Sunday, June 28, 2020

William F. Buckley's "Nearer My God": Book Review

Nearer, My God
I chose this on a whim as it was so far out of my usual orbit. No recollections of the old sod or stickball, and barely any for altar boys and fearsome clergy. Instead, a patrician account and series of reflections and reactions to the course of Catholicism from the venerable era in which Buckley was elegantly raised and the postconciliar malaise which has affected so many in the less certain Church.

His noblesse oblige permeates. There's a couple mentions of devout black butlers, but that's about it for class consciousness. It's rather astounding to follow this chronicle, so removed from the reality most of us share when it comes to education, privilege, or sailing at every opportunity at a summer home. This elevated lifestyle unfolds, and Buckley surely as he's accustomed to the manor/ manner born comports himself as he's been raised. It makes for a very curious spiritual autobiography/ FAQ.

For Buckley turns this midway into a novel experiment. He interviews a few of his friends, mostly converts, and all conservative fellow-travelers, often at the National Review, naturally. They also feature priests who've transferred to Catholic clergy from Protestant denominations. Buckley surveys their takes on many questions he raises about dogma, belief, and practice. Although as a cradle Catholic I must confess none of the statements he compiles would have convinced me to join "Rome," it's instructive to learn the mindset of those coming to "the faith" without being raised in it.
I could follow the theological details, but for many who admire Buckley, this granular examination may bore or bewilder. There's far less of his famed politics, and not much of his wit or rhetoric either.

It does all make for an oddly paced book. It's more a series of explorations and reflections, although the central theme of examining what persists post-Vatican II as the liberals often left the clergy and left the administration to overworked and understaffed priests and laypeople is important. For it demonstrates the rebound, if by default given the numerical advantage of the diminished remnant in control, of the traditionally minded episcopate and papacy, of what's a dwindling number of cradle-born congregants in America and Europe. This does all tilt in Buckley's view, as expected, to slant away from a global awareness of how the Church will fare as its center slides towards the "South."

As a result, this work will appeal to the small coterie of like-minded sympathizers with both Buckley's worldview and likely his class and background. The name-dropping may come without hesitation to this author, but it does remind the hoi polloi of our place among the pews and practically as peons. Few of the rest of us may be able to enter this intimately connected and convinced realm even via print, but it's a document to this reaction to what was meant as a reform to appeal to millions presumably reluctant to accept a pre-modern Church, even though the results in sweeping that aside enchanted far fewer than anticipated, at least among Buckley's entitled cabal. (Amazon US 12/12/17)

Wednesday, June 24, 2020

John Garth's "The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien": Book Review

 Image of The Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien: The Places That Inspired Middle-earth
Atlases of Middle-Earth, guides and art, tributes and monographs, films and “cosplay” proliferate. What John Garth adds to the ever-proliferating pile of Tolkien-related media is a careful eye and steady step. He explores the intersections between this world and that of Tolkien’s “legendarium.” He traces inspirations from what the author saw, and how they may likely have evolved into what can be gleaned from his tales, letters, drafts, and sketches.

While not all made it into the published product, the effort Garth demonstrates attests to Tolkien’s visionary projection, his uncanny talent at what this scholar compares to a paint-box, in which the author dipped, daubed, and mixed layers of color, depth, hue, form, and drama into his vast legacy of narratives.

To begin, Garth logically starts with the hobbits’ Shire. Tracking parallels to childhood scenes in the village of Sarehole near Birmingham, Garth shows how Tolkien grew up amidst an almost-vanished rural setting. He then broadens the scope, viewing the “people, languages and cosmology” of Tolkien’s panorama, already emerging in his youthful imagination. It soon encompasses England itself, transformed into Lúthien, a name with lasting resonance, for it graces Tolkien’s tombstone. Topography expands abroad, with chapters devoted to features such as shores and seas, inland waters, mountains, forests, battlefields, and industrial wastelands. All are “places built or shaped by people,” Garth notes, and by Tolkien’s incessant cultivation of fussy details as a “natural niggler” whose seeding as a medievalist and linguist bore abundant fruit.

Garth reminds readers that what Tolkien began over a century ago described races and places as seen by medieval poets and chroniclers, not necessarily as they actually were. This astute caution defends the author’s works against detractors who, looking back and projecting contemporary critical theory upon Middle-Earth, distort its perspective.

What opens up to the viewer dazzles. Drowned lands, moving islands, and sea-caves first appear as Garth follows Tolkien’s explorations of the real and the fictional, and their blur and blend. Mountains loom, for Tolkien’s 1911 walking tour of the Swiss valley of Lauterbrunnen offered a “superfluity of inspiration,” in Garth’s estimation.

Peaks of fire, ice, and mist echo, as do Tolkien’s analysis incorporating volcanoes, geology, subterranean architecture, and craggy formations. Again, the 1911 travels had taken him two days down the Rhine towards the Alps. Germanic lore of dragon lairs and Wagner’s Ring-cycle leave imprints in his works. Rivers, pools, marshes and floods connect one section of this book to the next on “tree-woven lands.” Clumps, clusters, and circles of woods Garth compares to Tolkien’s wonderfully drawn maps, varied vistas, and even medieval cathedrals which have enriched his subject’s imagination.

Philology, archeology, cartography entered too, for the castles surviving, burial mounds, barrows, chalk-figures, and the ruins excavated across England turned into the citadels, fortresses, halls, and towers which endure or topple as ancient attestations to bloodshed. They populated Tolkien’s landscapes. As Garth’s previous book documented Tolkien’s experiences in, and reactions to, the “Great War,” this scholar’s scrutiny of artifacts of stone and iron, conflagration into ash, diaries, letters, and jottings comprise a significant portion of this superbly illustrated new volume.

While other writers schooled in the Edwardian age focused on the phantasmagorical, Tolkien’s balance with the grim realities of combat tempered his treatment. Panoramic desolation sears his pages, as does telling detail, that for instance of dead faces after a slaughter, submerged in miasmas as glimpsed from above by weary, parched marchers.
Tolkien’s sensitivity toward the eradication of the environment that nurtured his soul permeates his creations. This mirrored the hidden damage within those who survived the global carnage. As Tolkien recovered in 1916 from “louse-borne trench fever,” in and out of hospitals, he strengthened the scaffolding of his narrative constructions.

Returning to England, Garth corrects Tolkien’s pioneering biographer Humphrey Carpenter’s assertion that Birmingham equated to the dark and despotic Mordor. Garth examines that city’s toy industry, and its buildings preserving the Gothic Revival and William Morris’ Arts and Crafts Movement of Victorian times. Yet Garth somberly acknowledges the “swallowing of Sarehole,” as Tolkien’s beloved hamlet succumbs to a suburban “sea of new red-brick,” in his phrase.

John Garth concludes by evoking Tolkien’s ideals of “community, peace, freedom, craft and intimacy with nature.” These virtues enriched both his fictional and factual domains where he passed his long life, and its results endure to “reflect what he most loved and detested in his own world.”

Whether new to Middle-Earth or a veteran pilgrim, anyone will learn much in this book.
(New York Journal of Books, June 18, 2020.)

Saturday, June 13, 2020

State of the Union



I excerpt part of a letter I sent my friend in Ireland. It expresses my state of mind. I edited and revised a bit, but for the record, as I have not groused for a few weeks now, here 'tis. 

Economically, both my sons were laid off mid-March, but both have enrolled for online MBAs at where I teach, as they get discounts. We figure the loans are worth it. My wife's one small business is barely functioning and both her part-time helpers had to be laid off. But as 34% of my fellow Americans are making more on the bonuses added to unemployment checks than they would have on their jobs, that says something, doesn't it? This is the issue that this whole up-ending has again revealed. But neither party gives a damn about the little guys and gals except come election, and the Dems want to tip the populace so everywhere looks like California, a one-party nepotistic fiefdom from now 'til eternity, while the GOP shrinks and bleeds out. What I want is more alternatives. I root for underdogs and misfits. But unlike "your" systems, which at least enable smaller groups some say, we're trapped.

I'm ticked off that the Dems shot down Bernie again. Not that I backed his entire platform or scheme. How he could fund "free college" and lots of goodies remains utopian. (Yet that was before the magic stimulus trillions got printed suddenly, as if Jack of Beanstalk fame's beans.) But he could have riled up the establishment. He would have gotten us motivated about decisions that effect us, not the Beltway Them. Joe Biden bumbling in as the Banker's Best Pal isn't a scenario I wanted either. I tend to brush past Trump, frankly. Agree or not, he delivered on few promises. Not that Obama did either, for the most part, but at least this Congress had the majority it wanted to theoretically enact its stratagems. What is odd is that while I don't obsess over #45, Biden always evokes dislike in me, as with Hillary or her ilk.

When the blue-state's cadre challenges me, I have no facile solutions. It looks as if the Elephant's Army will take this campaign against sporadic enemy firepower. However, the "necessary evil" compromise after four decades of my votes wears thin as a rationale for supporting a corrupt mechanism by which we're increasingly suppressed and manipulated.

Sure, same as it ever was. Except now it's GPS, CCTV, data-mining, and keyboard strokes. Soon augmented by temperature scans, who we've been near, and where we can come and go. The shrugs that these measures assure our happiness bring to mind the "salami tactics" of how the Eastern Bloc communists took power after WWII. They came into coalition with the socialist or left-leaning parties. Then they nudged their way forward, edging out their rivals, and slicing ever thinner the "rights" or "room" that they were allowed under the Reds. By a thousand precise strokes of the knife, millions found themselves painfully diminished. 

Back to the present, I have a lot of students and seemingly no less work than before, but at least the soul-draining commutes are shelved for the nonce. But there's tremendous agitation to get back to business here, even though virus contagion has not abated but plateaued. Basically, Americans have given up caring. The commercials were fascinating to see evolve the past three months, as I mentally charted how long it took for messages and slogans to evolve, inevitably over soothing piano music and soft female voiceovers. As if everybody is in a quarantine where their house is boarded up with them inside for forty days as in the good old days while bodies pile up at the doorstep. I'm embarrassed to gripe.

It reminded me of Most Oppressed People Ever for the Irish, when in fact I am among the guilty who can stay home and work while millions out there have to schlep about packages and deliveries to "us," and to deal with hospitals and protestors--that whole scene in my opinion was due to a contingent looking for a "show-case" to generate "civil unrest" that fit a certain set of dramatis personae that could be cast, and due to the cabin fever that people had been sick of as June loomed and folks demanded to be let out of their confines. It's not simple. I am addressing this in Ethics courses next term, as I am interested in why "certain cases" get promoted by activists while others that don't fit a narrative do not find the same traction whether as spread in various media or among protesters. My innate skepticism contends here with my recognition of wrongs needing righting. It's again that I sense our collective strings getting firmly pulled by a determined force above and just out of our sight or comprehension, that has been waiting for the virus situation to roll out their versions of what will be sold for our own protection, and mandated for our activity, while implementing in accelerated form a surveillance regimen that restricts our liberties for a "greater good."

But I heard that if measures weren't taken, there'd be 60 million dead globally and 2-3 million in the US, half a million in Britain. While many of us probably know nobody with the virus, among my students, one woman caught it from a co-worker who did not notify their boss early on, and then she passed it to her baby, who spent ten days in the hospital. Another reported her grandmother succumbed, and one from Cairo that her grandmother has the virus. And then there's indirect deaths, from those otherwise needing care that may have had their treatment limited or their access thwarted. Among these: a family member of mine in my small circle, who died in assisted-living in San Francisco. A second, a family friend whose son and mine have bonded ever since pre-school, was killed by a speeding kid in a McLaren sports car as he walked in downtown L.A. The emptied streets meant more pedestrian fatalities. Finally, for now, my wife's college friend died of brain cancer in New Mexico. While that likely had nothing direct to do with the virus, the fact that three funerals that would have been attended by us never happened adds to another type of loss deeply felt.

What I cannot understand is the vocal minority opposed to lockdowns since claims "they lied to us" given the casualty rates are low, as if the lockdown had nothing to do with the diminished death toll. Still wrapping my head around that claim! Damned if we did nothing, condemned if we did. Now we have silent enemy #2 to fight against with trillions of dollars, to complement our post-9/11 "homeland" force. Like a war on terror, how do you ever declare victory over an elusive foe? Does such a conflict stop? Or does it mutate forever?

Meanwhile, such threats mean those in power once again consolidate their grip on us all.

A way to monitor everyone for their own safety, and tracking movements for security. Which may sound familiar, somehow. After all, it's doing great in the People's Republic of China.