorum says that we must be good stewards of the earth, there is religious zealotry behind the sweet words. He is proposing, in effect, that the earth is dispensable but that our souls are not; that we will all outlive the earth, whether in heaven or hell. The point is not that he is elevating man above the earth; it is that he is separating man and earth. If President Obama really does elevate earth over man (accepting Santorum’s absurd premise for a moment), then at least he believes in keeping man and earth together. Santorum’s brand of elevation involves severing man from man’s earthly existence, which is why it is coherent only within a theological eschatology (a theology of the last days). And he may well believe that man cannot actually destroy the earth through such violence as global warming, for the perfectly orthodox theological reason that the earth will come to an end (or be renewed) only when Christ comes again to judge the living and the dead. In other words, global warming can’t exist because it is not in God’s providential plan: the Lord will decide when the earth expires. This is Santorum’s “theology,” phony or otherwise.

John Jeremiah Sullivan inhabits Paul Lakeland’s “space between.” One of the joys of Verdicts is that I get book recommendations and I get help thinking through the books I’ve read. Because of the recommendation of Anthony Domestico (and James Woods) I recently read Pulphead, Sullivan’s collection of essays. And because of Lakeland’s recent post, I’ve been able to frame why I enjoyed Pulphead so much. Although only two of Sullivan’s fourteen essays explicitly deal with issues of religious faith and doubt, all fourteen deal with faith and doubt about what we can know and what, to quote from the title of one essay, is “really real.”

Sullivan’s essays explore what is “really real” in politics and culture, whether those reflections be essays on post-Katrina New Orleans or the Southern writer Andrew Lyte or making sure blues recordings are saved or cave drawings in Tennessee or Bunny Wailer, the last surviving member of Bob Marley’s reggae group. His essay, “Upon this Rock,” which opens the collection and is the result of his visit to a Christian rock festival, and his essay “Feet in Smoke,” which is about his brother’s electrocution, coma, and revival, are superb. They show an intellect struggling with questions of meaning and community, life and death, faith and doubt. Sullivan is not a Christian, but he has a deep respect for genuine belief. Writing about the six young men he befriends at the rock festival, he notes, “it may be the truest thing I will have written here: they were crazy, and they loved God – and I thought about the unimpeachable dignity of that, which I was never capable of. Knowing it isn’t true doesn’t mean you would be strong enough to believe if it were” (40-1). Read the rest of this entry »

Since there appears to be a lot of interest on this blog, both from posters and from commenters, in detective fiction (see here, here, and here for starters); and since I’m just about to start reading Faithful Place, Tana French’s third novel about the Dublin Murder Squad; and since I continue in my quest to get more people to read the poems of W. H. Auden, I figured I would share Auden’s 1936 “Detective Story,” in which the poet imagines a hunt for the murderer of “our happiness.”

Auden loved detective fiction. Besides “Detective Story,” several other poems, including his long, baroque work The Age of Anxiety, engage with the genre and its conventions. You can find Auden’s most developed thoughts on the topic in his wonderfully titled essay “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict.” In it, Auden admits to a lack of self-control when faced with a good potboiler—“if I have any work to do, I must be careful not to get hold of a detective story for, once I begin one, I cannot work or sleep till I have finished it”—and speculates that the “interest in the detective story is the dialectic of innocence and guilt.” This dialectic, he thinks, appeals to a specifically religious kind of imagination: “I suspect that the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffered from a sense of sin.” (Maybe this explains why G. K. Chesteron and Dorothy Sayers were such great writers of detective stories.) Read the rest of this entry »

I just finished reading  David Plante’s old (1991) novel, The Accident, having also delved a few days ago into Jens Peter Jacobsen’s older (1880) Danish novel, Niels Lyhne. Plante’s short book takes place in Leuven in the days when it was still known as Louvain. Its central character is an American undergraduate spending a year abroad, uncomfortable in the Catholic atmosphere of the city because he is, he says, an atheist. In much the way, sincere and yet posturing, that many a young person tried it on in those days. Today it’s not so clear that anyone cares enough to be so clear about it. And of course the unnamed young man isn’t really clear at all. Which is where the story gets interesting. In contrast to the conventionally religious Tom, he doesn’t go to mass but he seems occasionally to pray. And his biggest argument with Tom is about the conventionality of belief. A real God, he suggests, would be much stronger. Shades of Elie Wiesel’s famous comment in Night that “there rose in my heart a prayer to that God in whom I no longer believed.”  And the young Niels in Jacobsen’s novel seems to be an atheist malgré lui, or at least one who would find the blanket rejection of religion that is the calling card of the new atheism to be simply boring.

When you put these two together with more accessible works like Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Rilke’s charming Stories of God, it seems clear that fiction about belief and unbelief is interesting when it focuses on the space between the two. I suppose this is because good fiction thrives on ambiguity. There’s nothing so dull as a believer without doubts or an atheist without—dare I say it—a soul. Imperfection makes a person interesting. That’s why I always used to sit among the smokers in the bad old days when airlines allowed  it (and gave you free food); you were simply more likely to meet someone worth talking to. The whisky priest or the lieutenant or Scobie would never show up in the no-smoking section. Read the rest of this entry »

Just can’t get enough of cutthroat politics? Find yourself on YouTube, replaying the meaner jabs from the Republican primary debates? You might want to add the 1990s BBC miniseries House of Cards to your Netflix queue. Based on a novel by a onetime Chief of Staff to Britain’s Conservative Party, House of Cardstracks the legal and illegal intrigues of Francis Urquhart, a Machiavellian party operative who wrangles his way up the rungs of power in post-Thatcher Great Britain. Urquhart (Ian Richardson) uses the press and the ambitions and paranoia of statesmen to his own advantage, but he hides his ruthlessness beneath a polite and even grandfatherly exterior. “You might very well think that: I couldn’t possibly comment,” he primly responds, whenever he has cunningly planted an idea in the mind of a reporter or colleague.

Manipulating journalists, tangling with the monarchy, destroying lives and careers with relish,  Urquhart is a charming and seductive antihero, and his schemes and deceptions make for an engrossing soap opera. But it’s the theatrical trappings that really distinguish House of Cards and its sequels, To Play the King and The Final Cut. The scheming Urquhart is a Shakespearean figure—part Richard III, part Iago and a very large part Macbeth, and the scriptwriters highlight these resonances with Shakespearean quotes and allusions. The spirit of Macbeth, in particular, haunts the story: Egged on by his equally ambitious and amoral wife (Diane Fletcher), Urquhart eventually racks up so many misdeeds that he might easily say, with Shakespeare’s thane-turned-king, “I am in blood/Stepped in so far that should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

Even more striking are the impishly self-satisfied remarks that Urquhart periodically delivers straight to us, the audience: In the middle of a scene, he will turn his head, look straight into the camera and share an unnervingly honest confession or observation, while the folks around him carry on, oblivious. These break-the-fourth-wall moments are like miniature Shakespearean monologues, and they underscore an all-too-familiar truth: that politics is, to a large extent, theatrics.

It will be interesting to see whether a forthcoming remake of House of Cardsmanages to be as interesting and sly: Director David Fincher (Fight Club, the Hollywood adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc.) is an executive producer of the forthcoming remake, which will be a Netflix original series and will star Kevin Spacey.

In his 1941 poem “At the Grave of Henry James,” W. H. Auden expressed his hope that writers would be judged not by their lives, but by their works:

All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple,

Pray for me and for all writers living or dead;

Because there are many whose works

Are in better taste than their lives; because there is no end

To the vanity of our calling: make intercession

For the treason of all clerks.

In a recent review in Harper’s (subscription required), Giles Harvey addresses just this question—how to understand the writer’s work in relation to the writer’s life—by considering the case of Philip Larkin. Larkin is probably the most celebrated British poet of the post-World War II era; as his posthumously published letters have made clear, he’s also probably the nastiest. His letters are sprinkled with casual (and not so casual) misogyny, with racial insensitivity, with snobbery, with self-pity, with a grouchiness that borders on the pathological. Harvey quotes several particularly nasty bits, but the worst—worst because the simplest and most symptomatic—is this throwaway: “all women are stupid beings.” And there’s lots more where that came from. (Which is a shame for all the obvious reasons, but also because, if you can ignore the foul bits—which of course you can’t—Larkin’s letters are a remarkable read.) Read the rest of this entry »

It’s official: America has Downton Abbey fever. You can’t open a newspaper or visit a culture/books website without reading about how Downton Abbey is revitalizing PBS, or affecting the publishing industry, or reflecting poorly on our “class-stratified” military. This interest is all for the good. I agree with Emily Nussbaum, who writes in the New Yorker that Downton Abbey “is situated precisely on the Venn diagram where ‘prestige’ meets ‘guilty pleasure’: it’s as much cake as it is bread.” (Though I have to disagree with Nussbaum’s adoration of Lady Edith, who not only is the show’s weakest link, but is generally acknowledged to be so by characters within the show itself.)

I want to talk briefly about a different British TV show, however, one that has gotten some publicity in the U. S. but hasn’t captured the popular imagination in the way that Downton Abbey has. If Downton Abbey allows us to figuratively travel to a different time, then the show I’m talking about features literal time travel; if the posh characters of Downton Abbey seem alien to us nowadays, then the show I’m talking about has actual aliens from faraway planets; if Downton Abbey straddles the line between high and low culture, then the show I’m talking about obliterates this line altogether, showing that the most condescended-to of genres, science fiction/fantasy, can create lasting, affecting stories. I’m talking about Doctor Who. Read the rest of this entry »

“A ‘canon’ so established in practice serves not so much to enshrine a hundred books as to help students to develop their own standards of evaluation. The canon (if such it be) and the questioning of it go together. There must be questioning, and there must be something of value that has stood the test of time worth questioning” (38). – Wm. Theodore de Bary, Finding Wisdom in East Asian Classics.

In describing one of his teachers, a friend once said that the professor was able to teach his own ideas through teaching Hegel. That is to say, the professor had so thoroughly apprenticed himself to Hegel that it was impossible to tell where Hegel stopped and the professor’s  interpretation began. I think the best teachers do that. In talking with Herbert McCabe and reading his work, for example, it was always difficult to figure out where Thomas Aquinas ended and McCabe began. The same can be said about Ralph McInerney, even though he came to quite different conclusions about Thomas than McCabe did. And the fact that both could be such devoted students of Thomas says more about Thomas’s breadth than it does about these scholars fine interpretations of him. Great texts, to borrow a phrase from Whitman, contain multitudes. Great teachers help us to navigate those multitudes.

In my last post, I discussed Harold Bloom’s The Anatomy of Influence, and I noted how Bloom hoped that he could help his readers get lost in great literature. But often when we read, especially when we encounter a new body of literature, we want someone to help us find our way. And if you want to find your way among the classic texts of East Asia, there is no better guide than Wm. Theodore de Bary. His latest book, an edited collection entitled Finding Wisdom in East Asian Classics, is the perfect map for beginners to navigate the vast territory that is East Asian languages and cultures. The book is the fruit of more than 60 years of research and teaching. Read the rest of this entry »

At one point in Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 novel Freedom, Walter and Patty Berglund, the married couple at the center of the narrative, discuss Patty’s recent visit to their lake house in Minnesota. They don’t talk about the most consequential thing that happened during Patty’s lakeside idyll: Patty slept with Richard Katz, a dark, sexy musician who also happens to be Walter’s best friend of many years. What they do talk about is Patty’s fevered reading, for the first time, of War and Peace.

“I’ve been reading a ton,” she said. “I think War and Peace is actually the best book I’ve ever read.”

“I’m jealous,” Walter said.

“Ah?”

“Getting to read that book for the first time. Having whole days to do it.”

“It was great. I feel kind of altered by it.”

“You seem a little altered, actually.”

“Not in a bad way, I hope.”

“No. Just different.”

This is meant to be painfully funny, of course. Having just cheated on her husband, Patty is in fact altered. (And her marriage with her.) But Franzen is also getting at something else in this passage: the strange, exhilarating, unrepeatable nature of reading a great work of literature for the first time.

I’m a firm believer in re-reading—I’ve probably read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead at least ten times—but this doesn’t blind me to the fact that the first reading of a book is a special reading. It’s that first reading that allows you to approach a text with a sense of wonder, with an openness that allows the text to work on you even while you work on it; it’s that first reading that can cause you to exclaim with delight, “What a world that such books exist in it!” Upon subsequent readings, these thoughts and feelings can come to seem naïve, even sentimental. But that doesn’t make this initial sense of exhilaration any less real.

Over Christmas break, I read War and Peace for the first time, and I find myself agreeing with Patty: it’s actually the best book I’ve ever read. In part this is because it’s perhaps the most encompassing book I’ve ever read. It contains fully embodied characters, intense historical and philosophical speculation, and precise, beautiful sensual details. Marilynne Robinson has written that great books are “witnesses to the strangeness and brilliance of human experience.” By this standard, War and Peace is a masterpiece. I constantly found myself thinking, “Yes! That’s exactly how life is!”

As I type these words, I see how they might seem naïve, even sentimental. War and Peace isn’t life, after all, but Tolstoy’s rendering of it. Now that I’m no longer under the novel’s trance, I recognize that there’s a bit too much romanticizing of the Russian soul for my taste, and that the concluding section, in which Tolstoy offers his philosophy of history and free will, might strike other readers as dull, though I loved it. I’m not sure if I will stand by my (and Patty’s) judgment of the novel a year from now; I suspect I will, but I can’t be sure. I do know, however, that my thrilling first reading won’t be recovered. It’s why we’re so often sad to close the final pages of a great book: not just because we don’t want the book to end, but because we don’t want our experience of reading the book to end, either.