Jordan Peterson's Wife Becomes Catholic

See this article in the Catholic Herald.

I don't, obviously, try to follow the news here. I didn't even write about the October 7th invasion/massacre in Israel, or anything that's followed it, but I have certainly given it a lot of my attention. But this seems significant in a way not very far distant from some of the things I do write about, e.g. posts in the "Catholic Stuff" category, to warrant mention.

Peterson is an interesting guy. Interesting and smart. I haven't read any of his books but I've seen him in interviews and talks and he has, as you probably know, a great many very sensible things to say, and apparently a strong and healthy respect for the religious traditions of Western civilization. That's enough to make him unusual for someone who has as much popular appeal as he does. I don't think anyone would be surprised if he followed his wife into the Church. 

Ridiculous Headlines of Recent Days

This one actually appeared on the 15th, so is more than ten days old. But it didn't get any less ridiculous.  

Government Can't Solve the Loneliness Crisis

It appeared in National Review, and, as you might suppose, it's a government-skeptical response to an outlandish idea for a new government project.

I just can't think of anything much to say about the very idea that government could possibly do anything at all about loneliness. I think you have to be...well, I won't say crazy, but definitely somewhat off, to believe that it could. And as for the alleged "loneliness crisis," the term suggests that, as with inflation, there is some acceptable level of loneliness in society, that it can be measured, and that when it exceeds the acceptable level Somebody Ought To Do Something.

That widespread loneliness exists is surely true; that it's worse and more widespread than it used to be is probably true. That the government, which is to say politicians and bureaucrats, can or should try to do something about it is extremely doubtful. George W. Bush once said "When people are hurting, government has to act." In context, which was a natural disaster, the remark made more sense, but still, it struck me as odd.

Ok, that's all pretty goofy. But the NR story is responding to something that strikes me as being out-and-out crazy. It's a press release from the office of the governor of New York:

Governor Hochul Appoints Dr. Ruth Westheimer New York State's Honorary Ambassador to Loneliness

You remember "Dr. Ruth," right? An old bawd--that was always my impression of her--who ran a talk show giving sex advice? She's now 94 years old but is nevertheless ready to "work day and night to help New Yorkers feel less lonely!" Filling in the background, the press release defines the terms for us: "Loneliness is defined as the feeling of being alone, regardless of the amount of social interaction, while social isolation refers to a lack of social connections." 

There's a great deal to mock in that press release, but it's more trouble than it's worth. (Why is it an ambassador to loneliness? How can you have an ambassador to an emotion? Why not to the lonely?) And anyway the word "honorary" suggests that it's only meant as a gesture. I'll just make one broader observation: Dr. Ruth's career (my impression confirmed by Wikipedia) was as a propagandist for the sexual revolution. Like essentially all of that stripe, she apparently has never considered the possibility that the success of that revolution may have contributed to the loneliness and other social ills that she does at least notice. No; the solution is always that the revolution has not gone far enough and must push ever onward. It's as if the successors of Robespierre and Company had concluded that the problem was that too few heads had been separated from bodies, and more must roll.

Some social progressives seem to be very close to proclaiming something which is strongly implied by things like this: that the enemy is the human condition, and that they intend to eliminate it. Which perhaps they are doing, but not exactly in the way they imagine. 

Here's a current ridiculous headline, from the Washington Post:

Antagonisms flare as red states try to dictate how blue cities are run

This is funny because "blue" America is constantly striving to dictate how "red" America is run, and has been doing so for many years. It's a major component of Democratic Party politics now, as well as of the work of many progressive institutions. And it's a major component of the forces dividing the country. (I haven't looked at the story; it's behind a pretty opaque paywall.)

Kids These Days and Their Crazy Music

When I was twenty-ish, and probably for some years afterward, I assumed that the music of my generation would be received by my children and those who came after in the way my generation received the popular music of our parents' generation--Glenn Miller, Frank Sinatra, and all the other music of the '30s and '40s which began to be pushed aside by rock-and-roll in the 1950s, but persisted into the '60s, to be disdained by young people for many of whom popular music was many things more than music. It was music for old people, meaning middle-aged and older. It was boring, it was corny (what is the contemporary equivalent of that term?), it was a fashion that had had its day and was now deader than the racoons in a racoon coat, deader than twenty-three-skidoo (whatever that meant) and speakeasies. And moreover for those who were really part of the youth culture that produced the music, it was an emblem of the old straight conformist commercialized world against which we had rebelled. 

All that was at least half absurd, of course, as the putatively counter-cultural music of the mid-to-late 1960s was inextricably bound to the corporate music business which sold it to us, profiting very well from it. It still surprises me a little to recall that The Velvet Underground and Nico was available in record stores in the small southern town where I went to college. Granted, it was a college town, but still....

I expected my generation, and the music of my generation, to meet the same fate. Somewhat to my surprise, that didn't happen. My children (for the most part) took to rock music as readily as my generation had. By 1980 or so, when the '60s kids were well into middle age, the music of our late adolescence had become "classic rock," and younger people listened to it as much as we did. Now, forty years later, the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix are still widely liked by people who were young enough to be their children, and even, theoretically at least, young enough to be their grandchildren. On my bookshelf there is an instructional book for guitar called Jimi Hendrix Note-for-Note, which is exactly what the title says, and was left behind by one of my now-forty-something children.

In expecting that rejection, I was of course completely misreading what was going on: the music of the cultural revolution continued to be favored in part because the revolution succeeded. But that's another topic.

On the other side of that division were the old folks whose reaction to rock-and-roll in general and to post-1965 rock in particular ranged from puzzled to outraged. They might acknowledge that the Beatles sometimes had some good tunes, and the radio still played a lot of fairly conventional music, but the whole hippie side of the thing made no sense to them. Why would a band call themselves the Grateful Dead? Or the Jefferson Airplane? Why would anybody want to look like that? Why would anybody want to listen to that stuff?

Now, at last, I have some idea of what they felt. I've noticed for several years now that on the infrequent occasions when I hear current pop music that I have a distinct and sometimes strong--very strong--aversion to it, not just to individual pieces but to the basic sound. A few days ago, deciding that I should take a closer listen, I watched this video in which Rick Beato listens to the Top 10 songs (as measured by Spotify, not Billboard, as of old) and evaluates them. You may know of Beato--his music-related videos are very popular and usually interesting. The title of this one tells you what he thought.

I had that adverse reaction--by which I mean "I hate this"--to at least half the songs he samples. (I've forgotten which ones now.) Beato supports his reaction with rational, music-based specifics. But I don't really care to analyze my reasons. Suffice to say that in those cases I hate the vocals and the instrumentation and, usually, the songs, or "songs." (With that last bit of snark I recall my grandmother, ca. 1966, saying "These songs today don't have any tune to them.") 

A few remarks: (1) I think rap/hip-hop has had a big part to play in all this, especially in the un-song songs which tend to consist of uninteresting complaints. (2) I absolutely cannot stand the "warble" effect produced on vocals with Auto-Tune--the impossible leaps and twists of pitch and tone that don't even sound human, because they aren't. Beato and others say that Auto-Tune, when used for its intended purpose--to make a note absolutely on pitch--takes the life out of music, and I believe it. But that warble is, to my ears, death itself, musically speaking. I suppose to say that a sound is like fingernails on a chalk board may no longer make sense, when chalkboards have probably long since disappeared from classrooms. If so, I guess it's appropriate that I use an obsolete comparison. (3) I was a little surprised at how bland and dull the Taylor Swift track is. I've never heard much of her stuff but I've had the impression that she is pretty gifted.

In general most current commercial pop doesn't register on my ears as music. It seems just a sort of processed sound product--Cheez-Whiz for the ears. I denounce it without shame, embracing my out-of-touch-old-man identity.

I am by the way very aware that there is plenty of good pop music being made, some of it no doubt by people under thirty. But it doesn't seem to make it into the mainstream. 

The Synod's Deep Depravity Revealed

They want us all to participate in a structured "discernment" process guided by facilitators. Perhaps, being progressives with a bureaucratic-administrative sort of mindset--i.e. the sort of people who like this sort of thing--they don't realize that for many or most others it's partly to be ridiculed and partly to be feared. It's frequently manipulative, aimed at pushing a group in a certain direction while providing a veneer of consensus.

I wonder if it's not just frequently but intrinsically so. Maybe not. But I don't think I'm far off in thinking that most people who have been obliged to participate in it see it as something of a sham. This is especially true if the "facilitators" are in positions of power over the facilitated. I'm slightly surprised that America magazine would spill the beans on this. But here is the former editor, Fr. Thomas Reese, S.J., asserting that "Pope Francis wants the synod in every parish":

Like the members of the synod, parishioners should be divided into groups of 10 members sitting at round tables.

In addition, at the synod, there was an experienced facilitator to guide the members of each group in the process. The facilitator’s job is not to impose his or her views on the group but to be an impartial moderator who encourages respectful listening and makes sure everyone is able to participate.

Each group also chooses a secretary to draft a report of the group’s discussions.

The actual work of the small groups involves “conversation in the Spirit” on the question they want to discern. The question could be a decision facing the parish or any of the topics (Communion, Mission, Participation) outlined in the synod working paper or Instrumentum Laboris. Perhaps most fruitful would be reflection on the questions that come out of the first session of the synod, which ends this week.

Etc. etc. You can read his whole proposal here. And here's a link to a PDF of the PowerPoint presentation (of course) outlining the process as implemented in the synod. 

At the parish level, I doubt that many people apart from those odd ones who thrive on committees and meetings and such would really want to do this. Likely conclusion, whether at synod or parish: "The Spirit is telling us to do what we wanted to do. Our God is a God of surprises!"

Or maybe I'm just too cynical. That's probably it. 

There was a similar program back in the '80s. It was called Renew. Everybody who participated recalls it with excitement and nostalgia. Those who are too young speak of it reverently and regret that they were not present for it. Right?

Ridiculous Headline of The (Previous) Week

Starbucks Reveals Holday [sic] 2023 Menu and Cups

Last week I had to choose between this one and the one about racist birds. Unlike that one, this one is merely ridiculous. Or maybe not. The position of Starbucks in American culture is creepy to say the least. And I really don't like the thing we now call Holiday. 

I was sorry to hear recently that a Starbucks may be opening here. It's likely to displace several locally-owned coffee shops. 

Also, I don't like their coffee.

Values

As I think I mentioned not too long ago, I've been going through old notebooks containing odds and ends of writing, with the aim of getting rid of the notebooks, as part of a bigger de-cluttering process. Some of the material is drafts of blog posts or essays which were eventually published. Much is only fragments, briefly noted ideas, not worth preserving. A few are more substantial. This is one. I have no very definite idea of when I wrote it, but I think it was at least fifteen  years ago. 

I seem to develop allergies to certain words or phrases from time to time. I'll notice myself having an irritable reaction to a word such as, for instance, "empowerment." Once I realize that this is happening I begin to analyze the term and usually find that it is being used in some way that strikes me as dishonest, evasive, or simply wrong.

The first instance of this which I can recall at the moment occurred in the late '60s or early '70s, and the word was "lifestyle." It seemed a harmless, perhaps even useful, term, but it always rubbed me wrong. Eventually I figured out that it was the savor of self-indulgence about it that put me off, and soon enough it became clear that it had two meanings: one, a way of living which ran defiantly counter to traditional morality, as in "alternative lifestyle," and, two, money, as in "we'd like to maintain our lifestyle." (Test-drive it and see: try talking about "the Trappist lifestyle"; it should make you feel uneasy.)

"Values" is another such irritating word. What's wrong with it? Isn't the lack of "values" one of our serious problems? Don't we need values? If so, why do I feel gloom descending upon me when I read in the bulletin of a Catholic college that it is "committed to Catholic values"?

The problem is that values alone are not worth much. The term has come to mean a mere preference.

That was all I wrote at the time. But I know that what I meant to go on and say was that "values" are not principles. "Values" are soft, malleable, somewhat subjective, possibly even a matter of personal inclination. Principles are hard and fixed. You can stand on them.

Catholic values are fine; they ought to include many qualities which almost everyone would applaud--in a Catholic college, they ought to include, for instance, academic excellence. Concern for justice and peace, if taken in a non-ideological sense, is a worthy value. But notice that those are abstract and a little vague. Why are these things valued? What are the principles which justify their being valued? If they aren't founded on Catholic principles--by which I mean the faith itself, starting with the creeds--then what? And with what justification? 

The gloom I described arises from a suspicion that use of the word "values" is often an attempt, possibly unconscious, to avoid or minimize that foundation, in the interest of appearing more accommodating to the secular modern suspicion of religion as such.

*

One casualty of the winnowing and discarding process I mentioned was some dozens of pages of a novel for which I once had great hopes. I could still see glimpses of promise in it, but not many. It was a little painful to discard those scribbled pages and close the door on that project forever.

I'm always a little annoyed by the cheerful counsel that "it's never too late!" to do this or that thing that you always wanted to do. Sometimes it really is. Sure, I could start working on that novel again, but it would be at the expense of spending time on other things I want to do or should do. At my age I can be pretty certain that I won't have time and/or good health for them all. 

Ridiculous Headline of the Week

Say Goodbye to America’s Racist Birds

The headline is ridiculous, and the news it links to is not only ridiculous but much more: crazy, sick, arguably wicked. You may have seen other news stories about this: the American Ornithological Society has decided that many bird names "have associations with the past that continue to be exclusionary and harmful today." 

Are these people not among the most insufferably self-righteous twits who have ever walked the earth? They have taken passive-aggression to undreamed of heights. And it's very hurtful.  

The headline makes the effort sound even crazier than it is. Even "activists" would have a very hard time convincing themselves that the birds themselves are racists. 

There is a hawk called Cooper's Hawk. I have no idea who Cooper was--not James Fenimore, I presume? Or maybe it was. In any case, he lived before our Red Guards began to do their work of purification, and is therefore automatically under suspicion. It won't take much to convict him. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Judging individual cases would be a big hassle, so they're just going to rename all the birds whose names include the names of persons. I expect the people who will actually feel better when this is done are not those who are said to feel "excluded" when they hear the words "Cooper's Hawk," but the activists who are enjoying the exercise of their power. 

And I suppose they won't get rid of the slur-adjacent "woodpecker," which is pretty much the same thing as "peckerwood."

I must, however, applaud the first comment on that story:

"OH GOD NO PLEASE DO NOT GET RID OF BOOBIES AND TITS!"

Shoegaze and Not-Shoegaze

Here are two albums I've been listening to recently: Under the Milkyway...Who Cares? by Seasurfer, and everything is alive by Slowdive. (I'm following the typography used by both bands.) The first can fairly be classified as "shoegaze;" one recognizes the basic sound immediately. I think of the other as "not-shoegaze" because Slowdive helped to define the style, and is always one of the first names mentioned when it's discussed, but this album really doesn't fit the mold. 

Slowdive existed for roughly five years in the early 1990s, then broke up, with three of its four members carrying on as a mostly-acoustic band called Mojave 3. Then Slowdive reformed around 2015 and in 2017 put out a new self-titled album, which is very much in their old style and is one of those fairly rare comebacks which fans generally consider as good as the band's earlier work.

All of which is to say that I expected this new release to continue in that vein.

Well, I was wrong. The first song, "shanty," opens with a synthesizer loop which made me think I was listening to Tangerine Dream, but then moves into something closer to the old sound. The next song, "prayer remembered," is almost ambient; there may or may not be a faint vocal mist in there somewhere. I thought of instrumental post-rock groups like Hammock and Explosions In the Sky. "alife" comes closer to a typical shoegaze sound than most of the album, and it's excellent. "andalucia plays" sounds more like Mojave 3 than Slowdive. And so on. Actually the whole notion of "typical Slowdive" was exploded by Pygmalion, the last album of the band's initial incarnation, so the variety here is not a new thing for them.

Though very varied in texture from one song to the next, the album remains fairly subdued throughout; not much jumps out at you as being brilliant. I was a bit disappointed in it on first listen, but it's continued to grow on me. Set aside categories and expectations: it's subtle, evocative music with a quiet emotional touch, well and carefully produced with a lot of interesting sonic detail. I remain disappointed only with the closing track, "the slab," which is to my taste monotonous without compensatory beauty.

This is possibly the closest track to what one might expect of the band. You might want to look away from the video if you're bothered, as I am, by spacey visual patterns. 

Under the Milkyway opens with a blast of noisy guitars and drums which more than justifies the oft-noted commonality between some shoegaze and some metal. That leads into "It's Too Late," which will do as well as any as a sample track--unlike the Slowdive album, this one is fairly consistent in basic sound. 

It's a curiously habit-forming album. I've listened to it at least five times over the past couple of months, which is unusual for me. And I haven't tired of it; I just keep liking it more. Definitely recommended to anyone who likes the basic sound. 

(p.s. Thanks, Rob)

A Halloween Poem

The Free Press, the new online news site founded by New York Times escapee Bari Weiss, has a weekly feature in which the English writer Douglas Murray offers one of his favorite poems. It's called "Things Worth Remembering," which, if I remember the original announcement correctly, means that these are poems he liked enough to memorize. If he really has them all by heart, that's impressive, though I wouldn't hold him to it. 

This week's poem is one by Thomas Hardy that I hadn't encountered previously; my acquaintance with Hardy doesn't go beyond a small range of anthology pieces. It's called "The Choirmaster's Burial." I'm not sure that link will work. I'm a subscriber and that's the URL I get when I click on the "Share" button for the post. If it doesn't work, I'm sure you can easily find the poem elsewhere. 

(I don't understand the relatively recent American fixation on Halloween.)

Ridiculous Headline of the Week

A Scientist Has Confirmed That Humans Have No Free Will

This was in Popular Mechanics; you can read the story here. To be fair to the magazine, the tone of the article hints that the writer doesn't take the "findings" of the scientist altogether seriously. And he gives the last word to another scientist who contradicts the first.

But how many people would take it seriously? Science says so! Not surprisingly, the scientist utterly contradicts himself by recommending ways that we should, but may not, choose to think, and actions that we should, but may not, choose to take in response to his conclusion--even to the point of asserting that certain things are good, in some presumably absolute sense, and that we should therefore choose them.

It would be hard to come up with a better example of the absurdity of asserting the findings of physical science as metaphysical truths. 

*

I may actually start doing this every week. I use the Brave web browser, which includes a news feed that gives me headlines and links to a great range of publications. I can cull out anything I know I'm not interested in, but a fair number of strange, irritating, or ridiculous things still appear. 

"Peak Post-Conciliar"

I try not to pay too much attention to current developments in the Catholic Church, as probably does everyone not in some way directly involved with the Church. It isn't difficult. It's like following, or rather abstaining from following, political campaigns. Every day brings some development which is reported upon excitedly for a while, then fades, and within weeks or months may be completely irrelevant and inconsequential, like, for instance, Bill Weld's 2020 campaign for the presidency. This effort is part of my broader attempt to break my habit of anxiety and worry about things over which I have no control. 

But, as with political campaigns, in the longer run what happens in the Church does affect me, and so I don't ignore it completely. 

I take it as more or less given that the Synod on Synodality is a waste of time at best, at worst a source of further trouble. All the sanctimonious talk about accompaniment and inclusion is fatally compromised by the malice of Traditionis Custodes. So I'm not paying much attention. The fact that the thing is happening at all is more interesting than the thing itself: what, really, is going on? What makes so many in the hierarchy, and others, see this as an important activity?

And so I am passing along these remarks from Amy Welborn: 

I’ve often said that one of the negative outcomes of the Second Vatican Council was the emphasis on internal church affairs. Not only that people got the notion that the most important Catholic marker of all was being “involved in the Church” but more importantly, because everything – everything was up for grabs afterwards, that’s where the energy went, that should have been about continuing to share the Good News with the world – it became all about organization, dividing spoils and struggling for power.

This Synod on synodality – is the pinnacle. It truly is peak Post-Conciliar.

I guess I could ask whether this is really the peak, and whether there are greater heights which the churchy can attain. I am constitutionally inclined to say "Things could always be worse." Still, I love the phrase. And it is plainly the case that since the Council the Church has spent more energy on internal conflict than on the outreach to the world that was the justification for it. 

There's more worth reading in that piece. It's brief, but it links to this one from July, which in turn links to others, all equally perceptive and worth reading.

If you're interested, I gave what is probably my last extensive remark on Vatican II in this post from about a year ago. I suppose I'll never leave it completely alone, but it seems unlikely that my views will change significantly.

Night of the Living Deadhead

I copied this from a Facebook post which didn't give the source, and it  was too funny not to share. I have discovered just now that it's by Asher Perlman and appeared in The New Yorker. 

In case you don't recognize it, the logo on the guy's t-shirt is the Grateful Dead's. Originally it was Phish's, but I think it's much funnier with the Dead's. In my circles Phish does not occupy the same position, either culturally or musically, as the Dead.

After laughing--LOL in fact--I'm moved to reflect on the brevity and fickleness of fame and fashion. In the late '60s and for some time afterward (till punk arrived, maybe?) nothing could have been more hip than the Grateful Dead. Now...well, the cartoon tells the story: the bald head, the unfashionable shorts, the vaguely tentative quality of the figure, suggestive of age and physical fragility, the disdain of the others (the guy vaulting over the bar is a great touch). And Jerry Garcia has been dead for almost thirty years. 

I hesitated about my title, thinking that surely that the pun has been over-used. But a quick search turned up only this instance. 

J. K. Rowling and the Sexual Revolution

I read and often enjoyed the Harry Potter books, but was not really a great admirer of them. So when I heard that J.K. Rowling had published, under a pseudonym, a detective novel meant for adults, I was not particularly interested. I suppose the only reason I even knew about it was that someone had revealed that "Robert Galbraith" was in fact Rowling. That of course attracted some publicity, and she was quite put out about the disclosure, for which I don't blame her. I assume she wanted to see whether she could write a book that would succeed on its own, without the assistance of the Harry Potter author's vast fame.

Well, that's a might-have-been; sales took off, and that book, The Cuckoo's Calling, has been followed by six more in the series, under the same pseudonym. I think they've all been fairly successful, so it's safe to assume that Rowling's reputation is not their main attraction. 

Time passes ever more quickly. If you had asked me when the publicity about the first book and its authorship appeared, I would have guessed five years or so ago. It was actually ten. But then if I had known that she had published six more books in the series since the first one I would have guessed longer, perhaps something more like fifteen years. Whatever you think of Rowling's writing, her ability to spin a complex and effective narrative in a fairly short time is astonishing. I think of one of Flannery O'Connor's letters in which she tells a friend that she's been working on The Violent Bear It Away for seven years and is trying to convince her publisher that this is normal. 

My wife read the The Cuckoo's Calling, liked it, and soon read most or all of the novels in the series, which is known, in the usual fashion of detective stories, by the name of its primary sleuth: the Cormoran Strike series. Then she discovered that there is a BBC TV series based on several of those books, so we watched it. It's called Strike in the UK and C.B. Strike here. And it's very good. We had to rent it, as it's not available on either Netflix or Prime, and it was worth it. I recommend it to anyone who likes that sort of thing.

What does this have to do with the sexual revolution? I'm getting to that.

When I graduated from high school I thought I wanted to be a journalist. Really I wanted to be a poet or some other more literary sort of writer; mainly I just had a very strong impulse to write, and journalism seemed like the way to go, the way to earn a living by writing. So in my first semester of college I took a journalism course, and that, along with a very good freshman English course, soon showed me that I ought to discard the idea of majoring in journalism. It was good that I figured that out quickly, because I would have been terrible at it. One of the things they used to teach journalists--perhaps still do, somewhere among the urgings to change the world, speak power to truth, etc.--was to include in the first paragraph of a news story the Five Ws: Who, What, When, Where, and Why. 

It's a good rule for a news story, which implies that I am not cut out to write news stories, because I don't write that way. I don't want to write that way. I like to take a bit of time, supply a bit of background and prelude, perhaps ramble a bit, before getting to the point. And I usually do in a blog post. Why not? Nobody is paying me, nobody is enforcing space limits, not many people are reading. So I may as well enjoy myself. I do try to keep in mind that I am asking for a degree of attention from the reader that he or she may not wish to provide, so I try to limit myself to a thousand words or so.

Here is the first paragraph of this post as I might have written it if I were observing the Five Ws:

Under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, J.K. Rowling [Who], author of the Harry Potter books, has published a series of detective  novels known as the C. B. Strike Mysteries [What], after the name of the detective protagonist. The first one appeared in 2013 [When] and six others have followed. They have been made into a BBC series called C.B. Strike. I haven't read the books, but as seen in the series certain aspects of the stories may be taken as suggesting that the sexual revolution may not have been an altogether good thing. [That will have to serve as the Why; Where is not really relevant, unless we treat Capitalist-Industrial Civilization as the location.]

I would go on to say that I don't know whether Rowling intends that suggestion, but that I at any rate found it unavoidable. Cormoran Blue Strike is the child of a famous rock star and a not-equally-but-still-famous groupie. (No doubt "Blue" is one of those offbeat names that hippies and rock stars sometimes gave their children; I don't know about "Cormoran.") I assume, though I don't recall the TV series mentioning it, that he was born in the late '60s or early '70s. He was mostly raised by relatives. His mother died of an overdose when he was in his late teens, no doubt a faded shadow of her formerly glamorous self. His father repudiated him and has never had anything at all to do with him. He has a number of half-siblings with most of whom he has little to do. He left college to join the Army where he served in the military police, lost a leg in combat in Afghanistan, and now earns a none-too-lucrative living as a private investigator.

All I know of J.K. Rowling's views on social and political questions is that she seems to be in general a pretty typical liberal, except for the fact that she has opposed the transgender movement's insistence that sex is not a biological reality, has consequently been branded a "TERF" (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist), and is now despised by the left, including many who once loved the Potter books. As I say, I have no idea whether Strike and his situation are intended to reflect Rowling's view of the '60s and the sexual revolution. But they certainly reflect the reality. Strike is the accidental product of the mutual pleasure-seeking of two people who don't seem to have cared much about anything else. Not abandoned but certainly neglected and damaged, he leads a life which is the opposite of the "lifestyle" pursued by his parents, defined by ugly and often violent realities and symbolized by his missing leg.

You can't get much more biological than conception and birth. Implicitly, that is an objection to, if not a repudiation of, the sexual revolution's doctrine that there should be no limits on sexual expression, that it doesn't really matter in any fundamental way, and that children are an optional and expendable result of contraceptive carelessness. Strike is a living embodiment of that objection, a walking, and limping, reminder of the serious consequences of its fundamental unseriousness.

That's 1229 words, including this note. 

*

In case you missed it in the comments on the previous post, Marianne gave us a link to a discussion between Rod Dreher and Louise Perry (and a moderator whose name I didn't get) about her book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. It's an hour and ten minutes long, but worth your time (and I say that as someone who usually doesn't have the patience to sit through such things). 

That's 1304 words. Sorry.

Louise Perry On The Sexual Revolution

Louise Perry, a British woman whom I'll describe for lack of a better word as a journalist, has recently published a book called The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. I have not read it, and probably won't, not because I don't think it would be worthwhile but because I have other priorities for my reading. She has also published something which I have read: in First Things, a profound reflection on the significance of the sexual revolution (click here to read it) with the somewhat surprising title of "We Are Repaganizing."

I call it surprising because Perry is not a Christian (though First Things of course is a Christian publication), and the essay is a practical defense of Christian sexual ethics. That is, it does not appeal to certain moral principles because they are Christian, but because they produced, over the centuries, a moral revolution, or at least a shift, which Perry approves. She makes points which have been made repeatedly over the past century or two by Christians, but are generally not only not accepted but not even comprehensible to the modern secular mind. For instance, there is the point about abortion and infanticide:

It was the arrival of Christianity that disrupted the Romans’ favored methods of keeping reproduction in check, with laws against infanticide, and then abortion, imposed by Christian emperors from the late fourth century. Christians have always been unusually vehement in their disapproval of the killing of infants, whether born or unborn, and their legal regime prevailed until the mid-twentieth century when we experienced a religious shift that will probably be understood by future historians as a Second Reformation.

(The comparison to the Reformation is not very apt, but let that go.)

And the one about the status and treatment of women:

Paul’s prohibition of (to use the Greek term) porneia—that is, illicit sexual activity, including prostitution—upended an ethical system in which male access to the female body was unquestioned and unquestionable. Whereas the Romans regarded male chastity as profoundly unhealthy, Christians prized it and insisted on it. Early converts were disproportionately female because the Christian valorization of weakness offered obvious benefits to the weaker sex, who could—for the first time—demand sexual continence of men. Feminism is not opposed to Christianity: It is its descendant.

In general, as the title of the piece suggests, she sees modern Western culture as in the process of returning to something like the fundamental assumptions of those Romans who saw no reason why an unwanted infant should not be disposed of. (In passing: it's unusual and refreshing to hear a non-Christian use the word "pagan" in a negative sense.)

It's a somewhat lengthy (for online reading) and very rich statement, and I don't want to leave the impression that those snippets are sufficient. You really should read the whole thing, so here's the link again. One of its themes is the connection between sex and reproduction. The sexual revolution has pretty much destroyed the general sense of that connection. In that it's of a piece with many of our technological triumphs--and it is made possible and sustained by one of those triumphs--which have encouraged us to think that physical reality is not something by which we need be overly constrained. 

In this context I often remember a moment from the 1980s when I worked for a large technology company. Though I tried not to make a show of it, my co-workers knew that I was a Catholic and a "social conservative," as the unsatisfactory term has it. One co-worker who was somewhat younger than I questioned my opposition to abortion. "Why," he asked, "shouldn't I be able to have sex whenever I want to?"--and, implicitly, without caring about pregnancy. He wasn't attacking me. He was genuinely puzzled as to why there should be any limit on his sexual desires. He had completely absorbed the attitude of the sexual revolution--which, I must say, is the more or less natural attitude of the human male. The triumph of the sexual revolution is the extension of that attitude to the female. 

The most basic answer to his question, obviously, is not "Because it's wrong," much less "Because Christianity teaches that it's wrong," but "Because that's not the way sex works." In the normal course of things, there is some fairly strong probability that normal sex will result in conception. And if you aren't prepared to deal with that, you ought not to be engaging in the act. As Garrison Keillor has one of his Lake Woebegon characters say, "If you didn't want to go to Minneapolis, why did  you get on the bus?"

Most people--most women, anyway--in the industrialized world today do prepare to deal with it by means of contraception. But if they don't prepare, or if the plan fails, abortion is the absolutely necessary recourse, the "Plan B," which is the grimly appropriate term for abortifacient drugs. "Just get rid of it." One of the things Louise Perry does in the First Things piece, and presumably in her book, is to investigate that reality with an honesty and clarity rare for non-religious thinkers. Her treatment of abortion is especially strong, mainly by being especially honest.

If the sexual revolution is to be rolled back, if we are to stop thinking as my co-worker of 35  years ago thought, women will have to lead the way. Even setting aside the nature of the male, a man speaking out against that mentality is regarded by many men as a prude and a spoilsport, and by women as an agent of The Patriarchy who wants to return them to The Dark Ages. Or the 1950s, which is about as far back as many people can now stretch their imaginations. 

Here's a thought experiment; I call it that because there is no chance of it ever actual being anything more than a thought. Suppose there were a law requiring that every pornographic film be followed by a scene of a woman giving birth--a realistic scene. I am tempted to answer my own obvious questions about how such a thing could be implemented, but since it is only a thought experiment I'll leave it at that. 

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Louise Perry was also a participant in a debate staged by The Free Press: "Has the Sexual Revolution Failed?" I've been meaning to mention The Free Press for a while. It was founded by a disgruntled New York Times writer, Bari Weiss. She is what was until fairly recently a more or less conventional liberal, but was appalled by the closed-minded and authoritarian progressives who were effectively controlling the Times. I'm not sure whether she left the Times entirely of her own volition or was pushed out, but at any rate she left, and The Free Press began as a Substack called "Honestly." That pretty much sums up her sense of her mission: to stand up for journalistic honesty in both reporting and opinion. In today's climate, that requires an unusual independence of mind, and The Free Press shows that. Its basic orientation is still what I would describe as formerly-conventional secular liberalism (Weiss is legally married to a woman). Obviously I have many disagreements with that mind-set, but the publication is genuinely open-minded and publishes all sorts of people and views. I subscribe to it in spite of those disagreements because I haven't entirely given up hope that our classical liberal order can be salvaged, and this is a worthwhile effort.

If it's not subscriber-only, you can watch the debate at the Free Press site: click here. The video seems to be hosted there, not on YouTube. I just watched the first couple of minutes which sort of disheartened me: it consists of news clips from the '70s and '80s featuring various unpleasant feminists. 

A Wild Bach Composition

A friend pointed this out to me a week or two ago: the Chromatic Fantasia/Fantasy in D Minor. It's spectacular. I'm not sure I would have recognized it as Bach if I hadn't known. Or, rather, I would have wondered if it was a Bach piece with which some more modern composer had taken a few liberties. Most of it is very Bach-like, but from time to time it sounds more "modern" to me, by which I must mean that it has harmonies which are more...chromatic, I guess?...than my ear expects from Bach. In any case, it's quite a ride.

Here's the performance she sent me--a live performance by Glenn Gould, which, since it's on video, is not only musically but visually unusual. By which I mean "odd." As she notes, he conducts with his left hand when it's otherwise idle.

And here's a vastly different performance by Wanda Landowska on harpsichord. You'll notice that the title says "Fantasia and Fugue." The work is BWV 903, and it does include both the fantasia and the fugue, but both these performances are of the fantasia only. I don't know why Landowska's is two minutes longer. It doesn't seem that much slower, overall, than Gould's. I haven't attempted a careful comparison but someone with a better ear might be able to point something out.

I love these old Landowska performances and have several of them (not this one) on LP. I think part of the reason I like them is somewhat extra-musical, having to do with the sound of the harpsichord itself, which for me has a slightly mysterious quality. I was going to add "antique," but that's superfluous.

Click here to hear part of it played by Jaco Pastorius (famous jazz bassist)--on electric bass. The track is three minutes long but only the first half or so is Bach, as far as I can tell--perhaps the second part has some relationship that I don't hear. It's an astonishing feat of dexterity. But as Johnson said of a dog walking on its hind legs: "It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." It is of course done "well" in the technical sense, but it's not very musical.

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Johnson, as you very likely know, made that remark of a woman's preaching. By mentioning it, I may seem to be advertising and agreeing with his jibe. But by not mentioning it, I might seem to be suppressing it to avoid offending feminists and perhaps women in general. I prefer to take the first risk, as the second seems overly timid.

The truth is that I don't know whether I agree with Johnson's general sentiment, shorn of his particular mean-but-funny comparison. I can recall offhand only one instance of hearing a woman preach. It was in a Methodist church, not so very many years ago, and there was something awkward about it, a feeling that the woman was out of her element. But maybe that was only her, or only me, though I think I recall that my mother didn't care much for her either. There certainly are women preachers in plenty in some Protestant denominations, and to that I would apply the tolerant appraisal I heard long ago from one of my mother's friends, who was then probably about the same age that I am now: "If it suits them, it suits me."

I feel that way about many things, and perhaps there should be more of them. It does not injure me if someone drives an ostentatiously expensive automobile. It's not like using "cliche" as an adjective. Or modifying the words of a hymn from "unless the Father calls him" to "unless the Father beckons." The image that puts into my mind is ludicrous and persistent. I am in fact injured by it.

Great Expectations

(If I'm going to assume people know who wrote Dune, I should do no less for this much greater novel.)

I think now that the version of Great Expectations which I read in the ninth grade must have been abridged, as it appeared in our literature textbook along with a number of short stories and poems, and it's not a brief book--not that long as Dickens novels go, but substantial. I also wonder whether it was simplified for us, because there are many passages that would be difficult for most fifteen-year-olds. Nor do I recall the confusion I think I would have experienced in trying to make sense of the locations in and near London which Dickens assumes are known to his readers. But maybe I've just forgotten that.

I do remember the principal characters--the orphaned boy Pip; his shrew of a sister who has grudgingly taken him in, along with her good-hearted husband Joe; the convict Magwich; the half-crazed and vengeful Miss Havisham and her young ward Estella. And I remember the basics of the story. Above all I remember the cold beauty Estella and Pip's hopeless obsessive love for her. I don't know about the average fifteen-year-old, but I at that age was ever ready for and usually involved in some intense infatuation. Pip's condition spoke to my own.

I doubt that I missed the irony of the title. But I also doubt that I fully savored it, because I would not have known that it was a conventional phrase with a more specific meaning than I would have realized. Apparently it referred to the expectation of a substantial inheritance or other gift of money and/or property, and of course would not have had for me the connotations that it did for those accustomed to its everyday use. If there were today (and maybe there is) a novel called Doing Well about a person or family with a lot of money and as much trouble, the title would have a resonance for us which it might not have a century from now, or to anyone who for cultural reasons did not recognize the financial implications of the phrase. (I've heard it said of the Philadelphia Quakers that "they came to America to do good, and they did well.")

But I didn't need that nuance to feel the shock of the difference between what Pip expected and what he actually received. If you know the story you know that the irony twists around again to make the collapse of Pip's expectations the making of him as a man. At the height of his brief ascent, he seems to be turning into an insufferable popinjay. I really didn't remember how he dealt with his benefactor after he learned the truth, and was pleased to find that he rose to the occasion, at great cost to himself.

Great Expectations was right around a hundred years old when I first read it. Now we are both sixty years older, and I've just re-read it for the first time. I like it more now than I did then--perhaps with less intensity, but certainly with more respect. Pip's lunatic quasi-love for Estella no longer touches me as it did, except as a memory of my own youth. More interesting to me now is the Estella who appears in the last few pages, humbled by suffering. And still more interesting is the Estella she might have become: if Pip had married her, would he have found, fifteen or twenty years later, that he had married the temperamental twin of his sister? Or would she have become a solid woman, as Pip became a solid man, a woman whom he would not have loved less as her beauty faded?

Dickens, as you may know, wrote two endings, one happy and one unhappy. The latter was his original intention, but he was talked out of it by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and wrote another, which was the one published. Personally I would like to have them combined. The happy one has a meeting and a substantial conversation between Pip and Estella, and a promise that they will never part; the unhappy one has only a brief encounter, and a parting that seems almost deathlike. I like the conversation in the happy one, in part for the insight it gives into the development of the two people. But a happy ending stains the sadder-but-wiser purity of the condition in which we leave them.

The two endings have in common a memorable figure: the possibility that Estella now understands (in the happy ending), or will someday understand (in the unhappy one), "what [Pip's] heart used to be." Dickens must have thought that was worth keeping, and he was right.

The 19th century was the great age of both the symphony and the novel, the age which fully defined and perfected them. The latter has fared better than the former since then (or has it?--I'll have to think about that), and Dickens's best work might serve as the exemplar. Yes, Great Expectations, like some other Dickens novels, is often sentimental and often relies on improbable coincidences. But it's a great story, and although it doesn't deal explicitly or directly with the big questions (as, for instance, Dostoevsky's work does), they are very much alive in the plot and characters. There's a strong argument that they should only or mainly be found there, but there are many exceptions. Dostoevsky would not be a great novelist if they were only explicit, and not also implicit; that is, not only also fully embodied.

Miles Coverdale, Bob Dylan, and The Foot of Pride

Dylan has a song, released on the first of the outtakes collections falsely called "bootlegs" (it's not a bootleg if it's released by the record company), called "Foot of Pride." It was recorded for the Infidels album but not used, thereby making the album weaker than it might have been. To me Infidels is one of Dylan's many very-mixed-bag albums, half great and half so-so. At least that's the way I recall it--I haven't listened to it for many years. "Foot of Pride" might even have been my choice for best track on the album, had it been there. Or possibly second-best, if another outtake, maybe the most celebrated and lamented of them all, had been kept: "Blind Willie McTell." Here's "Foot of Pride":

Lyrics here.

It's a weird phrase, and I wondered exactly what it meant. The general idea seems clear enough: when the consequences of your actions come to pass. Reading the Coverdale translation of Psalm 36 a while back I was startled by this: "O let not the foot of pride come against me."

Had Dylan read the Coverdale Psalms (the translation done by Miles Coverdale in the early days of English Protestantism)? Surely not, as they are, or for several centuries were, the official liturgical translation for the Church of England and other Anglican bodies, and not much known outside those. But also not impossible, I thought. The mystery was cleared a little when I compared Coverdale to King James: the latter also has "foot of pride," and it would be considerably less surprising that Dylan had encountered it there. Either way, I have to consider it far more likely than not that he got it from the Bible; it's just too odd. And not from a more modern translation, most of which seem to go for the less obscure "foot of the proud."

You'll notice that the fairly clear meaning of either translation seems to be the opposite of what I took Dylan to be saying. He seems to be suggesting that the foot in question is a sort of nemesis of the proud, not a menace to the righteous. Oh well--I've always considered the business of trying to read Dylan as if he were Ezra Pound to be a waste of time.

The Coverdale Psalms, as I've mentioned before, have definitely become my favorite version, overall. I add that last qualifier because the King James version of the 23rd can never be replaced in my mind, if only because "still waters" touches me more than "waters of comfort."

Back to Dylan: "Say one more stupid thing to me before the final nail is driven in" sort of expresses the way I feel when reading the froth of journalism and entertainment on the internet. I wish I could break myself of the habit of reading so much of it.  

Dune

Usually when I write about books I put the author's name in the title of the post along with the title of the book. But in a few cases it seems superfluous. Doesn't everybody know that Frank Herbert wrote Dune? Or is the fact that I think so only a manifestation of my own insularity? 

Anyway, he did, and the claim I've seen that it's the most famous of all science-fiction novels is probably correct. Also the greatest? I don't know about that, but I'm not really in a position to judge.

Last February I saw the 2021 Denis Villeneuve movie which dramatizes the first half (roughly) of the novel. The second film was to be released this fall, and I made up my mind to read the book again before then. I was in the midst of doing so when I saw an announcement that the film will be delayed until March of next year. Oh well--maybe I won't have forgotten it completely by then. 

I said "again," and there is a little bit of mystery about that for me. I definitely read it around 1976, for what I think was the first time. But when I was in high school in the mid-'60s I was a science-fiction fanatic, and subscribed to Analog magazine, in which Dune was serialized at the time. As best I can tell from Wikipedia, this was done under two different titles, two years apart. The first, called Dune World, appeared in 1963, in two installments; the second, Prophet of Dune, in 1965, in five (!) installments. I'm pretty certain that was during the period when I subscribed. I even seem to remember this cover:

Yet I have no memory of reading it. If I didn't read it, why not? If I did, why don't I have at least some fragments of memory about it? Is it possible that I found it too complicated and slow-moving and gave up after reading only a little? I won't say that's probable, but it is certainly possible. There is, obviously, no way to answer that question, but it bothers me.

The book is indeed by science-fiction standards, at least those of the early 1960s, complicated and relatively slow-moving. I conjectured in my post about the film that it probably spent more time on spectacular action than the book. That was an understatement. There is in fact not a great deal of action in the cinematic sense in the book. The attack on the Atriedes family, which occupies a significant portion of the film is and is indeed spectacular, happens mostly offstage in the book. There are other such instances. Perhaps this is something of a Star Wars effect. But Dune is definitely not space opera ("a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes space warfare, with use of melodramatic, risk-taking space adventures, relationships, and chivalric romance"), which Star Wars is.

The emphasis in the book is not on action but on a complex web of political intrigue, family and dynastic relationships, religion, ecology, and a sort of psychological mysticism. I won't bother with any further summary. Most people who are at all interested already know the basics of the plot, characters, and fictional world; anyone who doesn't can get plenty from Wikipedia.

That fictional world is a pretty impressive achievement. I don't think Dune is in the same literary class as The Lord of the Rings, but it bears comparison in the complexity and thoroughness of its imaginary world. When I say "bears comparison" I don't mean "is equal to"--on a 1-10 scale, if LOTR is a 10, then Dune is a 7 or 8. As far as I know Frank Herbert did not go so far as to create entire languages (which in Tolkien actually preceded the stories to some extent), nor is the history developed in as much detail, though I would guess that more of it is filled in by the many sequels.

The treatment of religion is also an interesting comparison. As all literarily-minded Christians know, religion does not exist in The Lord of the Rings, and yet the book is profoundly Christian. In Dune, on the other hand, religion is very explicitly everywhere. Yet it is in a sense not religious at all, but a sort of cultural tool, half-manufactured by worldly powers, especially the order of women called the Bene Gesserit who have a plan, implemented over centuries if not millennia, for producing a messiah-sort-of-person by directed breeding. And it's relevant to the book only through its effects on culture, and on behavior in general. Any notion of a transcendent spiritual reality is left very vague and very far in the background.

I recall that when I read the book in 1976 I scoffed a bit at the obvious way much of the culture of its Fremen, inhabitants of a desert planet, was drawn from Arabian culture, or others of the Middle Eastern deserts. That was unfair, and a result of my own ignorance. In those days I did not recognize such words as "jihad"; if I had, I would have realized that the Fremen are not copied from Arab-Muslim cultures, but rather are explicitly descended from them.

Dune takes place thousands of years in the future, when humanity has developed interstellar travel and populated many planets, but all of them began with ours. There are no "aliens" in the universe of Dune; every person is homo sapiens, though some have mental powers developed to a superhuman degree. The interstellar human society has reverted to a basic and ancient tripartite pattern: emperor, nobility ("houses"), and everybody else.

What it does have, which I don't think other science fiction of the time had, is psychedelic drugs, or rather drug: the substance called "spice" which is the foundation of the entire economic and political order. Frank Herbert had obviously had some experience along those lines--or if not, he knew people who did. There is a strong hint here of what would soon become known as the human potential movement. In that respect, as well as in its ecological focus, this strikes me as a very "Sixties" work. If I remember correctly, I first encountered the word "ecology" in Analog or some other sci-fi context. (Why do I remember that, but not whether I read Dune? Memory is a very hit-and-miss thing.)

In spite of what I said about the well-constructed world, I was left disappointed in my curiosity about certain things. In order for an interstellar empire to exist, there must be, one way or another, faster-than-light travel. Most science-fiction at least does a bit of hand-waving to explain this, usually one of the many variants of the "warp drive." Dune does not. The whole economic and political structure of the empire rests on the mysterious drug called "spice" which enables the powers of the monopolistic guild of navigators who alone can pilot interstellar craft. What's involved in that navigation, and how does the spice enable it? The book offers only the suggestion that it has something to do with the perception of possible future events. I suppose it's asking too much to want more information about that, just as it's asking too much to want to know how a warp drive works (though that doesn't stop people from trying).  

And about the famous sandworms: it was only a passing remark in an appendix that answered one question that kept occurring to me as I read, which was "what do they eat?" Answer: "sand plankton." Really? There's enough of that to support creatures that may be a quarter of a mile long and a hundred yards in breadth? Well, okay. But then why do they need all those extremely long sharp teeth? How and why does a plankton-eating creature attack and swallow anything that moves with single-minded intensity? How and why does it swallow a mobile factory or a spacecraft? How does it move at speeds which seem to be at least thirty or forty miles an hour while completely buried in sand?

Maybe I missed some of these answers. Maybe they're answered in the sequels, of which, as I mentioned, there are a lot. Herbert himself wrote five, and his son Brian has co-written, with Kevin J. Anderson, a number of others. I'm not sure what that number is; over a dozen, I think.

All in all, my reaction to Dune is much the same as it was 45 years ago: yes, it's impressive; yes, I enjoyed it; no, I'm not a devotee. I don't rule out reading the first sequel, Dune Messiah, but it's doubtful. 

Goodbye, Old Shoes

You served me faithfully for many years. 

This picture was taken about a year ago, when we were about to move to a new house, and I was trying to get rid of things that really had no reason to go with us. I am one of those people who find it difficult to throw away anything that might possibly still have some good use: if not useful at the moment, then possibly so at some future time, or, if near the end of its useful life, not definitively arrived there.

But those, whether prudent or not, are purely pragmatic considerations. My attachment to these shoes was a purer thing, a regard founded upon but not limited to merely material considerations. I loved them. But they were effectively deceased, inasmuch as they were no longer capable of serving as shoes, and so I reluctantly put them down, as one might a beloved dog who is in visible pain and can no longer wag its tail or eat its supper.

They were from a company called San Antonio Shoes, the model called Time Out, which is still in their catalog (click on that link to see what my shoes looked like, more or less, when they were new). This was at least the second pair I've worn out to almost the degree which you see here; possibly it's the third, but second seems to fit more closely into the possible span of time in which I wore them.

In 1992 I had fairly severe back problems (a ruptured disk) and had surgery to repair it. The surgery was successful, but I continued for years to have a certain amount of pain. Somewhere along in the following five to ten years I bought a pair of these shoes, and their cushiony sole and insole did great things for my back. I suppose some sort of athletic shoes might have done as well, but these were presentable for work. I wore them out, then bought another pair. The second pair, the one you see here (I think), was looking very bad by the time I stopped going in to work in 2016. They had the cracks in the sides which you can see in the picture, and the sole of the right one had twice come loose and been glued back. I still wore them fairly often around the house, enough for them to deteriorate further. When the sole came loose again, the upper was so far gone that there wasn't enough leather there to which the sole could be glued. That wasn't so very long ago, maybe a year before I had to make the difficult decision described above.

I now have two pairs of this same model, one brown and one black. I don't have occasion to wear them all that often, so at my age I don't expect to have to replace them. I notice that the company's price for them is now $209. I think that first pair cost no more than $60 or $70, and the second not much over $100. 

Earlier today, while thinking about this post and looking for the photo, I experienced a painful muscle spasm in my back which was one of the problems I had long before and long after that 1992 surgery, and which has not happened for at least the past ten years. Now, some hours later, it still hurts and I'm moving slowly and carefully, trying not to aggravate it.  It's as if the shoes have spoken to me from beyond the grave: don't forget us. 

A Remark on Jimmy Buffett

He was a smart businessman who made millions telling y'all it's okay to goof off all the time. 

That was my wife's observation, and I thought it was too funny to keep to myself. 

I mean no serious disparagement of Jimmy Buffett. I was oddly saddened when I heard of his death--oddly because I wasn't a great fan of his music, and never even heard much of it apart from the few songs that were played on the radio. 

Maybe it was because I loved "Margaritaville" when it appeared in 1977. My family vacationed on the Florida Panhandle coast when I was growing up, and I always had a sort of romantic relationship with that area. The crush had been dormant for some years, but "Margaritaville" caused it to flare up again. (I think it was the line about the flip-flop and the pop-top. And the shrimp.) It's a good song by any reasonable standard, and an awfully appealing vision of beach life without major responsibility, yet including that offhand serious movement from evasion to responsibility ("It's my own damn fault.")

I'd probably like more of his music if I heard it. The truth is that I was put off his work not long after "Margaritaville" was a hit. He played in Tuscaloosa, where I was living at the time, and I went to see him. It was the only concert I've ever left before it ended. Buffett seemed to be pandering to the dumb college audience, causing them to erupt in frantic cheering by saying the word "beer" or anything else to do with drinking. Or sex. I was hoping for something with more depth than simple-minded party music. The songs may actually have had that, but I didn't know them and of course couldn't hear the lyrics very well, and the atmosphere was brainless college party. (Isn't it sad that "dumb," "brainless," and "college" go so easily together?) It was disappointing and dull and I left early. I'm pretty sure his music, at least some of it, deserves better. "Margaritaville" itself is no shallow celebration of indulgence. 

A White Sport Coat And a Pink Crustacean remains one of my all-time favorite album titles, though as far as I remember I've never heard it. He was very good at that kind of wordplay, though the number of people who get that particular joke must be diminishing rapidly. 

Buffett grew up in Mobile and is thought of as a local  hero, but I have the impression that he didn't much reciprocate the sentiment, in part maybe because Mobile radio was not receptive to his music, especially in his early days. A few years ago I heard a snatch of one of his songs in which he complains about that. His family lived in the Mobile area called Spring Hill, the most affluent neighborhood in the city, and he went to the Catholic high school and reportedly was an altar server at the chapel of Spring Hill College, which in his day was the unofficial parish of the neighborhood. According to this article in Church Life Journal, "Catholicism left an indelible mark on his imagination":

O bless me father yes I have sinned
Given the chance I’ll prob’ly do it again

Yeah, I hear that. And the article continues, making a point similar to my wife's:

Once again there is a contradiction in the telling: in order to show that one can have a successful life by just having fun, Buffett commits himself to work hard...

He might be the world’s most famous beach bum, but he eschews excess in his personal life and is a driven, hands-on entrepreneur. 

You don't create the kind of empire that his Margaritaville restaurants and resorts became without being driven. I've never been to one (there's not one here), and probably wouldn't like it much if I did. But he gave a lot of relatively innocent pleasure to a lot of people, and our deteriorating popular culture is the worse for his loss. RIP.

Local lore says that the cover photo of this 1981 album, which I have never heard, was taken in Point Clear, up the road from where I currently live, which was, in Buffett's youth, where many affluent Mobile families had summer homes. It certainly looks like it could have been, apart from the phone booth. Piers like that are seen all along the shores of Mobile Bay, not at the Gulf.

Forty-five years after "Margaritaville," I live an hour away from the Gulf and don't go to the beach very often--once or twice a year, maybe--because of the traffic and the condominiums and the crowds. "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded." When I do go, it's in late fall and winter, when it's still pretty nice. 

Ikiru and Living

About halfway through Kurosawa's Ikiru I thought, with a touch of cynicism: This is going to be a story of a staid and gloomy old man facing death, given a new appreciation of life by a vivacious young woman. I wondered if perhaps this was the first film to portray that sort of encounter and awakening, which strikes me as a little trite now. (Why do I think that? In fact can't think of a single specific film that follows the pattern, but I know I've encountered it enough to feel a little impatient with it.)

But that was only the first half (roughly) of a fairly lengthy film, and the rest of the story plays out somewhat differently. 

The protagonist, Kanji Watanabe (played by Takashi Shimura), is an official in what is portrayed as a turgid city bureaucracy, indifferent to everything but its own machinery. Watanabe's job, as far as we see it, appears to consist mainly of looking at pieces of paper from the very large stacks that threaten to crowd out everything else in the office, looming over the staff in a very concrete representation of the phrase "overwhelmed by paperwork," and stamping them, presumably with a yes-no, approved-disapproved verdict. And one can't help thinking that most are disapproved, judging by the evasive not-our-responsibility behavior of the staff when they're approached by a group of women who want a sewage leak near their homes cleaned up.

Watanabe has not been feeling well, and he goes to a doctor who tells him nothing is seriously wrong with him. But the doctor is lying--a rather odd thing from a contemporary American perspective, but which appears to be standard procedure in the Japan of that time. Watanabe has been warned, though, by another patient: if the doctor thinks you have a fatal stomach cancer and not very long to live, he will tell you this, that, and the other--certain specific things--and those are in fact the very things the doctor says to him. Watanabe goes home believing he hasn't much longer to live, and we are not left wondering whether it could be a false alarm because we have been told in an opening voiceover that it is not. And the doctor admits it to an assistant after Watanabe is gone.

Watanabe is a widower and has been since his only child, a son, was very young. He has raised the boy alone, sticking with his dreary job for the child's sake. Now, in several painful scenes, he realizes that his son and daughter-in-law don't much care about him, apart from the pension he will eventually receive. He turns back to the job: did it, does it, really have to be so futile?

"Ikiru" means "to live," and the film suggests that the word is part of a question: what does it mean to live? On the basis of my very limited knowledge, I suspect the Japanese character does not go in as much for the big cosmic answer as some other cultures do. Kurosawa may have intended Ikiru to be almost as much a criticism of bureaucracy as an exploration of meaning, and it certainly works that way, but the title makes it clear that the deeper and more permanent concern is primary. The resolution arrived at is modest, hardly triumphant, not satisfying as a cosmic answer (at least not to me), but quite moving. If it is not a solution, it is certainly a consolation. There are a couple of scenes toward the end that I want to watch repeatedly, one in particular which involves falling snow.

When I watch these movies it takes me a little while to adjust to the acting style. Shimura's portrayal of Watanabe's terror strikes me as peculiar and overdone. I found it helpful to think of it not as an unsuccessful sort of naturalism but as the use of the face as a kind of tragic mask. With that adjustment, it works. 

This seems to be the original trailer. It's almost four minutes long.

*

All I know of Japanese cinema is the most famous of Kurosawa's work (Rashomon et. al.), and a few of Ozu's. Unlike the former, which are set in the pre-modern past, this one is then-contemporary postwar Japan. And on the basis of it and the Ozu films, I wonder whether the situation of old people whose children don't really want to be bothered with them is a widespread concern in Japan, or at least was in the 1950s. Or does the presence of the question in these films mean that the  behavior was a new and deeply shocking thing? And does that have any connection to the news reports I keep reading that the Japanese birth rate is so low as to place the culture's survival in doubt? All or most industrialized nations seem to be tending toward very low birth rates, but Japan's seems to be worse: Japan births fall to record low as population crisis deepens (CNN) 

*

The reason I watched Ikiru at just this time was that I was intrigued by Rob G's recommendation of Living, a recent English film which is a remake of Ikiru. (See comments on this post.) I basically dislike the whole idea of remakes. I dislike the idea so much that I can't even justify my prejudice by pointing to some examples, because I don't watch them. (For that matter I haven't seen most of the originals.) I think my prejudice began in 1978 when someone remade Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I had only recently seen the original and thought it was great, and didn't see the point of remaking it. (I'm asking myself now: how did I see it in the late '70s? I don't know. Home video had barely gotten started, and I'm pretty sure I didn't have a VCR until the early '80s. And when the original came out in 1956 I was eight years old and certainly didn't see it then.)

The argument for a remake of Ikiru is stronger than most, because the original is not only relatively obscure but presents language and culture obstacles for the Western audience. 

Anyway: Living serves as an example of doing it right. One way of doing it wrong would be to change too little, to make a slavish imitation, with whatever updates are necessary to bring it into a different time, place, and, possibly culture. In that case one might think "Why bother?" The other, which I think is probably what happens more frequently, is to trash it: to turn it into something else, as if the re-maker didn't really like the original, or, worse, to make it "contemporary" by sensationalizing it: more sex, more violence, cruder language, and maybe some (or a lot) of fashionable politics. (As I write this I suddenly remember some reviews of remakes which no doubt reinforced my prejudice: one, for instance, a remake of Cape Fear which made the villain into some sort of Christian.)

Living strikes exactly the right balance of homage and innovation. I suppose some critics, especially the trendier sort, might find it too close to the original, not "innovative" etc.; if so I disagree. I wondered, when I saw an ad for it, why the main character, a county official named Williams (Bill Nighy), is wearing a bowler: surely London office workers don't do that anymore? But the story is set in the 1950s, a more plausible time for a government official to mirror the rigid rule-following super-conventional type of his Japanese contemporary Watanabe. The result is a near-perfect transmutation. One would never suppose, if not otherwise informed, that it is not a wholly English original. 

There are a few changes to the story and to the characters. They strike me as not necessarily necessary but justifiable. Some are perhaps calculated to make best use of the English milieu, which in any case the film very much does. The one I noticed most is a change in the relationship between Wilson and his son and daughter-in-law. In Kurosawa's original, the latter are about equally at fault in their treatment of the old man. In this one, the son is only weak, and his wife is pretty close to actively malicious, pushing her husband (not very successfully) to make demands on his father with the broad goal of getting him out of their lives. And the son is, at the end, remorseful, which in the original he is not. 

Whether or not you've seen Ikiru, this movie is very much worth your while. I notice that it received a number of awards. Good; it deserves them. The screenplay, by the way, is by the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, among many others, who is Japanese by birth but has lived in England (mostly) since he was a child. I didn't recognize the name of the director, Oliver Hermanus, or any of his other work. 

Here's the trailer, which, you'll notice, is less than half as long as the Ikiru trailer. Attention spans are shorter than they once were, I think.

Another question I'm asking myself: why is Bill Nighy so familiar to me? I've seen almost none of the movies and TV shows listed in his filmography. Yet when Rob mentioned his name I knew immediately who he was.

For Once, I Am a Trend-Setter

Well, I guess that's not technically accurate. To set a trend, one must not only be enacting the trend, but be seen doing it. Nobody apart from my immediate family and my neighbors know that I'm doing it. And I'm pretty sure that they are themselves not trend-watchers who have noted that I'm doing it and informed the fashionable world. If my obscurity and ignorance don't give me any claim to setting the trend, I can at least truly say that for once I am well out in front of it. 

I'm referring to the trend of "silent walking." I only know about it because Rob G sent me this link: 'Silent walking' is going viral. What is it and what are the benefits?

"Silent walking" is walking without some electronic device piping music or talk into your ears. That it now seems unusual, an exception to a general rule, is amusing. That people feel the need to have it explained, justified and prescribed by experts--psychologists, doctors, the author of a book on "mindfulness"--is very amusing, in a not altogether enjoyable way.

I'm tempted to quote from the article, but it should be read to be fully appreciated.  

As for my own participation: I walk for twenty or thirty minutes several days a week, and have done this off and on for years. I've tried listening to music or spoken word--talk, or audio books--while walking, and I just don't like it. "Distracting" is not an adequate word. It puts me into a sort of foggy confusion, in which I'm attentive neither to my surroundings or to whatever is coming through the headphones. To say that I don't like it is really an understatement--I soon came to hate it, and gave it up entirely a long time ago. 

Bill Frisell: "Throughout"

Last Christmas someone gave me a biography of Bill Frisell: Bill Frisell, Beautiful Dreamer, by Philip Watson. In case you don't know the name, Frisell is a guitarist, one of the best-known musicians on any instrument in the contemporary jazz world, though "jazz" is not the right word for much of his work: how about small-group mostly-instrumental partially-improvised song-based American music? And substitute "solo" for "small group" on some recordings, including the first album issued under his own name, In Line, on the famous (iconic!) ECM label. Well, that one isn't 100% solo--several tracks include the bass player Arild Andersen. But it's mostly Frisell's guitar, and I think all the compositions are his. And although he's best known, and was first known, as a guitarist, his compositions are a major contributor to the high regard in which he's held.

This is one of them. To my taste, and apparently to the taste of a good many others, including the author of the biography, In Line is not an entirely satisfactory album as a whole. But according to the book, this one track, "Throughout," seems to have a way of getting under people's skin. It definitely got under mine. 

It also got under the skin of Petra Haden. Jazz fans (if there are any who read this blog) will notice her last name, even if they haven't heard of her. Yes, she is the daughter of Charlie Haden, the legendary (iconic!) bass player, whose long career began in the late '50s. Petra is one of a set of triplets, all of whom are musicians. She is quoted in the book:

'When I first heard it, I said, "This is my favourite song, in the world,"' she says, smiling. 'There was a point where I would listen to "Throughout" for  hours--how he layered the sound, like I enjoy doing when I record my vocals. The music reminded me of that feeling of being in a dreamland.'

Several of her musical projects have involved multi-tracked a cappella vocals. Presumably she was pleased to work with Frisell on an album cleverly titled Petra Haden and Bill Frisell. This vocal and guitar arrangement of "Throughout" appears on it.

I have not heard the whole album yet. And although I want to hear it, I have to say that I am even more eager to hear another Petra Haden album: a cover of the entire Who Sell Out album rendered in her multi-tracked vocals. Goodness. 

I will never be able to hear all of Bill Frisell's recorded work. Look at his discography. And it's not a case, as it too often is with jazz and pop musicians who manage not to die young, of brilliant youthful work followed by years of mediocre repetition. When Watson proposed the book to Frisell, the latter's first reaction was "What would you write about?" Apart from decades of making brilliant music, Frisell's life is not very dramatic. He had a stable and happy childhood and youth, met with considerable encouragement and opportunity, including teachers like the guitarist Jim Hall who gave him not only instruction but connections, has never had the drug and/or drinking problems so common among popular musicians, and has been married to the same woman since 1979. Maybe the dissolute artist route is not necessarily a good way to go, if one has a choice. 

On Social Science

There is a lot to say for the scientific method, but in the social sciences it is often little more than a magical trick: the ritualistic application of statistics to poor data measured by imaginary instruments.

Author unknown, found on a sheet of paper in my files, in quotation marks so apparently not my words. There's no mystery about why I copied it, though. I've believed for a long time that the "social sciences" are at best only half-scientific. The hardheaded scientific part is statistics--the statistical methods, I mean, not necessarily any particular instance of their use. As we all know, statistical results are no better than the data which is their raw material. And even valid statistics can easily be manipulated to make them say what someone wants them to say, a practice we can see in action any day.

The real value (where there is real value) is interpretation and evaluation of the facts, which means general intelligence, logic, common sense, insight, intuition, wisdom, imagination--in a word, the subjective. That's not a criticism of the project, but of its claim to being "science." Its worth is very dependent on the gifts of the practitioner. I'm an enthusiastic fan of Philip Rieff, who considered himself a sociologist,

These days there is, apart from those more or less intrinsic limitations, a great deal of social science that is obvious political and ideological advocacy which claims authority by the fact that it comes from someone with a Ph.D.  I don't think this is working very well anymore, with no lack of Ph.D.s proclaiming that the emperor's clothes are a miracle of craft and style. 

Oppenheimer Doom Music

I don't have any idea at all where I got the mp3 of this song, or rather track--it's not exactly a song, but a combination of droning and mechanical sounds and percussion. I found it haunting. And I don't remember how I figured out that the voice might or must be that of Robert Oppenheimer, as it does not include the famous "I am become death" line, but somehow I did.

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed. A few people cried. Most people were silent. 

I haven't seen Oppenheimer, but it strikes me that this would be an effective soundtrack for the credits, if not for Oppenheimer then another on a similar subject. 

After not hearing this for some years, I thought of it a few months ago and went looking for it among my mp3s. It took me a long time to find it, which is not surprising: I have thousands of mp3s, and the name of the artist is Scar Tissue; the name of the track is "Lazsik"; the name of the album is Form/Alkaline. 

Here is Oppenheimer himself.

 

Prayers For the Young Priests

This past Easter I wrote about going to the Vigil at a small parish where the pastor is a young priest, and said this:

The young priests I've encountered in recent years are all similarly committed to the traditional mission of the Church, which makes them "conservative" in the confused mind of our time. And they are very brave. The orthodoxy is not surprising, because, as has been pointed out for decades, who would give up everything a priest has to give up for an ill-defined mission of which he is half ashamed? The bravery is almost true by definition now, because in the minds of many all priests are automatically suspected of child molestation and other crimes. And the accusation obviously gives a lot of pleasure to those who already hate the Church for other reasons. I certainly would have trouble walking around in public if I thought people were looking at me with that in mind. God give them strength. 

This has been much on my mind for the past week or so because of a situation in my diocese. I haven't seen it mentioned in the national news, but then I don't see that much national news, so perhaps it's out there. There are quite a few local and state news stories about it, but I think I'll refrain from linking to them, because I don't want to be even slightly responsible for it getting wider attention. It illustrates a different sort of difficulty and threat faced by young priests--any priests, really, but especially young ones.

I also won't mention the name of the priest involved. It isn't the one whose parish I attended at Easter, but they're about the same age. I'll call this one Father M (for Mackay). I don't know him personally but I heard him speak a year or so ago at my parish. Our then-assistant pastor, also a priest of around the same age, had organized a series of talks for men, and Father M was one of the speakers. It was a good talk. He was intelligent, articulate, and obviously passionate about the orthodox faith, about the need for committed spiritual combat against all the temptations and distractions that the contemporary world presents, about the need for courage and self-mastery.

But there was one thing that made me a little uneasy. Before I mention that, I'll speak generally: any young person with an intense commitment to anything runs the risk of either burning out, because the intensity can't be sustained over the long haul, especially in the face of life's typical disappointments, or of going off the rails in some way, passion overriding prudence and balance: out of gas, or crash and burn. Some young priests make me a little uneasy on this count. They are orthodox, often traditionalist, devoted, and intense, and I worry that they won't be able to keep their balance over a lifetime of ministry, and will come to a halt in one of those two ways. 

Where religion is concerned, the form taken by that second possibility--intensity that goes out of control in some way--is likely to be fanaticism, superstition, and other spiritual diseases. Father Ronald Knox devoted an entire book, Enthusiasm, to the syndrome as it has manifested itself since the beginning of the Church. (He means the word "enthusiasm" in a sense that's pretty much fallen out of use now, more or less equivalent to "fanaticism.") It can be difficult to tell the difference between intense healthy devotion and intense unhealthy fanaticism, but there is a difference. It's even more difficult, I suspect, to recognize it from the inside: to know how, in one's own interior life, to maintain the former without falling into the latter. (I wouldn't know; I don't have the kind of zeal and energy that puts me in that danger.) 

One particular danger for the very religiously committed seems to be excessive interest in signs and wonders, particularly those having to do with the workings of evil. As best I can tell from what's public knowledge, something like that seems to have happened to Fr. M, and to have led him into trouble.

As good as his talk at my parish was, some of it made me, as I said, a little uneasy. He was clearly intense, and that sparked my usual concern, that he would not be able to sustain it while keeping his balance. And he talked a lot about demons, prayers of deliverance, purging one's space of things that might carry evil influences, and so forth, and that made me concerned that he might be giving more attention to those things than is really healthy. I don't mean that I definitely concluded that that was the case; when I say "concerned" that's all I mean; I had that little warning-bell feeling. From what I hear, this interest--which, if not excessive, is clearly great--has been a strong tendency of his for some time. 

It seems to be at the root of the current situation--the current disaster, it's fair to say. Fr. M was often asked to speak to classes at the local Catholic high school, and his talks often were heavy on the topics I just mentioned. And he sometimes had counseling or spiritual guidance sessions with individual students. He was apparently pretty quick to blame the direct influence of Satan for their problems, which in my experience is a cause for concern. And he had gotten very interested in certain Marian apparitions, especially the one(s) in Garabandal, Spain, which as far as I can tell from a little reading about them are at best of dubious authenticity. Excessive interest in those is also, for me, a cause for concern. Again, I don't mean that these things are plainly misguided, only that I've seen and heard enough over the years to know that interest in them can become quite unhealthy.

Reportedly his talk of demons and exorcisms was enough to alarm some parents. Were they justified? Or did they, like many contemporary Christians, just want a tame faith? I don't know. 

Apparently he became very close with one female student. And a couple of weeks ago he and the girl, who had graduated in the spring, disappeared and were found to have  fled (the word seems reasonable) to Garabandal, for reasons that remain unclear. The archbishop immediately deprived Fr. M of his priestly faculties (which the local media keep incorrectly calling "defrocked"). The girl's parents are understandably very upset. When she and Fr. M were located, they both denied that they have a sexual relationship. But of course that's being met with "yeah right" by many or most people, and that's at least somewhat understandable--it certainly looks bad.

But I believe them. Based solely on my experience of his talk, I am quite willing to believe that it is not a physically sexual relationship, and that Fr. M did not "groom" the girl, as the irresponsible local sheriff is saying. However, I also think it's quite likely that it was and is sexual in the broad sense--i.e., that he is a handsome young man and she is a no doubt pretty young woman, and they developed romantic feelings for each other. Perhaps they didn't even really or fully recognize that it was happening. That's hardly an uncommon phenomenon. 

Anyway, this is obviously a disaster for all concerned. Is it even in principle possible for Fr. M ever to function as a priest again? Does he even want to? Would any bishop ever let him? What will this have done to the girl's spiritual life and general emotional health? Will she leave the Church? Will her parents? Will he? 

And somewhere out near the edge of the ripples generated by this splash am I, seeing what is probably the loss to the Church, and in a small way to me, of a gifted young priest. You don't have to believe that a demon whispered directly into Fr. M's ear to see that this is a victory for the arch-demon. At least for now. I pray every day for "all bishops, priests, deacons, seminarians, and religious." Especially the young ones.

"No one notices the customs slip away"

That's a line from an Al Stewart song, "On the Border," the second hit single from his very successful 1976 album (and extremely successful single by the same name), Year of the Cat. It's one of the little cultural fragments that are always bouncing around in my head, and it probably shows up once a week or so, usually called forth by some little thing that strikes me as an emblem of the disappearance of the country I grew up in. Here's the context: 

In the village where I grew up
Nothing seems the same
Still you never see the change from day to day
And no-one notices the customs slip away

It's no longer the case for me that "you never see the change from day to day." The place--just a country crossroads, not really a village--where I grew up has mostly been...I started to say "wiped off the map," but it's worse than that: it's being physically wiped away, replaced by factories and warehouses. Some of it is still recognizable. But I'm not sure anyone actually lives there now. And this:

In the islands where I grew up
Nothing seems the same
It's just the patterns that remain, an empty shell
But there's a strangeness in the air you feel too well

I try not to harp excessively on the sense of living in a country that is no longer the one in which I grew up. Something like that is always the case to some degree for old people, though the rapid pace of change over the past hundred and fifty years makes it stronger, often much, much stronger. Some of it is just a species of nostalgia which is really an inevitable effect of time itself, and the changes that produce it are not necessarily for the better or the worse.

But still: has our constitutional republic not become an empty shell, something manipulated by ideologues and oligarchs for purposes of their own (what the leaders of today's Democratic Party refer to as "our democracy") rather than the effective instrument of ordered liberty that it ought to be? How many people now believe that we--all the American people--are really all in this together, sharing a common ideal? How many have an effective understanding of the concept of citizenship, or even an interest in it?

The "century" to which Stewart refers is now twenty-three years in the past; the song is going on fifty years old. But although the details are different the observations are still relevant. 

Anyway, it's a great song, and I think an extremely good album, though I haven't listened to it for many years. The images in this video are apparently from the Spanish Civil War, an event which some fear could be a pattern for our future. I don't really think that will happen, but the levels of partisan hatred make the warning apt. 

 

A Bit More About Those Two Movies

I don't know what I thought the actual content of a Barbie movie might be. Well, that's a little misleading right off the bat, because I didn't think about it at all. If I had, I suppose I would have expected a sort of Barbie cartoon, with a negligible story, no more substantial than an episode of The Smurfs. And that the feminists and other media women writing about it were just using the movie as an occasion to muse, positively or negatively, about the significance of the famous doll, musings that would have about as much substance as the little mannequin itself. 

But then I started coming across commentaries from serious-minded women who were finding some significance in the movie. Clearly there's more to it than just a lot of glib pop culture fluff and/or feminist cliches. I linked to several of these in comments on the previous post, but they deserve more attention than that, so here are links and a few quotes.

From Amy Welborn at Catholic World Report:

What emerges is that the actual world of actual women is difficult. The hints begin when Stereotypical Barbie—[played by Margot] Robbie—begins to experience limits and flaws, culminating in a startling admission that she’s starting to think about…dying. Off she goes, guided by the advice from Weird Barbie (the one whose chopped hair and markered-up face points to other ways Barbies are played with)—that she must find the girl who plays with her, whose angst is clearly filtering down into her up-to-now light-filled life....

Barbie might have begun her life inspiring little girls to reject real life and their unique way of being in the world, but at the end of this part of the journey, Barbie embraces that same way of being, of womanhood that is definitely not plastic, definitely not smooth and definitely not without mystery and pain—and embraces it with joy.

From Nina Power at Compact:

Gerwig’s Barbie points instead to a dialectical exit: Women can be mothers or not; they can take up any number of roles, or none; they can conform to femininity or look weird. Whatever, it doesn’t matter. But there are limits: We are past the moment of the free-floating signifier, of womanhood as a mere “identity.” The doll is born into suffering. To have a male or female body is to suffer and feel in different ways: We forget this if we reduce each other to mere signs. To be human is also to have to choose—an existential Barbie can hide this possibility from herself for a while, but facing every maiden is death, behind every Barbie, an Oppenheimer.

From Helen Andrews at The American Conservative:

Barbie is a symbol of youth, beauty, and possibility. She can be anything, and everyone is drawn to her. But it’s all meaningless because the reason she’s so beautiful and perfect is that nothing has ever happened to Barbie. All the meaning in life comes from the things that give you wrinkles.

When she comes to the real world, Barbie finds herself on a bench at a bus stop next to a grandmotherly looking old lady. She has never seen an elderly woman before. No one ages in Barbie Land. Barbie gazes at her face and says, “You’re so beautiful.” The woman smiles and says, “I know it.”

According to Gerwig, studio executives wanted her to cut the scene, because it doesn’t move the plot along. She told them, “If I cut the scene, I don’t know what this movie is about.”

I like the last line of that first paragraph.

From Carmel Richardson, also at The American Conservative:

The world [Barbie creator Ruth] Handler envisioned is, in many ways, the world we live in today. Like Barbie, American women have achieved high-level career success, especially in higher education, where their performance has notably surpassed that of American men. Like Barbie, American girls from a very young age have learned to flaunt their bodies and to call this empowerment. And like Barbie, Ken is only an accessory to female success today....

Unfortunately for those women who have followed the Barbie model, many now find themselves childless and unsatisfied. Emasculated men, apparently, don’t father many children.

Apart from commentary on the movie itself, these remarks revealed to me that I had a completely mistaken idea about how the Barbie doll came to be and what it meant. I had always assumed that it was the creation of a man or men. That was mainly because of the ridiculous and anatomically impossible (I think) physique. I imagined a male thought process something like Babies are boring. Let's make a sexy doll. And give her fun things to do. And I was always a little bit surprised that women put up with it--the sexy part, at least. 

Wrong. Well, that description of the thought process is more or less accurate, but Barbie was the creation of a woman, a proto-feminist and a pretty hard-headed businesswoman who wanted her daughter Barbie to have a doll that would give her aspirations to a more exciting life than that of a mother and homemaker. Now the whole Barbie phenomenon--the doll, not the movie--makes sense in a way that it didn't before. Especially the role played by very consciously and skillfully contrived marketing. (The physique of the doll, however, did begin in the imagination of a man: it was suggested by a sex doll.) 

Another thing I've learned over the past few days is how much my wife hates Barbie. I knew she had never played with or wanted a Barbie doll when she was little, but I had not realized that the feeling went far beyond indifference. Every time I've brought this movie up to her with remarks along the lines of what I've posted here--"You know, actually this movie sounds kind of interesting"--the response has been brief: "I hate Barbie." And that's pretty much that. 

*

About Oppenheimer: not surprisingly, it has kicked off a new round of arguments about the morality of dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Or rather, as far as what I've seen is concerned, a new round of justifications for it. Oppenheimer developed grave reservations about what he had done, and I gather the movie is sympathetic to those reservations. Moreover, he and many others with similar reservations were leftists, which tends to make those on the right suspicious and skeptical toward their ethical arguments. 

At any rate, whenever the question comes up, American conservatives can be counted on to defend the morality of the bombing. A post by Rich Lowry at National Review, occasioned by the film, is pretty typical. The headline:  

Oppenheimer Had Nothing To Be Ashamed Of

The subhead:

Dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the right call. 

There's no need to go into detail about the text. It's the justification that's always used: that the use of the bomb was necessary to end the war and in fact saved millions of lives. That's a reasonable argument, and if I'd been in Truman's place I might have done the same thing. (As is also usual, Lowry notes that the atomic bomb was really no worse than the fire bombing of cities--which is probably true, but is a bizarre line of reasoning: "It's ok that we killed these civilians, because we had already killed those other ones.")

What it doesn't address, though, is the moral principle, if formulated in an elemental way, without reference to the particular situation: is it morally permissible to deliberately kill innocent people? 

If the answer to that is yes, then it's a pragmatic, utilitarian matter. It's purely a cost-benefit analysis. X people will die if we do this. X+Y people will die if we don't. Therefore we do it.

If the answer is no, then the bombings were objectively wrong, however powerful the reasons for resorting to them were. 

What most conservatives, including most of those who oppose abortion, don't see is that if the answer is yes, then there is no argument against abortion (and many other things) in principle. 

In the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the practical calculation is very powerful, and I don't see any reason to doubt that it's correct as far as the number of casualties and the general horror are concerned. I don't dismiss it. Under the right threat we would probably all accede to things that we know to be wrong. But when, in the cold light of day, we say that it is, in principle, permissible to deliberately kill the innocent, we make a grave error. There's no good excuse for Catholics to make that mistake, because the Catechism is perfectly clear:

"Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation." A danger of modern warfare is that it provides the opportunity to those who possess modern scientific weapons especially atomic, biological, or chemical weapons - to commit such crimes. (2314)

I wrote about this at more length back in 2005: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Purification of Memory. One of my better efforts, I think, and one that I considered worth including in my book.

Ivan to Alyosha, in The Brothers Karamazov:

“Tell me straight out, I call on you—answer me: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears—would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? Tell me the truth.”

“No, I would not agree,” Alyosha said softly.

On the Peculiar Convergence of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Barbie In Movie Theaters

Catherine Wheel: Ferment and Chrome

I wonder how many hours have been entertainingly wasted in arguments about the nature of certain pop music sub-genres (not to mention sub-sub and so on), and about whether this or that band belongs in this or that category. Shoegaze seems to me one of the more difficult to pin down, in part because it often involves very loud and heavily distorted guitars, which gives it a lot of potential for overlap--with metal, for instance.

Here are a few attempts at a definition. Wikipedia:

...characterized by its ethereal mixture of obscured vocals, guitar distortion and effects, feedback, and overwhelming volume....

Shoegaze combines ethereal, swirling vocals with layers of distorted, bent, or flanged guitars, creating a wash of sound where no instrument is distinguishable from another. The genre was typically "overwhelmingly loud, with long, droning riffs, waves of distortion, and cascades of feedback. Vocals and melodies disappeared into the walls of guitars."

Pitchfork:

It’s a particularly unusual genre in that its name describes neither a sound nor a connection to music history. This music is, above all else, a place to explore the outer limits of guitar texture. And emotionally, shoegaze turns its focus inward. The extreme noise eliminates the possibility of socializing while the music is playing, leaving each member of the audience alone with their thoughts. It’s music for dreaming. 

Me, a few years ago:

I'll just say that in my mind the term implies very thick guitar textures combined with wistful and dreamy melodies and lyrics. Personally I lean toward the overlapping term "dreampop"; that is, the shoegaze I like tends also to fit the "dreampop" category. 

My remarks are from a 2019 post about Pitchfork's list of 50 Greatest Shoegaze albums. I was familiar with maybe ten of them, and in spite of my professed intention to get acquainted with some of the others, I haven't done so. Too much music, too little time. Also too many books to read, too much writing to write, etc.

But wait: I did get acquainted with one, Catherine Wheel's Chrome. I was motivated because another Catherine Wheel album, Ferment, is one of my favorite rock albums of any style, and according to Pitchfork Chrome is even better. Ferment is #23 on their list, while Chrome is #9. If the latter is better than the former, I certainly wanted to hear it, and never mind the sub-genre label. 

Well, according to me, it isn't. I like Ferment a good deal more. I first heard it quite a few years ago, before the turn of the century, on a tape sent to me by a friend who supplied me with a lot of good music over the years.

If I remember correctly, it took several hearings for me to warm up to it, but I soon grew to like it very much. The mixture of loud, noisy (there's a difference) guitars, tunes that took slightly odd turns and stuck firmly in the mind, and Rob Dickinson's unusual throaty and plaintive vocals were different from anything I'd ever heard. I don't think I heard the term "shoegaze" until much later. Here's the opening track from Ferment, "Texture":

On the other hand, according to my personal idea of shoegaze, #9 on Pitchfork's list does not even fit the category--not as a whole, anyway, though several songs do. It's hard rock, though without the bluesy flavor that's typical of the music that falls into that category. Some species of "alternative" or "indie" rock, of a pretty hard-hitting sort, maybe. And if obscured vocals are a defining characteristic of shoegaze, neither of these albums fits.

"Texture" is certainly loud, but it has some of that dreamy quality. The first track on Chrome, however, "Kill Rhythm," is not just loud but aggressive, with an angry edge (at least). "Texture" begins "Safe on the shore I've been sleeping." The first words of "Kill Rhythm" are "I want to fire a gun--show me." 

Chrome is an excellent album, whether or not I think it should be called shoegaze. But apart from that question I still prefer Ferment. To my taste its songs, overall, are better. There are three or four tracks on Chrome that seem pretty lackluster to me. 

The title track of Ferment is one of my favorites. Among other things, it has a very striking, even shocking, dynamic contrast: a pretty little tune that suddenly erupts into crushing noise. I know, that hardly sounds like a pleasant experience, but I like the effect. I kept thinking that the pretty part reminded me of something, some psychedelic thing from the '60s, and I finally realized the something was the live tracks from Pink Floyd's Ummagumma. Not the music alone, but the lyrics and the atmosphere as well. 

There's a very, very brief warning that the noise is coming, a sort of buzzing or squealing, maybe something that happens when some effect is turned on. If you listen to this be a little cautious with the volume.

AllMusic describes Catherine Wheel's music as a "dark, hard-edged brand of noise pop"--not as succinct a description as "shoegaze," but more accurate. Both these albums were released in the first half of the '90s, and were the group's first. By the end of the decade they had released three more proper albums and broken up. I'm familiar with only one of that three, Adam and Eve. It's a rather different thing, more varied than either Chrome or Ferment, and at times going off in a very different direction. I definitely wouldn't call it, on the whole, shoegaze. AMG says it's

...greatly influenced by Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock. So it's significant that Talk Talk's Tim Friese-Greene, who'd already produced Ferment and played on Happy Days, was called in again to play keyboards and ended up playing a major role in the album's sound, along with vaunted Pink Floyd producer Bob Ezrin

If you know those two Talk Talk albums, don't seek out this one hoping for something similar. I only heard that at a few points. But the comparison does suggest something serious and worth hearing, which I think it is.

Back in the first paragraph I mentioned the potential overlap between shoegaze and metal. There are in fact several (at least) bands who attempt to blend them, or have wandered back and forth between them. The one I'm most familiar with is a French group--mainly just one person who started out in black metal--called Alcest: "A dynamic Fench post-metal/blackgaze group strongly influenced by the British shoegaze movement." (AMG) How's that for a genre spec?

Don't be uneasy about listening to and watching this video; there is nothing of black metal at all in it.

I really haven't heard that much of them, and I'd like to. Too much music, too little time....