What I'm Reading

James K.A. Smith @ GoodReads

2010-08-03T14:52:00.003-04:00

Well, I've been horribly delinquent over here at "What I'm Reading." I have a long shelf of books above my desk here that I've been meaning to blog about, but just haven't found the time--probably because I've lapsed into thinking each post needs to be a "review" rather than just an off-the-cuff take on what I've been reading.

As a way to get away from that, I've just signed up for a GoodReads account and will hope to post more regularly at www.goodreads.com/jkasmith. (This is as close as I'm going to get to anything like Facebook!)

The Bookish Beware

2010-05-15T09:44:00.001-04:00

"How deluded we sometimes are by the clear notions we get out of books. They make us think that we really understand things of which we have no practical knowledge at all. I remember how learnedly and enthusiastically I could talk for hours about mysticism and the experimental knowledge of God, and all the while I was stoking the fires of the argument with Scotch and soda."

~Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, p. 224

The Impiety God Loves

2010-05-14T09:38:00.002-04:00

What a marvelous description Merton gives us of his friend Bob Gibney:

"Gibney was not what you would call pious. In fact, he had an attitude that would be commonly called impious, only I believe God understood well enough that his violence and sarcasms covered a sense of deep metaphysical dismay--an anguish that was real, though not humble enough to be of much use to his soul. What was materially impiety in him was directed more against common ideas and notions which he saw or considered to be totally inadequate, and maybe it subjectively represented a kind of oblique zeal for the purity of God, this rebellion against the commonplace and trite, against mediocrity, religiosity."

~Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, pp. 200-201

Merton on Columbia

2010-05-13T21:30:00.003-04:00

While Merton would praise some of his teachers at Columbia, he has this to say about the institution as a whole:

"Poor Columbia! It was founded by sincere Protestants as a college predominantly religious. The only that remains of that is the university motto: In lumine tuo videbimus lumen--one of the deepest and most beautiful lines of the psalms. 'In Thy light, we shall see light.' [The verse, incidentally, inscribed above the entrance of Calvin College's chapel.] It is, precisely, about grace. It is a line that might serve as the foundation stone of all Christian and Scholastic learning, and which simply has nothing whatever to do with the standards of education at modern Columbia. It might profitably be changed to In lumine Randall videbimus Dewey."

~Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, p. 194

In Covert Praise of Socrates

2010-04-16T18:42:00.002-04:00

Merton recounts an influential teacher and mentor, Mark Van Doren, and in doing so, sketches what I still aspire to (though often failing) in terms of pedagogy--the great tradition of the Socratic method:

"Mark would come into the room and, without any fuss, would start talking about whatever was to be talked about. Most of the time he asked questions. His questions were very good, and if you tried to answer them intelligently, you found yourself saying excellent things that you did not know you knew, and that you had not, in fact, known before. He had 'educed' them from you by his question. His classes were literally 'education'--they brought things out of you, they made your mind produce its own explicit ideas."

~Merton, Seven Storey Mountain, p. 154

Beware of Metaphysics!

2010-04-15T22:56:00.002-04:00

"Fortunately, this was one of the matters in which I decided to ignore his advice. Anyway, I went ahead and tried to read some philosophy. I never got very far with it. It was too difficult for me to master all by myself. People who are immersed in sensual appetites and desires are not very well prepared to handle abstract ideas. Even in the purely natural order, a certain amount of purity of heart is required before an intellect can get sufficiently detached and clear to work out the problems of metaphysics. I say a certain amount, however, because I am sure that no one needs to be a saint to be a clever metaphysician. I dare say there are plenty of metaphysicians in hell."

~Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, p. 104

The Psychology of Comfort

2010-04-11T20:13:00.002-04:00

[Resuming a series on Merton's Seven Storey Mountain after a hiatus over Lent.]

Merton offers a concise but insightful take on on a feature of our collective psychology which has only increased since he made the observation:

"Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture."

~Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, p. 91

Faith, Hope, and "Gentlemanness"

2010-02-08T07:56:00.002-05:00

In England Merton was enrolled at Oakham, a second-tier English public school in the Midlands. There he continued to encounter the strange blend of religion, nationalism, and lingering aristocracy that he associated with the Church of England. This becomes sadly humorous when he recalls the theological vision of the chaplain at Oakham:

"His greatest sermon was on the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians--and a wonderful chapter indeed. But his exegesis was a bit strange. However, it was typical of him and, in a way, of his whole church. "Buggy's" interpretation of the word "charity" in this passage (and in the whole Bible) was that it simply stood for "all that we mean when we call a chap a 'gentleman.'" In other words, charity meant good-sportsmanship, cricket, the decent thing, wearing the right kind of clothes, using the proper spoon, not being a cad or a bounder.

There he stood, in the plain pulpit, and raised his chin above the heads of all the rows of boys in black coats, and said, 'One might go through this chapter of St. Paul and simply substitute the word "gentleman" for "charity" wherever it occurs. "If I talk with the tongues of men and of angels, and be not a gentleman, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal...A gentleman is patient, is kind; a gentleman envieth not, dealeth not perversely; is not puffed up....A gentleman never falleth away"...'

[...]

The boys listened tolerantly to these thoughts. But I think St. Peter and the twelve Apostles would have been rather surprised at the concept that Christ had been scourged and beaten by soldiers, cursed and crowned with thorns and subjected to unutterable contempt and finally nailed to the Cross and left to bleed to death in order that we might all become gentlemen."

~Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, pp. 81-82

Merton goes Orwellian

2010-01-27T07:54:00.002-05:00

In his critique of the Church of England, Merton's prose brings to mind Orwell's stinging critique of class in The Road to Wigan Pier. Pointing out the conflation and assimilation of the "established" church, Merton writes:

"The Church of England depends, for its existence, almost entirely on the solidarity and conservativism of the English ruling class. Its strength is not in anything supernatural, but in the strong social and racial instincts which bind the members of this caste together; and the English cling to their Church the way they cling to their King and to their old schools: because of a big, vague, sweet complex of subjective dispositions regarding the English countryside, old castles and cottages, games of criticket in the long summer afternoons, tea-parties on the Thames, croquet, roast-beef, pipe-smoking, the Christmas panto, Punch and the London Times and all those other things the mere thought of which produces a kind of a warm and inexpressible ache in the English heart."

~Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, p. 72

Ordinary Saints, Unsuspecting Evangelists

2010-01-25T12:26:00.003-05:00

Merton's prose ripples with hagiographic energy when he recalls the influence of a humble French family, the Privats in Murat, remembering "their kindness and goodness to me, and their peacefulness and their utter simplicity. They inspired real reverence, and I think, in a way, they were certainly saints. And they were saints in that most effective and telling way: sanctified by leading ordinary lives in a completely supernatural manner, santified by obscurity, by usual skills, by common tasks, by routine, but skills, tasks, routine which received a supernatural form from grace within."

Staying with them for a few weeks as a boy, the now-boy-become-monk considers the weight of their impact on his life:

"Those were weeks that I shall never forget, and the more I think of them, the more I realize that I must certainly owe the Privats for more than butter and milk and good nourishing food for my body. I am indebted to them for much more than the kindness and care they showed me, the goodness and delicate solicitude with which they treated me as their own child, yet without any assertive or natural familiarity. [...] I was glad of the love the Privats showed me, and was ready to love them in return. It did not burn you, it did not hold you, it did not try to imprison you in demonstrations, or trap your feet in the snares of interest. [...]

After all, this going to Murat was a great grace. Did I realize it? I did not know what grace was. And though I was impressed with the goodness of the Privats, I could not fail to realize what was its root and its foundation. And yet it never occurred to me at the time to think of being like them, of profiting in any way by their example. [...]

Who knows how much I owe to those two wonderful people? Anything I say about it is only a matter of guessing but, knowing their charity, it is to me a matter of moral certitude that I owe many graces to their prayers, and perhaps ultimately the grace of my conversion and even of my religious vocation. Who shall say? But one day I shall know, and it is good to be able to be confident that I will see them again and be able to thank them."

~Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, pp. 62-65

The Architecture of Grace

2010-01-24T09:23:00.003-05:00

Reflecting on St. Antonin, Merton's French hometown during his formative youth, he observes:

"Here, everywhere I went, I was forced, by the disposition of everything around me, to be always at least virtually conscious of the church. Every street pointed more or less inward to the center of the town, to the church. Every view of town from the exterior hills, centered upon the long grey building with its high spire.

The church had been fitted into the landscape in such a way as to become the keystone of its intelligibility. Its presence imparted a special form, a particular significance to everything else that they eye beheld, to the hills, the forests, the fields, the white cliff of the Rocher d'Anglars and to the red bastion of the Roc Rouge, to the winding river, and the green valley of the Bonnette, the town and the bridge, and even to the white stucco villas of the modern bourgeois that dotted the fields and orchards outside the precinct of the vanished ramparts: and the significance that was imparted was a supernatural one.

The whole landscape, unified by the church and its heavenward spire, seemed to say: this is the meaning of all created things: we have been made for no other purpose than that men may use us in raising themselves to God, and in proclaiming the glory of God. We have been fashioned, in all our perfection, each according to his own nature, and all our natures ordered and harmonized together, that man's reason and his love might fit in this one last element, this God-given key to the meaning of the whole.

Oh, what a thing it is, to live in a place that is so constructed that you are forced, in spite of yourself, to be at least a virtual contemplative!"

~Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, p. 41.

Paradoxes for a Francophile

2010-01-19T07:16:00.003-05:00

In chapter two of Part One, we find the young Thomas Merton returning to France, the land of his birth. It opens with this musing from the older Merton, in puzzled recollection:

"How did it ever happen that, when the dregs of the world had collected in western Europe, when Goth and Frank and Norman and Lombard had mingled with the rot of old Rome to form a patchwork of hybrid races, all of them notable for ferocity, hatred, stupidity, craftiness, lust, and brutality--how did it happen that, from all of this, there should come Gregorian chant, monasteries and cathedrals, the poems of Prudentius, the commentaries and histories of Bede, the Moralia of Gregory the Great, St. Augustine's City of God, and his Trinity, the writings of Anselm, St. Bernard's sermons on the Canticles, the poetry of Caedmon and Cynewulf and Langland and Dante, St. Thomas' Summa, and the Oxoniense of Duns Scotus?

How does it happen that even today a couple of ordinary French stonemasons, or a carpenter and his apprentice, can put up a dovecote or a barn that has more architectural perfection than the piles of eclectic stupidity that grow up at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars on the campuses of American universities?"

~Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, p. 33

Brothers: Elder, Prodigal, and Otherwise

2010-01-18T08:29:00.003-05:00

"I suppose it is usual for elder brothers, when they are still children, to feel themselves demeaned by the company of a brother four or five years younger, whom they regard as a baby and whom they tend to patronise and look down upon. So when Russ and I and Bill made huts in the woods out of boards and tar-paper which we collected around the foundations of the many cheap houses which the speculators were now putting up, as fast as they could, all over Douglaston, we severely prohbitited John Paul and Russ's little brother Tommy and their friends from coming anywhere near us. And if they did try to come and get into our hut, or even to look at it, we would chase them away with stones.

When I think now of that part of my childhood, the picture I get of my brother John Paul is this: standing in a field, about a hundred years away from the clump of sumachs where we have built our hut, is this little perplexed five-year-old kid in short pants and a kind of a leather jacket, standing quite still, with his arms hanging down at his sides, and gazing in our direction, afraid to come any nearer on account of the stones, as insulted as he is saddened, and his eyes full of indignation and sorrow. And yet he does not go away. We shout at him to get out of there, to beat it, and go home, and wing a couple of more rocks in that direction, and he does not go away. We tell him to play in some other place. He does not move.

And there he stands, not sobbing, not crying, but angry and unhappy and offended and tremendously sad. And yet he is fascinated by what we are doing, nailing shingles all over our new hut. And his tremendous desire to be with us and to do what we are doing will not permit him to go away. The law written in his nature says that he must be with his elder brother, and do what he is doing: and he cannot understand why this law of love is being so wildly and unjustly violated in his case."

~Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, pp. 25-26

The Best Laid Plans...

2010-01-16T08:43:00.002-05:00

Continuing to meditate on the milieu of his parents' predictably unconventional sensibilities, Merton reflects:

"If we had continued as we had begun, and if John Paul and I had grown up in that house, probably this Victorian-Greek complex would have built itself up gradually, and we would have turned into good-mannered and earnest sceptics, polite, intelligent, and perhaps even in some sense useful. We might have become successful authors, or editors of magazines, professors at small and progressive colleges. The way would have been all smooth and perhaps I would never have ended up as a monk.

But it is not yet the time to talk about that happy consummation, the thing for which I most thank and praise God, and which is of all things the ultimate paradoxical fulfillment of my mother's ideas for me--the last thing she would ever have dreamed of: the boomerang of all her solicitude for an individual development."

~Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, pp. 12-13

Bohemian Monks

2010-01-15T08:58:00.003-05:00

"My father and mother were captives in that world, knowing they did not belong with it or in it, and yet unable to get away from it. They were in the world but not of it--not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists."

~Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, Harcourt, 1998, p. 3.

Here Merton, the writer, presages in a mirror his own struggles as an artist who, by the end of this journey, will also be trying to detach himself from the world by entering the cloister. Both the monk and the artist enact a bohemian refusal of "success" as dictated by bourgeois expectations.

Blogging Merton's "Seven Storey Mountain"

2010-01-15T08:41:00.005-05:00

Over the holidays I finally began reading Thomas Merton's classic, The Seven Storey Mountain (in a lovely 50th anniversary edition that my gracious neighbors gave me several years ago). Reading it was just what I had hoped: a veritable retreat between two covers, the itinerary of a soul in the best Augustinian tradition. (Indeed, while Merton talks more about Thomas and his neo-scholastic heirs, Gilson and Maritain, it seems to me he absorbed an Augustinian sensibility--the parallels to the Confessions are striking.)

This was a significant book for me, so I'm going to try a little experiment here: blogging The Seven Storey Mountain as a way of revisiting it and paying homage to the book. My goals are quite minimal: simply to highlight some passages of Merton's charmed writing, with little if any commentary, across the sweep of the book, over the next several weeks. I hope these snippets might be an invitation for others to pilgrimage with Merton's masterpiece.

Prodigal Critics

2009-12-14T16:21:00.003-05:00

In his Chronicle Review essay, "Prodigal Critics," Jeffrey Williams provides a very nice little history of shifts in criticism in the last century--specifically the rise of New Critics like John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks [who, I have to confess, are secret favorites of mine, lining the shelves here at home] who in turn gave birth to their own critics, like Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, and Stephen Greenblatt. Williams' brief is that "theory" in the US was more home-grown than a foreign (i.e., French) import. Worth reading--there's an education crammed into this little essay.

Locating Religion: On "Faith and Place"

2009-12-14T13:34:00.002-05:00

Mark Wynn's Faith & Place: An Essay in Embodied Religious Epistemology (Oxford, 2009) is one of the most interesting books in philosophy of religion I've read this year. As he notes in the opening, philosophical theologians tend to be concerned with place only to transcend it, focusing on God's omni-presence which relativizes differences in place. And yet religious practice is always placed, local, often in very intentional spaces--what he calls "the place-relative character of religious belief and practice." So Wynn sets for himself the task of articulating "the differentiated religous significance of place."

Wynn is primarily interested in knowledge of place as an analogue for knowledge of God. Drawing on figures such as Bachelard [an old favorite of mine], LeFebvre, and Bourdieu, he contests the paradigms of “knowing” in contemporary philosophy of religion (Swinburne and Alston are recurring examples throughout the book). The way we “know” a place, Wynn argues, points to a kind of embodied, affective, tacit knowing which gets little attention in philosophy of religion because of the regnant epistemology assumed in the field. So knowledge “of” place is a kind of limit case, pointing to a different kind of knowing, which then primes us to consider knowledge of God in similar terms. This alternative account of knowing is most fully developed in chapter 8, on the “aesthetic” dimension of knowing. (Throughout the book Wynn regularly builds bridges to poetry by autobiographically exploring his friendship with poet Edmund Cusick--and the way their friendship was tied to places.)

However, while this is the core argument of the book, Wynn is also attentive to the religious significance of place—how places are charged “sites” of knowledge (e.g., in a chapter on pilgrimage). Thus he is concerned both with knowledge of place and the “placed” nature of knowledge. An excellent book and an encouraging sign of alternative trajectories in philosophy of religion.

Boersma on Nouvelle Theologie's "Sacramental Ontology"

2009-12-10T14:44:00.004-05:00

Contemporary debates in “postmodern” theology often return to ground covered by a mid-twentieth century Catholic theological “sensibility” described as la nouvelle théologie (particularly questions of nature and grace, immanence and transcendence). A movement of ressourcement, these nouvelle theologians looked to the ancient fathers as a resource for engaging contemporary culture. And it is just this sort of constructive retrieval that characterizes much of the best work now being done in theology, which is why Hans Boersma's new book, Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery (Oxford UP, 2009) is such a gift. Boersma’s comprehensive, carefully-researched monograph will now stand as a classic study of this movement. Immersed in the primary documents, but with one eye on contemporary debates, Boersma especially shows that what was at stake in nouvelle théologie was a comprehensive vision of culture. These were not just intramural debates in ecclesiology or liturgical theology; nouvelle théologie was concerned with nothing short of a sacramental ontology—a theological account of the nature of reality per se. It is this ontology that unifies a coherent theological “sensibility” associated with a diverse array of theologians. Boersma also provides a reading which sees the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI as extensions of the ressourcement vision rather than a derailing of it. Indispensible.

The Year of the Flood

2009-10-12T20:08:00.003-04:00

Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood (Bloomsbury, 2009) chronicles the sort of post-apocalyptic world familiar to readers of Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, or Cormac McCarthy's The Road--worlds devastated by those supposedly civilizing animals we call humans.

In Atwood's world, the corporation has trumped the state, the suburbs have fallen into ruin, the artificial has replaced the natural, and murderous violence has become commonplace in the sandlots where kids continue to play out their make-believe games. And yet, somehow, Atwood's world isn't nearly as haunting as McCarthy's wending, minimalist Road. But it sure ain't Mayberry, either.

Our focus is drawn to a band of resistance centred in "The Gardeners," a green cult, living out a consistently vegan discipline rooted in an interesting combination of biblical metaphors and an unblinkered appreciation for natural selection, articulated in a rich set of practices including their own liturgical calendar of Feast Days and Saints Days (including some Canadians like Saint David Suzuki and Saint Terry Fox!), as well as their own hymnbook. (Indeed, I'm starting to think that knowledge of theology is a handicap while reading this novel because one could so easily get sucked into the minituae of Gardener theology, and be tempted to draw all sorts of parallels and analogies with Christian theology. It would be an interesting read for Christians concerned with creation care--but I'd worry that this would be instrumentalizing the story Atwood wants to tell.) The Gardeners are a remnant, squatting on what corners and ruins of former suburbia they can find, led by a cadre of Adams and Eves who are responsible for catechesis, education, and government--but regularly haunted by CorpSeCorp, the privatized industry that has assumed responsibility for what used to pass for "the common good."

While the world as described seems bad enough, things get worse when a plague ("the Waterless Flood") is unleashed--"a plague that infects no Species but our own" (p. 424), thus giving Creation a chance to try again without us.

So not unlike The Road, this is a relationship-as-the-means-of-survival story. We follow a small band of acquaintances whose relationships are bound by a kind of love, though they might not think so. In particular, the book is organized around Toby (a Gardeners convert who becomes an Eve) and Ren (a child in the Gardeners commune). The book is spliced in two parallel tracks: the "Toby" track is narrated in the third person (just who is that?), while the "Ren" track is told in the first person. We regularly jump from Year 25, "The Year of the Flood," back through the years leading up to Year 25, back as far as Year 10. Eventually, these two tracks intersect in the final chapters. (It is also significant that time in the book is organized according to the liturgical calendar of the Gardeners.)

What to make of it? It's been a long time since I'd read any Atwood (who is the doyen of Canadian letters). Having, of late, read stuff that wears its literary flourish on its sleeve (Thomas Wolfe, John Updike, etc.), Atwood's prose is spare and simple--and yet not quite the charmed minimalism of McCarthy. But it has a remarkably cumulative effect--she is carefully drawing a character such that 300 pages in, one can look back on a rich development that seemed transparent at the time. (Is this is the sign of someone whose medium is rightly the novel rather than the short story?) While her lexicon is tight and rather puritan (I can see how the realism of Ren's first person demands this, but not sure why the third person narration of Toby's experience had to hew to the same rules--perhaps this is a sign I'm missing something about that narrator?) And in the end, there were just a few too many "coincidences" for me; or at least, it seemed to me that the world would have been bigger, and our encounters more anonymous, then the close of the story suggests.

But that said, the story also turns into a beautiful page-turner with 100 pages to go, and the glimpses of friendship, charity, and compassion are welcome respites in such an appalling world.

Still More Mortification

2009-09-15T22:35:00.003-04:00

I'm still enjoying Mortification, one of those books that's so easy to read in snippets and small bites--and yet you just keep taking bite after bite, turning what should be a little snack into a meal. The result, of course, is that while you could have, in the same amount of time, enjoyed a meal of moroccan chicken with couscous and a little Gewurtztraminer, instead you've eaten an entire supper's worth of Combos pretzel snacks.

It's also one of those books--of which there is an entire cottage industry--which makes aspiring writers feel like they're part of some 'insider' club, listening in on the anecdotes of real writers, as if we were overhearing these stories in the corner of Nicole Krauss's Brooklyn apartment. We aspiring writers are suckers for illusion and want nothing more than to "be a writer"--indeed, if we're honest with ourselves, we spend more time wanting to "be a writer" than actually wanting to write. Alas.

As it turns out, many of the writers in this collection seem to confuse shame and mortification with being bored or not receiving a lavish red-carpet reception, such that some of the supposed scenes of "mortification" are really just episodes of a lackluster event. Don't give me your down-the-nose scoffing about the deplorable buffet at the Kalamazoo Literary Festival and Dwarf Toss. I want shame. I bought this sucker for the schadenfreude, not to hear your whining about poor train connections!

The best stories of mortification seem to involve copious amounts of alchohol, but even then the mortification is delayed until the next day (as when Michael Donaghy makes a deposit in the car-door pocket of his host the morning after: "an acid indigo porridge of red wine, Jameson's and aubergine curry").

Robin Robertson should also be credited for selecting some wonderful epigraphs for each chapter. My favorite, so far, is a proverb from Jean Cocteau:

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.

This heads John Lanchester's contribution, which includes an honest assessment about the culture (cult?) of "public readings":

The truth is that the whole contemporary edifice of readings and tours and interviews and festivals is based on a mistake. The mistake is that we should want to meet the writers we admire, because there is something more to them in person than there is on the page, so that meeting them in the flesh somehow adds to the experience of reading their work. The idea is that the person is the real thing, whereas writing is somehow an excresence or epiphenomenon ["the metaphysics of presence!]. But that's not true. The work is the real thing, and it is that to which readers should direct their attention.

While I'm as much of an egomaniacal sucker for such opportunites as the next author, I concede a latent truth in the combination of Cocteau's maxim and Lanchester's observation. It is, I find, very hard to speak about books one has published. (Lanchester goes on to say that the writer finds it easier to speak about the book that one is in the process of writing.) The irony, of course, is that when a book appears, and if one is fortunate enough to have readers, and perhaps even a few enthusiastic readers who might invite you to an event, they want you to talk about the book. But, of course, what you wanted to say about X or Y is in the book. And you're already on to the next project, in the muck and mire of a new book-in-the-making which is filling your head and stealing your sleep, and it's difficult to go back and get excited about the book you put to bed a couple of years ago, but which is just now "appearing" for others. The trick, I think, is to find ways to put yourself in the shoes of the reader. And there's no shame in that.

Mortification: The Public Shame of Writers

2009-09-11T15:46:00.002-04:00

Writers are no more prone to public shame than others. However, unlike others, they're likely to mine the experience for material. (And given their mistaken self-importance, they're also likely to over-amplify the significance of their mortification.) When such shamed writers have a flair for wit, the result can be quite entertaining.

I've been enjoying Robin Robertson's collection of such embarrassing tales in Mortification: Writers' Stories of Their Public Shame, full of bite-sized vignettes. Some of my favorite authors and poets (like Julian Barnes, Simon Armitage, John Banville, and James Wood) recount episodes of empty lecture halls, amorous (and mentally-unstable) fans, dead pets, mistaken identities, and writerly awkwardness. Judging from these anecdotes, the public reading is the prime site for writer's shame.

The writer's greatest mortification is perhaps summarized in an epigraph from Samuel Johnson:

There is nothing more dreadful to an author than neglect, compared with which, reproach, hatred and opposition are names of happiness.

Bringing It To the Table

2009-09-05T13:45:00.003-04:00

While we were in Asheville, NC last month, we visited what has to be one of the coolest bookstores on the planet (in one of the coolest cities in the country): Malaprop's. A feast. Spent way more than we should have (but since my wife bought as many books as I did, the guilt-factor was diminished).

The one book I devoured right away was a new Wendell Berry anthology, Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food, with an Introduction by Michael Pollan (of The Omnivore's Dilemma). It's a wonderful collection of Berry's writings on food production, farming, and husbandry, including some fiction selections that picture mealtimes and practices of eating. The selections span his entire writing career (and the early selections show how prescient he was/is). An excellent introduction to, and compendium of, Berry's thought.

Scotland, Genre Fiction, and Literature

2009-08-31T23:23:00.002-04:00

When I was living in York, James Kelman's experimental novel, Kieron Smith, Boy was getting a lot of attention (and it remains on my "to read" list). So I found this dust-up between Kelman and some of his Scottish confreres (Ian Rankin, J.K. Rowling, Alexander McCall Smith) of interest. Here's Alan Bissett's report from The Guardian:

There is an unspoken rule among Scottish writers that we don't slag each other off in public. The rule runs thus: coming, as we do, from a small, colonised nation, we automatically find ourselves marginalised by literary London and must fight doubly hard to gain the recognition abroad that is granted to English writers. While we may express private reservations about the work of another writer, we don't scupper their chances by saying this publicly. After all, each of us takes enough of that from critics.

That changed over the weekend. Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Scotland's only Man Booker prize winner, James Kelman, lambasted his country's literary establishment for praising the "mediocrity" of "writers of detective fiction or books about some upper middle-class young magician or some crap". Attention paid to the twin commercial giants of (presumably) Ian Rankin and JK Rowling had served, Kelman argued, to obscure Scotland's more radical tradition.

This has split the nation's literature in two. In a debate in the Sunday Herald headed 'Is Pulp Fiction Taking Over Scotland's Bookshelves?' daggers were drawn over the crime-ification of Scottish letters. The novelist Rodge Glass said that Kelman had been "very brave" in his remarks, while playwright John Byrne, spoke of "the danger of Scotland becoming known as the home of genre fiction, a factory churning out these things". And the response was ferocious. Professor Michael Schmidt of the University of Glasgow, defended the common reader against Kelman's "Stalinist" and "parochial" approach. Crime writer, Denise Mina, derided "this awful schtick about pushing the boundaries of literary technique", comparing it to "asking people to appreciate the welding on their plumbing".

As a manifestation of the old 'genre v real literature' chestnut, the debate should be just as interesting to those outside of Scotland. Kelman, committed to experimental form and language, sees genre fiction as redundant, compromised by commerciality. Mina, while still calling Kelman a "beautiful writer", regards his stance as a mere "play for status"; a failure of the writer's duty to entertain.

There is another to level to this, however, about the ways in which any country's indigenous literature – especially those of smaller or post-colonial nations – is threatened by the commercial imperative to produce page-turning, airport-friendly thrillers. A third level concerns the collusion of the literary establishment in this. It's certainly the case that the books editors of broadsheet newspapers will bemoan the fact that we're not all reading Tolstoy, while providing acres of coverage to crime writers. Genre fiction doesn't need highbrow attention in order to sell by the bucketload, yet editors must cover it precisely because it is so visible. This crowds out more risk-taking writers, for whom a single review from a perceptive critic can provide a career breakthrough.

It is galling, then, that a country like Scotland, home to an enormous, bristling, experimental tradition which includes James Hogg, Alexander Trocchi, Hugh McDiarmid, Muriel Spark, Edwin Morgan, Tom Leonard, Alasdair Gray, Janice Galloway, Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, Ali Smith, James Robertson and Kelman himself, is marketed to tourists as the home of Rebus and Potter.

One doesn't wants to decry authors who are certainly outstanding in their field (constructing a page-turner requires narrative skill); neither does one want to sneer at the tastes of book-buyers, for whom reading at all in this age of distraction is an increasingly fought-for pleasure. And it's not as though writers such as Mina, Val McDermid or Christopher Brookmyre aren't working a left-wing agenda into their books; they are. But genre fiction is, by definition, generic. Mina's disdain, in her comments, for pushing boundaries of form is palpable. The genre writer's first responsibility is to the genre itself: they must fulfil readers' expectations for convention, or they have failed. It's easy to see how this becomes part of a capitalist enterprise, which requires market 'product' and fears innovation as a 'risky sell'. At a time when capitalism is scouring livelihoods, however, we must empower writers such as Kelman to speak out against it, and put forth new ways of expressing and thinking about ourselves. This is far from being just a Scottish issue.

Philosophy, Film, and Biblical Studies: Two New Treasures

2009-07-28T21:30:00.003-04:00

In addition to being generally remiss in cataloguing my reading here, I've not commented on any books in philosophy or theology for a long time. That's largely because I spend most of my evenings reading poetry and literature now. I don't often find myself picking up theology or philosophy for enjoyment. However, in the course of working on a project this summer, I had occasion to read two new books from very different fields that are both provocative in different ways--but which also share some surprising resonances.

Ian W. Scott's Paul's Way of Knowing: Story, Experience, and the Spirit (Baker Academic, 2009) is a book in a bit of a growing field, exploring the epistemology of Scripture and biblical authors (cp. The Bible and Epistemology recently released from Paternoster). As the title indicates, Scott analyzes of “Paul’s way of knowing” inviting us to look to Paul as a contemporary resource for thinking about knowledge precisely because “[i]n Paul we have the opportunity to see how someone approached religious knowledge who was at one and the same time foundational in the development of Western culture and yet relatively untouched by epistemological currents which so many now suspect are bankrupt.” Scott unearths a “narrative structure to the Apostle’s knowledge,” a distinct narratival “logic” that is operative beneath his speech. In doing so, Scott brings “to the surface [Paul’s] tacit assumptions about how people in general can come to knowledge,” discerning “assumptions which the Apostle himself may never have brought to full consciousness.” In this articulation of Paul's implicit epistemology, Scott discerns a fundamentally narratival structure to Paul's understanding of what counts as "knowledge." And what's fascinating is that this is so counter-intuitive: Paul, of course, is the author of epistles, not Gospels. Yet Scott makes a convincing case that Paul thinks in story. I hope some Christian philosophers working in epistemology will venture into a dialogue with this strain of biblical studies.

On quite a different front, I've been absorbed by Carl Plantinga's new book, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator's Experience (University of California Press, 2009). (Carl is a colleague of mine at Calvin, sort of the resident philosopher in our Film Studies department.) Plantinga has long been analyzing the role of affect and emotion in film (his earlier work considered non-fiction film or documentaries; in this book he's considering "Hollywood" cinema). Here we find him contesting reductionistic paradigms in film theory that want to reduce a film to its “message.” Some film critics and scholars talk of “reading” a film, implying that “film viewing is a cool, intellectual experience.” Thus the critic decodes the film by boiling it down to the hidden meanings which can be simply articulated in propositional form. But such a paradigm of criticism assumes that films are basically just elaborate vehicles for information that is ultimately propositional and intellectual. "This way of thinking about film," he comments, "diminishes the art form by reducing it to a bare bones propositional message.” And as a result, all that is “moving” about movies is relegated to the non-essential and superfluous.

But as Plantinga rightly asks, “Are all of these affective elements of film spectatorship mere epiphenomena, the throwaway detritus of what is worthwhile about the film viewing experience?” The burden of his book is to suggest otherwise: that the affective, emotional aspects of film—precisely those aspects of movies that move us—are essential and irreducible. As he comments, “Any abstract meaning that a film might have is ancillary to the experience in which that meaning is embodied.” What a film means cannot be reduced to the proposal “message” that might be gleaned from it. This is because “[e]xperience creates its own meaning, and in some cases the meaning to be taken from the experience of the film may contradict the abstract meaning an interpreter might glean from film dialogue, for example. Affective experience and meaning are neither parallel nor separable, but firmly intertwined.”

The book is rich with concrete analyses from both the "classical" era of Hollywood film-making as well as the "New Hollywood" (the running commentary on The Royal Tenenbaums was one of my favorites). Anyone interested in film will find this is a fascinating read. Indeed, one could read it as a kind of cinematic analogue to James Wood's How Fiction Works. Plantinga shows us that movies work by moving us, not just telling us; they tap our affective centers and emotional life, not just feed information into our intellects. And the narrative force of cinema is tethered to film's visceral ability to connect with our emotions; we feel stories.

More Proof

2009-06-25T12:20:00.002-04:00

Over at Fors Clavigera I've shared a bit about the secret joy of receiving the proofs of a book. Today, reading an interview with Farrar, Strauss & Giroux publisher, Jonathan Galassi, I was encouraged to learn that even for someone for whom books are their business, the same thrill holds. As Galassi shares:

"The second great moment is when it actually becomes a book—a physical thing. I always feel that when you put a book into proofs it gets better just by virtue of being set in print. I know a lot of writers feel that way too. It takes on a kind of permanence. And then it's even more satisfying when it becomes an actual book."

As I've said before, I'm not entirely convinced by that last claim (post-publication depression seems comon, like post-dissertation depression), but I share the sentiments about page proofs.

Shouts & Murmurs: Book Club: newyorker.com

2009-06-09T11:56:00.001-04:00

Shouts & Murmurs: Book Club: newyorker.com

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What I'm Listening To: Ryan Adams

2009-06-06T00:03:00.002-04:00

I've got a 20 gig iPod that's full and yet everything was sounding flat to me. Neither Josh Ritter nor Patty Griffin nor John Coltrane seemed to bring my music to life. And then I found that, at some point (when?), one of the kids bought Ryan Adams' Heartbreaker. It was like finding buried treasure right here in the house! I'd only listened to Adams' more recent stuff (and, of course, can't forget that music video filmed on September 7, 2001, with the Twin Towers in the background). Like Josh Ritter, Adams lyrics also stand up as poetry. And the alt-country sound taps strings deep in my rural soul. Great stuff to (re)discover.

Dorothy West on Writing

2009-05-27T13:18:00.004-04:00

"When I was seven, I said to my mother, may I close my door? And she said, yes, but why do you want to close your door? And I said because I want to think. And when I was eleven, I said to my mother, may I lock my door? And she said yes, but why do you want to lock your door? And I said because I want to write."

~in Jill Krementz, The Writer's Desk (a tantalizing, moving collection of photographs of writers at their desks, with a delightful introduction by Updike), p. 39

"My Childhood," by Coleson Smith

2009-05-08T17:01:00.002-04:00

Way back in 2005, when he was just 10 years old, I posted a short "onomatopoeia" poem by my son, Coleson. Now, four years later, I'm happy to post another by this emerging poet. In fact, we're very proud that his poem, "My Childhood," just won the Fine Arts Competition in 9th & 10th grade at Grand Rapids Christian High.

My Childhood

By Coleson Smith

My childhood was white.
White like the moving trucks that took our lives from new beginning to new beginning.
White like the paint in my apartment room in Philadelphia.
White like the sand on the beach in Los Angeles.
White like the first snow of Grand Rapids.
White like the airplane that flew me to England.
White like the salt flats in rough red Utah.
White like aunt Jesse's wedding dress.
White like the snow at the cemetery.
White like the hair of my aging family.
My childhood was white,
white like all of the things that made me who I am today.

Ending Poetry Month with Updike

2009-04-30T08:28:00.002-04:00

Today marks the end of National Poetry Month. Treat yourself by taking the time to listen to John Updike read one of his early poems, "Seagulls" (scroll down the page a bit for the audio button).

Seagulls

A gull, up close,
looks surprisingly stuffed.
His fluffy chest seems filled
with an inexpensive taxidermist’s material
rather lumpily inserted. The legs,
unbent, are childish crayon strokes—
too simple to be workable.
And even the feather-markings,
whose intricate symmetry is the usual glory of birds,
are in the gull slovenly,
as if God makes too many
to make them very well.

Are they intelligent?
We imagine so, because they are ugly.
The sardonic one-eyed profile, slightly cross,
the narrow, ectomorphic head, badly combed,
the wide and nervous and well-muscled rump
all suggest deskwork: shipping rates
by day, Schopenhauer
by night, and endless coffee.

At that hour on the beach
when flies begin biting in the renewed coolness
and the backsliding skin of the after-surf
reflects a pink shimmer before being blotted,
the gulls stand around in the dimpled sand
like those melancholy European crowds
that gather in cobbled public squares in the wake
of assassinations and invasions,
heads cocked to hear the latest radio reports.
It is also this hour when plump young couples
walk down to the water, bumping together,
and stand thigh-deep in the rhythmic glass.
Then they walk back toward the car,
tugging as if at a secret between them,
but which neither quite knows—
walk capricious paths through scattering gulls,
as in some mythologies
beautiful gods stroll unconcerned
among our mortal apprehensions.

Michigan Poetry from Bill Hicok

2009-04-20T07:52:00.002-04:00

The poetry night at Literary Life was a wonderful evening, not least because of Heather Sellers--writer, poet, and professor at Hope College--who served as judge for the poetry competition and also offered a reading of her own work. Sellers is not only a witty, observant writer, she's also an outstanding reader (those two things don't always happily reside in the same person). I thought this was demonstrated most powerfully by how well she could read the work of others. In particular, I'm deeply grateful that she introduced us to this wonderful poem by Bill Hicok (from the New Yorker)--and did so with a reading whose cadence and charm made the poem come to life.

A Primer

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”
can sincerely use the word “sincere.”
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we’re not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget
how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.
It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother,
I live in my mother again, which is creepy
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,
suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn’t ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. “What did we do?”
is the state motto. There’s a day in May
when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics
is everywhere, and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.

Rushdie's Storied Tract: The Enchantress of Florence

2009-04-10T10:54:00.004-04:00

I was a Rushdie virgin before recently reading The Enchantress of Florence (though Midnight's Chldren remains very high on my to-read list). But the combination of Italy and India--a commerce between East and West--was too much to resist.

You'll have to forgive the cliched pun, but the book really is quite spell-binding. Central to the tale is the power of story, and the book is layered with stories upon stories, as well as some delightful miniatures packed into the story (such as the marvelous tale about the royal painter, Dashwanth). It is also concerned with competing stories and competing story-tellers who constitute the world by their stories (and thus constitute different worlds by different stories). Story-telling is world-making. Rushdie's exploration is concerned with both the power of mythologies but also the power of the artist--the story-telling power of the prophet as well as the world-making power of the novelist.

But he's also exploring the dangers of stories, their enchanting spell, their seductive ability to lure us into illusions. In fact, the book performs this very quickly: one feels swept into a dizzying array of narratives with charms that steal the ground from beneath us--and yet this narratival vertigo is so enchanting, we delight in our disorientation. And yet, this only works to the extent that Rushdie is an enchanter.

I wouldn't have expected that such a ruthless secularist could create such an enchanted, magical world. The prose is blazing without being precious, and as Christopher Hitchens has recently pointed out, Rushdie is a brilliant humorist.

My only gripe is that the book at times devolves to a propaganda-like tract--a move that is death for art. (In this respect it reminded me of a similar tract posing as a novel, Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy). Here we have a descendent of Ghengis Khan with the emerging irenic, democratic sensibilities of, well, Salman Rushdie. We have women from sixteenth-century Hindustan who imagine the world like Susan Sontag. In short, at times the novel is so concerned to be an apologia for a de-religionized, "secular" and liberal world that its anachronism becomes just a bit too much to swallow. Nonetheless, the power of Rushdie's story-telling opens up worlds that repay revisiting.

For Poetry Lovers in Grand Rapids

2009-04-08T12:29:00.003-04:00

Literary Life, my favorite bookstore in Grand Rapids, is hosting a special event this Thursday, April 9, 7pm as part of National Poetry Month. It will include a reading by Heather Sellers, poet and professor of English at Hope College, in Holland, MI. Sellers also served as judge for the 1st Annual Literary Life Poetry Contest and the winners of the contest will be announced that night as well. (I had the audacity to submit two poems but have absolutely no illusions about winning a thing.) I am looking forward to hearing Sellers and, I hope, hearing the winning poems as well.

Then on Thursday, April 16, 7pm, Literary Life's Third Thursday event will once again feature Grand Rapids Poet Laureate, Rodney Torreson. Torreson gave a reading last month and was delightful. He is wonderfully unassuming, almost timid, but his poetry sparkles. It is quintessentially "midwest" poetry--accessible, earthy, homespun, sacralizing the mundane. He finished that reading with "Don Larsen's Perfect World Series Game," from his collection, The Ripening of Pinstripes--a fantastic cresendo packed full of allusions. He is also a wonderful encourager of young poets (and even had one of his students, a freshman in high school, read five of her poems). I'm looking forward to introducing my son, Coleson (a gifted and--I hope--aspiring writer), to Torreson.

If you're in the vicinity, I'll hope to see you there!

Updike: A Month of Sundays

2009-04-05T15:04:00.005-04:00

While on a trip last week, I took along an old paperback edition of John Updike's mid-70s novel, A Month of Sundays. Penned in the first-person, the story recounts the misadventures of Rev. Tom Marshfield who writes the memoir as part of his rehabilitation while exiled in Arizona, banished from the ministry because of his adulterous habits. A grumpy Barthian (must be a Princeton grad! ;-) with no patience for the soppy humanism of Tillich and his ilk, Marshfield is nonetheless an unabashed, unashamed, and unrepentant worshiper in the temples of lonely, middle-class suburban women. Indeed, one must be struck by the difference between Marshfield and, say, Graham Greene's adulterers: the latter at least seem to think they ought to be penitent; Marshfield doesn't ever seem bothered by such notions.

The novel is a curious little time capsule, a peek into the swirling mores of the early 70s--though generally as viewed from a WASPish distance. It's also classic Updike: page-turning, unctuous prose laced with a strange eroticism that was probably more titillating than it ought to be. In fact, as I was reading it, I was concious of how the power of the story could so quickly create its own plausibility structures, a world in which Marshfield's behavior doesn't seem reprehensible. Perhaps Updike means to make us guilty by association, but I think more likely he means to create a world where there should be no guilt associated with such behavior. It the protagonist is a professing a Barthian, the ethos of a story is nothing other than "express-yourself" liberalism.

(And it should be noted that this is just the sort of novel that is rife with material to substantiate the claim that Updike is a misogynistic objectifier of women. While I know he always bristled at the charge, and though he'd likely offload the blame onto his first-person narrator, it's very hard to come away from the book and not share a sense of taint.)

Finally, it seems to me that Updike is never willing to not be "Updike." That is, Updike is never willing to relinquish the aestheticism that is his defining voice, even when he's writing in the first person of another. So the book--like any first-person work by Updike--is beset with a problem of voice and authenticity; in short, in Updike's hands, everybody sounds like Updike.

The Man Behind the Paris Review

2009-02-08T21:37:00.006-05:00

As Donald Hall puts it, when a young poet is 16, he wants to be the next Dante; when he's 25, he wants to be published in the New Yorker.

Well, when a young novelist is 16, he wants to be the next Proust; when he's 25, he wants to publish a story in the Paris Review. A literary quarterly of mythical status (rivaled only by Granta, I think), the PR has introduced generations to new voices that would go on to become the voices of a generation. So I was delighted to find a sort of 'biography' of George Plimpton, one of the co-founders of the Review, on the "new arrivals" shelf of the Grand Rapids Public Library.

George, Being George, edited by Nelson Aldrich, is either a brilliant experiment in biography or a half-baked substitute. The subtitle gives some indication of the book's approach: "George Plimpton's life as told, admired, deplored, and envied by 200 friends, relatives, lovers, acquaintances, rivals—and a few unappreciative observers." The book is a collection of vignettes from Plimpton's friends, associates, and even a few enemies--which, given his stature and charm as a "networker," pretty much amounts to a who's who in American letter and New York "Society." I have to admit, I had a hard time getting through the first chapter, but only because I have such visceral negative reactions to the lives of privileged East Coast Brahmins. And yet one can't help feeling that if you ran into Plimpton outside these contexts, you'd never guess he was heir to such privilege--that he was equally comfortable among the bohemians in post-war Paris and in the environs of the Vanderbilt mansion. Indeed, even if a few of his "detractors" are heard here, one comes away with the impression that Plimpton was just a helluva nice guy. But most interesting to me were the chapters that charted the emergence of the Paris Review in post-war Paris, after Plimpton had spent some time in Cambridge--on a shoe-string, regularly hanging of the precipice of collapse, torn between a Paris office and a New York center of gravity, but then growing into a stable, flagship quarterly.

At times the book's methodology felt like a punt--that this collection of reminiscences is really just the raw material that should have been the spine or skeleton of a proper biography. And yet the methodology completely sucked me in: you can read this stuff all day, and there is a certain rawness to these reflections which have an immediacy that feels almost oral. So perhaps rather than being a punt, the book hits a home run.

(Perhaps) The Saddest Poem I've Ever Read

2009-01-29T21:25:00.004-05:00

Isn't it odd how the loss of an author all of a sudden makes his books come to life on my shelf? Over the past several days I've been dabbling and sampling from the Updike on my shelves, including a small collection of his early verse. But then today Gina Barreca's blog pointed me to an Updike poem I had never seen before, and it might just be the saddest thing I've ever read:

Dog’s Death

By John Updike

She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.
Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn
To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor
And to win, wetting there, the words, “Good dog! Good dog!”

We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.
The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.
As we teased her with play, blood was filling her skin
And her heart was learning to lie down forever.

Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed
And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest’s bed.
We found her twisted and limp but still alive.
In the car to the vet’s, on my lap, she tried

To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur
And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.
Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her,
Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.

Back home, we found that in the night her frame,
Drawing near to dissolution, had endured the shame
Of diarrhea and had dragged across the floor
To a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.

"Literary Life" in Grand Rapids

2009-01-16T11:19:00.002-05:00

I know that I sometimes whine about how thoroughly midwestern Grand Rapids can sometimes be. Yesterday morning I was once again beset by self-pity, feeling exiled in a cultural backwater, when I discovered that neither Waltz with Bashir nor Revolutionary Road were playing in a single cinema in the Grand Rapids area. (You must read, by the way, James Wood's stunning piece of criticism on Yates in the recent New Yorker.) Having lived in Los Angeles for a few years, I got used to movies being "open in select theaters" just meaning, "open in the theater around the corner." Turns out--surprise, surprise--that Grand Rapids was not "selected."

But also as per usual, my wannabe-Manhattanite, cold snobbishness was gradually thawed through the day. While reading and working at Common Ground, I grinned to myself when I noticed a fellow patron reading Saul Bellow's Herzog. This was then capped with a wonderful evening at one of my new favorite spaces in Grand Rapids: the "Literary Life" Bookstore at the corner of Wealthy & Eastern, within walking distance from my house.

Deanna and I finally "discovered" Literary Life before Christmas. While it's been on our radar, I'm embarrassed to say I never made it inside until just last month. What a wonderful literary oasis! I immediately ended up in a back corner of the store that was loaded with books to sustain a writing life, then migrated into a rich poetry section, and only teased myself with the fiction shelves that looked so different from the chain store offerings. All of this clearly demonstrated a staff that knows what matters in the world of literature, poetry, and writing.

And last night was the beginning of a new Literary Life tradition: "Third Thursdays" will feature local artists and writers in a casual venue, enjoying coffee and LitLife's fabulous selection of teas. (The Harney & Sons "Paris" blend found tastebuds I didn't know I had before.) The opening act was the Kilpatricks, a wife/husband duo whose acoustic sound was somewhere between folk and a kind of "blues." (Great covers of Belinda Carlisle and Leonard Cohen/Jeff Buckley's "Broken Hallelujah." I'd love to hear Amber cover Rosie Thomas.) While listening, and afterwards, we could browse the shelves and I was once again impressed: somehow I got locked in the Ws (oh yeah, I was looking for Yates) and found a trove of David Foster Wallace and Evelyn Waugh. Hallelujah, indeed.

In short, Literary Life helps me to imagine how one might sustain a "literary life" right here in Grand Rapids.

Severance: The Problem with "Conceptual" Fiction

2009-01-09T22:24:00.003-05:00

I take special delight in happenstance book acquisitions. For instance, this week I found myself on the campus of the University of Central Florida, in their bookshop--"book"-shop being a bit of a stretch, since the store was more like what one finds in so-called "Christian bookstores;" namely, an overwhelming amount of logo-emblazoned merchandise with a few books hidden in the corner. In any event, one doesn't come to the campus of the University of Central Florida expecting much in the way of intellectual stimulation. But passing some time, I did find a bargain bin and hit upon a wonderful little surprise: Robert Olen Butler's 2006 experiment, Severance--an irregular sized offering from Chronicle Books, in a squat edition with blackened and deckled pages (the materiality, I think, being integral to the book's experimentality).

The book could be described as a concept-driven collection of "stories" which feel more like stream-of-consciousness poems, a sort of prose haiku. And the concept that drives them is the product of a morbid mathematics. This is staged by two "epigraphs" which, it turns out, are essential to the performance of the book:

After careful study and due deliberation it is my opinion the head remains conscious for one minute and a half after decapitation. -Dr. Dassy D'Estaing, 1883

In a heightened state of emotion, we speak at the rate of 160 words per minute. -Dr. Emily Reasoner, A Sourcebook of Speech, 1975

Coupling these two "facts" or hypotheses, Olen undertakes his experiment: to narrate the last 240 words worth of consciousness of severed heads across history, from Mud, a man beheaded by a sabertooth tiger, 40,000BC to Tyler Alkins, a civilian truck driver beheaded by insurgents in Iraq, 2004. In between we hear the sentient last-moment ramblings of St. Valentine and Marie Antoinette and Nicole Brown, along with a host of "unknowns" variously decapitated by elevators, executioners, and jealous husbands, sons, and even daughters.

Like alot of movie trailers and Will Ferrell films, the idea is better than the execution. (One might even have reservations about the concept insofar as it feels like publishing the fruits of what could be an outstanding creative writing exercise, but not necessarily a book of stories.) Granted, some of the pieces are exquisite (such as the last thoughts of St. Valentine or Claude Messner, a homeless man decapitated by an Amtrak train in 2000). The stories jolt from very different contexts and take up different voices, and suffused through most is a kind of eroticism (perhaps growing from a Freudian assumption about links between sex and death). And Butler is a master of language: attention to rhythm and lexicon gives these "stories" their poetic feel.

But at the same time, the collection suffers on two counts:

First, from the very first story, I found myself perturbed by the matter of voice. (It's James Wood who taught me to ask these questions of a story.) For instance, right out of the gate there's prehistoric man, thinking his last thoughts in English, and with a pretty decent vocabulary at that. Throughout the collection, while Butler at times tries to get closer to the voice of his lolling heads, it always feels like--all of a sudden, having been severed from their bodies--all heads become poets.

Second, the stories actually shrink from the concept. In almost every case, with only a few exceptions, what we get is not the 90 seconds of consciousness after the guillotine drops, but more like the 87 seconds just before the slice, with a blip after words. And oddly, almost all of these last glimmers of consciousness turn out to offer replays of the life that has preceded them (think of Lester Burnham's final musing after the gunshot in American Beauty). But this feels like both a cliche and a cheat. One wonders whether the head in the bucket, instead of recalling glistening wheatfields in the Kansas sun, doesn't--oddly and tragically enough--worry about whether it left the stove on that morning.

Favorite Poet(s) of 2008

2008-12-23T21:23:00.002-05:00

This year was one of discovery for me, finding poets that have long been familiar to others but hidden from my parochial, provincial vision. For instance: while Donald Hall had been on my radar, it wasn't until 2008 that I finally dove into his work. And according to my notes, I first discovered Charles Wright in the summer of 2007, but this year I enjoyed lingering with Negative Blue, with its alternate evocations of Italy and Virginia, Rorty and Dante.

But what's most remarkable for me is that, one year ago, I had never read a poem by Ted Hughes. That's what it means for me to "find" a poet: I don't know how I inhabited the world without him (or her). I simply can't imagine how my imagination looked before I read Anne Sexton; and I can't imagine how I perceived the world before Franz Wright.

And I don't know how I heard the world before reading Ted Hughes. His is the poetry of a Yorkshireman: earthy, wet, gutteral, alliterative, rolling and rocking. I can still remember being in our flat in York and being riveted by "The Hawk in the Rain":

I drown in the drumming ploughland, I drag up
Heel after heel from the swallowing of the earth’s mouth,
From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle
With the habit of the dogged grave, but the hawk

Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye.
His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet,
Steady as a hallucination in the streaming air.
While banging wind kills these stubborn hedges,

Thumbs my eyes, throws my breath, tackles my heart,
And rain hacks my head to the bone, the hawk hangs
The diamond point of will that polestars
The sea drowner’s endurance: and I,

Bloodily grabbed dazed last-moment-counting
Morsel in the earth’s mouth, strain towards the master-
Fulcrum of violence where the hawk hangs still.
That maybe in his own time meets the weather

Coming the wrong way, suffers the air, hurled upside down,
Fall from his eye, the ponderous shires crash on him,
The horizon traps him; the round angelic eye
Smashed, mix his heart’s blood with the mire of the land.

The very syllables are knee-deep in the muck of English winter while the word-hawk feels like it inhabits a vacuum, slipping streamlined as if the world were nothing, though threatened by that looming earth.

Or consider "The Thought-Fox" in which the poem sneaks up on both the poet and reader:

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

I'll also not forget finding a used copy of Hughes' New Selected Poems, 1957-1994 at Blackwell's in Oxford on Maundy Thursday, then reading it during a lonely Indian dinner before Maundy Thursday worship at St. Mary's.

I have much for which to be grateful in 2008; Ted Hughes is no small part of those graces enjoyed.

2008 Retrospective Reading List

2008-12-13T14:27:00.004-05:00

Tis the season for literary retrospectives. Around this time of year, my retrospection is always tempered by a certain amount of guilt and a sense of failure (alas, the plight of a Calvinist who loves literature). As I pass by our bookshelves--in the living room, in the front hall, above my desk, behind my desk, in the bathroom--I'm always a bit overwhelmed: even in my own rather humble libraries, there are volumes and volumes of "classics" calling my name: from the Odyssey and Dante's Vita Nuova to yet more McCarthy, Updike and Julian Barnes. There's half a shelf of Wodehouse, a collection of Sir Walter Scott novels, and twentieth-century landmarks like Bellow's Adventures of Augie March and Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. From across the pond, I'm still looking at James Joyce and piles of Evelyn Waugh, and the remaining volumes of Proust seem to turn up their nose in condescension when I walk past.

And here we are at the end of another year and my shelves are still weighed down with books I've yet to read. So I thought I'd do a little inventory; ranging across the shelves with my notebook, I recorded the books that I actually did manage to read (entire books, mind you; I'm the master of sampling, but that doesn't count). And it turns out that, though there are all those uncracked spines staring back at me, I did manage to wade into a decent number. (I've not done this before, so I don't have any comparative "sample.") Most importantly, there are books on the list that I've wanted to read for a long time and finally had the opportunity (our time in England was a change of rhythm that made this possible). Closer to the end of the year, after grades are submitted, I hope to comment on five or ten of my favorites from this past year (some I've already blogged about). Until then, in no particular order, here's my 2008 Retrospective Reading List:

Christopher Wood, The Pre-Raphaelites
Alice Munro, Runaway
Gary Wills, Venice: The Lion City
Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, Volume 1
Walter Pater, The Renaissance
Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (A Rebours)
George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist
Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of
Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. Simon Armitage
Christine Meldrum, Madapple
Donald Hall, White Apples and the Taste of Stone
Donald Hall, Unpacking Boxes
Arthur Rimbaud, I Promise to be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud
Ian Rankin, Knots & Crosses
Gore Vidal, The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal, ed. Jay Parini
David Sedaris, When You are Engulfed in Flames
James Wood, How Fiction Works
Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago

[When I'm looking for more excuses to avoid grading, I may comb through my periodicals, magazines and collections and come up with a list of short stories read this past year.]

Books, "Book Talk," Grand Rapids...and Wendell Berry

2008-12-05T08:40:00.003-05:00

Reading The New Yorker is both pleasure and pain for me. The pleasure comes from the stimulating content, including excellent commentary, criticism, fiction and poetry. The pain comes from the fact that I actually work through "Goings On About Town" each week--the pages and pages of fine print summaries and highlights of all the concerts, plays, exhibits, and films on offer in New York City. Reading about the cultural riches of NYC from afar usually deepens a sense of cultural exile here in the so-called heartland, in podunk Grand Rapids, Michigan.

But on other days, I'm reminded that we have our own little intellectual province here in Grand Rapids. This past Saturday, for instance, I took a stroll to one of our local used book shops, Redux Books. There I bumped into one of the sales executives of one of our local publishing houses, and along with the proprietor, we enjoyed a lovely conversation about publishing, books, and theology. I then made my way down into some of the far recesses of the basement holdings and emerged with a book of poems by Marianne Moore, the third edition of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren's Understanding Poetry, and a first edition of Donald Hall's Remembering Poets. That's a pretty delightful Saturday morning in any city.

Then this past Wednesday night was another wonderful "literary" experience. My friends Matt Bonzo and Michael Stevens, both professors at another local Christian university, have just published a wonderful new book, Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader's Guide (Brazos--another one of our local publishers). The book launch was Wednesday night, at one of my favorite spaces in Grand Rapids: the Ryerson Auditorium in the Grand Rapids Public Library downtown. The reception was hosted by the Vanderveen Center for the Book and was an evening of interesting, provocative conversation--on top of the fact that Bonzo and Stevens have also written a great book (which I'm now reading).

When I daydream (and night dream) about being a "writer," New York looms in my imagination like Nashville does for the young country musician, or the way Los Angeles tempts the aspiring actress. And the desire to make the pilgrimmage can make "small town" Grand Rapids feel cramped and provincial. But on other days, like these, I'm grateful for this little corner of the midwest in which are buried our own little cultural treasures.

NYC, of course, would also come with its price (as do Nashville and Los Angeles!). Not a few writers (especially southern writers like Faulkner and Walker Percy) found distance from the Eastern seaboard to be a necessary space for their work. Perhaps instead of pining for Manhattan or, in turn, resenting it, we should be working on fostering a literary and cultural regionalism. The Podunks of middle America can be home to "small, good things," too.

Unpacking the Boxes: More Donald Hall

2008-12-01T08:23:00.004-05:00

I recently noted the poetry of Donald Hall which has nourished me over the last few months. I think his verse has a cunning simplicity about it. In that earlier post I perhaps gave the mistaken impression that Hall was (just) a "nature" poet--the next Robert Frost or something like that. Such an impression would be misleading. While he hymns New Hampshire and Eagle Pond, he also pens verse about urinals and baseball. (He has suggested that "Love, Death, and New Hampshire" would be a good title for his collected poems.)

Given this immersion and appreciation, I couldn't resist reading his new memoir, Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry. The prose of poets is often both curt and intense. Hall's prose exhibits this in flashes, with passages that have the density of poetry, making you wonder whether the paragraphs began with line breaks and pauses. But other long sections are conversational. Hall lacks pretention, even though such would be warranted. This little volume tracks his childhood and his early love of poetry (both reading and writing), through his college years, time in Oxford and at Stanford, and then his longish tenure teaching at the University of Michigan. It then follows him to New Hampshire (though omitting the long illness and death of his wife, Jane Kenyon, which he's addressed elsewhere). Perhaps most poignant, even jarring, is the final chapter on "The Planet Antiquity"--the poet's honest chronicling of what it means to grow old, the body's cricks and creeks and general stubborness resisting desire. It is an account that gives pause to (relatively) young folks like me who continue to think of themselves as invincible.

As the subtitle promises, this memoir focuses on his life as a poet, with reminiscences of poet-friends (including life-long friendships with Robert Bly and Adrienne Rich) and experiences with some of the greats like Dylan Thomas and Robert Graves. (Just this past Saturday at Redux Books, our little treasure here in Eastown, I picked up a first edition of an earlier book of recollections by Hall, Remembering Poets.) Describing his experience as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, I could picture all his haunts and movements (he was a fellow at Christ Church) and was once again beset by nostalgia for England.

But Hall also recounts the work of poetry, the disciplines and regimens of a poet (every morning, for two hours--a Herculean feat), including the life-giving regimen of the 20-minute nap ("I have practiced the twenty-minute nap for half a century"). And the wrestlings of the poet with language, including the "spaces" of language--not just the words, but their arrangement and rhythm, the gaps and silences. Consider this reflection on a transitional phase, where he's grappling with form and meter and resisting the temptation to think of poems as "messages":

With my immersion in form, I found myself writing a kind of poem. It wasn't meter's fault; metrical poems can go anywhere and do anything. For me, these forms came to imply a reasonable poem. It sounds crazy now, but at that time I needed to understand what the poem was going to say before I began it. The better poems I wrote in my twenties--like "My Son My Executioner" and "The Sleeping Giant"--concealed a content I was not aware of. [...] As I was finishing the late poems of Exiles, something in me began to feel stifled, dumb, inarticulate. My grand language failed to express or reveal crucial areas of feeling. I flailed about, looking for other ways to make a noise. I had admired Marianne Moore's syllabics--keeping a syllable count, avoiding metrical feet. Holding on to the count of syllables as to a guardrail, I wrote a poem called "Je Suis Une Table." I thought it was a poem of wit exploiting a language error--tables can't talk--but it wasn't; it was an outcry, complaining of habitual limitation or inhibition. This poem began a journey. Eventually, I no longer demanded that my poems explain themselves before they got written; I learned to trust the impetus, to ride the wave. The wave was feeling, expressed largely in long vowels. I worked by accepting an image compelled by rhythm and sound--without requiring that it explain its purpose (pp. 120-121).

For thirteen years Hall taught English at the University of Michigan (he started when he was 28; finished in his early 4os). While he never saw this as his primary vocation, he did see it as a meaningful and passable way to fund what he really wanted to do, which was write. But one has the sense that, despite his ambivalence, Hall was a master teacher. As he rightly notes, the trick is to teach what you don't know. And to live for those glimpses where teaching and learning hit their stride.

Answering questions was the best part. Everyone who loves teaching has the same experience: Someone asks a question; it's something you never thought of, but the moment you hear the question, you know the answer. Ninety percent of what you say is something you didn't know until you said it.

(These are my favorite moments of teaching, too: when something emerges in the conversation, in wrestling together with texts and ideas. On the best days, in response to good questions, I can venture into new territory. Chalk flies, and sometimes, on a good day, we all learn something. I then stay in the classroom, after the students have filed out, and take down my own notes, recording what I've just figured out on the board for the first time.)

Mostly what shines through is a love of poetry and the poetic life (and Jane, and New Hampshire), with all its friendships and disappointments and anxities and depressions, with no small number of joys and delights. Here is poetic ambition: "the poet at fifteen wants to be as great as Dante; by twenty-five he wants to be in The New Yorker."

What I'm Listening To: Shakespeare's MacBeth

2008-11-05T08:46:00.002-05:00

I had a long drive, by myself, to Chicago this past weekend, so I was excited to learn that Calvin's library recently acquired a complete set of fully-dramatized recordings of the works of Shakespeare. I took Macbeth along with me, cranked it up, and was pretty much spell-bound--disappointed that I got to Chicago so quickly. A great performance that is very creative in trying to translate the dynamic, multivalent medium of the theatre to the pared-down medium of audio. The score is subtle but haunting, and the dramatization is very good. Highly recommended.

Poetry, Language, and Propositions

2008-10-24T19:14:00.002-04:00

Continuing on the poetry theme: in my upper-level seminar on Philosophy of Language & Interpretation, we've been talking about different "registers" of truth that map onto different uses of language. The sort of truth that is effected in poetry and literature is not reducible to the register of truth that is captured in propositions and syllogisms. Poetry does something different than an argument; but that doesn't mean it isn't "true." Only a kind of propositional imperialism would reduce truth to the mode of assertion.

In the course, we're going to work through these issues by reading Wittgenstein then diving into Nicole Krauss' novel, The History of Love. But this poem that I just read in the New Yorker also hints at these issues, in just the sort of way that can't be elucidated in propositional form:

THE WAY
by Albert Goldbarth

The sky is random. Even calling it “sky”
is an attempt to make a meaning, say,
a shape, from the humanly visible part
of shapelessness in endlessness. It’s what
we do, in some ways it’s entirely what
we do—and so the devastating rose

of a galaxy’s being born, the fatal lamé
of another’s being torn and dying, we frame
in the lenses of our super-duper telescopes the way
we would those other completely incomprehensible
fecund and dying subjects at a family picnic.
Making them “subjects.” “Rose.” “Lamé.” The way

our language scissors the enormity to scales
we can tolerate. The way we gild and rubricate
in memory, or edit out selectively.
An infant’s gentle snoring, even, apportions
the eternal. When they moved to the boonies,
Dorothy Wordsworth measured their walk

to Crewkerne—then the nearest town—
by pushing a device invented especially
for such a project, a “perambulator”: seven miles.
Her brother William pottered at his daffodils poem.
Ten thousand saw I at a glance: by which he meant
too many to count, but could only say it in counting.

The Poetry of Donald Hall

2008-10-20T21:52:00.003-04:00

Having posted about poetry over at Fors Clavigera, I thought it might be appropriate to share some recent poetry reading.

By the way, did I ever share one of my treasured little "poetic" experiences from York? Well, one of the things that characterizes a robust "newspaper culture" in England is stiff competition; and one of the outworkings of that is an incessant stream of promotional hooks and gimmicks to attract buyers. For example, the Sunday papers will regularly feature DVDs of classic movies, or a series of small glossy booklets on gardening or cosmology, etc. While we were there, my favorite paper, The Guardian, ran a fabulous promotion: "Great Poets of the Twentieth Century." For seven days straight, the paper included a small booklet of poems by some of the greats: Frost, Sassoon, Plath, Ted Hughes, TS Eliot, Larkin, and Seamus Heaney. This was capped off with a CD of the poets doing select readings. Like a boy collecting box tops for a magic decoder ring, I saved up mastheads of the paper to then send away for a free storage box for the set. It now sits here in our living room as a wonderful reminder of our time in York--and a very nice anthology of some great poems.

Over the past couple months, though, I've been enjoying the poetry of former Poet Laureate, Donald Hall, as collected in White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems from 1946-2006. Hall is a laureate of nature, especially New England's nature. But he's not a romantic. In fact, one will sometimes find oneself jarred by his grittiness and honesty about relationships. But he can also just be a charmer, giving us lyric that simply elicits a smile--until you start thinking about it, and realize more's going on here. Take, for instance, a fairly recent poem, "Olives" (apparently you can listen to it here):

"Dead people don't like olives,"
I told my partners in eighth grade
dancing class, who never listened
as we fox-trotted, one-two, one-two.

The dead people I often consulted
nodded their skulls in unison
while I flung my black velvet cape
over my shoulders and glowered
from deep-set, burning eyes,
walking the city streets, alone at fifteen,
crazy for cheerleaders and poems.

At Hamden High football games, girls
in short pleated skirts
pranced and kicked, and I longed
for their memorable thighs.
They were friendly--poets were mascots--
but never listened when I told them
that dead people didn't like olives.

Instead the poet, wearing the cape,
continued to prowl in solitude
intoning inscrutable stanzas
as halfbacks and tackles
made out, Friday nights after football,
on sofas in dark-walled rec rooms
with magnanimous cheerleaders.

But, decades later, when the dead
have stopped blathering
about olives, obese halfbacks wheeze
upstairs to sleep beside cheerleaders
waiting for hip replacements,
while a lascivious, doddering poet,
his burning eyes deep-set
in wrinkles, cavorts with their daughters.

(Revenge of the poets!)

But most moving in this collection are those poems written after the death of Hall's wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, particularly those collected in "Letters Without Addresses." The letters chronicle a year of mourning that cycles with the seasons as articulated in the rhythms of Jane's garden (an image particularly haunting for me, as I think of Deanna's gardens that adorn our house and life) and the snow that buries her grave.

[...]
Do you remember our first
January at Eagle Pond,
the coldest in a century?
It dropped to thirty-eight below--
with no furnace, no storm
windows or insulation.
We sat reading or writing
in our two big chairs, either
side of the Glenwood,
and made love on the floor
with the stove open and roaring.
You were twenty eight.
If someone had told us then
you would die in nineteen years,
would it have sounded
like almost enough time?
[...]

Gopnik on Mill in the New Yorker

2008-10-09T21:06:00.002-04:00

Last year, since we were headed to England for five months, I had to let my magazine subscriptions lapse. Upon returning, I decided to change things up a bit: though I re-upped on Vanity Fair, instead of renewing Harper's (I now get hand-me-downs from a friend) I subscribed to the New Yorker and am loving it (even if it does tend to make Grand Rapids feel very "midwest"). Samplings of cultural happenings in NYC, deeper reflections on the headlines, film reviews from Anthony Lane, regular pieces by Adam Gopnik (who I've praised before)--and it's a weekly. What's not to love?

Take Gopnik's review of a John Stuart Mill biography in last week's issue. Noting that Mill's staggering genius and enduring contemporaneity make any biographer just a bit resentful, Gopnik remarks:

Every time we turn a corner, there is Mill, smiling just a touch too complacently at having got there first. Admiration for intelligence and truth easily turns into resentment at the person who has them; Aristides the Just was banished from Athens because people were fed up with hearing him called Aristides the Just. It is one of the many virtues of Reeves’s funny, humane biography that it brings Mill to life in the only way sententious great men can be brought to life, and that is by showing us what he was like when he lost his heart and when he lost his reason. Both happened to him just once, but that was sufficient. Mill’s is a story of a man out in the pure sun of reason and rational inquiry, lit at night by the romantic moonlight of a little bit of love and just enough madness.

The World according to David Sedaris

2008-09-07T12:36:00.004-04:00

For the proverbial "something completely different," I just finished David Sedaris' latest book, When You are Engulfed in Flames, the first Sedaris I've read. Having enjoyed some of his NPR spots, I knew I'd be in for a treat. Sedaris is not a "comedian," but rather a humorist--a quirky observer of nooks and crannies of American (and global) culture that are usually ignored by other "critics." After the first night I had to stop reading this in bed because the uproarious laughter it caused kept waking up the kids. But don't be fooled: these aren't just funny little Seinfeldish "observations" (though you have to love lines like his comment on living in Normandy: Normandy "is like West Virginia, but without the possums"). In fact, one might be surprised at how Sedaris can explore the morbid and macabre in the mode of the comedic: from a season spent in a coroner's autopsy room to the human skeleton hanging in their Paris bedroom. I think Sedaris might be best illuminated if we see him in the orbit of Southern Gothic.

While it's a nice breezy, "beach" sort of read, it also feels like a book that should be read again. I'm not sure I've quite got a handle on Sedaris' world, but I have the sense that it's not the pop nihilism of a Seinfeld, nor just the trivialized world of other comedians. Despite the drugs and homosexuality, I have this hunch that if one reads between the lines, there's something sort of "conservative" about Sedaris: that at the end of the day, what matters are significant relationships, including (and perhaps even primarily) family. There might be a sense in which all of Sedaris' weird, even disturbing, stories are implicit love stories. Maybe the distance between Flannery O'Connor and David Sedaris is not as far as one might think.

The Practice of Criticism: On James Wood's, "How Fiction Works"

2008-09-02T04:51:00.003-04:00

I should say up front that James Wood is living my dream. A staff writer for the New Yorker, chief literary critic for The Guardian, professor of the practice of criticism at Harvard University, and a respected novelist to boot (and he's only five years older than I am!), Wood might be the closest thing we have to a successor to Edmund Wilson. So any criticisms that follow can probably be chalked up to little more than jealousy--the literary equivalent of suggesting that Wood has fat ankles.

How Fiction Works is a compact, even squat little hardcover, the very materiality of which seems bent on recalling an era and ethos of reading "before theory," as it were. Somehow the 4.5" x 7" format--coupled with wide margins, classic font, and running page heads that indicate the content of each page--manage to evoke the sorts of predecessors that Wood himself invokes: Ruskin's Elements of Drawing and E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel. The materiality of the book primes a certain approach, a certain horizon of expectation for the reader and seems to effect a first shift in readerly stance that Woods' criticism would encourage: attention to the craft.

If the title sounds like a dreary, mechanical textbook for Creative Writing classes the world over, in fact the book is as much for readers as writers. This is a work of criticism, not a Writers-Workshop-in-a-box. Nor is this a book which sets out to demystify the novel as if Wod were a member of the guild willing to share with us the secrets of the illusionist. While it is attentive to concrete realities of mechanics, How Fiction Works is not a disenchantment of the novel, disclosing to us the code or formula that makes fiction work. In fact, any reader will thank Wood for breaking open fiction in new ways in the opening chapter on narration alone. Like all good criticism, Wood names and articulates our intuitions and gut reactions. For instance, he names exactly the discomfort I have long felt about straight-up, confident, magisterial third person narration one finds in someone like Jane Austen (or Joyce Carol Oates, for that matter?). On this point he cites W.G. Sebald:

Given that you have a world where the rules are clear and where one knows where trespassing begins, then I think it is legitimate, within that context, to be a narrator who knows what the rules are and who knows the answers to certain questions. But I think these certainties have been taken from us by the course of history.

Wood goes on to provide a breezy but profound analysis of different kinds of narration which almost turns into a reverie on free indirect style. In this context he provides a stinging critique of Updike's failures in this respect in his 2006 novel, Terrorist, where the narrator's language refuses to bend "toward its characters and their habits of speech." Of course, some novels are exercises and experiments bent on seeing the extent to which this is possible. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury comes to mind, but more recently, something like Kieron Smith, Boy in which James Kelman tries to be the ventriloquist of a boy from working class Glasgow. But such a project is always beset by a bit of a ruse. After all, how likely is it that a tough young Glaswegian is going to take the time to pen a 432 page memoir, even if it is in the dialect that Kelman seeks to reproduce?

Wood is out to explain how fiction works, not in order to provide a template for would-be writers to go enact a formula, but more for readers who appreciate good criticism as a portal into the further enchanting mysteries of fiction (as when we ask ourselves sometimes, "Now, just how does this paper-and-ink artifact manage to do this to me?"). While Wood tips his hat to Barthes, this is not a "theory-driven" account of literature. Indeed, there is something kind of "lunch box"--or rather, "tool box"--about it in its meat-and-potatoes attention to the basic elements of narration, detail, character, language, register, and dialogue (ending with a short theoretical riff on one of Wood's enduring interests: the question of realism).

The range of Woods' interlocutors is almost dizzying (from Homer to Cormac McCarthy), but a couple of heroes keep asserting themselves: Flaubert and Henry James, even thought both were prone to what Wood sees as the persistent temptation of the modern novel--an aestheticist wallowing in detail (see Updike). But Flaubert and James are simply the leading voices of a rich choir that Wood orchestrates, with parts for Cervantes and Defoe as well as Pynchon and Delillo.

It's on this point that I would register one criticism. In what is, without question, a landmark book that I have already profited from quite immeasurably, I do find Wood sometimes wears his learning a little heavily. To be more precise, there are times when he slides from being precocious to being just rather obnoxious. Take, for instance, an opening "Note on Footnotes and Dates" in which Wood feels it necessary to point out that "I have used only the books that I actually own--the books at hand in my study--to produce this little volume." Why tell us that? Perhaps to deflect critics who will decry books that have been ignored--though, in that case, the criticism would still hold, wouldn't it? For instance, one can imagine politically correct assistant professors of English lamenting the "Eurocentric" nature of Wood's book ("Where is the Indonesian, post-colonial fiction?!") and thus Wood trying to head them off at the pass by saying, "Look, I was just working with what I had to hand." But then the criticism would be: "Not only is this 'little book' Eurocentrist and still-colonial, but James Wood is! He doesn't have any Indonesian, post-colonial fiction in his personal library!"

Instead, what is intended as a mark of humble constraints (in producing "this little volume") comes off as backhanded pomposity. This is augmented by the function of several of the scant footnotes in the text which seem like little more than Wood showing off. These includes little asides which catalogue instances of self-plagiarism in Tolstoy, Dickens, James and McCarthy (p. 65); or the convention of allegorical names in Tolstoy, Thackeray, Wordsworth, and Evelyn Waugh (p. 115); or the cast of minor characters with writers' names in Proust, Bernanos, Updike, Jones, Tolstoy (again!), and others (p. 162). Methinks Wood doth indulge a bit. (Read: fat ankles!)

Finally, let me take up one particular piece of criticism in which Wood, contrary to his otherwise exemplary practice, seems to miss the point precisely because he fails to appreciate a theological point in literature. (In The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, Wood has shown his superiority to a critic like Christopher Hitchens precisely in his ability to appreciate theological nuance.) The context is his marvelous discussion of free indirect style. Not surprisingly, he holds up Henry James' What Maisie Knew as a model. Though told from the third person, Wood notes how James' manages to make the narrative bend to the voice and world of young Maisie Farange, who is bounced between her divorced parents and attaches herself to one of her governesses, Mrs. Wix. Mrs. Wix had a daughter, Clara Matilda, who died tragically just when she was about Maisie's age, and Maisie often accompanies Mrs. Wix to Clara's grave in the cemetary at Kensal Green. Wood wants us to focus on James' ability to write from the third person in a way that invites us to inhabit young Maisie's confusion, torn between her mother (who speaks poorly of the lowly Mrs. Wix) and the governess, but also confused by the absence of Clara Matilda. He hones in on this passage:

Mrs. Wix was as safe as Clara Matilda, who was in heaven and yet, embarrasingly, also in Kensal Green, where they had been together to see her little huddled grave.

Wood suggests that "James's genius gathers in one word: 'embarrasingly.'" Whose word is "embarrasingly," he asks? "It is Maisie's: it is embarrassing for a child to witness adult grief, and we know that Mrs. Wix has taken to referring to Clara Matilda as Maisie's 'little dead sister.'" Wood is exactly right that "embarrasingly" is Maisie's language, and thus rightly notes James' ability to bend the narrative--even in the third person--to Maisie's world so that we hear Maisie and not (just) James. But Wood seems to completely misinterpret just what is "embarrassing" for Maisie. It is not witnessing Mrs. Wix's grief. It is, rather, the theological tension that even young Maisie experiences: how can Clara Matilda be in heaven and in Kensal Green? Wood seems to completely miss the also in the passage. It is the conjunction that is the cause of embarrassment.

These minor criticisms aside, How Fiction Works leaves one eager to read anew.

Flaubert's Madame

2008-08-21T11:02:00.004-04:00

I was recently pointed back to Flaubert's Madame Bovary by a bit of a circuitous route. In preparation for writing a review of Julian Barnes' new book Nothing to be Frightened of (the review will appear in the summer issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin), I spent some time in Barnes' "novels," including A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters and Flaubert's Parrot, both of which are fantastic forays in history and biography, contesting our tidy self-assured distinctions between history and the novel. (This relationship and distinction is brought to the fore in what I'm reading right now: the novelist Shelby Foote's monumental The Civil War: A Narrative--but more on that some other time.) Flaubert and his generation are at the center of Flaubert's Parrot, but they also persistently appear as sages of a sort in Nothing to be Frightened Of. Thus I was pointed back to Flaubert's classic (particularly Geoffrey Wall's translation for the Penguin Classics).

The subtitle of Madame Bovary is a signal to us: it promises to narrate Provincial Lives. One might say that Madame Bovary is the first "suburban" novel--opening and anticipating a literary line that peeks into the mundane lives of the petit bourgeois, a line that will eventually give us films like Magnolia and Little Miss Sunshine. "Provincial" in a French context, of course, simply means "not Paris," though the Rouen region of France was perhaps particularly "provincial" in this respect. And yet, Madame Bovary is not the cynical work of a snooty Parisian taking shots at benighted provincials. There is a certain way in which the novel's subject almost hallows provincial life, I'd say: it decides that it's worth looking behind the doors of a village pharmacist and tracking the life of a despondent housewife. No one could read the heart-rending closing scenes of the novel--where Flaubert's stylistic flourish is most evidenced--and conclude that the author despises "provincial lives." (In this respect it calls to mind what is still perhaps the most important novel I've ever read, Jean Girardoux's Choice of the Elect.) If I ever become a writer, this hallowing of the domestic will be my literary mission.

Of course, Madame Bovary is not famous for her domesticity! However, given the scandal of the novels sexuality upon appearance, the contemporary reader will be (pleasantly) surprised at how oblique the eroticism is here (cp. Stanley Fish's recent comments on "the two most erotic moments" in American cinema). Indeed, the explicitness of Madame Bovary will look tame to anyone who just watches the Disney channel.

But most significant about the novel is the way that Flaubert bores into his characters, stopping the camera, so to speak, and letting it hang on their interiority in ways I find quintessentially French. While there is a plot driving the story, we find ourselves reading as explorers of an internal geography. Flaubert is a kind of cartographer, mapping the psyche. And he does all of this in a style that is unmatched--not particularly baroque or flowery, but still in a way that seems to sing. He pauses at just the right moments and describes what is etched on a face or the movement of a hand. Sometimes, as in the closing scenes, this is done with a pace that is breathtaking without being hasty or impatient. Consider just one snippet, quite at random:

But as she was writing, she beheld a different man, a phantom put together from her most ardent memories, her favourite books, her most powerful longings; and by the end he became so real, so tangible, that her heart was racing with the wonder of it, though she was unable to imagine him distinctly, for he faded, like a god, into the abundance of his attributes. He lived in the big blue country where silken rope-ladders swing from balconies, scented by flowers and lit by the moon (p. 271).

It is a small irony that a story which narrates the disastrous frustrations of pleasure-seeking is couched in a style that makes reading sheer pleasure.

Revisiting the '68 Conventions

2008-08-05T08:45:00.003-04:00

As historical animals, we seem to have a curious blindspot: about a decade that precedes and then includes our birth. When we are young, this time has not sufficiently settled into the past to count as "history," and thus doesn't show up in our history textbooks. It is also an era that has been lived, shared and thus assumed by the adults around us; they needn't talk about it because they've all been there.

For me this blindspot has been particularly disappointing and frustrating because it means "the sixties"--an era that hovers in our collective consciousness as either a past nirvana or the time when hell's handbasket showed up on our doorsteps--has always been just out of reach, a fuzzy apparition that I've never quite been able to grasp. Having been born in 1970, I have no personal memories of the tumultuous and frenetic shape of the sixties and early seventies: the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK; the civil rights movement and urban riots; the moon landing; Vietnam; the Kent State shootings; Watergate; and so much more. (Being born and raised in Canada is also a factor here.)

If there was a year I could live in that decade, I think it would be 1968. As an academic, and particularly as a philosopher specializing in French philosophy, '68 has always loomed over the figures I study--which includes the soixante-huitards who barricaded the Sorbonne. But given that such time travel is not likely any time soon, I was at least encouraged by the NYRB's republication of Norman Mailer's account of the 1968 presidential nomination conventions in Miami and the Siege of Chicago. Sensing, I guess, that the 2008 conventions will be "historic" (I don't quite share that sentiment, but I understand where it's coming from), the reissuing of this classic actually shows how gutted and disappointing the nomination process has become.

Mailer brings his flair and cadence as a novelist to this "new journalism" account of the conventions (the Republicans in Miami, the Democrats [in]famously in Chicago) originally written for Harper's. Punctuated by rapid-fire brilliance and mad, dazzling metaphors, the book reads like a dispatch by beat poets. And Mailer inserts himself into the story (hence the "new journalism") but not intrusively. This is never about Norman Mailer; rather, the anxieties and hopes of "the reporter" (always in the third person) are simply taken to be portals that intersect with his quarry.

Mailer brings this period to life in ways that had me astounded--partly because of my ignorance of just what happened in Chicago that August, and partly because of Mailer's character studies of figures like Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, even Richard Nixon. Indeed, what is perhaps most surprising from Mailer is his generosity, which functions as a kind of objectivity that prevents his "new journalism" from just sliding into propaganda. Indeed, the Maureen Dowds and Michael Moores of the world would do well to read this and see how Mailer--who ceretainly didn't lack commitments--could even be fair to Nixon (Nixon!). "In 1962 the reporter had given a small celebration for the collapse of Richard Nixon after his defeat in the election for Governor of California," Mailer confessess. "Now, in 1968, he was on the edge of becoming the nominee. It was obvious something was wrong with the reporter's picture. In his previous conception of Richard Nixon's character there had been no room for a comeback" (p. 42).

Mailer's descriptions are wry and incisive. His account of the Republican convention is concerned with the plight and fate of the WASP, observing "the muted tragedy of the Wasp--they were not on earth to enjoy or even perhaps to love so very much, they were here to serve, and serve they had in public functions and public charities...--and so much of America did not wish them to serve any longer" (35). This might explain why "you could not picture a Gala Republican who was not clean-shaven by eight A.M." Hence the irony "that in a year when the Republic hovered on the edge of revolution, nihilism, and lines of police on file to the horizon, visions of future Vietnams in our own cities upon us, the party of conservatism and principle, of corporate wealth and personal frugality, the party of cleanliness, hygiene, and balanced budget [!], should have set itself down on a sultan's strip" in Miami (14). (Brings to mind the complete lack of intuition when the Democrats recently organized a conference on faith and politics--in Las Vegas!)

At times Mailer's descriptions border on reverie, like his closing reflections on cops and the police mentality, or his early riff on the religion of "Americanism":

So far as there was an American faith, a belief, a mystique that America was more than the sum of its constituencies, its trillions of dollars and billions of acres, its constellation of factories, empyrean of communications, mountain transcendent of finance, and heroic of sport, transports of medicine, hygiene, and church, so long as belief persisted that America, finally more than all this, was the world's ultimate reserve of rectitude, final garden of the Lord, so far as this mystique could survive in every American family of Christian substance, so then were the people entering this [Republican] Gala willy-nilly leaders of this faith, never articulated by any of them except in the most absurd and taste-curdling jargons of partriotism mixed with religion, but the faith existed in the crossroads between the psyche and the heart where love, hate, the cognition of grace, the all but lost sense of the root, and adoration of America congregate for some" (33-34).

Most harrowing, as you'd expect, is the first hand account of the violence and police brutality in Mayor Daley's Democratic Chicago. ("Daley," Mailer comments, "was not a national politician, but a clansman--he could get 73% of the vote in any constituency made up of people whose ancestors were at home with rude instruments in Polish forests, Ukrainian marshes, Irish bogs--they knew how to defend the home: so did he" [104].) This, I'm embarrassed to say, was all news to me. Here is Hubert Humphrey and Gene McCarthy, with Mayor Daley's army and Bobby Kennedy's ghost both looming over the Amphitheatre. Here we run into Alan Ginsberg and Jean Genet making their way to Grant Park, camped out with the Yippies across from the Hilton. Mailer's account of Chicago, "the last of the great American cities," includes a stark account of the stockyards and slaughterhouses that would be the milieu of the Democratic convention. I can't do justice to it here and simply counsel reading the book; it broke open this fuzzy area of my historical blindspot.

Perhaps most surprising, given what I knew of Mailer, is his honesty and self-knowledge, his almost confessional mode--wrestling with his own cowardice, racism, frustrations. One can feel the divided conscience of the now middle-aged Mailer who owns up to a "conservative" fear that he might lose the America he knew--"that insane warmongering technology land with its smog, its superhighways, its experts and its profound dishonesty" (186-187). And yet...

Yet, it had allowed him to write--it had even not deprived him entirely of honors, certainly not of an income. He had lived well enough to have six children, a house on the water, a good apartment, good meals, good booze, he had even come to enjoy wine. A revolutionary with taste in wine has come already half the distance from Marx to Burke (187).

This sort of honesty seems to be lacking from those who consider themselves the heirs of new journalism. Mailer fesses up to feeling caught: "To be forty-five years old, and have lost a sense of where his loyalties belonged--to the revolution or to the stability of the country" (188).

American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia

2008-08-04T10:50:00.003-04:00

I think I'm pretty clearly out of the closet now as at least a conservative sympathizer--so long as "conservative" refers to the dispositions of Burke et. al. and not the neoliberalism and libertarianism that currently marches under the banner of "conservative." Really, how could any enthusiastic Americanism, founded in revolution, ever be "conservative?" That tiny little problem notwithstanding, I've been spending the last couple of days dipping into American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia. (It's publication garnered quite a bit of attention, including a review in the New York Times.)

I should admit that if I'm a journal junkie, I also have a soft spot for encyclopedias of this sort. They still represent for me veritable educations in themselves, so I love wending through them, dipping in at a whim, then following the cross-referencing to pursue a thread. For instance, I followed a thread that began with an entry on Cleanth Brooks, which then took me to an entry on New Criticism, to ones on Donald Davidson and Allen Tate, pointing me to Southern Agrarians and The Sewanee Review. Another foray began with the entry on Eugene McCarthy (who emerges as a fascinating character in Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago), which then pointed me to an entry on Hilaire Belloc, landing in the entry on distributism (which I think I just might be).

The encyclopedia does a pretty decent job of exhibiting that "conservatism" in America is a contested philosophy. While all the luminaries of neoconservatism receive praise, other strains of American conservatism that contest this vision also receive coverage. So, for instance, Jeremy Beer 's entry on Schindler, David L. notes how Schindler's ecclesially-centered conservatism (for which I have great sympathy) is a trenchant critique of the "John Courtney Murray project" of assimilation carried out by supposed "conservatives" like Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak, and George Weigel (all of whom get their own entries, too). Or the constellation of entries related to the Southern Agrarians (including entries on Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and I'll Take My Stand) sketches a kind of conservatism opposed to the nationalism (not to mention "big government") that now passes for conservatism in federal politics.

Admittedly, there are pieces of the encyclopedia which are incestuous, hagiographic, and bordering almost on the ridiculous. (In the last category I point to Robert Sirico's entry on liberation theology, which is pretty much like asking Jeff Sharlet to write the entry for Ted Haggard in something like the InterVarsity Encyclopedia of Evangelical Saints.) But these weaknesses aside, this will be a book I keep on my desk, and close to my reading chair, as a mini-education in a movement.

Madapple: A Taste of Science and Religion

2008-07-20T23:06:00.004-04:00

A few months back I was intrigued by a booknote in Vanity Fair about Christine Meldrum's first novel, Madapple (published by Knopf--not a bad way to start!). It piqued my interest because the note indicated that the story--aimed at a young adult market--intertwined issues of science and religion. This past week I finally had a chance to read the book, which was entertaining, intriuging, a bit maddening, and in the end, only slightly disappointing.

The story is certainly not the usual fare, eluding the categories of science fiction, fantasy, and mystery, while dabbling in all three. Set in rural and smalltown Maine, the narrative revolves around a girl named Auslag who is part of an immigrant family from Denmark. The story also plays with time, starting in 1987, but then regularly transporting us to a courtroom in 2007, to dip back to events in 2003 and 2006. In some ways, Meldrum is at her best in the courtroom scenes (she's a trained lawyer), and the regular visits to this setting help make for chapters that come in short bursts--no doubt welcome by many young readers (and not a few older ones). The other "device" that Meldrum uses to weave the story is a persistent thread of botany. The life of Auslag and her mother revolves around a dizzying array of plants and flowers found in the the region (including "madapple"). At times this felt like an MFA gimmick, but it works and rarely feels forced. It not only moves the story forward and helps it to hang together, it is also an important means by which nature and science make themselves felt in the story--though "science" isn't the only way to respond to the "nature" that is plantlife.

And that, it seems, is at the heart of Meldrum's interest: if science and religion are at play in the story, they are on the stage as alternative explanations of phenomena. If Madapple deals with issues of science and religion, it's because the book is more fundamentally dealing with what Paul Ricoeur described as "the conflict of interpretations." Phenomena press upon us, nature pushes back against us, and we are pushed to render explanations, interpretations, and construals of what's happening. For instance, a strange and "unexplained" pregnancy can be variously described as a virgin birth or a rape. Meldrum tackles the conflict of interpretations at various levels throughout the story, and persistently offers episodes of religion and science as competing explanations--but also a couple of hints that they might be complementary explanations of the same phenomenon. On top of this, she is weaving a story that has just enough mystery and intrigue to keep you turning the pages (though a couple of things were telegraphed a bit too much). My disappointment stemmed from two trends in the book: First, methinks Meldrum caught a bit of the Dan-Brown-syndrome, displaying a sophomoric fascination with Gnosticism, the Essenes, and the Gospel of Thomas that is meant to shock and scandalize. (It was also weird to read a novel with a bibliography--what is that saying?) Second, I don't think Meldrum let's the conflict of interpretations persist. The novel shrink back from letting the conflict go "all the way down," so to speak (I won't hint in which direction in tips so as not to ruin the story of you); there could have been resolution to the story without bringing definitive resolution to the conflict of interpretations.

Those concerns aside, it's a great summer read, easy enough for the beach, and something you can pass along to your teenager--as I just did.

Beware of Books! From Walker Percy

2008-07-14T16:04:00.003-04:00

I'm working in a few snippets from Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins into the book I'm trying to finish (called Desiring the Kingdom). But I couldn't find a good excuse to work in this quote, so thought I'd pass it on here, from the mind the protagonist, Dr. Tom More:

Books matter. My poor wife, Doris, was ruined by books, by books and a heathen Englishman, not by dirty books but by clean books, not by depraved books but by spiritual books. God, if you recall, did not warn his people against dirty books. He warned them against high places. My wife, who began life as a cheerful Episcopalian from Virginia, became a priestess of the high places. I loved her dearly and loved to lie with her and would and did whene'er she would allow it, but most especially in the morning, at breakfast, in the nine o'clock sunlight out here on the "enclosed patio." But books ruined her. Beware of Episcopal women who take up with Ayn Rand and the Buddha and Dr. Rhine formerly of Duke University. A certain type of Episcopal girl has a weakness that comes on them just past youth, just as sure as Italian girls get fat. They fall prey to Gnostic pride, commence buying antiques, and develop a yearning for esoteric doctrine (p. 64).

Vidal's Prescience

2008-07-06T00:52:00.003-04:00

A couple of weeks ago a long-anticipated book arrived at my office: The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (Doubleday, 2008), edited by Jay Parini (also Vidal's biographer). It provides an excellent selection of Vidal's criticism and essays from 1953-2004. Unfortunately, having lately seen and read interviews with the aged Vidal, I'm afraid that he's becoming a bit predictable, regularly harping on the Bush regime, which seems like too easy a target and doesn't yield much creativity from Vidal's sharp mind.

However, most of these essays represent Vidal at his best: a participant in the nation's history who, with just a slightly haughty air, offers an incisive take on what's going on because of a keen sense of what's happened in the past (chronicled so well in his historical fiction). He refuses any distinction between "high" and "low" culture; all is fair game. Consider, for instance, the hilarious (but deadly serious) account of the "The Top Ten Best-Sellers According to the Sunday New York Times as of January 7, 1973," in which Vidal explores the Koontzes and Graftons of his day (concluding that, in fact, here was the first generation of novelists raised on television). There is a wonderful recollection of Edmund Wilson, as well as an iconoclastic and irreverent essay on "The Holy Family," the Kennedys, in which Vidal predicts a dynasty--in 1967, just months before RFK's assassination.

And reading these essays now, in some cases 50 years later, one has to be struck by Vidal's prescience. For just one example, I would point to some closing reflections in a long essay on Egypt under Nasser, published in Esquire in 1963:

We [Americans] truly believe that we never wanted a world empire simply because we don't suffer from a desire to see Old Glory waving over the parliaments of enslaved nations. But we do want to make a buck. We do want to maintain our standard of living. For good or ill, we have no other true national purpose. [...] Our materialistic ethos is made quite plain in the phrase 'the American way of life.'

I submit that our lack of commitment to any great mystique of national destiny is the healthiest thing about us and the reason for our current success. We are simple materialists, not bent on setting fire to the earth as a matter of holy prinicple, unlike the True Believers with their fierce Either-Ors, their Red or Dead absolutes, when the truth is that the world need be neither, just comfortably pink and lively. Even aid to such a disagreeable and unreliable nation as Nasser's Egypt increases our sphere of influence, expands our markets, maintains our worldly empire. And we are an empire.

While neoconservatism is defined precisely by its invention of and commitment to something like a "mystique" that Vidal cautions against, the pragmatism of the American empire remains solidly in place. And hence Vidal's closing warning is also prescient:

Ultimately, our danger comes not from the idea of Communism, which (as an Archbishop of Canterbury remarked) is a "Christian heresy" whose materialistic aims (as opposed to means) vary little from our own; rather, it will come from the increasing wealth and skill of other Serene Republics which, taking advantage of our increasing moral and intellectual fateness, will try to seize our markets in the world. If we are to end, it will not be with a Bomb but a bigger Buck.

What Vidal's prescience perhaps did not see is that such a displacing Republic would not be quite Serene, but Red.

Books, Materiality, and Beauty

2008-06-11T13:57:00.003-04:00

This is a bit spooky: just this morning, as I was waiting to head out for an appointment, I picked up a brand new volume sitting on my nightstand: a collection of Edmund Wilson's criticism just published in the the Library of America. And to be perfectly honest, I didn't pick it up to read it; I picked it up just to hold it, to caress it. I don't know if you've ever held a LoA volume, but they are pretty much the most sumptuous books one could hope for from an American publisher. They are thick and squat, with Bible-like pages and exquisite bindings, as well as a classic font. There is a weight to the books that is just a pleasure to hold and handle. Most of my library is very pragmatic (i.e., driven by a concern for building content on a budget, and thus populated by alot of Penguin classics paperbacks and such); but every once in a while, when I get a gift certificate, I splurge and also indulge in purchases that reflect the book as object.

How funny, then, to just read John Lancaster's reflections on the same phenomena, with the very same book, in this week's London Review of Books. Wilson, of course, would have taken a certain delight in such fetishization of his work!

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

2008-05-15T17:04:00.003-04:00

A couple of weeks ago I had a brief wait in the Birmingham train station, waiting to catch a train back to York. Somehow I found myself in the bookstore (imagine that!) and picked up a book I'd heard a bit about: Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which was nominated for the Man Booker Prize (akin to the American Pulitzer). After perusing the blurbs, I opened to the first page which opens thus:

"Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America. I noticed that you were looking for something; more than looking, in fact you seemed to be on a mission, and since I am both a native of this city and a speaker of your own language, I thought I might offer you my services."

Perhaps it was the use of the second person; perhaps it was because I somehow heard this in accent; perhaps it was because of the tension embedded in just these few lines; but in any case, I was hooked. Though I stacks of papers to grade on the train ride home, I bought the book and consumed it, finishing it just as the trained rolled into York station.

The book is set in a timeline that spans pre- and post-9/11 context; the event itself makes only a minimal cameo, though its ripple effects drive the later action of the narrative (tensions between India and Pakistan are much more significant). The novel tracks the "formation," one might say, of a young Pakistani, Changez, by some of America's most powerful institutions, including Princeton, Wall Street, and New York in general. (Of the difference between Princeton and New York, the narrator notes: "I was, in four and a half years, never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker.")

But the story also documents how his personal version of the American dream begins to unravel, because of 9/11, because of a surprising--even unwanted--new sense of allegiance to his homeland, because of a girlfriend who seems to have all one could dream of but who, in fact, suffers a private nightmare.

Hamid's command of the very difficult second-person approach is stunning, allowing him to play with time and ambiguities in quite captivating ways--including a delightfully maddening conclusion. And the story moves quickly while also developing characters: sort of breezy, but with real substance that sticks with you long after you're done the book. In short, a great read for a train ride.

Teaching as a Postal Vocation

2008-04-27T16:35:00.003-04:00

George Steiner's latest book, My Unwritten Books, has been getting a lot of press, mainly for the racy chapter on his sexual escapades in which he considers how different languages condition erotic experience (he takes this well beyond the old joke about sex in German). Indeed, critics seem rather fixated on this chapter--from the first review I read, I wouldn't have guessed that the book also includes some stellar criticism! But perhaps my favorite snippet comes from a conversation with him in The Guardian in which he captures the exciting opportunity that is teaching:

"unless you are absolutely first rate, which so few of us are, then what I call the letter-carrier function of the teacher is wonderful. To serve great works, to send the letters out hoping they get to a good mailbox, is a marvellous thing."

Academics are notoriously given to frequent fits of self-importance and illusions of grandeur. But every once in a while, we get a clear, humble, maybe maganimous glimpse of who we are and will be, and then find a special joy and delight in being teachers. Would that I could always be content to be a mailman.

Resurrecting the Green Knight

2008-04-16T06:37:00.003-04:00

My romance with medievalism makes me a sucker for anything Arthurian. What a treat, then, to be part of the generation that gets to enjoy Simon Armitage's new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of the most beloved epic poems in the orbit of the Arthurian tales. Armitage was particularly concerned to recover something often ignored by other translators: the importance of alliteration in the original. With that as a central goal, Armitage has produced a version that sings, even though it also conveys the grittiness and earthiness of the poetry (think Ted Hughes). This is poetry where guttural syllables matter. (I tried to read it with a kind of northern brogue in my head--but probably it's best read out loud. I'm going to try to convince the kids of that!) Aside from a fascinating story of honor, chivalry, and the Green Knight's rather pig-headed lack of prudence, there is also the titillating undercurrent of a certain eroticism in the story that is alluded to with a wink and a grin. A delightful experience that repays many re-readings.

Poetry Month with Knopf

2008-04-08T09:15:00.001-04:00

It's Poetry Month again, and as has been my custom, I encourage folks to sign-up for Knopf's wonderful Poem-a-Day program. Consider, for instance, today's treat from Edward Hirsch:

Self Portrait

I lived between my heart and my head,
like a married couple who can't get along.

I lived between my left arm, which is swift
and sinister, and my right, which is righteous.

I lived between a laugh and a scowl,
and voted against myself, a two-party system.

My left leg dawdled or danced along,
my right cleaved to the straight and narrow.

My left shoulder was like a stripper on vacation,
my right stood upright as a Roman soldier.

Let's just say that my left side was the organ
donor and leave my private parts alone,

but as for my eyes, which are two shades
of brown, well, Dionysus, meet Apollo.

Look at Eve raising her left eyebrow
while Adam puts his right foot down.

No one expected it to survive,
but divorce seemed out of the question.

I suppose my left hand and my right hand
will be clasped over my chest in the coffin

and I'll be reconciled at last,
I'll be whole again.

Gary Wills' Venice

2008-03-27T17:50:00.002-04:00

Tomorrow I make my first pilgrimage to Venice, the enchanted city that so charmed Ruskin, though his Stones of Venice narrates both what he takes to be its genius and its demise--which correlates with its Gothic beginning and Renaissance decadence. For Ruskin's Venice, the renaissance was as hardly a re-birth, but more of a death knell. So, as a devotee of Ruskin, you can imagine that I've been boning up on Stones (from a great 1898 edition in the York St. John's library in York).

However, I also took this as an opportunity to finally read a book that's been languishing on my shelf for a few years: Gary Wills' Venice, Lion City: The Religion of Empire (Simon & Schuster, 2001; paperback, 2002). I recall picking this up at a bookstore in Stratford several years ago, piqued by interest in Ruskin but with a sense that Wills' take represented the loyal opposition as it were. Turns out I was right.

It's a marvelous book, taking the reader on a tour of Venice's religious, commercial and political history through its rich artistic archive. (Wills opens with Evelyn Waugh's comment that "If every museum in the New World were emptied, if every famous building in the Old World were destroyed and only Venice saved, there would be enough to fill a lifetime with delight.") While the book does presume some prior knowledge of Venice (both history and art, as well as some sense of the geography of the city), it could also be profitably read alongside a decent guidebook for a first time visitor to Venice.

What's interesting is how Wills frames his "argument," as it were: First, though it was Ruskin who put him onto Venice, Wills is really out to contest Ruskin's moralistic thesis which suggested that Venice's empire crumbled precisely when commerce trumped religion. According to Wills, not only can the two not be separated, in fact, it was Venice's relentless pursuit of trade and commerce that already yielded all the earlier Gothic delights that Ruskin so valued.

This claim then floats on a second, more submerged interest: drawing persistent parallels with the "American" empire. Venice is celebrated as an empire of "independence," constantly resisting both Roman and Eastern hegemony--a kind of proto-protestant city on a hill devoted to labor, commerce, and trade. The analogy keeps bubbling up throughout the book--as when Lotto's depiction of the Annunciation brings to mind Jackie Kennedy (!): "I thought, when I first saw the picture in Washington, of Jacqueline Kennedy turning to clamber out of her car when the tremendous blow fell on her in the Dallas motorcade" (232-233). He brings the analogy home in an Epilogue, "Farewell to Empire," where he then labors to emphasize the differences between Venetian and American exceptionalism. While Venetians considered themselves exceptional, they didn't think that Venice could be replicated or exported, in contrast to American self-understanding which took itself as a pattern to be emulated and a system to be exported. In other words, Wills seems to draw the analogy in order to note that Venetian imperialism was pragmatic, commercial and "realist;" in short, Venetians weren't neoconservatives, had no PNAC-like idealism about a global Venice.

What's intriguing and prescient is the fact that this book was published on September 18, 2001 (and Wills didn't seem to make any changes for the 2002 paperback edition). He couldn't have known that the string of quotes from Wintrhop ("city set on a hill"), Jefferson (America as "the world's best hope"), and Lincoln would, within a year, be marshaled for just the kind of exceptionalist imperial project he was worried about here.

However, prescience is not quite wisdom. While the book is a spectacular tour of Venice via its art and architecture, and should be required reading for any thoughtful pilgrimage to Venice, I'm not convinced that Wills rightly diagnoses what's at stake in the "religion of empire."

Let me take just one example: What makes Venice the "Lion City" is the fact that it is home to the body of St. Mark, the Gospel writer signified by a lion. The relic of the saint--stolen from Alexandria by Venetian forces--played a central and crucial role in both the religious and political life of Venice from the time of its "translation" there in 828. The relic was presented to the doge (roughly, 'emperor') for protection. This is already an important episode: the saint's body was not delivered to the bishop, but to the doge--not to an ecclesiastical authority, but to a secular one. This already represented a marginalization of the bishop and--by extension--the pope and Rome (an early assertion of the "independence" of Venice that Wills so prizes). The doge becomes the protector of St. Mark's body in exchange for the saint's protection and prospering of the city. The Basilica of San Marco is the 'home' of this relic; but note, this is not a cathedral or a diocesan church--it is, in fact, the private chapel of the doge.

What does Wills conclude from this? That "Mark's body ordered the whole of society around itself" (33). Henceforth, "the republic would be true to him" (35).

But of course this is susceptible to exactly the opposite reading: that the "ordering" is just the other way around--that the republich has marshaled Mark's body as an instrument for its own ends, and that Mark's body is literally "brought in" (by theft) to baptize and sanctify the activity of the commercial empire.

Wills never seems to entertain this reading (even to disagree with it or dismiss it). As such, I think he underestimates his own phrase: "the religion of empire." These genitives are notoriously slippery. Wills seems to me "religion AND empire." This is why he thinks he can dismiss Ruskin's reading simply by noting that both piety and aggressive commercialism functioned simultaneously at the height of the Venetian empire. But that's seeing the two as distinct entities: Christian "religion" on the one side and commercial "empire" on the other. (Granted, I think Ruskin's reading fails on this point as well; he still works with too simple a dichotomy.)

But what if both are a matter of "religion?" What if it is precisely commerce that was the god of this empire? In short, what if it really might have been the case that the empire was the religion? (Wills seems to almost glimpse this when he notes that "[t]he doge, not the bishops, was the protector of religion in Venice, and when conflicts arose with Rome, the clergy were expected to be loyal to the Venetian faith" (45). Would it not be the case, then, that St. Mark was hijacked in the service of false gods?

And might this be a familiar story?

What I'm Listening To: More Josh Ritter

2008-02-25T09:37:00.004-05:00

Josh Ritter has been keeping me company lately. (I was pretty bummed to learn that he'd be playing at Calvin in the semester that we're in England; but I just saw today that in April he's going to be playing in Leeds, just down the road from York! Sweet.)

In particular, I've been spending time with some of his earlier albums like Animal Years and Hello Starling. And I've been just mesmerized by "Bone of Song," a strange hymn to musical creation through the story of a relic that is also a muse. Unfortunately I can't find anywhere that the song is streamed, but if you can, do listen. The lyrics alone don't do it justice.

Bone of Song
just where it now lies I can no longer say
I found it on a cold and November day
in the roots of a sycamore tree where it had hid so long
in a box made out of myrtle lay the bone of song
the bone of song was a jawbone old and bruised
and worn out in the service of the muse
and along its sides and teeth were written words
I ran my palm along them and I heard

lucky are you who finds me in the wilderness
I am the only unquiet ghost that does not seek rest

the words on the bone of song were close and small
and though their tongues were dead I found I knew them all
in the hieroglyphs of quills and quatrain lines
Osiris—the fall of Troy—Auld Lang Syne
Kathleen Mauvoreen—Magnificat—Your Cheatin’ Heart
the chords of a covenant king singing 'fore the Ark
then I saw on a white space that was left
a blessing written older than the rest
it said

leave me here I care not for wealth or fame
I’ll remember your song – but I’ll forget your name

the words that I sang blew off like the leaves in the wind
and perched like birds in the branches before landing on the bone again
then the bone was quiet it said no more to me
so I wrapped it in the ribbons of a sycamore tree
and as night had come I turned around and headed home
with a lightness in my step and a song in my bones
lucky are you who finds me in the wilderness
I am the only unquiet ghost that does not seek rest

I just love the juxtaposition of the Mary's song and the Hank Williams classic, "Magnificat--Your Cheatin' Heart." It was for just such brokennes that Mary's son broke into the world--and occasioned a song. If Jesus is the Word, perhaps he's also the song whose lyrics are closer to "Your Cheatin' Heart" than the pop diddies that are regularly "Jesu-fied" to make them allegedly "Christian."

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

2008-02-03T03:38:00.000-05:00

While tackling some British classics, it's also fun to read what British folks are reading today. For a start, I just couldn't resist a book with this fabulous title: A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, by Marina Lewycka (a lecturer at Sheffield University, not far from York). A breezy, entertaining story of a quirky family set amidst the Ukrainian immigrant community of the British midlands. A long ways from the thick, literary depth of Ivanhoe but a fun book to curl up with for a couple nights.

The Age of Chivalry Revisited

2008-01-31T04:03:00.000-05:00

One of the benefits of our sojourn here in York is that it means we're "unplugged" from some of the frantic pace that characterizes life back in the States, freeing us up for some dedicated time of reading. So one of my goals for this semester is to read a number of British classics that I've only dabbled in before. I've brought along Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, Cardinal Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, and others. But I dove into the pile by first reading Sir Walter Scott's 19th-century manifesto, Ivanhoe.

One of the courses I'm teaching here is "Victorian Britain and Postmodern Culture: Contemporary Medievalisms" (the informal title is "Everything Jamie loves about 19th-century Britain!"). As England was undergoing the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution--which, for all its "economic growth," also fragmented families and entire ways of life--the middle of the 19th century saw a backlash and critique in the form of a new fascination with medieval modes of life. Scott's Ivanhoe was a huge part of this. While penned as a story, it was adopted as a manifesto, calling England back from the atomism spawned by the "Satanic mills" of industry to the organic (and admittedly hierarchical) organization of the body politic in feudal times.

Scott's book (much of which is set right here in Yorkshire) embodies all the (often caricatured) pictures we've come to inherit: knights in shining armor, damsels in distress, tournaments and jousts, Richard the Lionheart and the despicable Prince John, characters hearkening to Robin Hood and Friar Tuck. But this is no mere lads' tale or entertainment. One has to be struck at the genuine literary quality of the book; this isn't some sort of proto-"genre fiction." And there are very interesting subplots and themes: One concerns the status of Jews in late medieval England, and here what appears to be Scott's traffic with typical anti-Semitic slurs is actually undercut, I think, by how Isaac and Rebekah function within the story. While anti-Semitic readers might have heard what they wanted to hear, on the other hand I think their attitudes are consistently undercut by Scott's narrative.

The other theme is historical and political, namely how "the English" came to emerge from the meld of Saxon and Norman--the indigenous English and the interloping French. King Richard and Ivanhoe's friendship marks the end of their animosity and the beginning of "the English."

An English treasure, penned by a Scot.

Top 10 Books in 2007: 1 & 2

2008-01-20T02:21:00.000-05:00

[Sorry to have left 1 & 2 hanging; I was lost to preparations for packing for our move to York, then the transition here--which means I'm now away from my library, but I'll comment on these books from memory.]

1. The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy. This book has left an indelible mark on me, perhaps most of all because of the circumstances in which I read it. In February of 2007, our family endured a tragedy, the thought of which still brings me to tears: our niece, Sophie, just one year old, died very suddenly. We returned to Canada to be with my sister-in-law, her husband and their boys, and with the rest of the family. I was both honored and terrified when asked to co-officiate the funeral. But over the course of that horrific week, my wife and I, drawing on the prayers of friends at home, were able to keep ourselves together for the family to lean on. But when we got back to Grand Rapids, my world fell apart (it's still not quite back together). One of the most tangible effects of this sorrow was that I simply couldn't read. The world had become so dark and flat and empty that I couldn't muster the psychic energy to pick up a book or even a magazine--me!, who has books literally strewn across every room in the house! For almost two months I couldn't bring myself to crack open a book. Part of me just couldn't re-activiate my imagination, part of me felt like I didn't deserve the joy that comes with reading, part of me was too angry to even see straight, and part of me was scared what I might find.

One day while crawling into bed I glanced at the books stacked in my bedside shelf and spied this volume, which I once purchased in a used bookshop in Stratford. I can't say exactly what drew me to it, but I picked it up, clicked on the lamp, and couldn't put it down for hours. The book seemed to embody just the tension I was feeling inside: between Foote, the wry cynic and skeptic, and Percy, the existential Catholic (walking in the paths of both St. Thomas and Kierkegaard). The correspondence crackles with the love of a long friendship. Clearly Foote is the more faithful and fulsome correspondent, always the initiator of epistolary volleys, pestering Percy to reply or come visit--but it is a pestering that craves presence, craves Percy's friendship (Foote seemed to be lonely even when others were around). Foote especially pours himself into the letters so that they are themselves a kind of literature. It is also a fascinating peek behind the curtain of "the writer's life"--it's joys and ecstacies, its valleys and sorrows, its pet peeves and quirks. Over the course of the correspondence both Percy and Foote emerge to become the giants of American letters that we now know them as, but the letters provide an account that is decidedly un-romantic, and yet precisely because of that, engenders a certain romance about the bohemian life of "the writer."

This book did nothing short of recreating the world for me. It also convinced me that I want to be a "writer"--not just an author, but a real, live writer.

2. Cormac McCarthy, The Road. Recall that one of my criteria for "best" in this list is the ability of a book to continue to haunt me, keep me up at night, awake with me in the morning, and generally not let go of my imagination. McCarthy's widely praised book did that beyond any other this year. Like All the Pretty Horses, this story chronicles a paired relationship (I think three's a crowd for McCarthy) in ways that are as sparse as they are intimate. Dialogue rarely get beyond a few words each, and yet so much is said (and unsaid). I also found it a convicting book, on at least two levels: on the one hand, the father's love for his son is so patient and compassionate in the face of such dire scarcity and violence that I'm ashamed at my own impatience with my children in the face of safety and plenty. On the other hand, the father & son's world is pared down to such necessity that one becomes very conscious of our own embarrassment of riches (and our culture of waste). For weeks after reading this I couldn't even allow myself to ever say I was "hungry" (which usually means that I haven't had a full meal in the last 2 hours!). McCarthy quite intentionally invokes the language of mendicant friars in the book, calling to mind disciplines of simplicity and solidarity.

In fact, I think the book is suffused with ritual and thus a kind of sacramentality. Quasi-liturgies both make and hold together the remnants of a "world" for father and son. In fact, for the book I'm currently completing--Desiring the Kingdom: Liturgy, Learning and Formation--I'm using a passage from The Road as an epigraph:

The boy sat tottering. The man watched him that he not topple into the flames. He kicked holes in the sand for the boy’s hips and shoulders where he would sleep and he sat holding him while he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it. All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.

Top 10 Books in 2007: 3 and 4

2008-01-03T14:05:00.000-05:00

3. Joseph Pearce, The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde (can be previewed at Google Books). Pearce's biography traces Wilde's "complicated" (to say the least) relationship to Christianity, and Roman Catholicism in particular. Noting that many of the French "decadent" authors the influenced Wilde (particularly Huysmans) later converted to Catholicism, Pearce discerns implicit longings throughout Wilde's corpus. Surprisingly (but not if one looks closely) he suggests that the supposedly scandalous Picture of Dorian Gray only "works" precisely because the decadence of the protagonist is implicitly criticized at every turn. It is hardly a celebration of immorality; rather, it is a morality tale in a classical tradition. I imagine that Wilde found himself wavering between two different Oxfords, or two different visions of the Renaissance that he learned at Oxford: one from Ruskin, the other from Pater. Pearce suggests that it was Ruskin's Renaissance that made the more longstanding impact.

4. It is perahps curious that in a year in which I read so much Joyce Carol Oates, I also had stacks of Graham Greene on my bedside table. The giant among them was certainly The End of the Affair. I can hardly begin to describe it because I find such a prospect so intimidating. Perhaps a couple of choice quotes might stand-in:

"I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil. I known so intimately that way that demon works in my imagination. [...] I can imagine that if there existed a God who loved, the devil would be driven to destroy even the weakest, the most faulty imitation of that love."

"Oh well," [the priest] said, "I'm not against a bit of superstition. It gives people the idea that this world's not everything." He scowled at me down his nose. "It could be the beginning of wisdom."

Top 10 Books in 2007: 5 and 6

2007-12-30T23:53:00.000-05:00

5. Looking back, I read quite a bit of Joyce Carol Oates over the past year, including her novella The Corn Maiden: A Love Story (in Transgressions, ed. Ed McBain), short stories collected in High Lonesome: Selected Stories, 1966-2006, criticism in Uncensored: Views & Reviews, and one of her novels: You Must Remember This. JCO is a compelling storyteller whose writing extends an invitation into a world (worlds often set in upstate New York). But when one begins to map the Oatean world, one finds that it is a nihilistic world that is laced with violence (boxing appears constantly as a crystallization of this in her work, particularly in You Must Remember This). And I don't use "nihilistic" in an off-handed sense: I mean quite literally that Oates seems to not only see ubiquitious violence in the world; she inscribes it into its very structure--as the essential conditions of the world. (This, I've suggested before, might actually be where she differs from someone like Cormac McCarthy: while McCarthy's barren worlds are riddled with violence, I find in McCarthy a hint of hope that it might--that it could and ought--to be otherwise.) For instance, in You Must Remember This, Felix's violent and incestuous abuse of his niece Enid is the condition of possibility for her music, college success, yea her very sense of identity. I don't have the heart for such a Hegelian world.

However, the passge from the novel that sticks with me is a bit of a throw-away scene later in the story. Felix, the former boxing star and current town "player," poses a question to his brother, Lyle, a used furniture salesman eeking out an existence on the working side of town: "What's it like being a father?" Lyle, resisting his "first instinct" to "make a nervous joke," instead replied: "It depends. Sometimes it does seem to me I'm thinking about them constantly, obsessively, even when I'm not exactly aware of it." Recounting his worry over the children when they were younger, Lyle feels Felix's intense stare and concludes: "I suppose it's the crucial thing in my life. All Hannah and I have really done, you know? Because, well, what else is there...?"

I'm not sure if JCO is participating in a bourgeois mocking of this work-a-day vocation of raising a family, or whether she's giving voice to a sanctification of the ordinary. I found myself moved by Lyle's confession as a valorization of the "work" of domesticity, of family-making and child-rearing. It is perhaps especially poignant for those who have a kind of "public" life, whose professional work gets recognition and acclaim through other channels. But at the end of the day, I'm with Lyle: what more important work could there be? While I'm not at all inclined to the idolization of the family (as in a disordered "focus" on the nuclear family), I do think that the "domestic" work of family-formation trumps much of our "public" work. Indeed, in an era when the pursuit of self-interest translates into, at best, serial monogamy, there might be nothing more "counter-cultural" than the "work" of family. In fact Lyle's remark called to mind a centuries-old admonition to parents, Jacobus Koelman's 1679 The Duties of Parents, which he opens by reminding fathers and mothers that the vocation of parenting "is the most important duty God has put on your shoulders." So often the arts and literature see domesticity as a poison and threat to an "interesting" literary life; but right here in a "literary" novel we hear Lyle suggesting otherwise.

6. I continue to find myself going back to Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. This is a book that has dug a deep well that this generation and the next will continue to drink from.

Top 10 Books in 2007: 7 and 8

2007-12-24T06:46:00.000-05:00

7. Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men. For the life of me, I can’t imagine how this book could possibly be a movie. Not because it isn’t a compelling story with all sorts of chilling thriller potential. And not because it isn’t populated with deep, fascinating, haunting characters (Chigurh is one of the most chilling characters I’ve run into in a while). The reason I can’t imagine this as a movie is because of McCarthy’s genius, namely his ability to paint such powerful pictures with such a simple palette and so few strokes. McCarthy’s prose is so frugal it borders on being stingy—and somehow (just how?!) he creates an engulfing world with two-bit dialogue and miserly description that says so much with so little.

The book also got me thinking: I think those who regale McCarthy for his “nihilism” (as I was wont to do a couple years ago) might be falling for a trap. I think we need to perhaps read McCarthy the way we ought to read Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray: we ought not confuse the author’s voice with that of the protagonist. So is it Chigurh who embodies Cormac McCarthy’s “worldview?” Or should we rather listen to the voice of Sheriff Bell?

Heading out into the chaotic moonscape that is Chigurh’s habitat (and creation, in a way), in an exchange with Molly, Sheriff Bell

pushed the chair back and rose and got down his gunbelt from the coatrack behind his desk and hung it over his shoulder and picked up his hat and put it on. What is it that Torbert says? About truth and justice?

We dedicate ourselves anew daily. Something like that.

I think I’m goin to commence dedicatin myself twice daily. It may come to three fore it’s over.

8. Edmund Wilson, Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912-1972. Wilson was one of the twentieth-century America’s great critics—from a time when criticism mattered (Norman Mailer, in a Paris Review interview, talks about his respect for critics like Wilson and Kazin), as well as a time when critics weren’t housed primarily in academia. Wilson and Kazin were part of a class of public intellectuals that has almost passed from the contemporary scene (Christopher Hitchens might be a bit of a throwback in this respect). I’m a correspondence junkie, so it’s easy for me to have a soft spot for a collection of letters from a sparkling figure like Wilson (who also was quite famous as a “character” in the literary scene; if the letters became a movie it would almost surely earn a ‘R’ rating). But letters like these also bring out my Luddite romanticism: it seems to me that the advent of email means we’ll never have books like this again. Our correspondence is too fleeting and flippant, too mechanical and utilitarian. No one will confuse our terse emails with the rich sorts of letters that Wilson and his circle used to swap. Wilson valued the letter (even the post card) as an outlet for literary flair and creation. Though he lacked any social filters and was only too willing to let his friends (like F. Scott Fitzgerald) know exactly what he thought of their work, one also finds here his appreciation for wise teachers and literary confreres.

Top 10 Books in 2007: 9 and 10

2007-12-23T15:35:00.000-05:00

Caving in to the general media mania for “lists” as the year draws to a close, I’ve looked over my shelves and recalled the ten best books I’ve read in 2007. A couple of provisos should be made: (1) These are books I read in 2007, not necessarily books that were published in 2007 (in fact, I think only one of them appeared in the past year); (2) by “best” I simply mean books that were significant for me in some way. Usually this just means that they were books I kept thinking about, books that kept re-inserting themselves into my consciousness and imagination, perhaps books that changed my mind in some way.

So over the next week or so I’ll be posting some brief reflections, in reverse order (though the ranking shouldn’t be taken too seriously).

9. Russell Kirk, Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered. Since reading this book, I’ve continued to dive into Burke’s corpus (in fact, he will be an important part of the Studies in British Culture course I’m teaching in York, England next semester). As David Brooks has noted, Burke’s conservatism is precisely what has been forgotten by the neoconservatives that currently pass for the Right.

10. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (in the old Random House Faulkner Reader, which also includes his Nobel Prize address). This is one of those reads by which I keep trying to make up for my lack of a liberal arts education. Faulkner is often cited as an important influence, or at least background, of the “Southern Catholic” writers I appreciate (Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor), so I felt an obligation to dive into this rather intimidating book. You sort of have to let it wash over you. It requires the reader to be willing to be out of control, to feel lost, to trust the author that it’s going somewhere. At times I have to say it felt maddeningly obfuscating. But Faulkner also paints multiple words in a minimalism that brought to mind the sparse dialogue of Cormac McCarthy. In fact, I need to check about influences of Faulkner on McCarthy, since Faulkner also has an uncanny ability to let the third person narrator’s voice accommodate itself to shifting characters and locales, as well as an art for dialogue (including difficult dialects) that are true to the characters. Nothing short of a literary experience.

Whose Stillborn God?

2007-12-19T10:57:00.000-05:00

Even critics will have to recognize that The Stillborn God is a stunning book. (It is also a handsome book, just the sort of thing one expects from Knopf: stout, creamy, a pleasure to hold. Only deckled pages would have been an improvement.) Lilla’s erudition informs a sweeping narrative of the early modern liberation from “political theology” effected by Hobbes, giving rise to the “Great Separation” between private claims to revelation and the public arbitration of politics by appeals to reason alone. But the remainder of the story tracks all the ways that “political theology” came back to haunt the modern West—particularly in German contexts. The core problem of the book is that it buys into the simplistic myth of religious violence and secular peace, resting on the unsubstantiated empirical claim that “religion” (whatever that is) breeds violence whereas institutions of liberal democracy foster peace (current world conflicts not withstanding). Lilla also continues to cling to the myth of a “secular” political philosophy. In both of these respects, he is culpably ignorant of contemporary scholarship (particularly the work of William Cavanaugh, John Milbank, Nicholas Wolterstorff and Jeffrey Stout). And Lilla can’t simply plead that he’s doing history; what’s at stake is his historiography. Despite these fundamental problems, it remains an important book that can’t be ignored.

Mailer vs. Vidal: Those Were the Days!

2007-12-19T09:43:00.000-05:00

The recent passing of Norman Mailer has been an occasion for the literati to reflect on both his genius and craziness (Christopher Hitchens' reminiscence is a treat). But perhaps the most voyeuristically captivating is Dick Cavett's recollection of the infamous episode of his late night TV talk show on ABC in 1971 wherein the talk show couch became an impromptu boxing ring as Norman Mailer squared off with Gore Vidal. The antics are ludicrous; and yet they stem from a sense that literature and criticism mattered (after all, the thrown-down-gauntlet that occassioned the fray was a claim Vidal made about Mailer in the New York Review of Books.)

But don't miss the really significant and depressing point: apparently in 1971, late night talk television was home to literary figures like Mailer, Vidal, and others. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine Cormac McCarthy and Joyce Carol Oates on Letterman? Or Alice Munro and Tom Wolfe making an appearance on Leno? Sadly, if this was ever going to happen on late night TV, I'd expect to see it on Comedy Central's Daily Show or Colbert Report.

Is Religion Dangerous?

2007-12-11T11:09:00.000-05:00

I'm not given to conspiracy theories about the "liberal" or supposedly anti-religious bias of the media. Indeed of late, with the emergence of the so-called "new atheism" of Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, et. al., I've been encouraged to see outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post bring in voices that weren't just echoing choirs, but pushed back on the shoddy scholarship and inflated claims of these works. But I must confess to being puzzled by one thing: why is it that Keith Ward's book, Is Religion Dangerous? (Eerdmans, 2007) has not yet been reviewed in a major outlet? It's British version (2006) was reviewed (and praised) in places like the Times Literary Supplement and the Daily Telegraph. Why has its American release been ignored by the Times, the Post, the Globe, and other usual suspects who've given space to the new atheism?

Ward's book is excellent. Regrettably, it was published (in the UK) before the appearance of Dawkin's God Delusion and Hitchens' God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything; but nonetheless it already anticipates the sorts of flimsy arguments that they spout. While Ward's Christianity is a little liberal for my tastes (he's more enthusiastic about demythologizers like Tillich than I would be), the core of the book is on the money. It is even-handed, absent the screeching alarmism that tends to characterize these debates. And it is peppered with a wry British wit. Easily accessible for a general audience who's been following these conversations.

A Postliberal Catholicism

2007-12-07T13:09:00.000-05:00

For many Protestants, “postliberal” theology has often also been an invitation to a more “Catholic” theology—a theology that is more properly ecclesial, written from and for the confessing, worshiping community. For instance, postliberalism has emphasized the extent to which “the Word of God” is the church’s book, rightly interpreted only within the stakes and interests of the confessing ecclesia. In a similar way, postliberalism has emphasized a role for tradition that counters the tradition-allergies of both conservative and liberal Protestantism. Thus one might suggest that Robert Barron’s wonderful book, The Priority of Christ: Toward a Postliberal Catholicism (Brazos, 2007), brings postliberalism back to its Catholic home. Drawing on the insights and intuitions of Lindbeck, Frei and others, Barron articulates a Catholic systematic theology that takes “the narratives concerning Jesus Christ as epistemically basic.” Thus his postliberal Catholicism is a narrative Catholicism, teasing out the implications of this for Christology and the doctrine of God, as well as ethics and epistemology—all drawing on a prodigious knowledge of the history of philosophy and theology. On top of all this, it is a downright lovely book, written with a kind of winsome literary flair that exhibits the inviting clarity of a master teacher. Highly recommended for sharp undergraduates; required reading for graduate students and scholars.

Not Your Grandma's Secularization Thesis

2007-12-01T14:51:00.000-05:00

Taylor’s massive tome, A Secular Age, is one of those big, heavy landmark books that is destined to be a definitive classic. Taylor is out to tell a story about the emergence of our “secular” age, articulating a new kind of secularization thesis that also functions as a criticism of tired, triumphalistic versions that confidently predicted the steady withering of religion in our “modern” world. On Taylor’s account, secularity or secularization should not be merely identified with a diminishment in religious belief or the decline of religious observance. Rather, a “secular” age is one in which belief in God is no longer axiomatic. The shift that gave rise to secular modernity was a shift in the plausibility conditions of society such that even religious believers recognize the contestability of religious belief. In this respect, Europe (with little public religious observance) and the United States (rife with public religiosity and high religious participation) are both secular insofar as religious belief is considered one option among others. This shift in plausibility conditions makes possible the emergence of an “exclusive humanism” that, for the first time, imagines human flourishing without reference to transcendence. Essential reading.

For further discussion of Taylor's book by signicant scholars, visit The Immanent Frame.

What I'm Listening To: Josh Ritter's "The Temptation of Adam"

2007-11-24T15:09:00.000-05:00

With thanks to my good friend, Mark (my "music pusher"), I have been absolutely absorbed by Josh Ritter's new album, The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter--like, I mean, seriously obsessed with it to an absurd degree. In particular, I just can't shake a stunning song, "The Temptation of Adam." It tells a fascinating, rather surreal story while at the same time exploring the aspects of the sort of "love" that only lives in sequestered situations ("desert island"-relationships, you might call them). The lyrics indicate something of the poetry, but this doesn't do justice to it as a song (with mellow acoustics). The YouTube video of a live performance captures some of this, but I would highly recommend splurging on the album. (And it really is an "album"--a throwback to the days when an album was a "work," a kind of sustained meditation on a theme. This album [plus bonus CD] have a symphonic quality about them insofar as one keeps hearing echoes and reprise. Great stuff.)

"The Temptation of Adam" Lyrics:

If this was the Cold War we could keep each other warm
I said on the first occasion that I met Marie
We were crawling through the hatch that was the missile silo door
And I don't think that she really thought that much of me

I never had to learn to love her like I learned to love the Bomb
She just came along and started to ignore me
But as we waited for the Big One I started singing her my songs
And I think she started feeling something for me

We passed the time with crosswords that she thought to bring inside
What five letters spell "apocalypse" she asked me I won her over saying "W.W.I.I.I."
She smiled and we both knew that she'd misjudged me

Oh Marie it was so easy to fall in love with you
It felt almost like a home of sorts or something
And you would keep the warhead missile silo good as new
And I'd watch you with my thumb above the button

Then one night you found me in my army issue cot
And you told me of your flash of inspiration
You said fusion was the broken heart that's lonely's only thought
And all night long you drove me wild with your equations

Oh Marie do you remember all the time we used to take
We'd make our love and then ransack the rations
I think about you leaving now and the avalanche cascades
And my eyes get washed away in chain reactions

Oh Marie if you would stay then we could stick pins in the map
Of all the places where you thought that love would be found
But I would only need one pin to show where my heart's at
In a top secret location three hundred feet under the ground

We could hold each other close and stay up every night
Looking up into the dark like it's the night sky
And pretend this giant missile is an old oak tree instead
And carve our name in hearts into the warhead

Oh Marie there's something tells me things just won't work out above
That our love would live a half-life on the surface
So at night while you are sleeping I hold you closer just because
As our time grows short I get a little nervous

I think about the Big One, W.W.I.I.I.
Would we ever really care the world had ended
You could hold me here forever like you're holding me tonight
I look at that great big red button and I'm tempted

Intersections: Hitchens on Updike on Others

2007-11-02T16:09:00.000-04:00

It's always a treat when voices that move, inspire, and evoke us come together on the same page of criticism: Who doesn't find an almost voyeuristic pleasure in reading living literary giants writing about other great contemporary literati? I'm a junkie for such criticism: reading Evelyn Waugh reviewing Graham Greene or P.G. Wodehouse, Joyce Carol Oates reviewing Don DeLillo--you get the idea. Those who enjoy the same intersections will find a treat in this Sunday's New York Times Book Review: Christopher Hitchens on John Updike's new non-fiction collection, Due Considerations. Not surprisingly, Hitch thinks Updike is just too damn nice.

As an aside, this is the sort of writing where Hitchens keeps his marbles. Unlike the sloppy "new atheist" Hitchens, Hitchens the literary critic--like Hitchens the investigative journalist--is always a delight.

Postal Petition from New York Review of Books

2007-10-25T10:57:00.000-04:00

If, like me, you enjoy reading in literary and political magazines outside of the mainstreem, consider signing this petition:

On July 15, the postal rates for many of this nation's small magazines increased by 20 to 30 percent, due to a decision made by the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) that turns against more than 200 years of postal policy.

We believe this issue to be of such importance to small intellectual publications on both the right and left that we felt it imperative to alert our readers. This rate increase has the effect of shifting costs from the large publishers, such as Time Warner, to smaller publications, such as The New York Review, Commentary, The National Review, and The Nation. These unfair and onerous rate hikes threaten the future of many smaller, independent publications.

Congressional hearings have been scheduled for next Tuesday, October 30. Prior to that, we are requesting that all concerned readers sign a congressional email petition that can be found here: http://www.freepress.net/postal/

Free Press, working with a wide variety of small publishers, is hoping to collect well over 100,000 signatures by the end of this week in order to get the attention of the committee members prior to the hearing. We hope you will join in this effort. These new postal rates threaten the existence of the small independent magazines and journals that are so important to a free press and a vibrant democracy.
Thank you for your help.

Rea S. Hederman > Publisher

Pascal for our Time

2007-10-02T10:04:00.000-04:00

I've been dipping back into an old love of late, Pascal's Pensees, in association with a (long overdue!) review I'm writing of William Desmond's very Pascalian Is There a Sabbath for Thought? Between Religion and Philosophy. So it was fortuitous when Nathan Bierma asked if I would write a little ode to Pascal for his Newsletter for the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL)--an immense resource of ancient, medieval and early modern texts. You can read it here.

"Art of Fiction" Interviews from The Paris Review

2007-08-28T23:22:00.000-04:00

On a rainy afternoon a couple weeks back, my wife and I curled up at Shuler's, a local bookstore. I found the latest issue of The Paris Review and was immediately sucked in by a fascinating interview with Norman Mailer, part of their "Art of Fiction" tradition of interviews with leading writers. Mailer is typically irreverent and spiritual at the same time, a kind of avant-garde conservative. The interview is a riot and filled with some absolute gems about matters including style, God, character development, wives and ex-wives ("every wife is a culture," Mailer remarks), the absence of a generation of critics to succeed Wilson, Kazin, and others--and much more. A wonderful read.

Today I went looking for the interview online (I couldn't quite afford to drop the twelve bucks for the journal) and found a veritable treasure trove: the journal has made available dozens and dozens of past "Art of Fiction" interviews since 1953. And they're being made available (many downloadable as .pdfs) absolutely free! A fantastic resource that will have me sidetracked for days.

Another Wright

2007-08-22T08:54:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure what it is about this surname, but to my list of "favorite poets named Wright" (James, Franz), I have recently added Charles. I only recently encountered his work: first in the summer issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review, then, about a week later, on the new arrivals shelf at the Grand Rapids Public Library where I picked up his recent collection, Scar Tissue.

Wright does a wonderful job of capturing the colloquial in ways that honor it without making it "high falutin.'" I hear in him a chronicler of sides and spaces of American culture that don't often receive the attention of poetic homage. VQR very generously provides access to one of my favorites, "Cowboy Up" and "The Gospel According to Yours Truly."

Cowboy Up
Charles Wright

There comes a time in one’s life when one wants time,
a lot of time, with inanimate things.
Not ultimate inanimate things,
Of course, but mute things,
beautiful, untalkbackable wise things.
That’s wishful thinking, cowboy.

Still, I’d like to see the river of stars
fall noiselessly through the nine heavens for once,
But the world’s weight, and the world’s welter, speak big talk and
big confusion.

The Gospel According to Yours Truly
Charles Wright

Tell me again, Lord, how easy it all is—
renounce this,
Renounce that, and all is a shining—
Tell me again, I’m still here,
your quick-lipped and malleable boy.

(Strange how the clouds bump and grind, and the underthings roll,
Strange how the grasses finger and fondle each other—
I renounce them, I renounce them, I renounce them.
Gnarly and thin, the nothings don’t change . . .)

Not Your Grandma's Christianity

2007-07-19T16:08:00.001-04:00

I finally had an opportunity to read Lamin Sanneh's wonderful little book, Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West. Sanneh, of Yale, is one of the leading voices reminding Western & European Christianity that it doesn't "own" the Church. And the book is written in the very engaging format of a dialogue, which makes it almost breezy (why don't more of us adopt this strategy?).

The book is a very helpful corrective and antidote to those (like myself!) inclined to a dreamy notion of Catholic liturgy and orthodoxy as the panacea for all global ills. While Sanneh is very interested in considering how world Christianity contests the secularism of the West, the shape of this "counter"-narration is very different from Western and European Christian critiques of secularism (as in Radical Orthodoxy--though I also think there are some important resonances).

According to Sanneh, the most interesting explosion of world Christianity bears little genealogical relationship to colonial missionary endeavors (which gave us "global Christianity", the globalization of European Christianity, not "world" Christianity, which springs from the bottom up). Rather, the most interesting movements of Christianity in the global South are indigenous. However, the current explosion owes one important factor to western missionary endeavors: the translation of Scripture into the mother tongue for different global contexts. The result, according to Sanneh, was that once colonial presence withdrew from these regions, Africans (for instance) were free to encounter the Gospel as Africans because they had the Bible in their mother tongue. And according to Sanneh, these contexts were especially primed for the Gospel precisely because their indigenous and primal religious sensibilities made them open to the dynamics and enchantment of a creator God who would come to inhabit history, would suffer, and rise from the dead. In other words, primal religions functioned as an especially fertile and open horizon for the reception of the Gospel--but now "discovered" indigeneously, and thus not freighted with European colonial baggage.

This is a fascinating story, and Sanneh, though emphasizing indigenous Christianity, is not simplistically anti-European precisely because he sees their role in translation. (I think he would also have to concede the formative role of 'Western' Christianity in shaping the very shape of the canon of the Bible that would later be translated into these mother tongues--but perhaps, in fact, the formation of the canon already included African and Asian voices.)

I do worry that there remains a hint of a new Christendom project latent in this story, but nonetheless, it is a story that needs to be heard far and wide in the West.

A Life in a Night: McEwan's On Chesil Beach

2007-07-05T08:20:00.000-04:00

While, fittingly, on the beach, I finished Ian McEwan's latest, On Chesil Beach. Lingering in the ambiguous space between novella and novel, the book is exquisite. McEwan sketches worlds in fine-grained detail, but does so with a minimalist, almost sparse style. What I found most intriguing and remarkable, however, is his command of time. It is the rhythm and cadence of the novel that struck me. In the course of a focused, slice-of-life story about a wedding night, he also manages to narrate two complete lives. And he does so without having to resort to tricks or gimmicks like flashbacks. Instead, the story wends from past to present to future to present without missing a beat, and without the least jarring of the reader's temporal sensibilities. One of the summer's few "beach" reads that will repay re-reading.

Repressing Freud

2007-06-01T07:15:00.000-04:00

Gary Greenburg's fascinating Harper's article, "Manufacturing Depression" (May 2007) prompted me to take down off my shelf a volume with some dust on it: the Modern Library edition of The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud. For the first time I read A.A. Brill's Introduction to the volume, which is both a pretty decent summary of Freud's psychoanalysis as well as Brill's recounting of his personal history with Freud--which coincides with the immigration of psychoanalysis to America, which was engineered by Brill as both Freud's first English translator and as founder of the New York Psychoanalytic Society. Freud recounts Brill's role in the final piece in this volume, "The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement." Freud was surprised by how well psychoanalysis was received "even in prudish America" (p. 950).

I finished Freud's "History" last night. While it is constructed as a bit of a martyr's tale, it is also an illuminating glimpse into the early debates. Especially helpful for me was Freud's account of the "seccession" of Jung who, on Freud's account, shrunk back from really being honest about the role of infantile sexuality in the development and formation of neuroses. Instead, Jung "spiritualizes" the libido. This, in fact, is a constant refrain in Freud: those who failed to follow his lead (also Breuler as well as Jung's "Swiss School") were too frightened to deal with the taboo of infantile sexuality. So Freud's "History of Psychoanalysis" is, in large part, a psychoanalysis of his opponents--which he freely admits, along with the risk (viz., that one opens oneself to a "psychoanalytic" response, p. 964). What surprised Freud is that someone could lose their psychoanalytic salvation: "I had not expected that anyone who had mastered analysis to a certain depth could renounce this understanding and lose it" (p. 963). With this sort of tone, I was almost waiting for the Master to break into parables about seeds, sowers, rocky ground, and birds of the air.

Whatever we have come to conclude about Freud (his theories are now roundly--and justly--criticized), I think we still need to appreciate how dramatic and powerful Freud's vision was. To read the work on dreams or sexuality is to see someone who is grappling with phenomena in incredibly attentive ways. In an almost phenomenological way, Freud was really attending to "the things themselves" (though like Husserl, he thought he was just "observing;" only his opponents he thought were "interpreting"). In sum, Freud articulated one of the most powerful and comprehensive mythologies of the last century. He sketched a nearly comprehensive story to account for phenomena that others had not.

In fact, what we have to deal with now is what Heidegger would call the "sedimentation" of theory. While Freud's theories have been discredited, psychoanalysis has sunked so deeply into the communal psyche of America that we end up constructing our experience according to Freudian rules. Thus "prudish America," heir to Puritanism and neo-puritanisms, is wont to repress so much, only to have it return. We thus end up replaying Freud in our everyday pathologies, even though we "know" better.

Greene on the Rock

2007-05-11T15:49:00.000-04:00

While over here in the UK I finished Graham Greene's Brighton Rock--set in the seaside resort town with a seedy side (think Atlantic City with accents), in the early 20th-century. It's a pretty streamlined treatment, and becomes quite brisk in the latter part of the story (one gets the feeling that Greene had a screen treatment in mind as he wrote the book--though it's clear that a film version could not have done justice to the closing drama and interiority). But what stands out is stunning character invention and development, particularly in the diabolical Pinkie, but also the self-confident Ida who, in a way, bears remarkable resemblance to the "earnestness" Alden Pyle in The Quiet American.

I won't be able to reproduce the layers of religious themes at work in the book, but perhaps a quote from the closing few pages captures how Greene sees sainthood tottering on the brink of demon possession (whereas Ida's world of moralistic certainty is actually never near to God). In the words of an anonymous priest:

He said gently, 'Corruptio optimi est pessima.'

'Yes, father?'

'I mean--a Catholic is more capable of evil than anyone. I think perhaps--because we believe in Him--we are more in touch with the devil than other people.'

Shivering thought.

Think Magic

2007-04-30T07:50:00.000-04:00

Speaking of memoirs: after pointing me to Taylor's Leaving Church (and having the same concerns), my wife passed along Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking (a National Book Award winner). In addition to Didion's literary depth, the book offers several other contrasts.

The year of "magical" thinking follows a horrific sequence at the end of 2003 in which Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne find their daughter on life support. Returning home from one such excruciating visit, Dunne suffers a massive cardiac episode and dies. It is weeks before Didion's daughter regains consciousness and can be told the terrible news--only to then later suffer a brain bleed that once again puts her in a coma (she later, very slowly, recovers).

Both Taylor and Didion are Episcopalians, though Didion is forthright that this is merely a cultural tradition for her. She is Episcopalian in the same way that one might be Texan or speak Spanish: it is taken to be an accident of birth, though nonetheless a formative aspect of one's identity. But she confesses that her heart was never really in it when, at the end of the creed, she would profess belief in "the resurrection of the dead." And yet, the "magical" thinking of this year seems to be the hope that John will return: that things need to be primed for his re-appearance. But perhaps in describing this as "magical," Didion has already implanted all that's needed to dismiss such thinking as mad.

Ultimately this is a memoir of grieving; and by the end, she has begun the work of mourning. Indeed, one of the insights of the book is her experiential distinction between "grieving"--which is largely passive, comes in waves, and sneaks up on you--and "mourning"--which is active, requires hard work and intentionality. But despite being a memoir of grieving, one must be struck by how un-sentimental the book is: it almost has an air of aristocratic or royal restraint about it ("you mustn't let them see you weep"). And yet neither is it aloof or cold. It is forthright, honest, and heartbreaking.

What struck me most is the way in which The Year of Magical Thinking (unlike Leaving Church) is a memoir where characters other than the author really take center stage--in this case Didion's husband, John, and her daughter, Quintana. The memoir is an homage, without slipping into hagiography.

It is also a glimpse of what can only be described as an exotic, almost extinct beast: a 40-year marriage right smack in the middle of Hollywood and the New York literary set. Here was a couple who were both writers, who worked from home together pretty much everyday for 40 years, who not only survived this, but thrived because of it. It is this marriage and this friendship that makes The Year of Magical Thinking so lonely, veritably echoing with emptiness. What emerges from the book is an honest picture of a marriage that was, above all, a friendship in the most Aristotelian sense. The account of marriage here is one that puts to shame so much "Christian" literature (e.g., cp. the non-account of Taylor's marriage in her memoir, which seems so tangential to her identity). The Year of Magical Thinking is a story of marriage as the hardest thing in the world, but also the most rewarding and enlivening ("quickening" we would say in the older rhythms of King James English). As such, Didion gives unwitting, backhanded witness to sacramentality.

Leaving Church for What?

2007-04-21T10:29:00.000-04:00

I just finished Barbara Brown Taylor's "Memoir of Faith," Leaving Church. Taylor was for 20 years an Episcopal priest--first in an urban Atlanta parish, then moving to a rural north Georgia parish that calls to mind scenes from Mitford. The narrative arc of the memoir, however, recounts her decision to leave parish ministry--eventually ending up as a religion professor at Piedmont College. As such, the book is somewhat mistitled: it's really a book about leaving ordained ministry. "Leaving Clergy" would be more fitting, but less catchy--and it does seem by the end of the book that Taylor's post-clergy rendition of Christianity does translate into leaving church. Having so diffused God's presence into "the world"--especially the world of "nature"--Taylor can't come up with very good reasons for staying. So instead we find her on the porch of her hilltop home on Sunday mornings, reading the paper and enjoying the geese flying overhead. (Many "emergent" folks will find much that they'll love in her critique of the institutional church; that in itself is a red flag for me.) Taylor is clearly no Anglo-Catholic, since she sees no sense of any special presence of the Spirit in the church's sacraments.

The book is breezy and honest and a compelling read. As someone who has at times been tempted by the reverse trajectory--to "leave college" for ministry--the book is a sobering look behind the curtain which I'll want to keep close by whenever those temptations rear their ugly head.

But I must confess I never quite found myself sympathetic to Taylor's narrative voice. I think this is for at least two reasons:

First, I found the book incredibly self-absorbed. Someone might be quick to point, "Well, it is a memoir; what did you expect?" But perhaps this says something about what memoirs have become in our culture, and why there is such a cult of the memoir today--and increasingly within the church (I think the same voice comes across in the memoirs of Anne Lamott and Lauren Winner). The memoir is a symptom of the general cult of narcissism that characterizes late-modern American culture. In these memoirs, the author gets all the best lines. Indeed, I felt like Taylor voice sounded like that of the stereotypical "only child" (is she? I won't be at all surprised). The world painted for us revolves around Taylor, as if everything existed for Taylor.

Is it possible for memoirs to not be narcissistic? Absolutely, though they are rare today. A non-narcissistic memoir will be characterized by a first-person voice that doesn't confuse the first-person perspective with the centre of the universe. It will be a memoir that lets others emerge in full-bloom as developed characters, and puts the best lines in their mouths. (The paucity of other characters in the book was, for me, the most striking piece. Not even her husband's picture gets filled in.) In short, it would be a memoir characterized by one of St. Augustine's central axioms: "What do we have that we did not receive?" (1 Cor. 4:7)

My second reservation stems from the first: I just can't bring myself to find liberalism as a very interesting or viable hope for the future. And at the end of the day, Taylor just wants to give us more liberal Christianity. By "liberal" I don't mean an epithet that the Southern Baptist Convention throws at anyone who rejects a literal six-day creation. By "liberalism" I mean an understanding of the self and the world that was bequeathed to us by Locke and Rousseau--a vision that places the individual at the centre of the world and sees the entire world existing to satisfy that autonomous, self-determined individual.

And it seems that is the spirituality that Taylor finds liberating. She cites with approval another friend who "left church." Talking about his decision to no longer participate in the church's worship, the friend testified: "I think I finally hear the gospel. The good news of God in Christ is, 'You have everything you need to be human.' There is nothing oustide of you that you still need" (p. 219).

That might be a gospel, but it's not the Gospel of Jesus Christ--it's the gospel spewed by the evangelists of Enlightenment liberalism who waxed elegant about the self-sufficiency of the individual. A gospel of self-sufficiency is the antithesis of a gospel of grace, which points out our utter lack, and our utter dependence precisely on something outside ourselves. And not just God: the corporate worship of the church is itself a testimony to how much I need all of these odd, strange, generally unlikeable people that congregate together whether we "want" to or not.

As much as I would sometimes like to "leave church," I know that this would only be fueling the worst parts of me, allowing me to retreat to a comfy space that I control, no longer disciplined by the hard work of submitting to external discipline and no longer required to be called out of myself to encounter and love those who get on my nerves (and they me!).

Leaving church is easy; it's staying that requires courage--and that requires grace.

Protestant Novelists?

2007-04-20T08:37:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking a little more about the closing questions I offered in my earlier reflections on Graham Greene's Quiet American--my hunch that somehow the Catholic sacramental imagination has produced better novelists than the Protestant social imaginary.

I should have qualified this, of course, to say that I was thinking primarily of 20th-century novelists--which is why Updike came to mind. It's probably the case that any American novelist in the 20th-century who isn't Catholic is a kind of "Protestant" novelist by default, just because of the ubiquitous protestantism of American culture (somewhat like Hegel said all Western philosophy after Augustine is "Christian" philosophy in some sense). This is obviously the case for Hawthorne and Melville, but might still be the case for 20th-century novelists, at least up to the 60s or so.

Perhaps this line of questioning is untenable, but it does seem instructive somehow. Pen-pal acquaintance Andre Muller (New Zealand) articulated the issue in correspondence: what would it mean for a novel to be "Protestant?"

Well, probably lots of guilt, with no penance! In which case Cormac McCarthy might be the quintessential Protestant novelist (!). More specifically, it seems to me that "Protestant" novels tend toward a kind of didacticism that reflects the cognitivist, "talking-head" way that Protestantism has tended to construe Christian faith. So rather than the obliqueness of Greene, you get something like Marilynne Robinson's Gilead--which is a fabulous book, but not on the order of Waugh or O'Connor (in my humble opinion).

[P.S. While it is unfortunately not available online, those with access to a relatively good library might be interested in my piece on Franz Wright in the most recent Harvard Divinity Bulletin. It's entitled "Absence as a Window." The same issue includes new poems from Wright.]

Graham Greene's "Very Quiet" American

2007-04-06T21:39:00.000-04:00

A couple weeks ago I faced a long drive by myself to Brock University in St. Catherine's, Ontario. To redeem the time as it were (6 hours each way), I checked out the audio version of Graham Greene's The Quiet American, read/performed by Joseph Porter. (Porter does a decent job, though his Alden Pyle sounds more like he's from Arkansas than Boston.)

This is Greene at his finest: an insightful critique of naive imperialisms in Indo-China forms the backdrop for the micro-drama between the "earnest" Protestantism of the American Pyle and the unwitting Catholicism of the "detached" Brit, Fowler, and their common love. Indeed, Love is at the center of everything, and the story is dripping with a sense of sacramental presence. The pentitential longing of the closing passage left me in tears on I-69.

The book also got me asking: Do we really have any great Protestant novelists? Can any Protestant novelist really hold a candle to the sacramental imaginations of Waugh, Greene, Percy, and O'Connor (or Tolkien)? What would we offer as a Protestant counterpart--Updike?! Is that the best we've got? Is this something of a confirmation of the "talking-head"-ness of Protestantism--its myopic concern with intellect as opposed to the Catholic affirmation of the sensual and imaginative?

MacIntyre on NOT Having Your Cake and Eating It, Too

2007-03-16T12:14:00.000-04:00

I'm spending some time in Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue today, and was particularly struck by the incisiveness of his diagnosis of a society that recognizes only "external" goods. As he discerns, "in any society which recognized only external goods, competitiveness would be the dominant and even exclusive feature" (p. 196). And then this fabulous quote:

Notoriously, the cultivation of truthfulness, justice and courage will often, the world being contingently what it is, bar us from being rich or famous or powerful.

The qualifier "contingently" is brilliant, and pregnant with theological insight: he doesn't given in to saying that these are always and essentially mutually exclusive, but only in the contingent configurations of our (broken, fallen) world. (It calls to mind some of Augustine's ruminations on "the praise of men" in Book 10 of the Confessions.)

MacIntyre then ends with this prescient diagnosis: "We should therefore expect that, if in a particular society the pursuit of external goods were to become dominant, the concept of the virtues might suffer first attrition and then perhaps something near total effacement, although simulacra might abound" (196).

Gee, I wonder what that sort of society might look like?

Telling God's Story: A must-read for preachers (and everybody else!)

2007-02-23T15:17:00.000-05:00

I just had opportunity to read the manuscript for a book due out in May: Telling God's Story: Narrative Preaching for Christian Formation (InterVarsity Press). This is, hands-down, one of the best books I've read in months, and certainly the most exciting book I've ever read on preaching that actually thinks about the nature and task of the Church. (Imagine that: a book on homiletics that is actually tethered to ecclesiology and not just current trends in rhetoric or corporate sales strategies.) InterVarsity asked me to provide an endorsement for the book and I was glad to say the following:

The church should be worried about this book. It comes as an invitation to rethink the task of preaching, but three pages into it you’ll realize that Wright is not giving us another “how-to” book for adding to the plethora of “messages” delivered every Sunday. No, this little book is packed with minor prophet-like punch, arguing that preaching is the practice by which the North American church has fallen, but also gives us a glimpse of how preaching could help her stand. Providing a brilliant historical and theological diagnosis of the problem with so-called “biblically based, need-centered preaching” (whether liberal or conservative), Telling God’s Story winsomely sketches what authentic “biblical” preaching looks like: not conscripting the Bible to legitimate the cultural narratives of consumerist individualism or triumphant nationalism, but rather finding ourselves in the biblical story as an alternative to both. If the church is properly said to be a polis, then this book unpacks the “politics” of homiletics. It should be required reading in seminaries across the North America. And we could hope that pastors already immersed in ministry would be willing to risk reading this book. But be forewarned: it will radically change your understanding of your charge to “preach the Gospel.”

The Bottom of the World

2007-01-09T19:35:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure where this started--it might have been from reading Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner years ago, or perhaps Melville's Moby Dick, or maybe even watching Master and Commander--but for the last several years I've been fascinated with the seas off southern South America, and especially dipping below Cape Horn to the bottom of the world. Seas you can stroll beside in southern California are fine, but there must be a special kind of terrifying beauty about waters that can be so monstrous (I remember first sensing this watching the bay north of Vancouver).

So it was a special treat when a friend gave me a copy of Hal Roth's sailing memoir, Two Against Cape Horn (1978), which documents the voyage of Hal and Margaret Roth from southern California down the west coast to South America, through the coastal channels of Chile, and final around Cape Horn itself before heading home via the eastern seaboard. It is a remarkable tale, including vignettes of intriguing people, history of sailors who first ventured around the cape (including Darwin's voyage on the Beagle), creative frugality and learning to live off the gifts of land (wild celery) and sea (mussells everywhere)--and even the account of their own shipwreck which left them utterly dependend upon the hospitality of Chilean natives and the navy. That, perhaps, was one of the most intriguing aspects of the story. There is something about such lone voyages--like all of the lone adventures of the wealthy, whether climbing moutains or sailing around the world alone--which are the height of modern (and American) individualism, a John-Wayne-ish swagger of independence. Perhaps unwittingly, Roth's story shows this all to be a lie: nobody sails around the cape "alone."

Kirk on Burke

2007-01-03T22:15:00.000-05:00

As I've indicated at times over at Fors Clavigera, I have found myself of late sometimes struggling with my orientation--POLITICAL orientation, that is (though my wife is sometimes alarmed by my interest in Oscar Wilde!). While my soul recoils at the ideology of the Religious Right, I find myself equally disenchanted with the Religious Left, and so I myself drawn to earlier models--primarily the 19th-century Christian socialism of Ruskin, Maurice (and the less 'Christian' visions of William Morris), I have also had a growing interest in more classic "conservatism" (as opposed to the neo-conservatism that dominates today's political discourse). This is especially true since, as an advocate of "ancient" paths of catholicity, I'm clearly sympathetic with the anti-revolutionary streak that characterizes conservatism proper.

So a couple months ago, I thought I could kill two birds with one stone by reading Russell Kirk's biography of Edmund Burke: Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered (1967; reprint ed., ISI Books, 1997). Burke is oft hailed as the father of conservatism, while Kirk is often looked to as a father of American conservatism. (The Russell Kirk Center is located not far from here, in Mecosta, MI.)

The book was a very engaging read, almost a bit of a page turner. It is written in a kind of "classical" style of brief biography (reminding me of Waugh's biography of Rossetti), perhaps teetering on the edge of hagiography, but never quite there. Kirk's treatment is primarily an account of the man through his ideas and political vocation, not pretending to offer any kind of comprehensive treatment. Rather, Kirk was trying to bring to life Burke's vision--and I was struck by how instructive it would be for today's neo-conservatives to return to Burke, who would have no truck with their passion for de-regulation, global expansion of laissez-faire market systems, and blatantly revolutionary program of "regime change."

Kirk's Burke is most passionately opposed to the "arbitrary" exercise of political power, which animated his attempts at conciliation with the American colonies while at the same time strenuously renouncing the French revolution and the ensuing reign of terror. This same concern led him to commit decades to reigning in the corruption of the East India Company and to battle for expanded Irish rights. This also translated into a very critical attitude to the Enlightenment (not unlike some postmodern critiques of the Enlighenment).

While I find Burke's penchant for Christendom to be bothersome, I can see where it's coming from (something like O'Donovan?). But what I find most perplexing about such "Christian" conservatism is how to square a core sensibility of conservatism with a core Christian doctrine. Conservatism, of course, is about "conserving;" it is anti-revolutionary, and operates with an abiding sense of the wisdom to be found in the past, in tradition, in the institutions that have been handed down across the ages. In fact, this translates into a kind of optimism about what's gone before. And it's this optimism about past institutions that I can't quite square with the doctrine of original sin. Burke at one point puts it this way, speaking in favor of "things long established": "The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment, is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species, it almost always acts right" (p. 93).

But how to square this confidence in the native wisdom of "the species" with the trenchant critique of human wisdom as folly that we find in the New Testament (Rom. 1; 1 Cor. 1:18-25)? I wonder if there is grounds for an ecclesial conservatism but not a political conservatism.

In any case, this is a book that I will read again, sooner rather than later.

Cormac McCarthy (Re)Visited

2006-10-10T20:09:00.000-04:00

A while back I made an off-handed and second-hand comment about the "nihilism" of Cormac McCarthy. A thoughtful reader (from Australia, as I recall) sent an email and encouraged me to suspend judgment about McCarthy until I had actually read him. Sage advice. So this past summer, while I was in Pasadena, I picked up a first edition of All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of McCarthy's acclaimed "Border Trilogy."

This post is my confession: forgive me, for I have sinned. I am, without reservation and with much devotion, a new convert to a different McCarthyism--which is, for my money, a long ways from nihilism. All the Pretty Horses is one of the most enthralling books I have read in a long time. (In fact, as soon as I put it down I immediately went to eBay and scored first editions of the next two volumes in the trilogy.) The friendship between John Grady and Rawlins is one of the most beautiful and poignant I've encountered (though, I must confess, I found that images of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal kept creeping into my head!). It is simply amazing how, in such sparse dialogue, McCarthy can make a friendship come to life so vividly. And far from nihilism, I did find in McCarthy what could be a kind of persistent hope--though, admittedly, it could also be a kind of resigned fatalism. But I'm suspending judgment until I work through the rest of the trilogy. And then hope to jump ahead to his newest novel, The Road. (Though that will take a while: I've tried to discipline myself to a bit of a reading order: a British novel, an American novel, then something "other" (e.g, French, Chinese), before moving back to British, American, etc. It's going to be hard to let those other McCarthy's sit on the shelf untouched.)

Bird by Bird: Anne Lamott on Writing

2006-09-13T20:02:00.000-04:00

[Despite a very busy summer, I also enjoyed a decent slate of summer reading, and will try to catch up a bit on my reading log here.]

Over the last two years my wife has become a devoted fan of Anne Lamott. Like most converts, she also tends to be a bit of a zealot, so I kept trying to more objectively guage just how good Anne Lamott was. While I still haven't gotten around to Traveling Mercies or Plan B, a few weeks ago while we were visiting friends in Atascadero, CA they gave me a copy of Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. I'm sold.

Lamott regularly had me laughing out loud. And if it doesn't sound too hokey, the book really was downright "inspiring." While I could pretty legitimately described as an "author," I still dream of being a "writer," and Lamott's wisdom helped dream myself into that just a little bit more. (Just need to take things "bird by bird.") But on top of the "instructions" side of this book, Lamott offers a number of gems by just being a closer observer, somebody who knows how to pay attention to what's right in front of her.

Perhaps, above all, I find her voice to be without guile. She is an honest writer, and here she is (sometimes brutally) honest about both writing and life.

Wine, Interpretation, and "Objectivity"

2006-08-13T10:54:00.000-04:00

An interesting piece in the New York Times today takes a hard look at the rise of the 100-point system for rating wine--tracing its history from Robert Parker's Wine Advocate to its industry-wide adoption--but also calling into question it's effectiveness. Even those who employ the system grant that it gives an air of scientificity and objectivity to something that is much slipperier and elusive. Judging wine (like hermeneutics and interpretation) is an art, not a science--though even the best art should be informed by good theory and criteria, as well as apprenticeship and training.

Perhaps most disheartening is the market-driven nature of the 100-point system and the challenges of conflict of interest when ratings are doled out by glossy magazines laced with ads from the wineries and producers subject to their judgment (as well as retailers who post those little scoring tags below the bottle displays). And while some mags commit [or claim to commit] to "blind" tasting, there's still a problem similar to peer-review in the academy: vintners have figured out what these folks like, and produce wines that are primed to score well--which is a bit like the tail wagging the dog.

The upshot? A few years ago, I read Jim Flick's book on golf, which recommended that most people should resist the hype of massive, ballooned 1-woods, just leave their drivers at home, play from the tee with a trusty 3-wood. Perhaps something of the same is true for new wine afficianados: Amateurs might do better to ignore the pseudo-science of scores and the mass-market formulas the system has spawned and, instead, trust the friendly, knowledgeable folks at a local wine shop.

A Tale of Two Religions?

2006-08-03T10:53:00.000-04:00

I had to hastily finish Michael Ruse's wonderful book The Creation-Evolution Struggle because it's due back to the public library. But it will repay a second loan. Ruse, a philosopher by training, has here written a bit of a page-turner history of the emergence of evolutionary theory and the ensuing debates and clash with religion--particularly creationism and intelligent design.

Ruse is eminently fair to both sides, without pulling any punches. It's particularly interesting to find a non-Christian scholar (Ruse variously describes himself as a "deist" and an "agnostic") who recognizes the long history of how legitimate evolutionary science is regularly morphed into a kind of secular religion. Ruse distinguishes these with the rubric of "evolution" or "evolutionary science" vs. "evolutionism"--the latter being the equivalent of a "secular religion." Ruse is at pains to argue that evolution did not necessarily entail evolutionism; but nevertheless, contingently and historically it did and has regularly yielded the latter.

Curiously, Ruse the philosopher here avoids properly philosohical questions (e.g., the epistemic conditions of "science," etc.), but he has addressed those questions elsewhere. This book provides an excellent history of the emergence of evolutionary theory and should be required reading for anyone interested in these questions.