Light On Dark Water

Sunday Night Journal — May 27, 2012

Three Movies and a Book

Winter's Bone

I suspect most people who read this blog regularly have already seen this--after all, you're the ones who told me about it. But a brief description for those who haven't: it's about a seriously messed-up family in rural Missouri. and is a very grim portrayal of the methedrine trade that seems to be doing to a lot of rural and small-town America what crack did to the big cities. The father is mixed up with the local meth (and who knows what else) syndicate. After being arrested, he has put the family farm up for bail money and disappeared. The mother is mentally ill in a pretty serious way, completely non-functional. There are three children: seventeen-year-old Ree and two much younger siblings. As the semi-adult on the scene, it falls to her to try to salvage the family and their home.

Ree needs to find her father and get him to show up for his court appearance. Naturally she goes first to his criminal associates. They don't want any questions asked. Things get ugly, and that's enough plot summary, in case anyone who's reading this hasn't seen the movie.

It's an excellent piece of work, but extremely grim, though not hopeless. Take two parts rural poverty, one part menace, and a dash of horror, and set it in the middle of grey-brown mountain winter. Not pretty, but worth seeing. I must say, too, that it captures the general atmosphere of a certain element of the rural South all too well. (No, Missouri is not "the South" exactly, but the poor white culture that we think of as Southern actually reaches into parts of the Midwest.) I don't mean the drugs and the heavy violence, but the basic culture: the way the people talk, the way they deal with each other, the houses with old cars and other machinery strewn around the property, and so forth. The film mainly shows only the darker side, which is only one part of the picture, but accurate as far as it goes. The acting is excellent. I was amused to hear a figure of speech which I used to hear frequently from someone I worked with who came from a similar background: "useless as tits on a boar."

I have not read the novel on which the movie is based, by the way.

Thank You for Smoking

This is a comedy based on Christopher Buckley's novel of the same name, which, again, I have not read. A black comedy, I should say (is that still allowed?), which follows the fortunes of a spokesman for the tobacco industry as he tries to make his employer look like a benefactor of mankind. Deeply cynical, he meets regularly with a couple of lobbyists for the firearms and alcohol industries. The three call themselves the M.O.D. Squad--Merchants of Death. I wouldn't recommend it strongly, but it's pretty funny in places. There is a sex scene which, like most, would have been better left off-screen. 

Die Hard

I hate to say it--I'm embarrassed to say it--but within the limits of the sort of thing it is, this is a great movie. I recorded it when it was shown on AMC several weeks ago and watched it in half-hour bits.  (It is crazy that we have cable TV and only use it for watching Alabama football, PBS, and movies most of which we could easily rent.) Years ago--and I think this is not the first time I've described this phenomenon--I saw part of it on TV in a hotel while I was at some conference or training. I had seen the last half or so of it, and every time I saw it mentioned I wondered how the story started. 

Really, don't laugh: as action movies go, I doubt they get much better than this. The villains are really bad, the action is spectacular and for the most part not totally unbelievable, and the hero is really a hero, albeit a flawed one (naturally): in the end his strongest motivation is his love for his wife and the attempt to save her from the villains. 

I suppose anyone with the least bit of weakness for this sort of thing has already seen it,  but if not, try it sometime when you want a couple of hours' entertainment. Die Hard II  is not nearly as good, in my opinion.

Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell

One of my children gave me this book, which is subtitled The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, for Christmas, inscribing it to "Indecisive" from "Overthinking it." I was skeptical, because I hadn't read any of Gladwell's books and think of him as a purveyor of the sort of pop social-science that tries to explain way too much. I ended up somewhat fascinated, though, not so much by any overall thesis, which in the end is not really on offer here (the subtitle seems to promise something which is not delivered), but by the case studies presented and what they reveal about the working of the human mind. 

I have suspected for a long time that there really is such a thing as female intuition, and that it's nothing mystical, but rather a very strong sensitivity to little things, operating in part below the level of consciousness. I have seen instances in which it was strikingly correct and instances in which it was strikingly incorrect. That sort of phenomenon, and those two sorts of instances, are what the book is about. It begins with a (true) story in which the Getty museum was offered a piece of statuary represented as being ancient Greek. The museum paid legal experts to investigate its ownership and history, and scientists to investigate its age. It was pronounced genuine, and the purchase was made. But from the beginning there were doubts on the part of art experts who knew at first glance that something was wrong.

Evelyn Harrison was next. She was one of the world's foremost experts on Greek sculpture, and she was in Los Angeles visiting the Getty just before the museum finalized the deal with Becchina. "Arthur Houghton, who was then the curator, took us down to see it," Harrison remembers. "He just swished a cloth off the top of it and said, 'Well, it isn't ours yet, but it will be in a couple of weeks.' And I said, 'I'm sorry to hear that.'"

The book contains one anecdote after another like that, in which someone reaches an instantaneous sub-rational conclusion and is convinced of its truth though he may not be able to explain why he believes it. My favorite of these is a tennis coach who usually knows when a player is about to double-fault on a serve. He didn't set out to make these predictions as a stunt, he just noticed that he usually seemed to know. And--this is the really interesting part--even after devoting a great deal of effort to trying to figure out the signal, watching a great deal of film, breaking it down frame-by-frame and so forth, as of the writing of the book he still doesn't know how he does it.

And then there are the cases where an intuitive snap judgment is wrong, the most dramatic and tragic being the Diallo case in New York, in which an unarmed man was killed by police who seem to have genuinely believed, first he was holding a gun, then that he had fired it.

What is the lesson here? That sometimes quick intuitive judgments are uncannily right, and sometimes they're completely wrong. When they're wrong, they tend to involve situations where something is at work that causes us to think we see what we expected to see, or are particularly alert for, such as a gun in the hand of a suspected criminal.

There is one situation, the only one I can think of, where I've noticed myself having the sort of ability that those art experts in the Getty story had. I worked for ten years as a software developer, and still do a certain amount of that work in my current job. I was never as good as the best programmers with whom I worked, but I did notice one gift that not everyone else seemed to have: when there was a problem with software that I had been involved with, I often was able to go straight to the source of the problem without any preliminary investigation, without looking at the evidence. This was obviously based on knowledge, but my judgment did not make conscious use of that knowledge. Not a particularly significant instance, but an interesting one in light of this book, because I remember wondering how I knew. Whether or not the ideas in this book have any applicability to situations in which one finds oneself, it's an interesting read. 

Sunday Night Journal — May 20, 2012

Wagner: The State of the Question

(For the benefit of anyone coming across this post in isolation from its predecessors of the past two weeks: I am writing this after having seen a repeat of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2011-12 Live in HD broadcast of its new Ring cycle.)

I suppose I should say “The Ring” instead of “Wagner,” as it’s the only Wagner I’ve heard, not counting the occasional excerpt or overture. But it’s probably not unreasonable or unfair to regard this enormous work as representing the essence of the composer and his work.

It’s fair to say that I have been pretty well won over now. Götterdämmerung is the longest of the four operas in the cycle, running in this production only ten minutes less than five hours. Yet either because it’s more effectively structured as a drama, or because I had by then gotten adjusted to Wagner’s method, it didn’t seem overly long, and I was never bored. In fact I wished that it had been a bit longer, because I wanted it to end with a more lengthy orchestral elegy. I emerged into the baking heat and glaring sun of the parking lot of the theater feeling that I was coming out from under the influence of some drug. I found it difficult to adjust to the abrupt requirement that I get out of the world of The Ring and into the world in which I was required to run an errand at PetSmart on my way home. Hours later the emotions aroused by the work were still swirling around in me, the voices still resounding, and I found myself mentally deserting my immediate surroundings, staring into space, drifting back into that state where nothing existed for me apart from what I was seeing and hearing on that giant screen and from that enormous sound system, hearing the Rhinemaidens or the fire music or the Valhalla motif.

And yet...even as I succumbed to its spell, I had reservations and misgivings:

Musical

It seems to be a quirk of my musical sensibility that when I hear a singer with an orchestra my ear attends first and primarily to the orchestra. The result is that I’m often slow to recognize and respond to the singer’s melody. I mention that because I wonder if it accounts partly for the fact that for the most part it was the orchestral music that moved me as music rather than the parts given to the singers. There are no arias, and to my ear it seemed that most of the singing by far was recitativ (the stuff that in most operas and oratorios constitutes the musically uninteresting filler necessary to support the words that move the action along). To be blunt, there is a decided dearth of good tunes here. But it’s very possible that more exposure to the operas would change my view of that.

But the best of the music...well, it’s surely among the best. I found myself almost wishing he had been an orchestral composer, but that’s probably a misplaced wish; he seems to have needed a text.

Dramatic

One could never accuse Wagner of being an irresistible storyteller. Often the dramas of The Ring seem more like a series of tableaux than a narrative. There’s a good deal of exposition, some of it pretty clunky, and of characters announcing and describing their emotions. There are lengthy discussions and arguments which stop the action for fairly long stretches of time. I believe these operas were over-long even in a culture where people probably had longer attention spans than ours tend to be. Verdi was writing around the same time and his works are in the two-to-three-hour range. Wagner wrote his own librettos and was perhaps somewhat indulgent with himself; as dramas without music I doubt very much that they would have seen a second performance.

Philosophical

I am speaking here without any first-hand knowledge of Wagner’s ideas, only what I got from the operas and what little I’ve read about him. But with that in mind:

It isn’t fair, but Nazism casts a shadow over the century or so of German history that preceded it. It isn’t Wagner’s fault, but when you hear characters in a drama shouting “Heil!,” you can’t not think of Hitler. It isn’t Wagner’s fault that Hitler praised him. It isn’t entirely fair that the cult of heroism in The Ring is tainted by the similar Nazi cult. And yet this taint can’t be escaped or dismissed entirely. I suppose Hitler may have liked Brahms, too, but if he did we don’t care. What makes Wagner different is that he reportedly did talk a great deal about ideas which have some continuity with some elements of Nazism. Great evil casts a shadow backward as well as forward, and while Wagner may never have dreamed that his reputed anti-Semitism and nationalism would develop so diabolically, it can't be denied that there is continuity there. 

But it must be said that there is no trace of any of this in The Ring. There is no mention of nation, no mention of race, except in the sense of family. The dramas take place in a mythological realm which is not only timeless but placeless. If Wagner thought all this had something to do with Germany (and apparently he did, at least according to George Bernard Shaw—see this post at All Manner of Thing)—such idea are outside the work itself. 

One might say—and I did say to myself once or twice during The Ring—that Wagner’s world is entirely pagan. But that’s really not true; it is, rather, paganism viewed from a post-Christian distance. It’s often said that we live in a post-Christian society, and that’s largely true. But in many ways it’s been true for some 200 years now. Among other things, the 19^th century interest in love as a mystical union owed something to Christianity. Real paganism, at least of the northern European variety, was a pretty hard, cold business; see Sigrid Undset’s Gunnar’s Daughter for a picture which is surely more accurate. What I have seen of the original Scandinavian legends contains love stories, but they are markedly unsentimental and unmystical. Wagner’s reworking of those sources is in many ways far more appealing, and is certainly far more sophisticated.

But there is something morbid in it; there is something morbid in much of Romanticism, in the artistic sensibility of the 19th century, I think, and Wagner brings it out more clearly than most. Where Christianity has love conquering death and bringing life, Wagner seems to make love and death the same thing, a mystical annihilation which may have more in common with some idea of union with the One than with the Christian idea of a personal union with God in which the person still exists. There is no God here; the frequent talk of “holiness” seems to have to do with Romantic ideas about “the holiness of the heart’s affections” (Keats). I'm not prepared to defend this statement, but intuitively it seems to me that the Wagnerian combination of morbid romanticism and hero-worship has as much to do with Nazism as Wagner's explicitly political and social thinking.

By the way, these recordings—at least I think they’re the same ones—are going to be available on DVD this fall. My first thought on reading that announcement at the end of the credits was that I must have them; my second was that the experience I’ve just had is probably unrepeatable and that the attempt to repeat it would probably be a mistake.

Sunday Night Journal — May 13, 2012

Today is Mother's Day, and has been very full of activity. I've had no time to write, so I will offer you something I wrote for Mother's Day 2006. 

It's hard for me to believe that that was six years ago. And I've been contemplating the fact that the year 2000 now seems a fairly long time ago--which of course it is, depending on what you're comparing it to. Remember how businesses were putting "2000" in the names of various products (e.g. Windows 2000, and talking about what they would do in "the new millenium"? How dated it all seems now.

Or even further back: 1969, when 2001: A Space Odyssey was released? The year seemed impossibly remote. How different the actual future has proved to be; how little has changed in some ways, how much in others. 

Sunday Night Journal — May 6, 2012

Images and Sounds

I haven't posted any pictures here (my own pictures, that is) for a while. The reason is partly that I haven't been taking very many, and partly that I haven't sorted through the ones I have taken over the past months. And the reason for both those things is lack of time.

And if you're a very regular and attentive reader of this blog, and also have a very good memory, you might remember that sometime last year I posted a couple of videos (nothing elaborate, just things captured with the video setting on my camera), and that I mentioned that I was also planning to post a video taken during Tropical Storm Ida, which I believe was in 2009.

So I decided this afternoon that instead of writing I would spend some time selecting and beautifying some nice images from my past six months or so of pictures, and also post that tropical storm video. Well, as is often the way with computers, I ran into unexpected technical problems with the video, which I won't bore you with, and then was pretty much out of time. But here are a few pictures, starting with a still from Tropical Storm Ida.

One of those strange spider webs on the ground in the woods, that you only see when the dew is heavy:

One of many pictures I've taken of these dead trees in the bay. They were probably cypresses. I don't expect them to be standing that much longer--the next hurricane will probably knock them down. This was taken last October.

A heron in morning fog, December 31 2011:

And, from the same morning: I don't know why I took this, and it's entirely possible that it was an accident, but I for some reason I really love it:

And also: a couple of years ago my wife gave me for my birthday a little hand-held sound recorder. Sometimes I use it to record little notes to myself, usually about something I'm writing, while I'm on the way to or from work. I've also played around with recording natural sounds with it, and I did that one night a couple of weeks ago when I was taking my nightly walk to the bay with the dogs. There is a little creek that empties out into the bay, and up in that creek a bit there are a lot of reeds or rushes which provide homes for frogs. (It's the mouth of that creek which reflects the trees in the picture above--it moves around and changes shape all the time.) And there are woods all around. For some years now we've had very few lightning bugs--"fireflies" to most of the world, and I think that's a nicer word, but it feels slightly pretentious for me to say it, because I grew up saying "lightning bugs." But this year there have been quite a lot. I was standing about halfway between the bay and the reeds with the recorder going, and the woods beyond the reeds were full of those sweet cool flashes of light from the lightning bugs. You can hear tree frogs, an occasional bigger frog, and insects, but mostly the waves. At some points you can hear the traffic from up on Section Street, several hundred yards away. I'm sorry you can't see the lightning bugs.

 SpringNightAtTheBayApril2012-2

 

Sunday Night Journal — April 29, 2012

Dialogue and Motive

A few days ago in a comment thread Paul linked to this interesting report on a study which claims to find that conservatives understand the views of liberals better than liberals understand the views of conservatives. I take Studies of this sort in general with a pretty big dose of skepticism—after all, hardly a week seems to pass that someone doesn’t produce a Study purporting to prove that conservatives are fundamentally stupid, etc. This one is intriguing partly because the results actually go counter to the self-admitted bias of the liberal psychology professor who did it, and partly because, for what it’s worth, my personal experience supports the conclusion.

As far as I can remember I have never encountered, either in person or in print, a liberal who was able and/or willing to understand conservative arguments on their own terms—that is, to address what the conservative says he intends, and the arguments with which he supports that intention, rather than what the liberal assumes he intends. For instance, on the question of our responsibility toward the poor: if a conservative agrees that there is such a responsibility, but that there are better ways to meet it than the federal programs beloved of liberals, the liberal generally does not acknowledge that this is a disagreement about means and not ends. Instead, he concludes that the conservative doesn’t care about the poor, is a social Darwinist, etc. There simply doesn’t seem to be any willingness or ability on the part of liberals to believe that conservatives actually have the common good at heart, but differ about how to achieve it.

I don’t say that conservatives don’t often fall into the same way of thinking. But the study indicates that there are more exceptions to the tendency on the conservative than on the liberal side.

The liberal response seems always to assume that opposition to a particular approach toward solving a problem is opposition to solving the problem at all. In other words, the liberal is incapable of believing, or at least disinclined to believe, that any approach to a problem other than the liberal one can be reasonable and sincere. If you oppose affirmative action, you must favor racism. If you oppose giving more money to any and all government educational agencies, you must want children to be ignorant. (The teachers’ union in my state has been doing this for decades, pretty effectively: any opposition to anything it wants is deemed opposition to education, period.) If you think our programs for the elderly are unsustainable, you must want to push an old lady in a wheelchair over a cliff, as Congressman Paul Ryan was depicted doing in an ad attacking his proposals for Social Security and Medicare reform.

(I always feel obliged to insert this disclaimer: yes, I am mindful of the inadequacy of terms like “liberal,” “conservative,” “left,” and “right,” especially in the American context, but that doesn’t mean the parties don’t exist.)

Ryan, Rand, and Georgetown

Speaking of Paul Ryan: I have long wondered how it is that Christian admirers of Ayn Rand reconcile Rand’s ideas with their faith. At the level of fundamental metaphysics, the two simply cannot be reconciled. Rand’s philosophy as a whole can fairly be described as satanic, except that Satan does not share her foolish belief that there is no such thing as spiritual reality. I’ve suspected that what they, the Christians, do is to separate Rand’s economic ideas from her metaphysics. They read Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead and are thrilled by the achievements of the heroes, and filled with indignation toward their malicious collectivist enemies. They either miss or mostly ignore the materialist and atheist foundations of Rand’s didactic stories; what they see is an inspiring story of individual heroism against collective stupidity and venality. It wouldn’t be so hard to do that if one only read Atlas, which is the only work of any length by Rand that I’ve read; perhaps the same is true of The Fountainhead.

And they aren’t totally off base, at least if we ignore the question of literary judgment—I thought Atlas was bad to the point of being funny. Her opposition to collectivism was the one thing that Rand got mostly right. Her family’s pharmacy was confiscated by the early Soviet government, so she had direct experience of what happens when a government decides to confiscate private property, ostensibly for the benefit of the people but in practice for the benefit of those who run the government, either directly or indirectly. It doesn’t seem to be recognized by the most vociferous denouncers of Rand’s ideas that what disgusted her most (at least on the evidence of Atlas Shrugged) was not so much government itself as crony capitalism, the appropriation of government’s power by private interests. The most loathsome characters in Atlas are those who can’t compete with the genius of the heroes and therefore use the power of government to rig the game in their favor, like a football team that bribes the officials.

And she’s half-right about individual achievement. It’s a fine thing when a gifted person exercises those gifts, and a shabby one when the envious scheme to bring him down. Anyone can cheer the one and boo the other, just as audiences cheer and boo the heroes and villains of any melodrama. She was only half-right, because her gifted heroes are grotesquely egotistical, and risibly enchanted with their own (highly implausible) superiority, like characters in some cartoon version of Nietzsche.

Paul Ryan, a Catholic, is somewhat notorious for acknowledging Rand’s influence on him, while simultaneously claiming that his economic vision is compatible with Catholic social teaching. In the past week or so he has made some remarks distancing himself from Rand, and has been accused of lying about his earlier enthusiasm, as expressed in remarks such as “I give outAtlas Shrugged as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it. Well... I try to make my interns read it.” (This remark is usually paraphrased as something like “forces his staff to read Atlas Shrugged,” which is not exactly the same thing, and lacks the light tone of the actual words. The primary source and context for this remark seems to be a 2003 article in the Weekly Standard which is available only to subscribers.)

I don’t think Ryan's there is necessarily any contradiction between Ryan's past and current views (which is not to say that they are entirely coherent). In fact they are what I would expect to hear from the sort of Christian I was wondering about. Every admiring word about Rand that I’ve heard attributed to Ryan has been in the context of economics, and he seems offended that people would think this makes him a full-fledged metaphysical Randian. This doesn’t say much for his intellectual consistency, but it doesn’t surprise me very much.

At any rate, I think there are a lot of good things in his address he gave at Georgetown last week, which you can read here. Some of the Georgetown faculty are up in arms about him, in particular accusing him of being insufficiently orthodox, which is pretty funny coming from them. (Nor do those who signed the letter of protest—theology professors and others—seem likely to have much knowledge of economic reality). But—in line with the study I referred to earlier—they don’t seem even to attempt to meet the argument that his proposals will actually preserve the essentials of the social safety net they advocate. They assume that his disagreement with their means is a disagreement about the end. I am certainly willing to believe that he needs to keep working at the project of basing his economic views less on Ayn Rand and more on the teachings of the Church, but I’m not convinced that he deserves their wholesale condemnation, and I think his ideas deserve an open and charitable debate.

I don’t want to take a position on Ryan’s budget proposal (apart from the fact that I think it should include defense cuts, which it reportedly does not). These things have gotten so vastly complicated that it’s almost impossible for an ordinary person to grasp what a plan like this really contains and what its significance really is. And that in itself is a symptom of something gone badly wrong. What we need are honest and disinterested experts to study it and explain it to the rest of us. But most of the people who have the time for that sort of thing are highly partisan and can be expected to slant things their way, usually in the most hyperbolic way possible. I admit that I tend to dismiss liberal rhetoric about “gutting” social programs, because they say that about any attempt whatsoever to constrain the growth of their favored programs.

I do, however, take Ryan at his word that he believes his plan would be the best thing for the country as a whole, and is not just a cover for his desire to push somebody off a cliff. As he says,

Serious problems like those we face today require charitable conversation. Civil public dialogue goes to the heart of solidarity, the virtue that does not divide society into classes and groups but builds up the common good of all.

But you can’t have a civil dialogue when one side assumes that anything said by the other is only meant to divert attention from an evil conspiracy.

Sunday Night Journal — April 22, 2012

Notes on a couple of movies I’ve seen recently.

Islands in the Stream

I saw this movie when it was released in 1976 or 1977 and liked it a great deal. I’ve thought about it occasionally over the years and wanted to see it again. Now I have, and I found it at least as good, maybe better, than I remembered. In fact I’m tempted to call it great. After watching it a week or so ago I looked around on the net for other opinions, and I found several people describing it as a forgotten and/or underrated classic. Not entirely forgotten, obviously, since it’s available on DVD. But offhand I don’t remember ever hearing it mentioned by anyone, critic or friend, since I saw it that first time.

It’s based on Hemingway’s posthumously published novel of the same name, which I hadn’t read in 1977 and still haven’t. I don’t think the critics had (or have) a very high opinion of the novel, and obviously I can’t speak to the relative merits of book and film, or the degree of resemblance between them. But if indeed it’s a mediocre novel, it’s one of those cases of a so-so book inspiring a very fine film.

The story is centered on an aging artist living in a sort of exile in the Bahamas, reasonably content but isolated. You might say it tracks his re-engagement with the people he loves, and the enlargement of that circle in a pretty dramatic way. He has three sons by two marriages who come to visit him for the summer, and a big part of the story involves the establishment or re-establishment of his relationship with them. Later the first of his ex-wives reappears. I really don’t want to say much more than that for fear of spoiling the story, which for me at any rate was very powerful when I was twenty-nine and is just as powerful now that I’m sixty-three. I remember on my first viewing thinking that it was a perceptive and accurate picture of the way men love, and I still think so.

George C. Scott’s performance as the protagonist, in many ways a typical Hemingway character, strikes me as simply perfect. And not the least of the film’s pleasures, by the way, is the Caribbean setting, beautifully photographed. It also has a score that seems to me at least considerably better than average.

I’d be interested in knowing whether anyone else has as high an opinion of it as I do.

We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen

One night six or eight weeks ago I was browsing around on Netflix and saw this available for online viewing. Out of curiosity I watched the first ten minutes or so of it. A few days later I found myself thinking about it, and went back for another ten minutes, and so watched the whole thing in ten or twenty-minute pieces.

The Minutemen, if you don’t already know it, were a punk band of the early 1980s, and theirs is one of the names that are always mentioned in any history of punk. I had paid almost no attention to punk at the time it was happening, and a few years ago decided to educate myself a bit on the subject. The Minutemen were one of the bands I had to hear, and I listened to the album which is generally considered their best, Double Nickels on the Dime (that is, 55 miles per hour on Interstate 10). I wasn’t greatly taken with their music, although I found it interesting. (You can read my review of it here.)

Yet I found this documentary fascinating. If punk is a musical style, I don’t care much for it. If it’s the expression of anger, or the simple desire to shock and offend, I don’t like it at all. But if it’s about the rejection of the entertainment industry, about people making their own music rather than passively accepting what the industry sells, and about artistic and personal integrity, I find a lot to like.

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with rock-and-roll. A few minutes of watching the typical posturing of the typical commercially successful rock group are enough to make me never want to hear another note of it. The Minutemen, as they come across in this film, are refreshing, determinedly down to earth. There’s nothing of the usual sex-and-drugs-let’s-party rock-and-roll mentality about them. Watch the trailer below, especially that first bit, where the three members of the band are being interviewed. You might think at first that you’re hearing three kids who are just starting a band, but in fact that interview was made after they had become pretty successful—very successful, in the context of the “alternative” scene. They don’t seem to be trying to impress anybody; they’re still just being themselves, three guys who started a band. And look at and listen to Mike Watt, the bass player, the guy in the jeans and blue shirt whose reminiscences and reflections make up a big part of the movie: you’d never guess he’s a rock star. And of course he isn’t, in the sense that, say, Bono, is. He’s an impressive bassist and has been moderately successful since The Minutemen, but he doesn’t have anything like the stagey mannerisms and egotism (and, not infrequently, the apparent stupidity) that are too often the mark of rock musicians.

Punk rock—well, rock in general—usually brings along with it some degree of left-wing politics, and that seems to have been part of The Minutemen’s conception of integrity. To the extent that that’s expressed directly, it seems to be the usual rather simple-minded stuff—hating Ronald Reagan, and so forth. But it isn’t overpowering, and insofar as it’s rooted in a dislike of the commercialization and mechanization of every aspect of American life, those roots are healthy.

The film as a whole is made more affecting by the fact that D. Boon, the brilliant guitarist and not-so-brilliant singer, was killed in an auto accident in 1985 at the age of twenty-seven and at the height of the band’s achievement. Mike Watt’s grief is still (the movie was made in 2005) real and evident. I guess what I’m trying to say is that this is an engaging picture of a very likeable group of musicians. I don’t know that it made me like their music any more, but it made me like and respect them. I think anyone with much interest in pop music would enjoy it. 

Here’s that trailer:

  

And, by the way, the explanation of the title, from the movie’s Wikipedia entry:

The title is a lyric from their song “The Politics of Time.” It’s also referred to in a comment made near the end of the film by Mike Watt, in a 1985 interview, when the band is asked if they have anything else to say. He answers for them: “We jam econo.” Econo was local slang for economic and described the band's dedication to low-cost record production and touring. It also describes the band’s (and burgeoning underground independent music scene’s) do-it-yourself attitude and philosophy.

Sunday Night Journal — April 15, 2012

An Unexpected Vision

The past couple of weeks have been difficult at work, due to the departure of someone who not only was responsible for a lot of things that I don’t know much about but who will probably be impossible to replace. I should be working nights and weekends to try to compensate for her absence, but am stubbornly refusing to do so. Long hours are to some extent part of the package when you work in information technology, but I’ve reached a point in my life where I’m not willing to sacrifice for my employer what little time I have for other things.

I was very much looking forward to the weekend, and when I arrived at home I got an entirely unexpected vision of beauty. The picture below is of the street or road that I live on. “Street” for me implies pavement, and the pavement ends a little before my house. The street comes down a short but fairly steep hill, where the pavement ends, and takes a right turn before reaching my house. There are woods all around, and you can’t see beyond the turn. This is the view you get when you come around the turn.

That’s my mailbox, driveway, and red 1992 Volvo (for which I paid $3000 five years ago, a pretty good investment as it has served me reasonably well). The orange traffic cone presumably belongs to the city; I don’t know how it got there. At the end of the road there’s a path through some trees, and then Mobile Bay. Apart from the presence of my car, this is the way things looked when I came around that turn at about 6:30pm on Friday. The picture was taken a few minutes later, and I’m including it so that you can better imagine what I saw: four children running down the road to the bay.

They were, I guess, ten or eleven years old, three girls and one boy. I’ve met the boy, who lives with his apparently single mother in one of the condominiums a couple of blocks away. I don’t recall having seen the girls before. The girls all had long hair and were wearing jeans or shorts and light blouses or t-shirts, the boy has thick curly hair and was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. When I saw them they were about even with where my car is parked. The last of the group, a girl with light brown hair, heard my car and stepped off into the grass, while the others kept going. Then she saw that I was slowing down and ran to catch up with the others. I could hear them calling and laughing to each other. I stopped, more or less where I took this picture a few minutes later, and watched them till they disappeared into the woods.

I realize as I write this that it’s going to be impossible for me to communicate to you how beautiful they were, and how they moved me: their freshness, their gladness, their seemingly effortless vitality, their grace and freedom. There is a point toward the end of childhood where the body and mind have attained a certain maturity but have not yet fallen into the fears and lusts and longings of adolescence, which seem to stay with us in some degree for the rest of our lives. I found myself wishing they could remain as they were forever. But that’s to wish that they never complete the journey. They made me very happy for a little while, and I said a prayer for them.

1 Samuel by Francesca Aran Murphy

I had planned to write a full review of this book today, but have changed my mind for two reasons. First, the weekend has been busier than I expected. Second, I mentioned to someone in email last week that I was planning to review it, and he asked what publication I was reviewing it for. So I started thinking, well, why not take a bit more time with it, and see if I can place it with Touchstone or some other publication, because I think the book merits the attention. I don’t know how many subscribers Touchstone has, but I’m sure it’s more than the number of people who read this blog. I’m therefore going to make this just a quick first draft of what will be a somewhat longer review.

I don’t know much about biblical scholarship, but this book strikes me as being exactly the way it ought to be done. I should admit that I actually have...let us say low expectations of it, because as a discipline it seems to have played a significant role over the past 150 years or so in undermining Christian faith. It is with a certain weariness and dread that I hear a homilist open his discussion of a scripture reading with “What Matthew (or Mark or Luke or John...) is trying to tell us here is...” What follows is likely to discard the literal meaning of the text in favor of some psycho-literary lesson, possibly of dubious value.

Dr. Murphy does not do this at all. In fact the book seems to engage in a sort of running argument with what I understand to be the conventional literary and historical approaches: the literary one which is all too literary, in that it treats the text as mere literature, the historical one which purports to sit in highly skeptical judgment of its factual truth. This book instead starts with the presumption that scripture means what it says, and that when it clearly treats events as having really happened it is not trafficking in myth and legend (or fiction). Most importantly, it presumes that scripture is intelligible, that the people who put it down were not fools or idiots—nor, on the other end of scholarly mistake, were they novelists, carefully crafting a narrative for literary and theological effect. It takes the biblical author’s historical situation and way of looking at the world as, yes, substantially different from our own, but, no, not so different as to be unintelligible. In short, it sets out to explain, not to explain away.

Broadly speaking, it is an extended and focused effort to bridge the gap between the biblical world and the contemporary believer. In the best tradition of modern theology, it makes ready use of modern discoveries in history and archaeology and languages, but it does not turn these tools against the text. And it doesn’t assume the necessity of what I have always, as a completely unschooled layman, regarded as the suspect practice of resolving disjunctures in the text by assuming them to be the work of multiple hands, in this case with differing agendas. Apparently it is widely held among scholars that the stories of Samuel and Saul, which seem at times to support and at times to condemn the Israelites’ desire for a king, must intermingle the writings of pro and anti-monarchic parties. But Dr. Murphy, in what strikes me as a genuinely literary and yet orthodox approach, tries to show (if I’ve understood her) that this ambivalence expresses something deeper, something about the possibilities inherent in the situation, something about the ultimately incomprehensible but metaphysically real freedom of both God and man.

An assumption of realism must direct our interpretation of the episode, if we want to read it within Christian tradition. The presupposition that the text is describing something that really happened is a tremendous gift to the historical biblical critic. It hinders the formulation of circular hypotheses about source documents and stimulates us to use our historical imagination to try to figure out what is really going on here.

To try to figure out what is really going on here. You would think that would be the primary mission of the scholar but it certainly doesn’t seem to be the case always.

This is not the sort of thing I ordinarily read, and with my chronic difficulty in concentrating I had to work at getting started in it. Once I’d gotten fifty or pages or so in, though, it became fascinating, though never easy; every page is dense with ideas and facts and references to other commentaries, from ancient times until the present. I’m somewhat in awe of the labor involved in the writing of it, not to mention the erudition manifested throughout. I really can’t imagine examining any text at such length and in such detail, and to follow it was a mind-stretching experience.

Challenging it is, but not dry. Those who have met Dr. Murphy online won’t be surprised to learn that flashes of wit appear throughout, sometimes most unexpectedly, as in the description of the Ark of the Covenant as a “bonsai temple.” Or the observation that “In the ancient world, they had to fall back on theater, since they did not have Home Box Office.” Nor will they be surprised by a number of references to The Wire and other contemporary dramas.

I haven’t said anything about the actual content of the book being studied, 1 Samuel. If you’re as biblically unlearned as I am, you may not immediately recognize that title as designating the story that begins with the birth of Samuel and ends with the death of Saul. I had never read it from start to finish. It is quite a story, and well worth the time spent reading this commentary on it, which naturally you’ll want to begin by reading 1 Samuel itself, unless you already know it well.

Quite a story indeed. My father, who was a churchgoer but ever inclined to questioning, used to say that the terrible behavior of Biblical figures like Saul and David was an argument for the truth of the Bible, or at least for the fact that the Hebrews believed it to be true: no one attempting to hoodwink or proselytize on behalf of a religion would have so openly exhibited the sins of so many of its major figures. 1 Samuel qualifies as a prime argument for that case.

Sunday Night Journal — April 8, 2012

Easter Sunday

What were they thinking? In his Good Friday homily at the cathedral in Mobile, Fr. Martin asked this question about the disciples of Jesus as they saw him arrested, tried, and executed. What had they expected of him? Certainly not this. And what did they think when their expectations were utterly crushed? There is no evidence that any of them had any idea that the Resurrection would follow.

I know what I would have been thinking. It would have gone something like this: I should have known it would all come to nothing. This is what always happens; it’s the way life always goes: a beautiful beginning, then disappointment. Nothing ever turns out the way you want it to, or not for long. Dreams always fail. You never get what you longed for, or if you do it isn’t what you thought it would be, or it disappears even as you hold it. And in the end nothing remains but the dream itself, the same old longing.

One of three or four passages in The Lord of the Rings which haunt me, and which pass through my mind almost daily, is this exchange between Gimli and Legolas, upon their parting with a lord of Gondor; specifically, it’s the words of Gimli I recall, and which might be my own:

“That is a fair lord and a great captain of men,” said Legolas. “If Gondor has such men still in these days of its fading, great must have been its glory in the days of its rising.”

“And doubtless the good stone-work is the older and was wrought in the first building,” said Gimli. “It is ever so with the things that Men begin: there is a frost in the Spring, or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise.”

But Gimli’s is not quite the last word; the exchange continues:

“Yet seldom do they fail of their seed,” said Legolas. “And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring up again in times and places unlooked-for. The deeds of Men will outlast us, Gimil.”

“And yet come to naught in the end but might-have-beens, I guess,” said the Dwarf.

“To that the Elves know not the answer,” said Legolas.

Again, my sympathies are with the dwarf. It is not easy or natural for me to resist the feeling that in the end decline and extinction will have the last word. I almost wrote “the idea” in the preceding sentence, and changed it to “feeling,” because that’s what it is; it’s not a conviction, not a conclusion reached by reason, and in fact is contrary to my conscious belief. Yet to some extent it is an idea, though an unwelcome one. After all, is there anything in our direct experience to suggest, much less prove, that it is not true? I say direct experience: we have the testimonies of others, and our own intuitions and hopes. To believe in spirit as the source of material life rather than its product often requires a conscious effort, while the clear indications of the material world itself, and the conclusions of the sciences which investigate it, are that all, literally all, will come in the end to nothing: the heat death of the universe, utter cessation, futility and un-meaning. 

So I would have been thinking, with whatever adjustments in the imagery required for the knowledge and culture of the times, had I been one of the disciples. Just another of life’s inevitable disappointments, a type of the ultimate disappointment.

And what would I have thought at the news of the Resurrection? Undoubtedly I would not readily have believed it; perhaps not until I had seen it for myself. And when finally I was persuaded, I would have made that leap with tears of joy.

But this is, after all, not really speculative. I was not there two thousand years ago, but I have passed through the same doubts and into the same belief, from darkness to light. It was not as compressed in time, not as immediately intense as the experience of the disciples, but it must be a similar transition. And every Triduum I make the journey again, imagining on Good Friday that I do not know that the Resurrection is coming. What I feel and what I say when it does come begins with “Thanks be to God,” but doesn’t end there.

I have had a smaller and more personal taste of resurrection in the past couple of weeks. I came to the Catholic Church after a sojourn of several years as an Episcopalian. Though I couldn’t stomach the doctrinal problems of the Episcopal Church, I became deeply attached to the Anglican liturgy. Moreover, my roots are in the Methodist Church, which is Anglican at one remove. And then there’s my ancestral connection to the British Isles, and my love of English literature. It was painful to leave the Anglican liturgy, even though at the point I encountered it, in the late 1970s, it was being drearily modernized. I needn’t rehash the usual complaints about the banality of the post-Vatican II Catholic liturgy; suffice to say that I shared them, at times almost to the point of despair and temptation to apostasy, and that it was a trial to my faith.

When John Paul II allowed the use of a modified Anglican liturgy under the term “Anglican use,” I had a flicker of hope that I would see such a thing, but there have never been more than a few parishes in the country using it, none of them anywhere near me. And I was pleased when Benedict XVI went further, to the creation of an Anglican ordinariate, but I didn’t expect ever to benefit from it myself. For some time now I’ve been reconciled to the Catholic liturgy as it is, happy enough to receive the graces of the Mass that I could live with the dullness of its treatment.

Then one morning at work couple of weeks ago, there came, entirely unexpected, an email from my wife telling me that she had just had a telephone conversation which brought her news that a seminarian in our diocese has begun the process of establishing regular Anglican Use worship in this area. Until the seminarian, a former Episcopal priest, is ordained, it will not be a Mass; the first event is Evening Prayer, on April 15, and my wife and I will surely be there, God willing.

Thanks be to God. I can’t even say that this is an answer to a prayer; I regarded it as so unlikely that I hadn’t even bothered to pray for it more than a few times, and those long ago. This is God giving more than was asked for or expected, as he did with his followers at the first Easter. However this works out in the longer run, I’ll remember, when I feel doubtful, the happy surprise of hearing the news.

Sunday Night Journal — April 1, 2012

Fifty Shades of Grey

This is depressing: it seems that there is a pornographic novel called Fifty Shades of Grey which is extremely popular among women, and that its plot involves a young woman who gives herself as a masochistic sex slave to a billionaire. Here is one of several commentaries on it which I’ve run across recently. I wouldn’t be surprised at such a book coming from a man, and I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that it came from a woman, because I have long since accepted, though very unwillingly, that money and power are extremely attractive to at least some large proportion of the female sex. In my younger and more conventionally liberal days, quick to defend woman as an oppressed minority—and, more fundamentally, naturally chivalrous and a bit idealistic about God’s most beautiful creation—I objected to this. Observation proved me wrong.

It’s not the novel itself but its popularity that depresses. Every man who reads a news story like this must  surely wonder, at least for a moment, if his own wife or girlfriend would drop him in an instant for the first billionaire who expressed an interest in tying her up. And reportedly it is especially popular among married women. 

Also depressing, though simultaneously amusing, is the view of the two women who wrote the commentary linked to above. With that grim and superficial ideological blindness typical of academic feminism, they deplore the novel’s “reactionary gender politics,” though not of course the fact that it’s pornographic. They think its appeal stems from the fact that women have not attained the imagined level of socio-economic power which would make them indifferent to the promise of attaining it by association with a rich and powerful man. What a silly delusion. If there’s another thing I’ve learned, it’s that there is something elemental in desires of this sort, something that can’t be  explained away with socio-economic arguments (even if they’re plausible, which I don’t think these are). Even at its best feminism was never more than a very incomplete account of what women really think and, as Freud wondered, what they really want.

Is it arrogant of me, as a man, to say that? Too bad; I am only proceeding according to the common-sense maxim watch what they do, not what they say. If nothing else has emerged clearly from the gender debates of the past forty years, it is that the presence of “reactionary gender politics” does not in the least deter most women from liking some piece of art or entertainment that otherwise appeals to them. The career of Madonna alone is proof of that (no matter how such sexual exhibitionism is dressed up as “empowerment”).

I suspect, and hope, that women having good relationships with men and a grounding in faith are less susceptible to the likes of this novel. It’s almost an axiom in many intellectual circles—and nowadays not only there, but in decidedly non-intellectual circles, as a result of ideas being propagated into fashion and popular culture—that religion is frequently the expression of a repressed sexual impulse. But I think it’s more often the other way around, that erotic obsessions and perversions are frequently misplaced religious longings. The desire to surrender oneself to a sadist is a perversion of the desire to surrender oneself to God. And, on the earthly level, no matter how reactionary it is to say so, it seems pretty clear that most women want their husbands to be, in a sense, and most certainly a non-abusive sense, in some degree of authority over them—this is only another way of describing the oft-stated preference of women for men who are “confident,” “in command,” etc.

In fact—and this is pure speculation—I wouldn’t be surprised if women who, as a matter of principle and perhaps as an effect of anger, are in the habit of pushing aggressively against the men in their lives are more susceptible to the pornography of submission than those who are at ease with...how do I say this without using words that carrying implications I don’t intend?...in some fundamental psychological way looking up to their husbands? Nature will have the penultimate, though not the last, word in these things.

Smart Kids in Small Towns

I found this post by Pentimento an interesting twist on a phenomenon I’ve noticed more than once, first of all in myself. She describes her reaction to moving from the life of an artist and intellectual in New York (City) to the life of a wife and mother in a much smaller city in the same state:

I felt that I was in a dull, dreary place that was a poor match for my ...specialness, the specialness I'd long believed to be my birthright.

This is exactly what I and no doubt millions of others have felt while growing up in places like the one to which Pentimento has moved. If you’re one of the bright kids, interested in art and ideas and other things which are not generally high on the list of concerns for most people in such places, you almost inevitably start thinking of yourself as special, by which of course you mean superior.

The usual or classic pattern is that this smart kid escapes from the country or the small town to the metropolis (or perhaps only to the university) and there suffers the humiliating passage from big fish in small pond to very ordinary fish in big pond. This may, but doesn’t necessarily, lead to some degree of humility. I would expect that to go in the opposite direction—from the intellectual life of the metropolis to the dullness of the provinces—would provoke a strong impulse to hold oneself forever above the natives, and it speaks well of Pentimento that she wants to choose otherwise.

Sometimes, whether or not he leaves the small town behind, the smart kid’s sense of superiority hardens into lasting contempt. I think of an Alabama native who used to write for a newspaper here and who, on leaving to take a job in the northeast, bade farewell to the state with a sneer that he was happy to be leaving a place he’d never liked anyway and which was notable only for football and racism. I wonder how he fared in his new place. If he found appreciation there for the abilities that went under-praised at home, it has not achieved enough notice to reach us here.

That person was very proud of being a liberal in this heavily right-wing state. The path of the smart kid often leads to conventional liberalism. The provinces tend to be conservative in an instinctive and unreflective way. The smart kid looks beyond that, criticizes the simplistic and conventional views he encounters all around him, reads books and magazines that present him with other and more well-thought-out opinions, and decides that if his townspeople are conservatives, then he must be a liberal. And that’s perfectly understandable. But if he escapes to the metropolis (perhaps only in his mind—with modern communications one may mentally escape while remaining physically in place), he may find himself again among people who all think alike; only now he may not recognize the force of convention and fashion in maintaining the prevailing opinions, and so become as locked in to a set of received ideas as the people back home.

As one of those smart kids, the thing I had to learn, first, was that I was  not special in the way that I thought I was. Later, I learned that everyone else is special, that those people I thought were dumbbells are every bit as complex and interesting as I thought I was, and often also smarter in some ways than me and my intellectual heroes and friends. And then I could come back around to seeing myself as special, but this time without pride: special not because I am superior to others but because I’m just like them: unique and important in God’s eyes, a fact in which everyone’s sense of being special originates and is objectively justified.

April Fool’s Day

I was planning what I thought would be an amusing April Fool’s Day post, but when I realized that April 1 would fall on Palm Sunday decided it would be inappropriate. Check back next year.

Speaking of Palm Sunday, I’ve always been a little puzzled by the fact that we have a Passion narrative on this day. It seems out of place. Shouldn’t we celebrate the entry into Jerusalem today, the better to acknowledge our perfidy on Thursday?

Sunday Night Journal — March 25, 2012

Fish and Lip

Someone in my department at work is leaving us for another job, and Thursday was her last day, so we took her out to lunch. Elimination of places that either weren’t open or were too far away or weren’t to someone’s liking sent us to Red Lobster, a restaurant I used to like before I moved to the coast, but haven’t been to for many years. On a sudden whim, I decided to order fish and chips, mainly out of curiosity to see what I would get. I’d like to try authentic English fish and chips, but the attempt to find them here is a little absurd, because I have no way of knowing how close anything served here is to the real thing. 

The waitress was somewhat on the grouchy side. When I said I wanted fish and chips, she replied “Chips or fries?” This completely flummoxed me for a moment, because, as everyone knows, What We Call Fries the English Call Chips. It was as if she had asked me whether I wanted ham or chicken in my ham sandwich. And the description in the menu said the dish consisted of fish and fries.

All I could manage to articulate in reply was “I thought fries came with it.” And her sarcastic reply was “Chips or fries. That’s why I asked the question. We make our own chips out of—”

“Fries,” I said, cutting her off and handing her the menu.

I guess she realized she was being unpleasant, because she was a lot nicer after that. But it was remarkable how the exchange continued to rankle me. I thought of it several times in the course of the afternoon, and when I did I felt a degree of anger way out of proportion to the incident. She had treated me as if I were stupid, which was bad enough, but what I really couldn’t stand was the fact that I had failed to show her, not to mention my co-workers, that she was wrong. I re-enacted the dialog in my mind, this time ending it with me saying something like You’re acting like I’m stupid, but actually you’re the stupid one.

In short, she had injured my pride, and I suppose that’s a good thing, especially in Lent.

The fish and fries weren’t especially good, either. But for all I know they were exactly what you would get in England. I’d like to think not, because the fries were the usual fast-food type, not actual slices of potato.

Color Photos from the 1930s and ‘40s

One side effect of the invention and development of photography is that it’s almost impossible for many people, maybe most, to resist entirely the idea that the world really looked as it does in old photographs. The late 19th and early 20th centuries were black and white or sepia, and people mostly stood still with grave expressions on their faces. The ‘20s through the ‘40s were less grave, but still monochrome. There were no colors in the world until the 1950s, and even then the colors were faded and everything a little blurry. A lot of movies and TV shows have reinforced this irrational but powerful impression by making any depiction of those times resemble the photographs to some degree. We know it’s a false impression, but we—or at least I—have to make a conscious effort to shake it off.

My mental image of the ‘30s and ‘40s is especially affected by this syndrome. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen enough movies made fairly recently but set somewhere between 1880 and 1930, in which the colors are depicted realistically, to get the impression out of my head. And maybe it’s partly because I watch a good many movies made in that period, and they’re almost all in black and white. Anyway, I was happy to stumble across a wonderful gallery of color images from those days made available online by the Library of Congress. Clicking on the picture below will take you to the gallery. The colors are mostly pretty subdued, sometimes to the point where you would say they're only sort of semi-color, but still, the images are useful for dispersing that monochromeness.

Lenten Music

Maybe you’ve noticed that I haven’t posted a weekend music video for a while. That’s mainly because I’ve cut way back on music for Lent. I gave up pop music entirely, and haven’t listened to very much classical. As Simcha Fisher notes, Lent does not exactly rank with Christmas as an occasion for beloved music. But she has a set of very good pieces , one of which I’m going to insert here:

 And for today, the feast of the Annunciation: