Friday, November 04, 2005
A night off (sort of) ...
I've got to hunker down with Anne Rice's new novel tonight, so I can ask her some intelligent questions Tuesday afternoon. And I got home late, so not much in the way of a post tonight. But one little note: Borrowed from my colleague David Stearns today a collection of CDs called The Sammy Davis Jr. Story. I borrowed it because I found it included the studio version of Davis singing the Anthony Newley/Leslie Bricusse song "What Kind of Fool Am I?" from Stop the World I Want to Get Off. It's the best version of it that anyone has ever done. And there is much else besides by a guy who, in addition to having some the greatest pipes ever, was just spectacularly talented.
Thursday, November 03, 2005
A curious (and pleasant) surprise ...
A couple of years ago I wrote a little essay about what constituted success in poetry. My point was that if you succeed in writing a couple of poems that are widely and routinely anthologized you are in a very select group of poets and, as such, a success in the field. I now realize that in the age of the Internet this notion may have to be modified. I recently found that a poem of mine called "Craft Warnings," which was published a few years ago in First Things, can be found on the Net. But one of the places it can be found intrigues me. I'm not even sure I know what Supernating Superdudes is. So I was both surprised and pleased when I found that someone there who goes by the name of Dragon *Etain* had posted my poem here (you have to scroll down to find it) -- and in a particular context to boot. I like the idea of the poem being out there adrift in cyberspace. Supernating Superdudes seems a youthful undertaking and I'm glad the poem is reaching whoever the people are who frequent the site.
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
Writing a review ...
Once again, I haven't much time, but -- since one of the points of this blog is to give a look at what goes on behind the scenes in my professional life -- I thought I'd write briefly about my latest experience of writing a review for my Sunday column. The book I reviewed for this coming Sunday is Daniel Hoffman's Makes You Stop and Think, a collection of sonnets written over the past 50 years.
After I blogged last night, I set about reviewing it. I had what I thought was a good lead, but then I got stuck. I knew what I wanted to say, but couldn't quite figure out how to say it, especially since nowadays there is premium on space and whatever you say you have to say as economically as possible. So, after trying on thing and then another, I took a long walk -- and things started to sort themselves out in my mind. By the time I got home, I was able to wtite the next few paragraphs. And then, as Pepys would say, to bed.
But if you start writing before you retire you are likely to have a restless night: The writing continues even while you sleep it seems. When you sleep, because you wake up often with ideas drifting through your head.
What made this book so hard to review is that it is so good. Good reviews are much harder to write than bad ones. If you don't like a book, there are usually any number of ways of taking aim and firing. But to get across why a book is good demands that you be as precise as you can -- and there's that problem of space: You can't begin to be thorough.
At any rate, I returned to the review at various times throughout the day and finished it this afternoon. Now, you would think that such a piecemeal approach would lead to something choppy. Actually, it turned out rather well, if I do say so myself, and Jeff Weinstein, my editor, seemed to get through it quicj=kly and easily.
And so, though I've had a long and difficult day, I also have a sense of accomplishment. Now I have to settle in with the next book I'm reviewing: Anne Rice's Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt.
After I blogged last night, I set about reviewing it. I had what I thought was a good lead, but then I got stuck. I knew what I wanted to say, but couldn't quite figure out how to say it, especially since nowadays there is premium on space and whatever you say you have to say as economically as possible. So, after trying on thing and then another, I took a long walk -- and things started to sort themselves out in my mind. By the time I got home, I was able to wtite the next few paragraphs. And then, as Pepys would say, to bed.
But if you start writing before you retire you are likely to have a restless night: The writing continues even while you sleep it seems. When you sleep, because you wake up often with ideas drifting through your head.
What made this book so hard to review is that it is so good. Good reviews are much harder to write than bad ones. If you don't like a book, there are usually any number of ways of taking aim and firing. But to get across why a book is good demands that you be as precise as you can -- and there's that problem of space: You can't begin to be thorough.
At any rate, I returned to the review at various times throughout the day and finished it this afternoon. Now, you would think that such a piecemeal approach would lead to something choppy. Actually, it turned out rather well, if I do say so myself, and Jeff Weinstein, my editor, seemed to get through it quicj=kly and easily.
And so, though I've had a long and difficult day, I also have a sense of accomplishment. Now I have to settle in with the next book I'm reviewing: Anne Rice's Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt.
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
A cool site ...
Learned today about a blog I didn't know about, Jerry Jazz Musician, which offers lots of things besides jazz -- though jazz will do. Being a Bobby Darin fan, I especially enjoyed this interview with David Evanier, author of Roman Candle: The Life of Bobby Darin.
Monday, October 31, 2005
A great, great poet ...
Little time -- and energy -- to blog tonight (I have a review to work on), but the day cannot end without acknowledging that on this date in 1795 John Keats was born. As much as any poet Keats got me interested in poetry. Few have ever been more adept at turning language into music ("Yet would I on this very midnight cease,/And the world's gaudy ensigns see in shreds..."). Here is a nice site dedicated to him. And here is one of my favorites among his poems:
To Sleep
O SOFT embalmer of the still midnight!
Shutting with careful fingers and benign
Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower'd from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine;
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close,
In midst of this thine hymn, my willing eyes,
Or wait the amen, ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities;
Then save me, or the passèd day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes;
Save me from curious conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oilèd wards,
And seal the hushèd casket of my soul.
To Sleep
O SOFT embalmer of the still midnight!
Shutting with careful fingers and benign
Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower'd from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine;
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close,
In midst of this thine hymn, my willing eyes,
Or wait the amen, ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities;
Then save me, or the passèd day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes;
Save me from curious conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oilèd wards,
And seal the hushèd casket of my soul.
Sunday, October 30, 2005
Elites, experts and the like ...
The other day, in the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan had a piece about our "elites" making "A Separate Peace". Today Glenn Reynolds links here and here to commentaries on Noonan's piece.
I admire Peggy Noonan immensely, but I tend to agree with much of what Phil Bowermaster and Justin Katz have to say in response. The "experts" the maninstream media has come to rely on tend to be experts in ... commentary and little else. As Katz points out it was genuine experts in typography that put the lie to Dan Rather's fake documents. And asI have suggested here, much public discourse these days has to do with the "meaning" of something without any real reference to what was said in the first place. I listened the other night to a blogger on a panel bloviate about the mainstream media's complicity in the administration's "lies" about WMDs. Well, I can be as critical of the MSM as anyone, but I'm sorry: U.S., British, Israeli, French, German, and Russian intelligence all indicated that Iraq had WMDs. Iraq had used WMDs twice -- against Iran and against the Kurds. Hans Blix wanted more time look for WMDs because ... he suspected they were there. Even the fact that they have not been found does not in itself demonstrate that they were not there. After all, the reason people hide things is to keep them from being found. But even if we grant that they were not there, that would only indicate that all the experts in this matter were wrong, not that anyone lied.
Which brings me to a point I have been meaning to get at for a while regarding th level of public discourse. Calling mistakes lies is bad, to be sure, and lowers the level of discourse. But there are more fundamental problems in this regard: the failure to define terms, for instance, which one sees all the time in the Darwinism/Inteligent Design debate (such as it is). Evolution and Darwinism are not equivalent terms; neither are intelligent design and creationism. More and more, arguments tend to be framed incorrectly. The Inquirer recently had something devoted to "What If." What it amounted to was a collection of counterfactual conditionals (which, as Umberto Eco has pointed out, always lead to correct conclusions, precisely because the propositions themselves are false -- running, as they do, counter to fact). Time and again, in public discourse, correlation is presented as causation and weak correlation as strong. If the media spent more time dispassionately sorting out the faulty argumentation that takes place frequently on both sides of any debate -- rather than taking sides in any of them, however covertly (in fact, especially covertly) -- it would perform a public service consumers might well find indispensible.
I admire Peggy Noonan immensely, but I tend to agree with much of what Phil Bowermaster and Justin Katz have to say in response. The "experts" the maninstream media has come to rely on tend to be experts in ... commentary and little else. As Katz points out it was genuine experts in typography that put the lie to Dan Rather's fake documents. And asI have suggested here, much public discourse these days has to do with the "meaning" of something without any real reference to what was said in the first place. I listened the other night to a blogger on a panel bloviate about the mainstream media's complicity in the administration's "lies" about WMDs. Well, I can be as critical of the MSM as anyone, but I'm sorry: U.S., British, Israeli, French, German, and Russian intelligence all indicated that Iraq had WMDs. Iraq had used WMDs twice -- against Iran and against the Kurds. Hans Blix wanted more time look for WMDs because ... he suspected they were there. Even the fact that they have not been found does not in itself demonstrate that they were not there. After all, the reason people hide things is to keep them from being found. But even if we grant that they were not there, that would only indicate that all the experts in this matter were wrong, not that anyone lied.
Which brings me to a point I have been meaning to get at for a while regarding th level of public discourse. Calling mistakes lies is bad, to be sure, and lowers the level of discourse. But there are more fundamental problems in this regard: the failure to define terms, for instance, which one sees all the time in the Darwinism/Inteligent Design debate (such as it is). Evolution and Darwinism are not equivalent terms; neither are intelligent design and creationism. More and more, arguments tend to be framed incorrectly. The Inquirer recently had something devoted to "What If." What it amounted to was a collection of counterfactual conditionals (which, as Umberto Eco has pointed out, always lead to correct conclusions, precisely because the propositions themselves are false -- running, as they do, counter to fact). Time and again, in public discourse, correlation is presented as causation and weak correlation as strong. If the media spent more time dispassionately sorting out the faulty argumentation that takes place frequently on both sides of any debate -- rather than taking sides in any of them, however covertly (in fact, especially covertly) -- it would perform a public service consumers might well find indispensible.
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Ponderings and questions ...
The Guardian recently published some excerpts from Robert Winston's forthcoming book, The Story of God.
I don't know about the book as a whole, but the excerpts seemed to me to raise more questions than were answered.
Take, for instance, the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity. The intrincically religious regard religion as an end in itself, the extrinically religious accept it as a social convention. Winston cites a study suggesting that the latter are more susceptible to mental and emotional disorders than the former. He then tackles the notion of religion as an advantageous adaptation in human evolution. Specifically, he cites David Sloan Wilson's thesis that "religiosity emerged as a 'useful' genetic trait because it had the effect of making social groups more unified. The communal nature of religion certainly would have given groups of hunter-gatherers a stronger sense of togetherness." But that sounds like extrinsic religiosity to me, which isn't the variety that offers the advantages. (If the communitarian aspect of religion is what makes it advantageous for survival, this is likely to be the result of a a genuine commitment to the faith. The communal attachment minus the commitment would probably not have such an effect. In other words, if relgion does have an adaptive advantage, it must derive from genuine belief, not superficial assent.)
Winston also cites the study of identical twins that suggested there may be something genetic about religious sensibility. But while genetics may serve to explain why identical twins, separated at birth and raised by parents with vastly different outlooks, end up having the same outlook themselves, what explains identical twins who don't end up having similar outlooks?
I certainly think there is a difference between those who regard religion as a social convention, and accordingly go to church, and those who experience God as a living presence in their lives. I also think that what has really bothered many Catholics about the sex abuse scandals in the Church is the suspicion that members of the hierarchy may be more loyal to the Church than to God -- or, what may be worse, draw no distinction between the two.
Finally, there is what Winston quotes from Richard Dawkins:
"Religious behaviour in bipedal apes occupies large quantities of time. It devours huge resources. A medieval cathedral consumed hundreds of man-centuries in its building. Sacred music and devotional paintings largely monopolised medieval and Renaissance talent. Thousands, perhaps millions, of people have died, often accepting torture first, for loyalty to one religion against a scarcely distinguishable alternative. Devout people have died for their gods, killed for them, fasted for them, endured whipping, undertaken a lifetime of celibacy, and sworn themselves to asocial silence for the sake of religion."
I wonder how the Apostle of Darwinism explains this singularly maladaptive behavior and how it has managed to survive and indeed flourish.
I don't know about the book as a whole, but the excerpts seemed to me to raise more questions than were answered.
Take, for instance, the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity. The intrincically religious regard religion as an end in itself, the extrinically religious accept it as a social convention. Winston cites a study suggesting that the latter are more susceptible to mental and emotional disorders than the former. He then tackles the notion of religion as an advantageous adaptation in human evolution. Specifically, he cites David Sloan Wilson's thesis that "religiosity emerged as a 'useful' genetic trait because it had the effect of making social groups more unified. The communal nature of religion certainly would have given groups of hunter-gatherers a stronger sense of togetherness." But that sounds like extrinsic religiosity to me, which isn't the variety that offers the advantages. (If the communitarian aspect of religion is what makes it advantageous for survival, this is likely to be the result of a a genuine commitment to the faith. The communal attachment minus the commitment would probably not have such an effect. In other words, if relgion does have an adaptive advantage, it must derive from genuine belief, not superficial assent.)
Winston also cites the study of identical twins that suggested there may be something genetic about religious sensibility. But while genetics may serve to explain why identical twins, separated at birth and raised by parents with vastly different outlooks, end up having the same outlook themselves, what explains identical twins who don't end up having similar outlooks?
I certainly think there is a difference between those who regard religion as a social convention, and accordingly go to church, and those who experience God as a living presence in their lives. I also think that what has really bothered many Catholics about the sex abuse scandals in the Church is the suspicion that members of the hierarchy may be more loyal to the Church than to God -- or, what may be worse, draw no distinction between the two.
Finally, there is what Winston quotes from Richard Dawkins:
"Religious behaviour in bipedal apes occupies large quantities of time. It devours huge resources. A medieval cathedral consumed hundreds of man-centuries in its building. Sacred music and devotional paintings largely monopolised medieval and Renaissance talent. Thousands, perhaps millions, of people have died, often accepting torture first, for loyalty to one religion against a scarcely distinguishable alternative. Devout people have died for their gods, killed for them, fasted for them, endured whipping, undertaken a lifetime of celibacy, and sworn themselves to asocial silence for the sake of religion."
I wonder how the Apostle of Darwinism explains this singularly maladaptive behavior and how it has managed to survive and indeed flourish.
Friday, October 28, 2005
A touch of blogging ...
It has been a wearisome week at The Inquirer. There is a buyout offer on the table and quite a few people have signed up for it. People I have worked with for 20 years and more are planning to exit. And no one can really say for sure what things will be like when it's all over -- except that it won't be the same.
And so, after a couple of very long days, I shall confine my blogging to noting that on this day, in 1903, Evelyn Waugh was born. Here is a fine piece on him by George Weigel. And this, from my favorite among his novels, Brideshead Revisited, nicely summarizes how I have been feeling of late:
How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation, Dresden figures of pastoral gaiety! Our wisdom, we prefer to think, is all of our own gathering, while, if the truth be told, it is, most of it, the last coin of a legacy that dwindles with time.
And so, after a couple of very long days, I shall confine my blogging to noting that on this day, in 1903, Evelyn Waugh was born. Here is a fine piece on him by George Weigel. And this, from my favorite among his novels, Brideshead Revisited, nicely summarizes how I have been feeling of late:
How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation, Dresden figures of pastoral gaiety! Our wisdom, we prefer to think, is all of our own gathering, while, if the truth be told, it is, most of it, the last coin of a legacy that dwindles with time.
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Come to the Village (the East Village, that is) ...
Debra Matsumoto, publicity manager for North Atlantic Books, sent me an interesting email the other, which she gave me permission to share:
Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose was the brainchild of some freelance producers who love books. On Nov. 10, 9:30-11 pm, laundry and language will spin together at the Avenue C Laundromat, 69 Avenue C @ 5th St. in the heart of the East Village. Following a successful inaugural event with Legs McNeil and Sam Lipsyte in August, this second installment will feature Rob Brezsny, the syndicated astrology columnist for The Village Voice and Jungian beatnik, and fiction writer Kelly Link.
This format is urban multi-tasking genius and creative guerrilla bookselling for fly-over city centers where competition for attendance is the most challenging and competitive. For more information, please contact Emily Rubin, emrubin@earthlink.net; cell: 917.501.9825.
Too bad it's a Wednesday. Hard for me to get to Manhattan in the middle of the week. But it sure sounds interesting.
Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose was the brainchild of some freelance producers who love books. On Nov. 10, 9:30-11 pm, laundry and language will spin together at the Avenue C Laundromat, 69 Avenue C @ 5th St. in the heart of the East Village. Following a successful inaugural event with Legs McNeil and Sam Lipsyte in August, this second installment will feature Rob Brezsny, the syndicated astrology columnist for The Village Voice and Jungian beatnik, and fiction writer Kelly Link.
This format is urban multi-tasking genius and creative guerrilla bookselling for fly-over city centers where competition for attendance is the most challenging and competitive. For more information, please contact Emily Rubin, emrubin@earthlink.net; cell: 917.501.9825.
Too bad it's a Wednesday. Hard for me to get to Manhattan in the middle of the week. But it sure sounds interesting.
One more time ...?
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," wrote
George Santayana. This piece by Jonathan V. Last offers further evidence that Santayana was right. (Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily.
George Santayana. This piece by Jonathan V. Last offers further evidence that Santayana was right. (Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily.
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Taken to task (cont'd) ...
Oni Lasana, one of the email correspondents who was critical of the last line of my review on Sunday of Caryl Phillips's Dancing in the Dark, responded today to the answer I sent her and has given me permission to quote her. Here's what she wrote:
Hi Frank,
I'm surprised you wrote back in such detail to defend your review. Thanks. I understand all points you made, especially about human nature and the definition of shame. However in my experiences, human nature transends one's race.
To be quite frank, as a person of color, I still find your last line in the review to be a subliminal act of sabotage to the author and publisher of the book. What person of any color would want to read a book that will make them feel ashamed. In my humble opinion, the review was excellent, only the last line was in bad taste.
All the best...all the time~
Oni
This got me to thinking. Specifically, I began to think that Oni was right: I certainly didn't intend it -- in fact, it was the opposite of what I intended -- but that last line might very well turn potential readers off. I should have stuck to the fact of my response and not gone beyond it to a judgment about how others should respond. So I'm going to send out a changed version for the KRT wire and have the online version changed as well. I'll stick to how I felt and not tell others how to feel.
Thanks, Oni.
Hi Frank,
I'm surprised you wrote back in such detail to defend your review. Thanks. I understand all points you made, especially about human nature and the definition of shame. However in my experiences, human nature transends one's race.
To be quite frank, as a person of color, I still find your last line in the review to be a subliminal act of sabotage to the author and publisher of the book. What person of any color would want to read a book that will make them feel ashamed. In my humble opinion, the review was excellent, only the last line was in bad taste.
All the best...all the time~
Oni
This got me to thinking. Specifically, I began to think that Oni was right: I certainly didn't intend it -- in fact, it was the opposite of what I intended -- but that last line might very well turn potential readers off. I should have stuck to the fact of my response and not gone beyond it to a judgment about how others should respond. So I'm going to send out a changed version for the KRT wire and have the online version changed as well. I'll stick to how I felt and not tell others how to feel.
Thanks, Oni.
Monday, October 24, 2005
Taken to task ...
And now for another behind-the scenes glimpse in the life of a newspaper book review editor:
In my review yesterday of Caryl Phillips's novel Dancing in the Dark, based on the life of black entertainer Bert Williams, I had the temerity to write the following:
One would hope that an African American, reading this book, would feel compassion for its melancholy protagonist, trapped in a cultural double-bind. Any white American, reading it, ought to feel ashamed.
My colleague Michael Rozansky warned me that that final sentence might elicit some critical email. And so it did. I can't quote any of them -- there were five, I think -- because I don't have the writers' permission, but the gist of all of them seemed to be that the racism that existed in this country at the time was certainly deplorable but nothing that white Americans today need be ashamed of. I suggested to a couple of my correspondents that it would seem to me perfectly reasonable if a contemporary German felt ashamed over what happened in Germany during the Nazi era. So why shouldn't we be ashamed of our country's racism? I reminded another that the primary defintion of shame is "a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety." Accordingly, I think shame is an altogether appropriate emotional rsponse to certain things that have taken place in American society. Finally, I told all of them that I believed in a common human nature and a universal moral law and that decent people tend to find certain actions and attitudes shameful.
So far, none of my correspondents has written back.
In my review yesterday of Caryl Phillips's novel Dancing in the Dark, based on the life of black entertainer Bert Williams, I had the temerity to write the following:
One would hope that an African American, reading this book, would feel compassion for its melancholy protagonist, trapped in a cultural double-bind. Any white American, reading it, ought to feel ashamed.
My colleague Michael Rozansky warned me that that final sentence might elicit some critical email. And so it did. I can't quote any of them -- there were five, I think -- because I don't have the writers' permission, but the gist of all of them seemed to be that the racism that existed in this country at the time was certainly deplorable but nothing that white Americans today need be ashamed of. I suggested to a couple of my correspondents that it would seem to me perfectly reasonable if a contemporary German felt ashamed over what happened in Germany during the Nazi era. So why shouldn't we be ashamed of our country's racism? I reminded another that the primary defintion of shame is "a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety." Accordingly, I think shame is an altogether appropriate emotional rsponse to certain things that have taken place in American society. Finally, I told all of them that I believed in a common human nature and a universal moral law and that decent people tend to find certain actions and attitudes shameful.
So far, none of my correspondents has written back.
The trouble with experts (revisited) ...
Earlier this month I posted some thoughts about The trouble with experts in which I commented somewhat unfavorably on a column by George Will regarding the Harriet Miers nomination. I was interested to see that John Hinderaker of Power Line has an article in The Daily Standard that echoes some of my sentiments:
... there is no Constitutional requirement that Supreme Court justices be lawyers. It might well be good to have a non-lawyer or two on the Court. Such justices may not bring much value to issues of, say, bankruptcy law; but the Constitution is a straightforward document, intended to be read and understood by men and women of ordinary intelligence and experience. There is no reason why expositing that document should be solely the province of lawyers.
Harvard law professor Charles Fried also had an interesting article on the same subject in yesterday's Boston Globe.
But perhaps most interesting of all, at least from the point of view of taking Will to task, is this piece by Dafydd ab Hugh at Big Lizards Blog.
... there is no Constitutional requirement that Supreme Court justices be lawyers. It might well be good to have a non-lawyer or two on the Court. Such justices may not bring much value to issues of, say, bankruptcy law; but the Constitution is a straightforward document, intended to be read and understood by men and women of ordinary intelligence and experience. There is no reason why expositing that document should be solely the province of lawyers.
Harvard law professor Charles Fried also had an interesting article on the same subject in yesterday's Boston Globe.
But perhaps most interesting of all, at least from the point of view of taking Will to task, is this piece by Dafydd ab Hugh at Big Lizards Blog.
Sunday, October 23, 2005
Schools of evolution ...
In the Oct. 8 edition of the British magazine The Spectator, historian Paul Johnson made a most interesting point in a column headlined "Increasingly it is historians who have the answers in science" (available online only to subscribers). Here's the money quote:
Evolution is ... a matter of history. When biologists tell me, as a historian, to get off their turf, my reply is that I have at least as much right to be there as they do. No one disputes that the evolution of life forms took place. But how? Darwinian fundamentalists -- by which I mean those who claim natural selection is the sole and exclusive form of evolution -- have an obligation to produce a chronology showing how their theory fits into the chronology of life on earth. So far as I can see, it does not fit -- natural selection is too slow to be the evolutionary matrix in all cases. It is on this point that Darwinian theory crumbles. And it is a historical point. Clio knows best.
Please, before criticizing me -- or Johnson -- for espousing creationism, read that passage carefully. Note the phrases "sole and exclusive" and "all cases."
I noticed that, last week, at the trial taking place in Harrisburg regarding the Dover Area School District's requirement that students be made acquainted with intelligent design theory, biologist Michael Behe, author ofDarwin's Black Box, testified. I read Behe's book some years ago and interviewed Behe. The book, as I recall, was strictly about biology -- by which I mean there was no discussion of religion in it -- and Behe seemed a very reasonable fellow when I talked to him. I can't see why Behe's book wouldn't be suitable to a reading list for science students. But, presuming I'm wrong, and it wouldn't be appropriate, what about Evolution in Four Dimensions : Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life, by Eva Jablonka and Marion C. Lamb? This posits that not all evolutionary change can be attributed to selection among random genetic mutations; acquired changes, as well as induced changes, also play a part. If anyone out there catches a whiff of Lamarckianism, well, Jablonka and Lamb previously authored Epigenetic Inheritance and Evolution: The Lamarckian Dimension. And speaking of Lamarck, what about Lamarck's Signature : How Retrogenes Are Changing Darwin's Natural Selection Paradigm by Edward Steele, Robyn A. Lindley, and Robert V. Blanden? This shows how at the molecular level characteristics acquired by the immune system can be inherited.
If other factors, besides natural selection, can be shown to figure in the process of change known as evolution, that is something worth knowing. Or shall books such as these not be allowed in the classroom either, because they challenge what Johnson calls Darwinian orthodoxy? (None of these books, by the way, so far as I know, has any bearing on, or in any way makes a case for, intelligent design theory.)
Evolution is ... a matter of history. When biologists tell me, as a historian, to get off their turf, my reply is that I have at least as much right to be there as they do. No one disputes that the evolution of life forms took place. But how? Darwinian fundamentalists -- by which I mean those who claim natural selection is the sole and exclusive form of evolution -- have an obligation to produce a chronology showing how their theory fits into the chronology of life on earth. So far as I can see, it does not fit -- natural selection is too slow to be the evolutionary matrix in all cases. It is on this point that Darwinian theory crumbles. And it is a historical point. Clio knows best.
Please, before criticizing me -- or Johnson -- for espousing creationism, read that passage carefully. Note the phrases "sole and exclusive" and "all cases."
I noticed that, last week, at the trial taking place in Harrisburg regarding the Dover Area School District's requirement that students be made acquainted with intelligent design theory, biologist Michael Behe, author ofDarwin's Black Box, testified. I read Behe's book some years ago and interviewed Behe. The book, as I recall, was strictly about biology -- by which I mean there was no discussion of religion in it -- and Behe seemed a very reasonable fellow when I talked to him. I can't see why Behe's book wouldn't be suitable to a reading list for science students. But, presuming I'm wrong, and it wouldn't be appropriate, what about Evolution in Four Dimensions : Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life, by Eva Jablonka and Marion C. Lamb? This posits that not all evolutionary change can be attributed to selection among random genetic mutations; acquired changes, as well as induced changes, also play a part. If anyone out there catches a whiff of Lamarckianism, well, Jablonka and Lamb previously authored Epigenetic Inheritance and Evolution: The Lamarckian Dimension. And speaking of Lamarck, what about Lamarck's Signature : How Retrogenes Are Changing Darwin's Natural Selection Paradigm by Edward Steele, Robyn A. Lindley, and Robert V. Blanden? This shows how at the molecular level characteristics acquired by the immune system can be inherited.
If other factors, besides natural selection, can be shown to figure in the process of change known as evolution, that is something worth knowing. Or shall books such as these not be allowed in the classroom either, because they challenge what Johnson calls Darwinian orthodoxy? (None of these books, by the way, so far as I know, has any bearing on, or in any way makes a case for, intelligent design theory.)
Saturday, October 22, 2005
More about self-publishing ...
This past summer, my colleague Tanya Barrientos wrote an excellent piece about the explosion in self-publishing. Scores of thousands of books are being published every year through iUniverse, Xlibris (which is part-owned by Random House, which guarantees that any book published by Xlibris that sells a certain number of copies will be referred to a Random House acquisitions editor), and AuthorHouse. It is not only possible, it is altogether likely that at least some of these books are as good as anything brought out by commercial publishers. Michael Hoeye's Time Stops for No Mouse was originally self-published. So was Leaves of Grass. The problem is finding out which, among all those that are out there, are the ones worth paying some attention to.
Xerox Corp. came up with a promising idea recently: an Aspiring Authors Contest. There were more than 250 entries and the judges were well-respected critics: Maureen Corrigan of National Public Radio and Emily Chenoweth, fiction editor of Publishers Weekly. I blogged about the contest here and here. The latter post announced that Tanya -- who has written a couple of well-regarded novels herself -- had agreed to review the winner, Barbara Ghosh's Tenure Track to Mommyville.
Well, Tanya gave it her best shot, but said she felt it wouldn't be a good idea to review the book in The Inquirer. She explained why in an email (which she has given me permission to quote in full here):
The romance of do-it-yourself publishing is irresistable to anyone who loves fairy tales. Or to anyone who's ever labored over a novel in obscurity, daydreaming of the moment their hard work will be discovered and - poof!- they become the prince or princess of the publishing world.
I like happy endings as much as anybody else, which is why I came to Tenure Track to Mommyville, a self-published novel by Barbara Grosh, with great expectations. After all, it was chosen by Maureen Corrigan, the widely respected book critic for National Public Radio, and Emily Chenoweth of Publishers Weekly, and as the winner of a national contest staged by Xerox Corporation to find true talent in the slush bucket of print-on-demand titles.
The main character is Elaine Barlow, an economics professor who did not get tenure and has found herself transitioning into the life of a stay-at-home-mom. Her husband, a veterinarian, is resentful. She is unsure of her ability to mother well, and is certain she's lost her intellectual edge.
In the publicity material, Corrigan is quoted as calling the novel "a picture of the trials and tribulations of 21st century motherhood."
But a well-crafted picture it's not. The story is serviceable, as is the prose. But there was nothing about Mommyville that made me think the self-publishing world is bubbling with undiscovered gold.
The narrative read too much like non-fiction. It dragged and wandered and employed dialogue that didn't sound natural. So much for fairy tales.
I haven't read Ghosh's book myself, but I trust Tanya's judgment. The key observation in her email is that "the narrative read too much like non-fiction." There are plenty of autobiographical novels out there -- D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, all of Thomas Wolfe's novels, and all of Henry Miller's. Miller's are worth considering in this context, because he invented little -- but he exaggerated a lot: he turned his life into a burlesque. My point is that for a novel to work the author has to do more than transcribe the details of his or her life and just change the names of persons and places. There has to be a powerful imaginative element.
Ghosh has plenty to be proud of. It's not easy to write a book. It takes time and effort amd perseverence. She should keep at it and I hope she does. In the meantime I'm going to continue paying as much attention as I can to what is going on with all this self-publishing.
Xerox Corp. came up with a promising idea recently: an Aspiring Authors Contest. There were more than 250 entries and the judges were well-respected critics: Maureen Corrigan of National Public Radio and Emily Chenoweth, fiction editor of Publishers Weekly. I blogged about the contest here and here. The latter post announced that Tanya -- who has written a couple of well-regarded novels herself -- had agreed to review the winner, Barbara Ghosh's Tenure Track to Mommyville.
Well, Tanya gave it her best shot, but said she felt it wouldn't be a good idea to review the book in The Inquirer. She explained why in an email (which she has given me permission to quote in full here):
The romance of do-it-yourself publishing is irresistable to anyone who loves fairy tales. Or to anyone who's ever labored over a novel in obscurity, daydreaming of the moment their hard work will be discovered and - poof!- they become the prince or princess of the publishing world.
I like happy endings as much as anybody else, which is why I came to Tenure Track to Mommyville, a self-published novel by Barbara Grosh, with great expectations. After all, it was chosen by Maureen Corrigan, the widely respected book critic for National Public Radio, and Emily Chenoweth of Publishers Weekly, and as the winner of a national contest staged by Xerox Corporation to find true talent in the slush bucket of print-on-demand titles.
The main character is Elaine Barlow, an economics professor who did not get tenure and has found herself transitioning into the life of a stay-at-home-mom. Her husband, a veterinarian, is resentful. She is unsure of her ability to mother well, and is certain she's lost her intellectual edge.
In the publicity material, Corrigan is quoted as calling the novel "a picture of the trials and tribulations of 21st century motherhood."
But a well-crafted picture it's not. The story is serviceable, as is the prose. But there was nothing about Mommyville that made me think the self-publishing world is bubbling with undiscovered gold.
The narrative read too much like non-fiction. It dragged and wandered and employed dialogue that didn't sound natural. So much for fairy tales.
I haven't read Ghosh's book myself, but I trust Tanya's judgment. The key observation in her email is that "the narrative read too much like non-fiction." There are plenty of autobiographical novels out there -- D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, all of Thomas Wolfe's novels, and all of Henry Miller's. Miller's are worth considering in this context, because he invented little -- but he exaggerated a lot: he turned his life into a burlesque. My point is that for a novel to work the author has to do more than transcribe the details of his or her life and just change the names of persons and places. There has to be a powerful imaginative element.
Ghosh has plenty to be proud of. It's not easy to write a book. It takes time and effort amd perseverence. She should keep at it and I hope she does. In the meantime I'm going to continue paying as much attention as I can to what is going on with all this self-publishing.
Back to blogging (again) ...
The book I am currently reading for review, Henry Hitchings's Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary contains a sentence that goes far to explain my absence from the blogopshere this past week:
[Johnson's] thoughts on the nature of writing convey the impression that he considered it something to set oneself to 'doggedly', to persevere at, to achieve 'by slow degrees'.
I would extend this to include literary and journalistic endeavor generally: Writing, editing, and research have their pleasures to be sure, but they also involve a lot of plain hard work, much of it singularly unexciting. I took the week before last off (and was able to do a good bit of blogging as a result). When I returned to work, though, I was faced with an office that had accumulated a week's load of books and galleys, which needed to be sorted and shelved. There was also a week's worth of email and snail mail. And there were, of course, reviews and articles to be edited and moved to the copy desk, meetings to attend, etc., etc.
Luckily, I had some help. Kevin McManmon, one of The Inquirer's dwindling number of editorial assistants, was assigned to lend a hand -- and that helped mightily. So by week's end everything was pretty much back in order. But it was a week of long days -- and I had some events to attend several nights as well. Finally, my home office needed some attention too, which it got yesterday.
In short, now that order has been restored, I can resume blogging.
I mention all this because, first, this blog is supposed to give a behind-the-scenes glimpse at what it's like to be a newspaper book review editor and, second, it's useful to remember that writing, painting, sculpting, composing and the like are not always glamorous undertakings. They have more than their fair share of drudgery and success in them, however modest, comes from going at them with a will.
[Johnson's] thoughts on the nature of writing convey the impression that he considered it something to set oneself to 'doggedly', to persevere at, to achieve 'by slow degrees'.
I would extend this to include literary and journalistic endeavor generally: Writing, editing, and research have their pleasures to be sure, but they also involve a lot of plain hard work, much of it singularly unexciting. I took the week before last off (and was able to do a good bit of blogging as a result). When I returned to work, though, I was faced with an office that had accumulated a week's load of books and galleys, which needed to be sorted and shelved. There was also a week's worth of email and snail mail. And there were, of course, reviews and articles to be edited and moved to the copy desk, meetings to attend, etc., etc.
Luckily, I had some help. Kevin McManmon, one of The Inquirer's dwindling number of editorial assistants, was assigned to lend a hand -- and that helped mightily. So by week's end everything was pretty much back in order. But it was a week of long days -- and I had some events to attend several nights as well. Finally, my home office needed some attention too, which it got yesterday.
In short, now that order has been restored, I can resume blogging.
I mention all this because, first, this blog is supposed to give a behind-the-scenes glimpse at what it's like to be a newspaper book review editor and, second, it's useful to remember that writing, painting, sculpting, composing and the like are not always glamorous undertakings. They have more than their fair share of drudgery and success in them, however modest, comes from going at them with a will.
Sunday, October 16, 2005
More Ibsen ...
Last night, my wife and I went to see Ibsen's The Lady From the Sea in a production at the Lantern Theater Company. The production was quite good, and the play is the only Ibsen play I can think of that has a happy ending (Peer Gynt does, too, in a way, but it's ambiguous). It is, however, a transitional work and so not entirely satisfying. Ibsen took a big step in it away from purely social drama and toward symbolic drama (but he retreated a bit with his next, Hedda Gabler). One of the interesting things about the play is that Hilda Wangel, who fatefully visits Solness, the title character in The Master Builder (which we saw Wednesday in New York), appears as a young girl, apparently before her initial encounter with Solness. It is clearly the same character, though. It is not at all surprising that this little girl would grow up to be the character in The Master Builder (of course, we get to know her family background as well).
The important theme in The Lady From the Sea is that love must be unconditional and that the one who loves must grant the beloved freedom, even if that freedom entails the loss of the beloved. Once again I was reminded of how far above most contemporary dramatists Ibsen towers. He thought originally, powerfully, and was never in thrall to fashionable ideas or poses.
The important theme in The Lady From the Sea is that love must be unconditional and that the one who loves must grant the beloved freedom, even if that freedom entails the loss of the beloved. Once again I was reminded of how far above most contemporary dramatists Ibsen towers. He thought originally, powerfully, and was never in thrall to fashionable ideas or poses.
Saturday, October 15, 2005
The essay revisited ...
In August, commenting on a post of mine -- Exploring the mind ..., Melville Goodwin cited Joseph Epstein as a worthy, contemporary counterpart to Montaigne. In last week's edition of The Weekly Standard, Epstein had a piece titled "The Culture of Celebrity" that goes a long way to support Melville's claim. A key paragraph:
Far from being devoted to ideas for their own sake, the intellectual equivalent of art for art's sake, the so-called public intellectual of our day is usually someone who comments on what is in the news, in the hope of affecting policy, or events, or opinion in line with his own political position, or orientation. He isn't necessarily an intellectual at all, but merely someone who has read a few books, mastered a style, a jargon, and a maven's authoritative tone, and has a clearly demarcated political line.
But, as Glenn Reynolds would say, read the whole thing. (Hats off to the indispensible Arts & Letters Daily.
Far from being devoted to ideas for their own sake, the intellectual equivalent of art for art's sake, the so-called public intellectual of our day is usually someone who comments on what is in the news, in the hope of affecting policy, or events, or opinion in line with his own political position, or orientation. He isn't necessarily an intellectual at all, but merely someone who has read a few books, mastered a style, a jargon, and a maven's authoritative tone, and has a clearly demarcated political line.
But, as Glenn Reynolds would say, read the whole thing. (Hats off to the indispensible Arts & Letters Daily.
Friday, October 14, 2005
Putting my foot in it again ...
A couple of weeks ago, my colleague Carlin Romano wrote an excellent review of Michael Ruse's The Evolution-Creation Struggle.
In the meantime, in the hinterlands of Pennsylvania, a court case is proceeding having to do with whether or not it is permissible to teach intelligent-design theory in public schools. There has been much in The Inquirer about this case, though I confess to having read very little of it. But a thought occurred to me yesterday that may be pertinent (then again, it may be impertinent): The subtitle of Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker is "Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design." Dawkins's book, presumably, is meant as a work of science. It is therefore advancing as a scientific notion the thesis that evolution (at least in its neo-Darwinian version) is proof that the universe has not been designed. How widely is this thesis accepted among scientists, I wonder. And whether widely accepted or not, could such a book be taught in a public school? It is, after all, advancing a thesis regarding nature and design.
In the meantime, in the hinterlands of Pennsylvania, a court case is proceeding having to do with whether or not it is permissible to teach intelligent-design theory in public schools. There has been much in The Inquirer about this case, though I confess to having read very little of it. But a thought occurred to me yesterday that may be pertinent (then again, it may be impertinent): The subtitle of Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker is "Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design." Dawkins's book, presumably, is meant as a work of science. It is therefore advancing as a scientific notion the thesis that evolution (at least in its neo-Darwinian version) is proof that the universe has not been designed. How widely is this thesis accepted among scientists, I wonder. And whether widely accepted or not, could such a book be taught in a public school? It is, after all, advancing a thesis regarding nature and design.
Another playwright ...
Harold Pinter has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I can't say I've ever been much of a fan myself. Pinter's work has always struck me as a leaden amalgam of the pretentious and the boring. Since there are accolades galore, let's, for variety's sake, take a look at the the dissenters. Here's Roger Kimball. And here's J. Bottum.
But to be fair, here, from the right, is also a defense.
What is most annoying about this award is that the Swedes continue to ignore the first-rate in their midst, namely, Torgny Lindgren. As for American writers who deserve it, I'll stick with Elmore Leonard.
But to be fair, here, from the right, is also a defense.
What is most annoying about this award is that the Swedes continue to ignore the first-rate in their midst, namely, Torgny Lindgren. As for American writers who deserve it, I'll stick with Elmore Leonard.
Thursday, October 13, 2005
Afternoon at the theater ...
I am on vacation this week and yesterday my wife and I traveled to Manhattan to see a fine production of Henrik Ibsen's great play The Master Builder at The Pearl Theatre Company in the East Village. If you feel starved, as I often do, for real drama, classical drama -- as opposed to the ax-grinding sermonettes so many theaters seem compelled to stage -- then consider a subscription to this company. My wife and I sure are: Following the Ibsen run, they'll be staging plays by Wycherley (The Gentleman Dancing Master), Euripides (Hecuba), Shakespeare (Measure for Measure) and Schiller (Mary Stuart).
The weather made traveling less than pleasant yesterday, but it was worth it, the play was so well done, perfectly paced and without any cutesy-pie contemporary spin (a very smart move -- Ibsen wasn't just ahead of his own time; he looks as if he's even ahead of ours).
The actors all have a sound grasp of their parts, so the ensemble work is excellent. But it's the three central roles -- Halvard Solness, the master builder; Aline, his wife; and Hilda Wangel, the young woman who fatefully re-enters his life -- who give this play its strange power, and Dan Daily as Solness, Robin Leslie Brown as Aline, and Michele Vazquez as Hilda are fully up to their tasks. Brown is both chilling and heartbreaking as a woman whose very soul has been paralyzed by grief. The scene where she tells Hilda of her dolls -- destroyed in the fire that destroyed the house she grew up in, and which she still played with even after her marriage to Solness -- is touching and wrenching at the same time. As for Vazquez, she brings just the right measure of coquettish passion to what is a very ambiguous role. It's certainly easy to believe she could inspire an aging architect to risk his life to please and impress her. Then there's Solness: Daily captures not only his confident charm and ruthless imperiousness, but also the insecurity beneath the pluck. But he captures something more: the terror that lies at the heart of this man's existential drama. When Solness tells Hilda of what really went on that day she saw him place a wreath -- for the first and only time -- at the topmost point of the building -- a church -- that he had just finished, it is really scary: Solness has defied God -- and has been pursued by Him ever since. So Hilda is a kind of angel -- and an angel is messenger from God.
I could go on on and on about The Master Builder, which I first read in college, but had never seen staged until yesterday. When I first read it, I was a young man with artistic aspirations; now I'm an aging man with no illusions, and few aspirations left. Seeing it had a strange effect on me, which I will have to mull a bit before I get a handle on it -- if I can get a handle on it.
Saturday night, my wife and I are going to see another Ibsen play: The Lady From the Sea. This was the first of Ibsen's late plays, in which symbolism became an integral part of his work. Interestingly, Hilda Wangel is one of the characters in The Lady From the Sea. So I'll get to see what she was like as a child.
The weather made traveling less than pleasant yesterday, but it was worth it, the play was so well done, perfectly paced and without any cutesy-pie contemporary spin (a very smart move -- Ibsen wasn't just ahead of his own time; he looks as if he's even ahead of ours).
The actors all have a sound grasp of their parts, so the ensemble work is excellent. But it's the three central roles -- Halvard Solness, the master builder; Aline, his wife; and Hilda Wangel, the young woman who fatefully re-enters his life -- who give this play its strange power, and Dan Daily as Solness, Robin Leslie Brown as Aline, and Michele Vazquez as Hilda are fully up to their tasks. Brown is both chilling and heartbreaking as a woman whose very soul has been paralyzed by grief. The scene where she tells Hilda of her dolls -- destroyed in the fire that destroyed the house she grew up in, and which she still played with even after her marriage to Solness -- is touching and wrenching at the same time. As for Vazquez, she brings just the right measure of coquettish passion to what is a very ambiguous role. It's certainly easy to believe she could inspire an aging architect to risk his life to please and impress her. Then there's Solness: Daily captures not only his confident charm and ruthless imperiousness, but also the insecurity beneath the pluck. But he captures something more: the terror that lies at the heart of this man's existential drama. When Solness tells Hilda of what really went on that day she saw him place a wreath -- for the first and only time -- at the topmost point of the building -- a church -- that he had just finished, it is really scary: Solness has defied God -- and has been pursued by Him ever since. So Hilda is a kind of angel -- and an angel is messenger from God.
I could go on on and on about The Master Builder, which I first read in college, but had never seen staged until yesterday. When I first read it, I was a young man with artistic aspirations; now I'm an aging man with no illusions, and few aspirations left. Seeing it had a strange effect on me, which I will have to mull a bit before I get a handle on it -- if I can get a handle on it.
Saturday night, my wife and I are going to see another Ibsen play: The Lady From the Sea. This was the first of Ibsen's late plays, in which symbolism became an integral part of his work. Interestingly, Hilda Wangel is one of the characters in The Lady From the Sea. So I'll get to see what she was like as a child.
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
Letter from Dublin (1)
Katie Haegele, who filled in for me here briefly this past summer, and who reviews young adult books -- and much else besides -- for The Inquirer, has flown to Dublin to matriculate at University College, Joyce's alma mater. I asked her to send me a letter from time to time, commenting on what she observes of the literary scene there. Here is her first:
This Modern Life: A Dublin Diary
Hello Inqy readers! I’m writing to you from a tiny
cottage in Dublin. The house I’m staying in
is just outside the city center in an old
working-class neighborhood, nestled in a row
of what they call workers' houses — teensy,
one-story stucco joints that Guinness built for its
employees in the 1880s. Think Roddy Doyle in South
Philly.
Ostensibly I’m in here to study toward a master’s
degree in modern English literature. But between me
and you, I’m also here for the experience. The
experience of living in a foreign country on my own,
of finding out how much of my personal perspective has
been culturally determined, of learning how to buy
rounds and remain standing after they’ve all been
drained. So while it’s true that I’ve been living it
up since I got here, my out-of-classroom experiences
are proving to be about as literary — and definitely as
modern — as anything on my reading list.
Last week I heard a talk given by Declan Kiberd, the
chair of the Anglo-Irish Department at University
College Dublin. He spoke eloquently, and with energy
and a refreshing directness, on James Joyce’s Ulysses and what he called the “common culture.” Ulysses is
the quintessential modern novel in many ways, of
course, not the least of which was its then-shocking,
God-is-a-shout-in-the-street sense of secularism. But
Kiberd went on to say that modernism itself was a
village phenomenon — that Joyce wanted to maintain the
sense of community they’d enjoyed in the old days
(after first chucking any residual provincialism and
ignorance). Ulysses was both a celebration and an
epitaph of the culture that produced it, Kiberd said,
because it chronicled everyday human interactions in a
city that, by the time the book was published in the
1920s, would no longer be the kind of place where
people went out strolling just to see who they might
run into for a chat.
I know Kiberd is right. Dublin has changed
dramatically over the last 100 years (especially the
last 20), and it’s now a wealthy, bustling, and
international city. On some streets you’re about as
likely to hear Spanish, French, or English being
spoken with a Caribbean lilt as you are to hear a
local brogue. There are also plenty of folks here who
rush around in suits and eat in overpriced fusion
restaurants and are about as pleasant to spend time
with as those kind of people are anywhere. (Maybe
that’s what my professor means when he talks about
global modernization — the Western world’s unfortunate
acceptance of yuppies.) But from my perspective,
Dubliners still talk and listen to each other much
more than people do in Philadelphia. The majority of
the people I’ve met here, including strangers on the
street, seem *present* in their day-to-day
interactions, not simply nodding as they mentally tick
off an endless to-do list, preoccupied with something
that seems more important simply because it hasn’t
happened yet. I don’t mean to romanticize the place;
people are just people wherever you go. Anyway, it
could be just a matter of size. With only around six
million people Ireland is a small country and, as I’m
finding out, a lot of them know each other.
The evening after our first class a bunch of us went
out to get acquainted over a few pints. I got to
talking to the only girl in my class who might fairly
be described as a hipster. Her shoulder tattoos were
on display, and she talked about postmodernism in a
cute, croaky smoker’s voice. She seemed like someone
who might share my taste in books so I asked her who
in Ireland is writing good stuff right now. She told
me about the poet Paula Meehan, who she likes because
she writes about Dublin as it is today rather than
taking some wistful stroll down a cobble-stoned memory
lane, which is apparently a local publishing trend my
classmate considers overdone and hokey. When we met
again at class the next day, she’d brought me an
anthology that contained some of Meehan's work and
also included a poet named Eavan Boland. I got all
excited when I recognized Boland’s name and started to
talk about one of her poems, which is hard to do when
you can’t remember the title or any of the imagery.
Synopsis doesn’t exactly do poetry justice. But I did
remember that the poem was about the birth of her
daughter and that it had a fantastic line saying that
the next time they meet will only be a reunion. After
I recited it my classmate looked at me evenly for a
good second and my face got hot as I worried I’d said
something stupid.
“Well,” she said drily, “I know her daughter, and
she's a bit of a bitch.”
Something tells me that writing about literary Dublin
is going to read more like a soap opera than a blog
entry. So be sure to tune in for the next episode ...
-- Katie
This Modern Life: A Dublin Diary
Hello Inqy readers! I’m writing to you from a tiny
cottage in Dublin. The house I’m staying in
is just outside the city center in an old
working-class neighborhood, nestled in a row
of what they call workers' houses — teensy,
one-story stucco joints that Guinness built for its
employees in the 1880s. Think Roddy Doyle in South
Philly.
Ostensibly I’m in here to study toward a master’s
degree in modern English literature. But between me
and you, I’m also here for the experience. The
experience of living in a foreign country on my own,
of finding out how much of my personal perspective has
been culturally determined, of learning how to buy
rounds and remain standing after they’ve all been
drained. So while it’s true that I’ve been living it
up since I got here, my out-of-classroom experiences
are proving to be about as literary — and definitely as
modern — as anything on my reading list.
Last week I heard a talk given by Declan Kiberd, the
chair of the Anglo-Irish Department at University
College Dublin. He spoke eloquently, and with energy
and a refreshing directness, on James Joyce’s Ulysses and what he called the “common culture.” Ulysses is
the quintessential modern novel in many ways, of
course, not the least of which was its then-shocking,
God-is-a-shout-in-the-street sense of secularism. But
Kiberd went on to say that modernism itself was a
village phenomenon — that Joyce wanted to maintain the
sense of community they’d enjoyed in the old days
(after first chucking any residual provincialism and
ignorance). Ulysses was both a celebration and an
epitaph of the culture that produced it, Kiberd said,
because it chronicled everyday human interactions in a
city that, by the time the book was published in the
1920s, would no longer be the kind of place where
people went out strolling just to see who they might
run into for a chat.
I know Kiberd is right. Dublin has changed
dramatically over the last 100 years (especially the
last 20), and it’s now a wealthy, bustling, and
international city. On some streets you’re about as
likely to hear Spanish, French, or English being
spoken with a Caribbean lilt as you are to hear a
local brogue. There are also plenty of folks here who
rush around in suits and eat in overpriced fusion
restaurants and are about as pleasant to spend time
with as those kind of people are anywhere. (Maybe
that’s what my professor means when he talks about
global modernization — the Western world’s unfortunate
acceptance of yuppies.) But from my perspective,
Dubliners still talk and listen to each other much
more than people do in Philadelphia. The majority of
the people I’ve met here, including strangers on the
street, seem *present* in their day-to-day
interactions, not simply nodding as they mentally tick
off an endless to-do list, preoccupied with something
that seems more important simply because it hasn’t
happened yet. I don’t mean to romanticize the place;
people are just people wherever you go. Anyway, it
could be just a matter of size. With only around six
million people Ireland is a small country and, as I’m
finding out, a lot of them know each other.
The evening after our first class a bunch of us went
out to get acquainted over a few pints. I got to
talking to the only girl in my class who might fairly
be described as a hipster. Her shoulder tattoos were
on display, and she talked about postmodernism in a
cute, croaky smoker’s voice. She seemed like someone
who might share my taste in books so I asked her who
in Ireland is writing good stuff right now. She told
me about the poet Paula Meehan, who she likes because
she writes about Dublin as it is today rather than
taking some wistful stroll down a cobble-stoned memory
lane, which is apparently a local publishing trend my
classmate considers overdone and hokey. When we met
again at class the next day, she’d brought me an
anthology that contained some of Meehan's work and
also included a poet named Eavan Boland. I got all
excited when I recognized Boland’s name and started to
talk about one of her poems, which is hard to do when
you can’t remember the title or any of the imagery.
Synopsis doesn’t exactly do poetry justice. But I did
remember that the poem was about the birth of her
daughter and that it had a fantastic line saying that
the next time they meet will only be a reunion. After
I recited it my classmate looked at me evenly for a
good second and my face got hot as I worried I’d said
something stupid.
“Well,” she said drily, “I know her daughter, and
she's a bit of a bitch.”
Something tells me that writing about literary Dublin
is going to read more like a soap opera than a blog
entry. So be sure to tune in for the next episode ...
-- Katie
Monday, October 10, 2005
Poetry meets technology ...
The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil is, I think, one of the really important books to come out this year. My review of it appears in the Health & Science section of today's Inquirer.
Ray Kurzweil is very smart guy. But don't take my word for it. Listen to what he had to say in an interview I had with him last week.
Over the weekend I took a look at Ray Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet.
Yes, our intrepid inventor has devised a program that enables a computer to write poetry. The link explains better than I ever could how it works and let me say, before the sensitive plants among us flex their tendrils in exasperation and rage, that it's worth your time. I suspect a published poet who had a sufficient body of work in hand could use the program to flesh out a too-thin new volume. Problem is, I suspect critics would complain that old territory was being explored in much the same way.
What I think might be interesting would be to acquaint the computer with one or more poets, then feed the computer data about a particular subject, as well as ideas and images suggested by same to the person using the program. I would also program the computer, if possible, with information about certain strict forms -- the villanelle, say. And see what comes of that.
But, you wonder, a machine writing poetry? Well, the more intimate the machine and its operator become, the more personal and orginal the poetic output might become as well. At present, the poems Ray's program has generated strike me as skillful, but cold. My God -- has he tried language poetry, I wonder?
Ray Kurzweil is very smart guy. But don't take my word for it. Listen to what he had to say in an interview I had with him last week.
Over the weekend I took a look at Ray Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet.
Yes, our intrepid inventor has devised a program that enables a computer to write poetry. The link explains better than I ever could how it works and let me say, before the sensitive plants among us flex their tendrils in exasperation and rage, that it's worth your time. I suspect a published poet who had a sufficient body of work in hand could use the program to flesh out a too-thin new volume. Problem is, I suspect critics would complain that old territory was being explored in much the same way.
What I think might be interesting would be to acquaint the computer with one or more poets, then feed the computer data about a particular subject, as well as ideas and images suggested by same to the person using the program. I would also program the computer, if possible, with information about certain strict forms -- the villanelle, say. And see what comes of that.
But, you wonder, a machine writing poetry? Well, the more intimate the machine and its operator become, the more personal and orginal the poetic output might become as well. At present, the poems Ray's program has generated strike me as skillful, but cold. My God -- has he tried language poetry, I wonder?
Sunday, October 09, 2005
The trouble with experts ...
Last month, I posted some thoughts on The Matter of Experts. With the President's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, the subject has now become a matter of national debate. Last week, in the Washington Post, George Will wrote a column in which he declared that "constitutional reasoning is a talent -- a skill acquired, as intellectual skills are, by years of practice sustained by intense interest. It is not usually acquired in the normal course of even a fine lawyer's career."
Says who? The United States Constitution, as I have had cause recently to point out, happens to be written in plain English. Its authors, for instance, would never have been so sloppy as to call something a talent in one phrase and a skill in the next.
Having spent more than 40 years reviewing books (to say nothing of editing them and much else besides), I think I know something about texts. One thing I know is that you should hold off on trying to figure out what something means until you're pretty certain you know what it says. In that idiosyncratic masterpiece, The Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, Albert Jay Nock records an anecdote that has some bearing on this:
The ex-president of one of our colleges tells me that for a dozen years he carried on experiments in the value of literacy, using freshman as his guinea-pigs; that is to say, he experimented on persons who were not only literate, but who had gone so far as to pass their entrance-examinations. Selecting a paragraph of very simple but non-sensational prose, he asked his students, taking them one by one, to read it carefully; then to read it carefully again; then to read it aloud to him; then to write down the gist of it in their own words. Hardly any one could do it; hardly any one was able to bring anything like an adequate power of reflective thought to bear upon the substance of a simple paragraph. In other words, they could not read.
"While the ability to read must presuppose literacy," Nock observes, "literacy is no guarantee whatever of the ability to read." When you have Harry Blackmun writing about penumbras and the shadows thereof you have a literate person either unable or unwilling to read what the text under consideration says -- or does not say. Only an expert, a man with years of experience on the bench, could come to such a pass.
As it happens, the document that Mr. Will thinks only those with the requisite talent or skill (whichever) can comprehend serves up only two qualifications for Supreme Court justice: nomination by the President and confirmation by the Senate. Now Mr. Will is not the only conservative -- and not the only advocate of "original intent" interpretation of the Constitution -- who has objected to Miers's nomination. What exactly do they think the original intent of the framers was in this instance? Of course, there were no law schools then, so they obviously wouldn't have thought that the best people for the court would be law professors. Maybe they thought that honest people who could read would be able to figure out what a given statute meant and decide a case that way.
I should think that the court would benefit greatly from the perspective of a highly successful practicing lawyer (see Beldar for excellent and comprehensive arguments and evidence in support of this viewpoint). Moreover, confining court membership to scholars or jurists unnecessarily -- and counterproductively -- narrows the focus on the cases before the court. It is also unwarranted by the Constitution itself. If membership on the court ought to be restricted to law professors and other jurists, then let's get to work drafting a Constitutional amendment to that effect.
Says who? The United States Constitution, as I have had cause recently to point out, happens to be written in plain English. Its authors, for instance, would never have been so sloppy as to call something a talent in one phrase and a skill in the next.
Having spent more than 40 years reviewing books (to say nothing of editing them and much else besides), I think I know something about texts. One thing I know is that you should hold off on trying to figure out what something means until you're pretty certain you know what it says. In that idiosyncratic masterpiece, The Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, Albert Jay Nock records an anecdote that has some bearing on this:
The ex-president of one of our colleges tells me that for a dozen years he carried on experiments in the value of literacy, using freshman as his guinea-pigs; that is to say, he experimented on persons who were not only literate, but who had gone so far as to pass their entrance-examinations. Selecting a paragraph of very simple but non-sensational prose, he asked his students, taking them one by one, to read it carefully; then to read it carefully again; then to read it aloud to him; then to write down the gist of it in their own words. Hardly any one could do it; hardly any one was able to bring anything like an adequate power of reflective thought to bear upon the substance of a simple paragraph. In other words, they could not read.
"While the ability to read must presuppose literacy," Nock observes, "literacy is no guarantee whatever of the ability to read." When you have Harry Blackmun writing about penumbras and the shadows thereof you have a literate person either unable or unwilling to read what the text under consideration says -- or does not say. Only an expert, a man with years of experience on the bench, could come to such a pass.
As it happens, the document that Mr. Will thinks only those with the requisite talent or skill (whichever) can comprehend serves up only two qualifications for Supreme Court justice: nomination by the President and confirmation by the Senate. Now Mr. Will is not the only conservative -- and not the only advocate of "original intent" interpretation of the Constitution -- who has objected to Miers's nomination. What exactly do they think the original intent of the framers was in this instance? Of course, there were no law schools then, so they obviously wouldn't have thought that the best people for the court would be law professors. Maybe they thought that honest people who could read would be able to figure out what a given statute meant and decide a case that way.
I should think that the court would benefit greatly from the perspective of a highly successful practicing lawyer (see Beldar for excellent and comprehensive arguments and evidence in support of this viewpoint). Moreover, confining court membership to scholars or jurists unnecessarily -- and counterproductively -- narrows the focus on the cases before the court. It is also unwarranted by the Constitution itself. If membership on the court ought to be restricted to law professors and other jurists, then let's get to work drafting a Constitutional amendment to that effect.
Thursday, October 06, 2005
A poet worth remembering ...
Dave Lull, commenting on my earlier post noting Wallace Stevens's birthday, quotes Randall Jarrell as saying that Stevens "wrote some of his best and newest and strangest poems during the last year or two of a very long life." Another poet of whom the same can be said is far less known than Stevens, but deserves to be better known: John Hall Wheelock, friend and classmate of Van Wyck Brooks and Maxwell Perkins. The poetry Wheelock wrote during most of his career was solid, senstive stuff. But the arrival of old age -- he lived into his 90s -- seems to have brought out the best, the deepest, and the most original in Wheelock. Here's a sampler. The second, I think, is particularly good.
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
Inarticulate?
Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit has a post with an extensive quote from the transcipt of the President's news conference today. Hard to read this -- complete with a reference to John Barry's excellent The Great Influenza -- and not wonder about the conventional wisdom regarding George W. Bush's smarts. Seems to me there's quite a command of the facts on display, as well as pretty sound syntax.
Sunday, October 02, 2005
Happy Birthday, Mr. Stevens ...
Wallace Stevens was born on this date in 1879, in Reading, Pa. I am unusually fond of his poetry. Every year I manage to read most of The Collected Poems. How, as a native Philadelphian, can I not like the poet of these lines:
Only the rich remember the past,
The strawberries once in the Apennines,
Philadelphia that the spiders ate.
If you read Stevens's Collected Poems from start to finish, one finds him arriving at rather a serene state, tinged with melancholy, perhaps, but wise, intimating over and over that life cannot be reduced to its constituent ingredients.
The earlier poems delight, but the later ones edify. Here's one of the last:
The Planet on the Table
Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.
Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.
His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.
It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,
Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.
Only the rich remember the past,
The strawberries once in the Apennines,
Philadelphia that the spiders ate.
If you read Stevens's Collected Poems from start to finish, one finds him arriving at rather a serene state, tinged with melancholy, perhaps, but wise, intimating over and over that life cannot be reduced to its constituent ingredients.
The earlier poems delight, but the later ones edify. Here's one of the last:
The Planet on the Table
Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.
Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.
His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.
It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,
Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.
Saturday, October 01, 2005
Ahead of the curve ...
Roger Simon cites hemoclysm as the new vocabulary word of the day. Why, we only used it here yesterday! And in reference to much the same thing.
Friday, September 30, 2005
How right are great artists?
I came upon this interesting debate via Instapundit yesterday.
I think that Ann Althouse's point is well taken. To be a great artist -- or a great scientist, for that matter, and probably a great anything else -- requires a strongly individual outlook and an outstanding measure of self-confidence and self-reliance.
So why, when it comes to politics, do so many artists adopt what amounts to support for a paternalistic, collectivist, ultimately authoritarian outlook? I think it's because they think that society can be shaped in much the same way that they shape their work -- and they know that what is required for that is a strong-willed shaper. The artist in relation to his own work is a despot. Artists, moreover, are very much influenced by appearances. Augusto Pinochet is obviously a general and nothing but a general. Fidel Castro, on the other hand, maintains the appearance of a guerilla fighter (better battle fatigues than parade dress)and mouths all sorts of egalitarian and revolutionary platitudes (and bravely stands up to the bully that is the United States). This seems to be enough to render him appealing to a good many artists. It worked for Mao, too, believed by many to be the all-time champion of Twentieth Century Hemoclysm.
I think that Ann Althouse's point is well taken. To be a great artist -- or a great scientist, for that matter, and probably a great anything else -- requires a strongly individual outlook and an outstanding measure of self-confidence and self-reliance.
So why, when it comes to politics, do so many artists adopt what amounts to support for a paternalistic, collectivist, ultimately authoritarian outlook? I think it's because they think that society can be shaped in much the same way that they shape their work -- and they know that what is required for that is a strong-willed shaper. The artist in relation to his own work is a despot. Artists, moreover, are very much influenced by appearances. Augusto Pinochet is obviously a general and nothing but a general. Fidel Castro, on the other hand, maintains the appearance of a guerilla fighter (better battle fatigues than parade dress)and mouths all sorts of egalitarian and revolutionary platitudes (and bravely stands up to the bully that is the United States). This seems to be enough to render him appealing to a good many artists. It worked for Mao, too, believed by many to be the all-time champion of Twentieth Century Hemoclysm.
Thursday, September 29, 2005
On cynicism ...
In his play Lady Windermere's Fan, Oscar Wilde famously defined a cynic as "a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." Like all good aphorisms, this one is richly ambiguous. The more one values something, the harder it is to put a price on it. And yet, in the market place at least, the price attached to something does tell us how much some people value it. Is a Rolex watch worth what it costs? Just as a timepiece, probably not. My Swiss Army watch tells time just as well as any Rolex, I suspect.
Among the young, cynicism has become a sort of protective coloration. It's a way of justifying sitting on the fence. Which is fine, because the fence is the right place to sit sometimes. Eventually, though, one must make up one's mind and decide what it is one values. This is best done when one is comfortable being unsure of things (the young are unsure enough -- though they may pretend or even think otherwise; they're just not comfortable with it, which is why they may pretend or think otherwise). Making a decision that has to be made, knowing full well that it may turn out to be wrong -- that's the start of maturity. Of course, things get even dicier afterwards, since a decision may be right even though things initially go wrong, and may be wrong even if things initially go well.
Life is every bit as ambiguous as the best aphorism.
Among the young, cynicism has become a sort of protective coloration. It's a way of justifying sitting on the fence. Which is fine, because the fence is the right place to sit sometimes. Eventually, though, one must make up one's mind and decide what it is one values. This is best done when one is comfortable being unsure of things (the young are unsure enough -- though they may pretend or even think otherwise; they're just not comfortable with it, which is why they may pretend or think otherwise). Making a decision that has to be made, knowing full well that it may turn out to be wrong -- that's the start of maturity. Of course, things get even dicier afterwards, since a decision may be right even though things initially go wrong, and may be wrong even if things initially go well.
Life is every bit as ambiguous as the best aphorism.
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Changing times ...
The Inquirer announced a buyout offer this week in order to facilitate a reduction of newsroom staff by 16 percent -- 75 jobs. The newspaper business would seem to be in trouble. Advertising and circulation, for many papers, are both down. The Internet is frequently cited as the culprit -- people getting their news online rather than from papers.
This is usually thought of in terms of mere convenience, but I think there's a lot more to it than that. Take local news, for instance. I never look for local news on the Internet. I don't even know if there's much local news to be found there, apart from the local TV stations' sites -- and The Inquirer and Daily News sites. So it isn't just a matter of convenience. The A section of the paper I get every morning is right before the B section. I just skip it usually.
I read national and international news online because I can get nearer the source. If I want to know what's going on in Great Britain, I'll check the Times of London or the Evening Standard or the Telegraph.
But there's another problem. The newspaper business has become something of game of Chinese Whispers -- everybody's passing along the same story in the same way. There's also the problem of keeping up with the Times -- the idea that, if the New York Times did a big piece on something, every other paper ought to as well. My own view is that there's an entire planet's worth of news out there and that it's the job of reporters to find it and report it. I think people would buy any paper that was filled every day with stories about things they hadn't heard of, as opposed to another story that they've heard on radio and TV, and seen online. You can go anywhere in the U.S. and read the same damn thing in every newspaper.
The big story today is Tom DeLay's indictment. Let me make a prediction: DeLay isn't going to be convicted of anything. Why do I think that? Because I read the indictment -- and so can you right here. See if you can figure out what exactly it is DeLay is accused of (he's only mentioned near the end).
My point is that if you spend a bit a time on the Internet and are really interested in finding out the facts about the DeLay case, you can be your own reporter -- and your own media critic to boot, since you'll probably find the accounts in the papers and TV lacking in ... reportage. On the tube they'll have the same AP or Reuters story and some pompous windbags telling you how it's all going to turn out. In this case, it's trouble for the Republican Party, of course. In the paper there will be an analysis that will say much the same thing as the pompous windbags and the editorial page will portentously take a position that you can almost certainly guess if you're at all familiar with the paper in question.
Same old, same old. What people want is something different. News.
This is usually thought of in terms of mere convenience, but I think there's a lot more to it than that. Take local news, for instance. I never look for local news on the Internet. I don't even know if there's much local news to be found there, apart from the local TV stations' sites -- and The Inquirer and Daily News sites. So it isn't just a matter of convenience. The A section of the paper I get every morning is right before the B section. I just skip it usually.
I read national and international news online because I can get nearer the source. If I want to know what's going on in Great Britain, I'll check the Times of London or the Evening Standard or the Telegraph.
But there's another problem. The newspaper business has become something of game of Chinese Whispers -- everybody's passing along the same story in the same way. There's also the problem of keeping up with the Times -- the idea that, if the New York Times did a big piece on something, every other paper ought to as well. My own view is that there's an entire planet's worth of news out there and that it's the job of reporters to find it and report it. I think people would buy any paper that was filled every day with stories about things they hadn't heard of, as opposed to another story that they've heard on radio and TV, and seen online. You can go anywhere in the U.S. and read the same damn thing in every newspaper.
The big story today is Tom DeLay's indictment. Let me make a prediction: DeLay isn't going to be convicted of anything. Why do I think that? Because I read the indictment -- and so can you right here. See if you can figure out what exactly it is DeLay is accused of (he's only mentioned near the end).
My point is that if you spend a bit a time on the Internet and are really interested in finding out the facts about the DeLay case, you can be your own reporter -- and your own media critic to boot, since you'll probably find the accounts in the papers and TV lacking in ... reportage. On the tube they'll have the same AP or Reuters story and some pompous windbags telling you how it's all going to turn out. In this case, it's trouble for the Republican Party, of course. In the paper there will be an analysis that will say much the same thing as the pompous windbags and the editorial page will portentously take a position that you can almost certainly guess if you're at all familiar with the paper in question.
Same old, same old. What people want is something different. News.
Monday, September 26, 2005
While there's still time ...
Sept. 26 has but an hour and 20 minutes left, but before midnight I want to note that on this date in 1888 T.S. Eliot was born in St. Louis, Mo. That midwest origin near the banks of the Mississippi is often forgotten -- but never by Eliot himself, who alludes to it in "The Dry Salvages":
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Stop the bell, close the book, quench the candle ...
"Bell, book, and candle shall not drive me back,
When gold and silver becks me to come on."
So says Philip the Bastard in Shakespeare's King John. It's an allusion to the Roman Catholic rite of anathema, pronounced in cases of major excommunication. According to one account, a bishop and 12 priests gather in the cathedral. Each holds a candle. The bell tolls as for one dead. The bishop pronounces the sentence:
"Wherefore in the name of God the All-powerful, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, of the Blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and of all the saints, in virtue of the power which has been given us of binding and loosing in Heaven and on earth, we deprive N-- himself and all his accomplices and all his abettors of the Communion of the Body and Blood of Our Lord, we separate him from the society of all Christians, we exclude him from the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church in Heaven and on earth, we declare him excommunicated and anathematized and we judge him condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels and all the reprobate, so long as he will not burst the fetters of the demon, do penance and satisfy the Church; we deliver him to Satan to mortify his body, that his soul may be saved on the day of judgment."
The priests respond "Fiat, fiat, fiat" ("Let it be done ..."). The holy book on the altar is closed and priests and bishop quench their candles by dashing them to the floor.
It brings to mind a time when the Church was associated with solemnity, not obscenity. As a Catholic wont from time to time to review books that have some bearing on the Church and its teachings, I feel obliged to comment on the sex scandal in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, which recrudesced last week when the grand jury charged with investigating the matter issued a report on its findings. In an interview with Inquirer reporter David O'Reilly, Cardinal Justin Rigali, Philadelphia's Archbishop, cautioned the faithful that the report was not suitable for family reading. No lie there. This document makes the Starr Report seem wholesome by comparison. It is filled with toxic waste. The priests whose activities are chronicled therein are predacious vermin who committed criminal acts for which, thanks to the egregious mishandling of the matter by Church authorities from start to finish, they cannot be prosecuted -- because the statute of limitations has run out. If ever there was a group of people deserving -- just for starters -- of formal, public excommunication, it is these twisted clerics.
My wife, who was raised an Episcopalian but attends Quaker meeting, has wondered out loud how anyone could continue to go to a Catholic Church. Well, a single Archdiocese on the banks the Delaware -- and even a number of them throughout the United States -- hardly constitutes the whole story of the 2,000-year-old institution that is the Roman Catholic Church. In fact, world-class villains are hardly a recent phenomenon in Church history -- the Borgias come immediately to mind. But they are outnumbered by far by the likes of Father Damien and St. Francis of Assisi.
Nevertheless, as is usually the case with my wife, she hit upon the crux of the matter (no pun intended), namely, the grievous blow this scandal has delivered to the faith and the faithful.
In Saturday's Inquirer, Cardinal Rigali was quoted as saying that "in every single case reported to Archdiocesan officials, action was taken based on the best medical attention available." What about sin, your Eminence? I realize that, for many, it's an archaic term, but I believe it is still used in Catholic moral theology. Even if one admits that the moral failings of the priests in question were to some extent mitigated by a measure of psychiatric disorder -- and I think it's a stretch myself -- those moral shortcomings remain both obvious and grievous.
As I understand it, if a Protestant finds his minister's sermons less than edifying, he is free to look around for another church, or even another denomination, and go there instead. But Catholics don't go to church for the sermon, or for the hymns, or even for the Scriptural readings. They go to witness and partake of the miracle of the Eucharist, the Transubstantiation of bread and wine into the Real Presence of Jesus. For Catholics, the Host is not merely a symbol. For them, it actually is what it symbolizes -- Jesus Himself, His flesh and blood. Catholics also believe that what is called the Last Supper was the first Mass, during which Jesus instituted not only the sacrament of the Eucharist, but also the sacrament of Holy Orders, giving the 11 apostles present priestly powers to effect the miracle He had just performed and to pass that power on to others.
Now I know it will seem odd that a reasonably well-educated, presumably well-read, worldly-wise journalist should subscribe to such doctrines, which doubtless strike some as bizarre, but sharper cookies than I have subscribed to them as well. Presumably, Archdiocesan officials subscribe to them also. Then why didn't they act upon them? Why, confronted with acts the Church designates as sinful -- rape, corruption of innocents, abuse of authority, to say nothing of blasphemy -- did they evince no moral response? I go to confession and tell the priest I'm having an affair and I'll be told to repent and clean up my act, not see a shrink. Bishops and priests seem ready enough to bloviate about sin to the laity, but when it comes to their wayward colleagues -- oh, they need treatment. What the priests cited in the grand jury report needed was arrest, prosecution and conviction. Moreover, even if Archdiocesan officials had a hard time discerning the moral dimension of the problem, what about their plain duty as citizens? When you know that a felony has been committed, padres, you're supposed to report it.
Has this sorry episode shaken my faith? Not at all, actually. I never placed my faith in the hierarchy, only my tentative trust. I attended Catholic schools for some 16 years and, as Yogi Berra noted, "you can observe a lot just by watching." I learned fairly soon that ordination is no fast-track to sanctity. I've known plenty of good priests. But I've also known priests who scarcely rubbed elbows with civility, let alone piety. As for scandals, Jesus Himself warned that they were inevitable: "For it must needs be that scandals come," He says in the Gospel of Matthew -- adding, however, "woe to that man by whom the scandal cometh." Woe indeed: "... he that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea."
No mention there of "the best medical attention."
When gold and silver becks me to come on."
So says Philip the Bastard in Shakespeare's King John. It's an allusion to the Roman Catholic rite of anathema, pronounced in cases of major excommunication. According to one account, a bishop and 12 priests gather in the cathedral. Each holds a candle. The bell tolls as for one dead. The bishop pronounces the sentence:
"Wherefore in the name of God the All-powerful, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, of the Blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and of all the saints, in virtue of the power which has been given us of binding and loosing in Heaven and on earth, we deprive N-- himself and all his accomplices and all his abettors of the Communion of the Body and Blood of Our Lord, we separate him from the society of all Christians, we exclude him from the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church in Heaven and on earth, we declare him excommunicated and anathematized and we judge him condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels and all the reprobate, so long as he will not burst the fetters of the demon, do penance and satisfy the Church; we deliver him to Satan to mortify his body, that his soul may be saved on the day of judgment."
The priests respond "Fiat, fiat, fiat" ("Let it be done ..."). The holy book on the altar is closed and priests and bishop quench their candles by dashing them to the floor.
It brings to mind a time when the Church was associated with solemnity, not obscenity. As a Catholic wont from time to time to review books that have some bearing on the Church and its teachings, I feel obliged to comment on the sex scandal in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, which recrudesced last week when the grand jury charged with investigating the matter issued a report on its findings. In an interview with Inquirer reporter David O'Reilly, Cardinal Justin Rigali, Philadelphia's Archbishop, cautioned the faithful that the report was not suitable for family reading. No lie there. This document makes the Starr Report seem wholesome by comparison. It is filled with toxic waste. The priests whose activities are chronicled therein are predacious vermin who committed criminal acts for which, thanks to the egregious mishandling of the matter by Church authorities from start to finish, they cannot be prosecuted -- because the statute of limitations has run out. If ever there was a group of people deserving -- just for starters -- of formal, public excommunication, it is these twisted clerics.
My wife, who was raised an Episcopalian but attends Quaker meeting, has wondered out loud how anyone could continue to go to a Catholic Church. Well, a single Archdiocese on the banks the Delaware -- and even a number of them throughout the United States -- hardly constitutes the whole story of the 2,000-year-old institution that is the Roman Catholic Church. In fact, world-class villains are hardly a recent phenomenon in Church history -- the Borgias come immediately to mind. But they are outnumbered by far by the likes of Father Damien and St. Francis of Assisi.
Nevertheless, as is usually the case with my wife, she hit upon the crux of the matter (no pun intended), namely, the grievous blow this scandal has delivered to the faith and the faithful.
In Saturday's Inquirer, Cardinal Rigali was quoted as saying that "in every single case reported to Archdiocesan officials, action was taken based on the best medical attention available." What about sin, your Eminence? I realize that, for many, it's an archaic term, but I believe it is still used in Catholic moral theology. Even if one admits that the moral failings of the priests in question were to some extent mitigated by a measure of psychiatric disorder -- and I think it's a stretch myself -- those moral shortcomings remain both obvious and grievous.
As I understand it, if a Protestant finds his minister's sermons less than edifying, he is free to look around for another church, or even another denomination, and go there instead. But Catholics don't go to church for the sermon, or for the hymns, or even for the Scriptural readings. They go to witness and partake of the miracle of the Eucharist, the Transubstantiation of bread and wine into the Real Presence of Jesus. For Catholics, the Host is not merely a symbol. For them, it actually is what it symbolizes -- Jesus Himself, His flesh and blood. Catholics also believe that what is called the Last Supper was the first Mass, during which Jesus instituted not only the sacrament of the Eucharist, but also the sacrament of Holy Orders, giving the 11 apostles present priestly powers to effect the miracle He had just performed and to pass that power on to others.
Now I know it will seem odd that a reasonably well-educated, presumably well-read, worldly-wise journalist should subscribe to such doctrines, which doubtless strike some as bizarre, but sharper cookies than I have subscribed to them as well. Presumably, Archdiocesan officials subscribe to them also. Then why didn't they act upon them? Why, confronted with acts the Church designates as sinful -- rape, corruption of innocents, abuse of authority, to say nothing of blasphemy -- did they evince no moral response? I go to confession and tell the priest I'm having an affair and I'll be told to repent and clean up my act, not see a shrink. Bishops and priests seem ready enough to bloviate about sin to the laity, but when it comes to their wayward colleagues -- oh, they need treatment. What the priests cited in the grand jury report needed was arrest, prosecution and conviction. Moreover, even if Archdiocesan officials had a hard time discerning the moral dimension of the problem, what about their plain duty as citizens? When you know that a felony has been committed, padres, you're supposed to report it.
Has this sorry episode shaken my faith? Not at all, actually. I never placed my faith in the hierarchy, only my tentative trust. I attended Catholic schools for some 16 years and, as Yogi Berra noted, "you can observe a lot just by watching." I learned fairly soon that ordination is no fast-track to sanctity. I've known plenty of good priests. But I've also known priests who scarcely rubbed elbows with civility, let alone piety. As for scandals, Jesus Himself warned that they were inevitable: "For it must needs be that scandals come," He says in the Gospel of Matthew -- adding, however, "woe to that man by whom the scandal cometh." Woe indeed: "... he that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea."
No mention there of "the best medical attention."
Saturday, September 24, 2005
Noticing the unpublished (cont'd.) ...
My previous post has elicited some incisive comments, to which I feel I should add some further observations. As David Montgomery points out, the principal reason self-published books are unlikely to get noticed is the sheer number of books being produced -- some 200,000 from commercial publishing houses alone. And, as David also points out, a good many of them aren't worth reading either.
Self-publishing triumphs invariably result from a combination of heroic self-promotion and plain, old-fashioned luck. Not long after I became The Inquirer's book editor, Anne Gordon, who was then features editor, brought to my attention a self-published children's book that had been sent to her accompanied by a letter from the author begging for a review. Anne had taken the book home and tossed on the dining room table. Her son, who was then 12, picked it up, read it, and told her it was great. I figured that if a kid reads a book aimed at kids and likes it there must be something worthwhile about it. So I asked Ann Waldron, who then reviewed children's books for the paper, to review it. She described the author as "inventive and an excellent writer" and said he had created "an unlikely, but truly captivating hero."
The Inquirer reviewed his next book, too, which reviewer Hillary Homzie called "a gripping story full of emotion and original humor."
Not long after, the author landed a lucrative deal with Putnam. He was Michael Hoeye. That first, unpublished book was Time Stops for No Mouse.
I suppose the all-time winner in the self-published category is Leaves of Grass, and God knows, Walt Whitman was no slacker when it came to self-promotion. Still, the fact remains that most self-published work is destined for oblivion. Then again, most commercially published work is as well.
So where does that leaves us? Well, what I find interesting today -- and that explosion of verbiage known as the blogosphere demonstrates this -- is that a lot of people these days feel the need to write. And technology has given them a cost-effective way of producing books. The blogosphere has demonstrated something else: A lot of these non-professional writers have much that is worthwhile to say and are very good at saying it. Mike Shatzkin, a publishing industry consultant I met at BookExpo America this past June, thinks that the new self-publishing outlets may become the publishing equivalent of baseball's farm teams. The question is to come up with an effective process of winnowing. Mike and I seem to have arrived independently at much the same answer to this question. I hope to follow up on the idea in the not so distant future. So there's another reason to stay tuned.
Self-publishing triumphs invariably result from a combination of heroic self-promotion and plain, old-fashioned luck. Not long after I became The Inquirer's book editor, Anne Gordon, who was then features editor, brought to my attention a self-published children's book that had been sent to her accompanied by a letter from the author begging for a review. Anne had taken the book home and tossed on the dining room table. Her son, who was then 12, picked it up, read it, and told her it was great. I figured that if a kid reads a book aimed at kids and likes it there must be something worthwhile about it. So I asked Ann Waldron, who then reviewed children's books for the paper, to review it. She described the author as "inventive and an excellent writer" and said he had created "an unlikely, but truly captivating hero."
The Inquirer reviewed his next book, too, which reviewer Hillary Homzie called "a gripping story full of emotion and original humor."
Not long after, the author landed a lucrative deal with Putnam. He was Michael Hoeye. That first, unpublished book was Time Stops for No Mouse.
I suppose the all-time winner in the self-published category is Leaves of Grass, and God knows, Walt Whitman was no slacker when it came to self-promotion. Still, the fact remains that most self-published work is destined for oblivion. Then again, most commercially published work is as well.
So where does that leaves us? Well, what I find interesting today -- and that explosion of verbiage known as the blogosphere demonstrates this -- is that a lot of people these days feel the need to write. And technology has given them a cost-effective way of producing books. The blogosphere has demonstrated something else: A lot of these non-professional writers have much that is worthwhile to say and are very good at saying it. Mike Shatzkin, a publishing industry consultant I met at BookExpo America this past June, thinks that the new self-publishing outlets may become the publishing equivalent of baseball's farm teams. The question is to come up with an effective process of winnowing. Mike and I seem to have arrived independently at much the same answer to this question. I hope to follow up on the idea in the not so distant future. So there's another reason to stay tuned.
Friday, September 23, 2005
Noticing the unpublished ...
Last week I noted that Barbara Grosh's novel Tenure Track to Mommyville had won Xerox's Asprining Authors contest. So I think it worth mentioning that Inquirer staff writer and columnist Tanya Barrientos, a novelist herself, who recently wrote a piece in our Image section about self-publishing, has agreed to review the book for The Inquirer. Stay tuned.
Thursday, September 22, 2005
What a difference a word makes ...
Walking to work this morning I passed a fellow outside the University of the Arts who was wearing a t-shirt with the words "Arte Diem" printed on the front. But the fellow wearing it is obviously no Latinist. I presume "arte diem" is meant to be a take on "carpe diem" -- "seize the day." The problem is that "arte diem" doesn't mean anything. I guess -- and it's only a guess -- that it's supposed to mean "art day." Only, in Latin, that would be "dies artis."
OK, call me a pedant. But it brings to mind one of the many silly things in that singularly silly book The Da Vinci Code. The learned historian Lee Teabing tells our hero and heroine that of all the European languages, English is la lingua pura -- the pure tongue -- because it has the fewest words of Latin origin. Really? Why just a glance of what I've written reveals several -- passed, print, presume, obvious, origin. A glance at any page in any English dictionary will reveal plenty more.
I shall go to my grave dazed and confused over the success of The Da Vinci Code. It is poorly plotted, the time-frame is implausible, the writing pedestrian, and the characters barely one-dimensional. Even more annoying, at the same time The Da Vinci Code arrived in bookstores, another novel -- The Lamplighter, by Anthony O'Neill -- arrived there also. This is everything The Da Vinci Code is not: brilliantly plotted, beautifully written, and theologically imaginative. The main characters are unforgettable.
Imagination is a quality sorely lacking in most theological discourse. Take the Catholic doctrine of the bodily Assumption of Mary into Heaven, where she is crowned Queen of Heaven by Jesus. So Heaven is ruled by the Son of God and His human mother. Richly ambiguous and mysterious to be sure. No wonder Carl Jung called Pope Pius XII's declaration of this dogma "the most important religious event since the Reformation." According to Jung, Mary "is functionally on a par with Christ, the king and mediator. At any rate her position satisfies a renewed hope for the fulfillment of that yearning for peace which stirs deep down in the soul, and for a resolution of the threatening tension between opposites. Everyone shares this tension and everyone experiences it in his individual form of unrest, the more so the less he sees any possibility of getting rid of it by rational means. It is no wonder, therefore, that the hope, indeed the expectation of divine intervention arises in the collective unconscious and at the same time in the masses. The papal declaration has given comforting expression to that yearning."
OK, call me a pedant. But it brings to mind one of the many silly things in that singularly silly book The Da Vinci Code. The learned historian Lee Teabing tells our hero and heroine that of all the European languages, English is la lingua pura -- the pure tongue -- because it has the fewest words of Latin origin. Really? Why just a glance of what I've written reveals several -- passed, print, presume, obvious, origin. A glance at any page in any English dictionary will reveal plenty more.
I shall go to my grave dazed and confused over the success of The Da Vinci Code. It is poorly plotted, the time-frame is implausible, the writing pedestrian, and the characters barely one-dimensional. Even more annoying, at the same time The Da Vinci Code arrived in bookstores, another novel -- The Lamplighter, by Anthony O'Neill -- arrived there also. This is everything The Da Vinci Code is not: brilliantly plotted, beautifully written, and theologically imaginative. The main characters are unforgettable.
Imagination is a quality sorely lacking in most theological discourse. Take the Catholic doctrine of the bodily Assumption of Mary into Heaven, where she is crowned Queen of Heaven by Jesus. So Heaven is ruled by the Son of God and His human mother. Richly ambiguous and mysterious to be sure. No wonder Carl Jung called Pope Pius XII's declaration of this dogma "the most important religious event since the Reformation." According to Jung, Mary "is functionally on a par with Christ, the king and mediator. At any rate her position satisfies a renewed hope for the fulfillment of that yearning for peace which stirs deep down in the soul, and for a resolution of the threatening tension between opposites. Everyone shares this tension and everyone experiences it in his individual form of unrest, the more so the less he sees any possibility of getting rid of it by rational means. It is no wonder, therefore, that the hope, indeed the expectation of divine intervention arises in the collective unconscious and at the same time in the masses. The papal declaration has given comforting expression to that yearning."
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
News ....
Last Sunday, Inquirer book critic Carlin Romano reviewed Salman Rushdie's new novel Shalimar the Clown. Carlin liked the book a lot and last Friday he went to Manhattan to interview Rushdie. That interview will be broadcast online Sunday in its entirety. Carlin also writes about Rushdie in Sunday's Arts & Entertainment section. This is the first of what we hope will be a series of interviews with authors online. So stay tuned.
Monday, September 19, 2005
All aboard ...
Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar chronicles a train trip Theroux took from Britain to Japan and back, aboard such romantic-sounding routes as the Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, and the Trans-Siberian Express. Theroux began his trip on this date in 1973, departing London's Victorian Station.
Sunday, September 18, 2005
The priniciple of subsidiarity (revisited) ...
Last week, after posting a little something about King Canute, I found myself in a most interesting discussion of the principle of
subsidiarity and how it pertained to events following Hurrican Katrina. Now I am beginning to discover that more and more people seem to agree with what I was trying to get across. Glenn Reynolds has some pertinent commentary
here. Note especially his link to a blogger from Japan. Two key paragraphs:
Well, I will tell you as someone who has lived here for a decade: what you hear about disaster preparedness ALWAYS involves local intiatives. Sometimes, municipal governments are involved; other times, it's smaller public institutions. 1 September, the anniversary of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, was Disaster Prevention Day here. Apparently, over a million people participated in demonstrations and drills and things. Our apartment building's management company distributed leaflets to our mailboxes, outlining what would happen if a quake hit and our building were declared unsafe until inspection. New survival gadgets are always cropping up in human interest features on NHK.
...
In Japan, what we're told is this: A disaster may render you unreachable. It may cut you off from communication networks and utilities. The appropriate government agencies (starting at the neighborhood level and moving upward depending on the magnitude of the damage) will respond as quickly as they can, but you may be on your own for days until they do. Prepare supplies. Learn escape routes. Then learn alternate escape routes. Know what your region's points of vulnerability are. Get to know your neighbors (especially the elderly or infirm) so you can help each other out and account for each other. Follow directions if you're told to evacuate. Stay put if you aren't. Participate in the earthquake preparation drills in your neighborhood.
But, as they say, read it all.
subsidiarity and how it pertained to events following Hurrican Katrina. Now I am beginning to discover that more and more people seem to agree with what I was trying to get across. Glenn Reynolds has some pertinent commentary
here. Note especially his link to a blogger from Japan. Two key paragraphs:
Well, I will tell you as someone who has lived here for a decade: what you hear about disaster preparedness ALWAYS involves local intiatives. Sometimes, municipal governments are involved; other times, it's smaller public institutions. 1 September, the anniversary of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, was Disaster Prevention Day here. Apparently, over a million people participated in demonstrations and drills and things. Our apartment building's management company distributed leaflets to our mailboxes, outlining what would happen if a quake hit and our building were declared unsafe until inspection. New survival gadgets are always cropping up in human interest features on NHK.
...
In Japan, what we're told is this: A disaster may render you unreachable. It may cut you off from communication networks and utilities. The appropriate government agencies (starting at the neighborhood level and moving upward depending on the magnitude of the damage) will respond as quickly as they can, but you may be on your own for days until they do. Prepare supplies. Learn escape routes. Then learn alternate escape routes. Know what your region's points of vulnerability are. Get to know your neighbors (especially the elderly or infirm) so you can help each other out and account for each other. Follow directions if you're told to evacuate. Stay put if you aren't. Participate in the earthquake preparation drills in your neighborhood.
But, as they say, read it all.
Saturday, September 17, 2005
What's in a word?
SciFi author Dafydd ab Hugh, a frequent guest blogger, now has a blog of his own, on which he has posted a most interesting piece about how language frames thought.
Thursday, September 15, 2005
The dangers of certainty ...
Some years ago I attended a lecture given by John Polkinghorne, the physicist and Anglican priest, at the Center for Theological Inquiry in Princeton. Father Polkinghorne prefaced his answer to one of the questions that was put to him afterward by saying that all of the most interesting questions did not admit of a simple, conclusive answer. That, he said, was what made them interesting.
This idea has some bearing on the comments appended to my previous post. We have a craving for certainty. But it is precisely this craving, it seems to me, that gets in the way of apprehending the truth.
I was talking today to a colleague of mine -- Gene D'Alessandro, who was one of the performers in the Philly Fringe Festival presentation of An Evening of Damon Runyon, which I blogged about the other night. I told Gene that the reason I tended not to like social drama was that it tended to deal in certainties. Genuine art is concerned with gradations of light and shade -- with ambiguities.
Take Macbeth. In the beginning, Macbeth is hesitant. It is Lady Macbeth who goads him into villainy. But once he has chosen his course, he does not waver, or go to pieces, as she does. Even at the end -- when it is clear to him that Birnum Wood has indeed come to Dunsinane, and that MacDuff is not exactly of woman born -- even then, he does not lose courage. He is a villain, to be sure, but it is impossible not to admire his defiance of fate. He is no cardboard cutout, but a man who has chosen his course. Which makes him at one and the same time evil and admirable.
It is its capacity to capture such ambiguities that connects art with life, because it is the ambiguities that give life -- and art -- its richness.
There is so little we can be certain of. Moreover, the more we are certain of things, the more we are inclined to be intolerant regarding them. This is not to say we can never make up our minds. We must make up our minds. What is existential authenticity other than the courage to choose in the face of uncertainty? And each choice always leads to further choices. Such is the adventure of being alive.
This idea has some bearing on the comments appended to my previous post. We have a craving for certainty. But it is precisely this craving, it seems to me, that gets in the way of apprehending the truth.
I was talking today to a colleague of mine -- Gene D'Alessandro, who was one of the performers in the Philly Fringe Festival presentation of An Evening of Damon Runyon, which I blogged about the other night. I told Gene that the reason I tended not to like social drama was that it tended to deal in certainties. Genuine art is concerned with gradations of light and shade -- with ambiguities.
Take Macbeth. In the beginning, Macbeth is hesitant. It is Lady Macbeth who goads him into villainy. But once he has chosen his course, he does not waver, or go to pieces, as she does. Even at the end -- when it is clear to him that Birnum Wood has indeed come to Dunsinane, and that MacDuff is not exactly of woman born -- even then, he does not lose courage. He is a villain, to be sure, but it is impossible not to admire his defiance of fate. He is no cardboard cutout, but a man who has chosen his course. Which makes him at one and the same time evil and admirable.
It is its capacity to capture such ambiguities that connects art with life, because it is the ambiguities that give life -- and art -- its richness.
There is so little we can be certain of. Moreover, the more we are certain of things, the more we are inclined to be intolerant regarding them. This is not to say we can never make up our minds. We must make up our minds. What is existential authenticity other than the courage to choose in the face of uncertainty? And each choice always leads to further choices. Such is the adventure of being alive.
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Before I forget ...
I have discussed Michel de Montaigne here a number of times lately. Well, 413 years ago today, the great man died. Mass was being said in his room and he died, reportedly, duting the elevation of the Host. One of the sayings he had carved into the roofbeams of his library will serve to honor his memory: "I establish nothing. I do not understand. I halt. I examine."
More at Today in Literature, which could use your support.
More at Today in Literature, which could use your support.
Some publishing news ...
Xerox Corp., in partnership with Lulu.com, a provider of free online publishing tools, and ColorCentric Corporation, a Rochester-based commercial printer, recently upped the ante in the alternative publishing sweepstakes by sponsoring an Aspiring Authors contest, aimed at finding "the best work of unpublished fiction." The winner was announced today.
She is Barbara Grosh of Pittsford, N.Y., and her book is titled Tenure Track to Mommyville. It tells the story of an academic who is denied tenure and returns home to care for her child and try to save her marriage. Grosh, who has a Ph.D. in economics, was herself an assistant professor who left the academy to raise her daughter. She gets 250 copies of her book and $5000.
The runners up were The Long Black Veil by Jeannine DeLine and Bobbi L'Huillier, sisters who live in Rochester, N.Y., and CodeName Snake: The Evil We Kill by Morton Rumberg of Gold River, Calif.
The judges were Maureen Corrigan of National Public Radio and Emily Chenoweth of Publishers Weekly.
There's more information here and here.
She is Barbara Grosh of Pittsford, N.Y., and her book is titled Tenure Track to Mommyville. It tells the story of an academic who is denied tenure and returns home to care for her child and try to save her marriage. Grosh, who has a Ph.D. in economics, was herself an assistant professor who left the academy to raise her daughter. She gets 250 copies of her book and $5000.
The runners up were The Long Black Veil by Jeannine DeLine and Bobbi L'Huillier, sisters who live in Rochester, N.Y., and CodeName Snake: The Evil We Kill by Morton Rumberg of Gold River, Calif.
The judges were Maureen Corrigan of National Public Radio and Emily Chenoweth of Publishers Weekly.
There's more information here and here.
Monday, September 12, 2005
American classics ...
I am not known to be a frequenter of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. But I attended one of its events tonight and I'm here to say it was time very well spent. It was An Evening of Damon Runyon at the Society Hill Playhouse's Red Room. Five actors -- Barry Brait, Gene D'Alessandro (a colleague of mine), Rene Goodwin, Arnold Kendall, and Vince Mancini -- collaborated in reading five of Runyon's classic tales of Broadway low-lifes. The stories are at turns funny and touching, the language bottled-in-bond American vernacular. The performers were uniformly excellent, offering a nice variety of voices and accents.
Runyon, oddly, was born in Manhattan -- Kansas, that is -- but the Manhattan he was born to is located between the Hudson and the East Rivers. The show's on again tomorrow at 9 p.m. In my opinion, they should extend the run. Indeed, there should be more shows like this. Audiences would love them and literature would be well served.
Runyon, oddly, was born in Manhattan -- Kansas, that is -- but the Manhattan he was born to is located between the Hudson and the East Rivers. The show's on again tomorrow at 9 p.m. In my opinion, they should extend the run. Indeed, there should be more shows like this. Audiences would love them and literature would be well served.
Sunday, September 11, 2005
A useful legend ...
Given all the blame being heaped upon President Bush for having been somehow responsible for the debacle in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina (perhaps he should be corrspondingly praised for the comparatively efficient response in Mississippi -- after all, he had about much to do with the one as with the other), it seems useful to recall the legend of wise King Canute, who used the sea's inexorable tides to demonstrate the limits of executive power.
Literary cross-currents ...
Yesterday (Sept. 10) was the anniversary of the birth, in 1890, of Franz Werfel, a writer sadly neglected today. Here is an interesting piece about him by George Weigel.
Today is the anniversary of the birth in 1524 of the French poet Pierre Ronsard.
Here is a translation of one of Ronsard's better-known poems:
OF HIS LADY'S OLD AGE
When you are very old, at evening
You'll sit and spin beside the fire, and say,
Humming my songs, 'Ah well, ah well-a-day!
When I was young, of me did Ronsard sing.'
None of your maidens that doth hear the thing,
Albeit with her weary task foredone,
But wakens at my name, and calls you one
Blest, to be held in long remembering.
I shall be low beneath the earth, and laid
On sleep, a phantom in the myrtle shade,
While you beside the fire, a grandame grey,
My love, your pride, remember and regret;
Ah, love me, love! we may be happy yet,
And gather roses, while 'tis called to-day.
If this seems familiar, it is because William Butler Yeats took it and turned into one his better-known poems:
When You Are Old and Grey
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
Today is the anniversary of the birth in 1524 of the French poet Pierre Ronsard.
Here is a translation of one of Ronsard's better-known poems:
OF HIS LADY'S OLD AGE
When you are very old, at evening
You'll sit and spin beside the fire, and say,
Humming my songs, 'Ah well, ah well-a-day!
When I was young, of me did Ronsard sing.'
None of your maidens that doth hear the thing,
Albeit with her weary task foredone,
But wakens at my name, and calls you one
Blest, to be held in long remembering.
I shall be low beneath the earth, and laid
On sleep, a phantom in the myrtle shade,
While you beside the fire, a grandame grey,
My love, your pride, remember and regret;
Ah, love me, love! we may be happy yet,
And gather roses, while 'tis called to-day.
If this seems familiar, it is because William Butler Yeats took it and turned into one his better-known poems:
When You Are Old and Grey
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
In memoriam ...
After Mass today the church bells rang 10 times while the congregation prayed silently in mmemory of the victims of Sept. 11, 2001. I mention this because I think, in its simplicity and brevity, it could serve as a model for how best to commemorate this sad anniversary.
Friday, September 09, 2005
Noting an anniversary before it's too late ...
Today in Literature notes that today was an important date in the life of James Joyce.
Places to visit ... and further thoughts ...
Jim Bowman's Blithe Spirit draws our attention to Blupete, a blog out of Nova Scotia filled with interesting information about poets, essayists, history and much else.
There is, for example, a nice page on Montaigne, which gives me an opportunity to resume discussing that great Perigord gentleman.
In response to a post of mine last month titled Exploring the mind, Melville Goodwin pointed out that Joseph Epstein's method of writing essays is often like Montaigne's. I have not read a lot of Epstein, but everything that I have I've liked. And I did not know about his method of just ruminating over a quote, say, and being taken wherever.
In my original post, though, I don't think I succeeded in making the point I set out to. What I wanted to say was that, as I see it, Montaigne used writing as a philosphical method. He is, of course, the exact opposite of the grand, systematic thinker -- and attempts to derive a system of thought from his writings miss the point of those writngs.
I studied philosophy and still read a good deal of it, but I think attempts to encompass reality in a system of thought are futile. I don't think life can be "figured out." But you can figure out how to live -- and that's what Montaigne was about. One of the fundamental things he understood about is that human reason and understanding are profoundly limited. And he found that out by recording his trains of thought. He wasn't aiming to prove a thesis, or demonstrate a theory. He was observing thought, noting its inconcsitencies and contradictions, how prejudice and feeling get in the way of logic, how we are usually able to find that what we would like to be true somehow is true. In some ways, the modern thinker Montaigne most resembles is J. Krishnamurti, who repeatedly counseled his listeners to engage in "choiceless awareness" while examining "the contents of consciousness." It's not as easy as it sounds.
There is, for example, a nice page on Montaigne, which gives me an opportunity to resume discussing that great Perigord gentleman.
In response to a post of mine last month titled Exploring the mind, Melville Goodwin pointed out that Joseph Epstein's method of writing essays is often like Montaigne's. I have not read a lot of Epstein, but everything that I have I've liked. And I did not know about his method of just ruminating over a quote, say, and being taken wherever.
In my original post, though, I don't think I succeeded in making the point I set out to. What I wanted to say was that, as I see it, Montaigne used writing as a philosphical method. He is, of course, the exact opposite of the grand, systematic thinker -- and attempts to derive a system of thought from his writings miss the point of those writngs.
I studied philosophy and still read a good deal of it, but I think attempts to encompass reality in a system of thought are futile. I don't think life can be "figured out." But you can figure out how to live -- and that's what Montaigne was about. One of the fundamental things he understood about is that human reason and understanding are profoundly limited. And he found that out by recording his trains of thought. He wasn't aiming to prove a thesis, or demonstrate a theory. He was observing thought, noting its inconcsitencies and contradictions, how prejudice and feeling get in the way of logic, how we are usually able to find that what we would like to be true somehow is true. In some ways, the modern thinker Montaigne most resembles is J. Krishnamurti, who repeatedly counseled his listeners to engage in "choiceless awareness" while examining "the contents of consciousness." It's not as easy as it sounds.
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Perhaps I stand corrected ...
I have on a number of occasions stated here that my principal objection to intelligent design theory is that it seems to involve a category error: It poses a scientific question and proposes a metaphysical answer.
But a colleague of mine, who has taught philosophy at some noteworthy institutions of higher learning, and who is far from being a Christian apologist, assures me I am wrong, pointing out (I must paraphrase) that it is not unreasonable, upon observing that the complexity of an entity is such as to render its existence by mere happenstance overwhelmingly improbable, to argue that said entity has been intentionally designed. You may not be able to prove that, he says, nor identify the designer, but it is not an unreasonable line of argument and does not involve a category error, since it stays strictly within the realm of logical inference.
To this I might add something Thomas Fleming wrote in The Spectator a couple of weeks ago in an article titled Why America is not a Christian country," unfortunately only available to subscribers:
Intelligent design, it goes without saying, is a boneheaded piece of pseudo-science, almost as simplistic as the naive materialism that Darwinists teach. But neither side of the argument cares about logic, much less truth. The important thing is to declare which side you are on: religious fanaticism or cosmopolitan anti-religious fanaticism.
But a colleague of mine, who has taught philosophy at some noteworthy institutions of higher learning, and who is far from being a Christian apologist, assures me I am wrong, pointing out (I must paraphrase) that it is not unreasonable, upon observing that the complexity of an entity is such as to render its existence by mere happenstance overwhelmingly improbable, to argue that said entity has been intentionally designed. You may not be able to prove that, he says, nor identify the designer, but it is not an unreasonable line of argument and does not involve a category error, since it stays strictly within the realm of logical inference.
To this I might add something Thomas Fleming wrote in The Spectator a couple of weeks ago in an article titled Why America is not a Christian country," unfortunately only available to subscribers:
Intelligent design, it goes without saying, is a boneheaded piece of pseudo-science, almost as simplistic as the naive materialism that Darwinists teach. But neither side of the argument cares about logic, much less truth. The important thing is to declare which side you are on: religious fanaticism or cosmopolitan anti-religious fanaticism.
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
A blog debut not to be missed ...
I have had the privilege of teaming with Inquirer photographer Eric Mencher twice -- last year in Dublin for the Centenary of Bloomsday, and just recently for a piece about the Art Scene in Tunkhannock, Pa. (check out this Slide Show), and another about glass sculptor Christopher Ries (here's a Flash Show).
I can honestly say I am better journalist for having worked with Eric, who did intense, comprehensive preparation for both outings. So, if you want to see photography at its best, check out This Urban Life, Eric's new blog.
I can honestly say I am better journalist for having worked with Eric, who did intense, comprehensive preparation for both outings. So, if you want to see photography at its best, check out This Urban Life, Eric's new blog.
Monday, September 05, 2005
Conservative strands (Part II) ...
David Aaronovitch in the Times of London discerns another fissure in conservatism.
An afterthought ...
In my post yesterday I said that Jonathan Rauch's review of Rick Santorum's It Takes a Family was the best review of the book I had seen. I should have added that it's one of the best book reviews I've ever read, period. If you want to know what a really good book review looks like, read that one. (Here's the link.)
For one thing, Rauch has obviously read the book, not just flipped through the pages looking for phrases he can use to attack it. Most of what has been written about Santorum's book that I have seen has obviously been done in attack mode: That awful right-winger has written a book expounding his troglodytic moral views; isn't that awful?
Rauch, by contrast, teases out the implications of Santorum's views and plausibly wonders if this does not portend a problem for the conservative movement and the Republican Party.
One engages with Rauch's review precisely because it so incisive. I don't myself happen to think that the problem he discerns will amount to much in the long run. Santorum's more rigid moral views simply do not command consensus either among Republicans or among Americans in general. Neither do more extreme libertarian views, for that matter.
The Republicans have cobbled together a fairly broad coalition whose consituents do not agree on everything and in some instances do not agree, period. But they can work together, with all involved reasonably expecting to get something of what they want. If the so-called religious right dominated Republican politics the way Democrats say it does, the Republicans would never win a national election. On the other hand, Democratic politics really is dominated by the anti-war left, precisely to the degree that Democrats claim the religious right dominates the Republicans. And that is why Democrats have a hard time winning national elections.
For one thing, Rauch has obviously read the book, not just flipped through the pages looking for phrases he can use to attack it. Most of what has been written about Santorum's book that I have seen has obviously been done in attack mode: That awful right-winger has written a book expounding his troglodytic moral views; isn't that awful?
Rauch, by contrast, teases out the implications of Santorum's views and plausibly wonders if this does not portend a problem for the conservative movement and the Republican Party.
One engages with Rauch's review precisely because it so incisive. I don't myself happen to think that the problem he discerns will amount to much in the long run. Santorum's more rigid moral views simply do not command consensus either among Republicans or among Americans in general. Neither do more extreme libertarian views, for that matter.
The Republicans have cobbled together a fairly broad coalition whose consituents do not agree on everything and in some instances do not agree, period. But they can work together, with all involved reasonably expecting to get something of what they want. If the so-called religious right dominated Republican politics the way Democrats say it does, the Republicans would never win a national election. On the other hand, Democratic politics really is dominated by the anti-war left, precisely to the degree that Democrats claim the religious right dominates the Republicans. And that is why Democrats have a hard time winning national elections.
Sunday, September 04, 2005
Conservative strains ...
Jonathan Rauch has written a review of Rick Santorum's It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good that is by far the best I have seen. Rauch's analysis is excellent. Here is perhaps the key paragraph:
Where Goldwater denounced collectivism as the enemy of the individual, Santorum denounces individualism as the enemy of family. On page 426, Santorum says this: "In the conservative vision, people are first connected to and part of families: The family, not the individual, is the fundamental unit of society." Those words are not merely uncomfortable with the individual-rights tradition of modern conservatism. They are incompatible with it.
Glenn Reynolds thinks Rauch is suggesting that the Republican Party is splitting. I think he has merely discerned a fissure in American conservatism that has been there from the beginning -- and may well provide a good deal of the movement's vital tension (as Blake observed, "Without contraries is no progression").
Santorum's book is published by ISI Press. ISI stands for Intercollegiate Studies Institute. But that wasn't always the group's name. When Frank Chodorov founded it in 1953, the initials were ISI, but they stood for the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists. Chodorov was an anarcho-individualist, much influenced by the great Albert Jay Nock.
But the man Chodorov chose to head his society was none other than a young fellow fresh out Yale by the name of William F. Buckley Jr., whose father, Frank, had been a friend of Nock's. ISI, under both its names, has consistently explored all of the strands of conservatism and has been pretty open throughout its history to all of the movement's often contending factions. In 1968 I lectured at an ISI summer school held at Rockford College (I spoke on Nock). The followers of objectivist Ayn Rand and also those of radical libertarian Murray Rothbard were tough to deal with.
There have always been in the American conservative movement those who have wanted to place government at the service of traditional morality. But there have also always been those who have cautioned agianst going too far in the direction (Buckley is one of them). The split in the movement -- which has, as I say, always been there -- is between the traditionalists on the one hand, and the libertarians on the other. (At the last Republican National Convention the libertarian wing of the party -- represented by Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger -- was more on display than ever before.)
Santorum is a Catholic, and his view that the family, not the individual, is the basic unit of society, is standard Roman Catholic social doctrine. There has, by the way, been from the beginning a strong Catholic strain running through American conservatism.
But is Santorum's view, as Rauch suggests, incompatible with what he calls "individual-rights conservatism?" Philosophically, there may well be a number of irreconcilable differences between the two viewpoints. But the two sides have more in common with each other -- a commitment to free enterprise, a belief in the principle of subsidairity, among others -- than either has with the political left. Reagan, a very skillful politician, played both sides of the aisle and never identified himself exclusively with either. The two sides drive hard bargains, but they usually manage to cut a deal.
Where Goldwater denounced collectivism as the enemy of the individual, Santorum denounces individualism as the enemy of family. On page 426, Santorum says this: "In the conservative vision, people are first connected to and part of families: The family, not the individual, is the fundamental unit of society." Those words are not merely uncomfortable with the individual-rights tradition of modern conservatism. They are incompatible with it.
Glenn Reynolds thinks Rauch is suggesting that the Republican Party is splitting. I think he has merely discerned a fissure in American conservatism that has been there from the beginning -- and may well provide a good deal of the movement's vital tension (as Blake observed, "Without contraries is no progression").
Santorum's book is published by ISI Press. ISI stands for Intercollegiate Studies Institute. But that wasn't always the group's name. When Frank Chodorov founded it in 1953, the initials were ISI, but they stood for the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists. Chodorov was an anarcho-individualist, much influenced by the great Albert Jay Nock.
But the man Chodorov chose to head his society was none other than a young fellow fresh out Yale by the name of William F. Buckley Jr., whose father, Frank, had been a friend of Nock's. ISI, under both its names, has consistently explored all of the strands of conservatism and has been pretty open throughout its history to all of the movement's often contending factions. In 1968 I lectured at an ISI summer school held at Rockford College (I spoke on Nock). The followers of objectivist Ayn Rand and also those of radical libertarian Murray Rothbard were tough to deal with.
There have always been in the American conservative movement those who have wanted to place government at the service of traditional morality. But there have also always been those who have cautioned agianst going too far in the direction (Buckley is one of them). The split in the movement -- which has, as I say, always been there -- is between the traditionalists on the one hand, and the libertarians on the other. (At the last Republican National Convention the libertarian wing of the party -- represented by Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger -- was more on display than ever before.)
Santorum is a Catholic, and his view that the family, not the individual, is the basic unit of society, is standard Roman Catholic social doctrine. There has, by the way, been from the beginning a strong Catholic strain running through American conservatism.
But is Santorum's view, as Rauch suggests, incompatible with what he calls "individual-rights conservatism?" Philosophically, there may well be a number of irreconcilable differences between the two viewpoints. But the two sides have more in common with each other -- a commitment to free enterprise, a belief in the principle of subsidairity, among others -- than either has with the political left. Reagan, a very skillful politician, played both sides of the aisle and never identified himself exclusively with either. The two sides drive hard bargains, but they usually manage to cut a deal.
Saturday, September 03, 2005
The matter of experts ...
It is, I believe, fairly widely known that newspapers are having a hard time of it these days. Circulation figures and ad revenues are both down. Various reasons have been adduced as to why this is so, the commonest being the easy — and free — access to the news online.
But I continue to think that if, when you picked up your newspaper every morning, you found it filled with well-written, well-researched stories about interesting things you didn’t know about — and couldn’t find anywhere else — you’d make sure to re-up your subscription.
I think the decline of newspapers has to do with other things. I alluded to one in a recent post: preferring punditry over reporting. But reporting has its problems, too, one of which is the reliance on experts.
Reporters are very fond of experts (I suspect the fondness is mutual). But reliance on the testimony of experts is simply a variation on the argument from authority. Thomas Aquinas was a great respecter of authority, but even he noted that the argument from authority is the weakest form of argument. The problem is that it really doesn’t amount to much more than asserting that such-and-such is true because so-and-so says it is.
As it happens, experts are often wrong. If you had gathered all of the literary experts — writers, critics, scholars — in the United States together in one place — say, Harvard — in 1895 and asked them who the two best American poets of the time were, it is doubtful they would have chosen Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson.
Astronomers in Galileo’s time, asked about the solar system, would have cited the Tychonic system, devised by Tycho Brahe, the greatest astronomer of the day and one of the greatest ever. His system had the planets revolving around the sun, and the planets and sun in turn revolving around the Earth. Tycho was an expert and other experts agreed with him.
This is not to suggest that expert testimony should not be sought out. It is rather to suggest that it not be sought out in order to arrive at some sort of consensus. Science has nothing to do with consensus. The consensus in the 16th century may have been in favor of Tycho’s system, but the consensus was wrong and Galileo was right. One scientist with correct data constitutes a majority of one.
It is far more fruitful to seek the areas of disagreement among the experts and explore them, not in order to settle them, least of all in order to take sides, but simply in order to inform the rest of us about them. Otherwise we lead people to think that more is known for sure than is in fact the case.
But I continue to think that if, when you picked up your newspaper every morning, you found it filled with well-written, well-researched stories about interesting things you didn’t know about — and couldn’t find anywhere else — you’d make sure to re-up your subscription.
I think the decline of newspapers has to do with other things. I alluded to one in a recent post: preferring punditry over reporting. But reporting has its problems, too, one of which is the reliance on experts.
Reporters are very fond of experts (I suspect the fondness is mutual). But reliance on the testimony of experts is simply a variation on the argument from authority. Thomas Aquinas was a great respecter of authority, but even he noted that the argument from authority is the weakest form of argument. The problem is that it really doesn’t amount to much more than asserting that such-and-such is true because so-and-so says it is.
As it happens, experts are often wrong. If you had gathered all of the literary experts — writers, critics, scholars — in the United States together in one place — say, Harvard — in 1895 and asked them who the two best American poets of the time were, it is doubtful they would have chosen Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson.
Astronomers in Galileo’s time, asked about the solar system, would have cited the Tychonic system, devised by Tycho Brahe, the greatest astronomer of the day and one of the greatest ever. His system had the planets revolving around the sun, and the planets and sun in turn revolving around the Earth. Tycho was an expert and other experts agreed with him.
This is not to suggest that expert testimony should not be sought out. It is rather to suggest that it not be sought out in order to arrive at some sort of consensus. Science has nothing to do with consensus. The consensus in the 16th century may have been in favor of Tycho’s system, but the consensus was wrong and Galileo was right. One scientist with correct data constitutes a majority of one.
It is far more fruitful to seek the areas of disagreement among the experts and explore them, not in order to settle them, least of all in order to take sides, but simply in order to inform the rest of us about them. Otherwise we lead people to think that more is known for sure than is in fact the case.
Friday, September 02, 2005
Speaking of Glenn Reynolds ...
The Instapundit interviews Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near. It's long and pretty detailed -- there are even graphs -- but that's what makes it well worth your time and attention.
But let's get serious ...
Glenn Reynolds, over at Instapundit, has a comprehensive List of Agencies to whom you can make a contribution on behalf of the people trying to put their lives back together after Hurricane Katrina. Visit and give, please.
I gave online to Catholic Charities -- which, the last time I checked, was listed second for contributions -- because I've had good experiences with them in the past.
I gave online to Catholic Charities -- which, the last time I checked, was listed second for contributions -- because I've had good experiences with them in the past.
Thursday, September 01, 2005
A process of random selection ...
I just got home about an hour ago. I had to spend several hours shelving the books that had piled up over the past few days. I couldn't get to them because I had a couple stories to write -- which involved doing some extra reporting -- and I had lots of other stuff to do besides.
Anyway, while I discarded September's galleys and made way for December's and January's, I started thinking about the lively exchange I've been having here with Melville Goodwin and others about intelligent design and neo-Darwinism. There are maybe 600 galleys for October and another 600 for November already on the shelves, a mere fraction of the more than 12,000 that on average get published every month. It's a prodigal display of fertility, just like you see in nature, where, out of millions of fish eggs, say, only a comparatively few will actually grow up to be mature fish -- very few indeed when you take into consideration how many fall prey to other species.
I can't bring myself to believe that only the best books get reviewed. I can't even be sure if the best books get noticed. We surely can't imagine that only the best specimens survive in nature. Random selection is surely an imperfect method for determining which books to review. Seems an odd system for organizing life, too. Then again, maybe it's designed that way.
Anyway, while I discarded September's galleys and made way for December's and January's, I started thinking about the lively exchange I've been having here with Melville Goodwin and others about intelligent design and neo-Darwinism. There are maybe 600 galleys for October and another 600 for November already on the shelves, a mere fraction of the more than 12,000 that on average get published every month. It's a prodigal display of fertility, just like you see in nature, where, out of millions of fish eggs, say, only a comparatively few will actually grow up to be mature fish -- very few indeed when you take into consideration how many fall prey to other species.
I can't bring myself to believe that only the best books get reviewed. I can't even be sure if the best books get noticed. We surely can't imagine that only the best specimens survive in nature. Random selection is surely an imperfect method for determining which books to review. Seems an odd system for organizing life, too. Then again, maybe it's designed that way.
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