The good Jew? Ozick reviews Mamet

I typed an hour's worth of ruminations, lost by a finger's slip. So I will suffice to say that these comments intrigued me, caused me to examine my own hybridity (word du jour for the lit crit crowd and Bob in his "social construction" doctoral studies), and reflect upon the status of religion as shown in the play "Doubt" seen last week by Leo and me at the Ahmanson. A fittingly named venue, after the philanthropist family of Home Savings savings who converted from Judaism to evangelical Christianity. The play's a bit ham-fisted and I wish that Fr. Flynn had been allowed to remain more ambiguous as to his guilt in molesting the off-stage and a bit too righteously abused and African American 1964 first in the Ital-Mick rosters who does not there belong boy, but Cherry Jones' acclaimed performance as the nun sniffing something rotten in the 1964 parish of St. Aloysius does, even if full of scenery- chewing, manages to fill the vast spaces of the too-large theatre full of 1900 kids and a few shepherds of the flock like me. It does offer a memorable justification by the Sister of her mission (from God?): "In the righteous pursuit of wrongdoing, one may step away from God." So argued those crusading against the Tribe, or Cromwell burning Drogheda.

Which I will lead efficiently back to the Ozick on Mamet review from the LA Times last Sunday. Mamet's rare among assimilated Jews in justifying the right of Israel to simply survive. Despite his own two marriages to shiksas, he calls for the perpetuation of the tribe. Eating bacon sandwiches as he once was in an interview I read a decade ago, he insists on the cultural legacy that he defiantly asserts in the face of the goyim. Surely, therefore, representative of the type of Jewish people that we have gotten to know in the past fifteen years in our markedly secular shetl on the slopes above a nominally Catholic city.

I guess, being a willed hybrid, I can compare the fate of the next fifty years' worth of Jews ready to define themselves as such with the plight of those speaking Irish. Nobody grows up unthinkingly identifying themselves in our Americanized and anglicized (here lingually, there culturally) society solely as Jewish faithful or Irish-speaker. Now, what of the hasidim, or the gaeilgoiri? Well, both of these are modern reactions to the loss of these traditional signifiers, people who consciously set themselves, a "stiff-necked people" or "fossilized fanatics", against the tide of conformity, homogenization, and elimination. We all, these days, have to choose our faction. More of us--Leo, Niall, and me in our mischling blend and Layne in her own fleischig fashion--must also contend with not wanting to discard one suit once worn by our fathers for a dress that bedecked our mothers, so to speak.

How this wraps back into Nicholas Donin and all those today who, descended from Jews, probably even with all the mitochondrial DNA that genogeographers can rescue, do not know there origins does make for humbling postures. Despite xenophobic gestures from Chosen People who resisted four thousand years of blandishments by temple prostitutes (word of the week thanks to Niall and Leo debating why one of their versions of Gilgamesh labels happy Hurri such and the other keeps her demure if admittedly a party girl) and Republican Gaels who never mixed with the Gall. Why? As we all intermarry and mate and mingle in ways unfathomable by ancestors who in Galway never met perhaps but one or two members of the Jewish persuasion in their lives, and I'm guessing not even that given that no Jews lived in the West that are at least recorded in the admittedly incomplete and now irretrievable data. The symbolic destruction of the British archives of centuries of taxation of the natives and of profits by their "betters" when the Four Courts was bombed at the start of the Irish Civil War, ironically of course post-(partial, there's the rub)independence does make me lament as well as shrug with futility about how much eludes forever even the most determined geneticist when it comes to unearthing the sleeping past and those beneath the earth we all tread but to fall upon.

Donin, where are you now? Which side did you claim on your flea-bitten deathbed, surrounded by halitoxic priests? Any "mental reservation," any pressure to renounce what you had announced-- if not from without, for no rabbi would have been near, but within your soul? Each side, Catholic and Jewish, allows an out at the last moment, two strikes, bottom of the ninth. We all must one day have to swing for the fences, but it is ourselves who will be lifted up, into who knows what bleachers, to land in what hands, to be grasped or fumbled or dropped into the eternal sky.

The good Jew

Cynthia Ozick assesses David Mamet’s call for soul-searching.

By Cynthia Ozick

October 8, 2006


The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the Jews
David Mamet
Nextbook/Schocken: 190 pp., $19.95

In the middle of the 13th century, in the town of La Rochelle in northern France, a Jew named Donin — learned both in scripture and in the homiletic commentaries, debates and morally centered scriptural interpretations that constitute the Talmud — underwent baptism, joined the Franciscans and began to style himself Nicholas. The condition of Jews in this period of church dominance was untenable. To live as a Jew was to live under a continuing death warrant. Crusader pogroms slaughtered 3,000 Jews in Brittany, Pitou and Anjou. Fanatical monks and bishops heaped calumny upon calumny against Jewish populations.

It was in this mercilessly oppressive climate that the new Franciscan Nicholas sought to become chief among the calumniators. In a malicious spew of preposterous fabrication, and in the face of his own knowledge, he asserted that the Talmud insulted Jesus, the Virgin and the church; that it blasphemed against God; that it declared deceiving and killing Christians lawful. As a result of Nicholas' exertions, 24 cartloads of Talmuds were burned in Paris, by papal decree, in 1244. And the Jews of France, defenseless under the heel of a church determined to destroy Jewish life, were found guilty of a dangerous wish to destroy Christianity.

Nicholas Donin's world is not ours; we neither inhabit nor recognize it. Medieval Christianity is not contemporary Christianity, earnestly pledged to familial harmony with Jews. But what of Nicholas himself? Why did he do it, why was he drawn to promulgate the very lies that were certain to threaten the safety of a small and helpless people — his own? At a distance of seven centuries, we can only speculate. Say that he did it out of opportunism, to stand with the powerful against the weak. Or that he did it out of fear, to escape the stigma of inferiority, the inexorable consequence of his Jewish birth. Or out of cowardice, or spite, or obsequiousness, or ingratiation, or self-aggrandizement. Or even (but this is satire) out of a kind of utopian universalism, a yearning for all peoples to be as one, without difference or dissent. Say any or all of these things, but do not say that Nicholas Donin's character — or, as we call it nowadays, his mind-set — is, like the culture that accommodated him, dead.

It is this strangely recurrent mind-set that is David Mamet's salient preoccupation in "The Wicked Son," a loose sequence of reflections on the nature of anti-Semitism and its fractional offshoot: hostile Jewish estrangement. The title refers to the lively liturgy of the Passover Seder table, which, like much Jewish discourse, plays with interrogating itself. One questioner (the "wicked son"), by evading the "we" of fellowship and addressing the gathering as "you people," proves not only that he has departed psychologically from his historic inheritance but, more emphatically, that he intends malice. Though marginal to the majority, he is the most noticed and the noisiest. And in identifying the wicked son of our own time, Mamet — preeminent playwright and filmmaker, Pulitzer Prize winner, showbiz celebrity newly awakened to Jewish faithfulness — turns to an ancient term redolent of communal and especially religious betrayal: apostate.

But in the American experience and generally in the mainly secular West, Jewish flight into conversion is no longer an expedient, or relevant, means of self-erasure; nor was it ever, even for Nicholas Donin, the crux. Harmful estrangement meant self-serving politics then, and, in a different guise (usually touching on the state of Israel), it remains self-serving politics now. In asserting this thesis, Mamet is sometimes blunt and sometimes circuitous, given to dubious analogies. Yet his grit is unfailing, and he stands nearly alone among his colleagues, in theater and Hollywood, who have shown a failure of nerve. Easy enough to slap down the street slurs of Mel Gibson, but it requires a stiffer spine to counter the far more insidious, and pervasive, defamation of the anti-Semitism that calls itself anti-Zionist.

Mamet, though, has even broader (and in some respects lesser) charges. He is explicit in his condemnation of "the Jews who, in the sixties, envied the Black Power Movement; who, in the nineties, envied the Palestinians; who weep at 'Exodus' but jeer at the Israel Defense Forces; who nod when Tevye praises tradition but fidget through the seder; who might take their curiosity to a dogfight, to a bordello or an opium den, but find ludicrous the notion of a visit to the synagogue; whose favorite Jew is Anne Frank and whose second-favorite does not exist; who are humble in their desire to learn about Kwanzaa and proud of their ignorance of Tu Bi'Shvat; who dread endogamy more than incest; who bow the head reverently at a baptism and have never attended a bris."

The mention of Tu Bi'Shvat, the Jewish Arbor Day, a post-biblical minor holiday charmingly dubbed "the New Year of the Trees," tips off Mamet's orientation: He is alert to heritage and spiritually conscientious. Still, the current widespread recrudescence of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel scurrilousness is a nervous issue even for the many Jews who are apostates in Mamet's sense — the non-observant secular agnostics who are not synagogue-goers and who are apathetic toward both the minor and major holidays, who are personally unscarred by Holocaust wounds and whose citizenship in a nation founded on democratic institutions is spiritual gratification enough. What causes uneasiness, including among the most religiously indifferent, is not only the daily trumpeting of genocidal intentions by the jihadist leaders of Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah, the last of which has massacred Jews as far away as Argentina. A wishfully accepted facade — "land for peace" in a merely territorial dispute — now discloses its enduring and deadly marrow: The Jewish nation's "right to exist" is called into question or denied outright, an utterance no sane person would dare to apply even to the life of a dog or a horse.

What has hastened Jewish anxieties are the jihadists' abettors, sympathizers and apologists who are active in more civilized societies, especially the dogmatic "progressive" elites in the press, on the lecture circuit and in the universities. It is no longer possible, if it ever was, to pretend to distinguish between open anti-Semitism and ostensibly political movements such as divestment and boycott. That there are Jews prominent in these movements, and indefatigable in identifying with defamatory zealotry, ultimately leads Mamet to his j'accuse.

"The Wicked Son" sets out to plumb the inmost nature of the apostate, particularly through social parallels (and parables) and through anthropology and Freudian psychology, and also, regrettably, through certain eccentric or inappropriate tics of language. The very word "apostate," for instance, tends to cast the argument in a religious mold yet mixes it oddly with the therapeutic. Apostasy, Mamet is persuaded, can actually be cured. How? By diligent ritual observance and devotion to Torah learning, until the apostate finds that "the habit of investigation, of study, of curiosity, has supplanted what he will now be able to recognize was the habit of apostasy." The italics are touching. Does Mamet imagine that sending Noam Chomsky, say, or Norman Finkelstein or Judith Butler or Tony Judt to yeshiva will undo their practiced enmities?

He is also prone to a confusion of terms. An "apikoros," a Greek-derived word defined in the book's glossary (which Mamet apparently neither compiled nor consulted) as "[a] heretic, one who is learned in Judaism but rejects it," is not the same as Mamet's apostate, whom he consistently faults for "knowing nothing of Judaism except the slander of its opponents." But an apikoros is not necessarily a slanderer (Nicholas Donin excepted), and many a skeptic has been seen turning up at Sabbath services, whether for the familiar pleasures of the liturgy or simply out of solidarity.

More perplexing is Mamet's adverting throughout to "the Jewish race," a questionable phrase acceptable perhaps in the 19th century but genetically false and permanently tainted by Nazi racist fabrications. Yet another wayward usage is "tribal," here possibly intended sociologically, nevertheless always smacking of backwardness and denigration. It is hard to know whether these recalcitrant terms were chosen straightforwardly or with a kind of tough in-your-face defiance emblematic of Mamet's gutsiness in addressing his nasty subject. The frequent Freudian lingo — "the trauma of the clan," "resistance is the neurosis," anti-Semitism as sadomasochistic fantasy, and all the rest — is, it seems to me, more the product of stale psychoanalytic fashion than new-minted thought.

But most extraordinary of all is Mamet's strange notion of Judaism as "a secret society, similar in the public imagination to the Rosicrucians." I believe he means this playfully (if perilously: "Secret society" inevitably suggests the fraudulent Protocols), and I hope he also means it ironically; otherwise, he would be overlooking a blazing yet commonplace truth — that nothing on earth is less arcane than Judaism, which, for better or worse, has given birth to two world religions and whose scripture undergirds innumerable literatures and cultures.

Anti-Semitism has often been attributed to any number of widely recognizable ills found in all societies, such as scapegoating, bias against difference, group-versus-group hostility. But Jew-hatred does not take easily to ready-to-hand rational comparisons. It is close to being a metaphysical disorder and exists even where there are no Jews; it has a profound affinity with a belief in demons and other phantasmagoria (an affinity from which the most sensitive, cultivated and sophisticated minds are not always barred). "What is the fear the Jew engenders?" Mamet asks. "Perhaps it is caused by his historical, absolute, terrifying certainty that there is a God." Here is a conjecture wholly off the mark. The most ferocious anti-Semites and Jew-killers alive today are the jihadists who affirm God with, in fact, a terrifying certainty. And again: "The cure for the Jew is neither assimilation nor conversion, but religion." Nazi Germany built a national identity on an anti-Semitism that incinerated, without distinction, the assimilated, the converted, the believing and the unbelieving, and Daniel Pearl was not beheaded because he was an American stand-in for Western globalization. The anti-Semite is no "normal" bigot. This is why any attempt at finding analogies to anti-Semitism in this or that historical experience or pariah status or sexual disturbance or childhood trauma or political affront has no logical force. Human histories, even horrendous ones, are not interchangeable.

Yet Mamet diligently looks for parallels and origins, frequently inapplicable and at times grotesque — "the unresolved race memory of slavery"; "the child's need for security and for powerful and moral parents"; advocates of Francis Bacon as the real Shakespeare; gays, veterans and the disabled; the "high school car wash"; "[t]he confederation of the shamefaced," including members of Reform synagogues and amateur writing groups; and more. That Mamet supposes these scattershot disparities to be analogous to, or suggestive of, anti-Semitism is both confounding and dismaying.

"The Wicked Son" is a weakly argued work in the service of a pair of powerful indictments. The first points to an intractability: the persistence of anti-Semitism from generation to generation, a kind of cross-gender mental hemophilia endemic to the brain that carries and transmits it. The second charge is lodged against anti-Semitism's Jewish accomplices, nowadays noisome with peace-and-justice sloganeering and often mistakenly accused of self-hate. But the craven motives that spur Mamet's inauspiciously named "race treason" are no different from Nicholas Donin's 13th century opportunism. All are equally rooted in self-promoting callousness, servile ingratiation and other stigmata of excessive self-love.

As it happens, two scrupulously documented current books take up these themes far more intelligibly and comprehensively than Mamet, for all the stinging wisdom of his intuition, is able to do. Mamet himself cites "The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege" by Kenneth Levin, a psychiatrist and historian who anatomizes in depth what he terms "Jewish self-reform and self-effacement in conformity with leftist tenets." "The Jewish Divide Over Israel: Accusers and Defenders," edited by Edward Alexander and Paul Bogdanor, consists of meticulously supported essays on the pathological careers of leading Jewish antagonists. (For the record, six pages of my own are included in the latter.) These volumes are, for the moment, definitive. But if Mamet's passionate yet sometimes idiosyncratic analyses do not always satisfy, his resoluteness in standing against the defamers and their apologists is as needed as it is rare among his peers.

My Big California Adventure

We celebrated Niall's eleventh birthday; the little hobbit went to Disneyland's southern annex-- my wife insisted that I would not find it as bad as anticipated. Well, the Downtown D-land part that divides the old park from the new stretches from the hotel across what was an immense parking lot and is now a promenade lined with chain stores akin to Universal City Walk. Nothing that exciting, but the cleanliness is quite noticeable when compared with the litter strewn and graffiti-scarred real-life counterparts of the California Adventure's inspirations. Unlike the week before, when I threw up at the gates of the same park necessitating a ride home and unrelenting guilt for ruining Niall's birthday. But, as I observed chipperly on Layne's MySpace blog, at least we saved the $11 parking fee. Whose lack may have barely covered the gas, being stuck on the 5 Northbound a couple of hours on the way home, nearly none of which I recall.

Back to Anaheim. Gay Days '06 in hundreds of red and pink tank-tops and t-shirts among as many more rubicund garments displayed by men of all ages and about three woman as far as I counted. Layne reminded me of Disney's historically early and generous encouragement of the gay community in its own creative and occupational endeavors. I recall her telling me long ago of the coke-fiend guys responsible for animating the Pink Elephants on Parade sequence from Dumbo. The other most common sighting in this habitat were Aussie migrants. I guess it's summer vacation for them; it seemed half of the pinker shades of the Caucasian persuasion we passed were declaiming with twangy brays. I told the kids how strange to think that once Disneyland had a strict dress code for entrance; the part-time punks and determinedly swishy strollers in their respective plumage did show how even the happiest place on earth had to let in those who wished to proclaim their own conforming non-conformity, to present a giddy or sullen demeanor befitting their sartorial choices. I thought of Enid in Ghost World on why she did not want the cool old 50s jalopy to drive: then you'd have to get the clothes, and match everything you did to the car.

We went on the Condor Rides, as if floating above various California beauty spots, nearly free of tract houses except the one over a golf tourney in Palm Springs. A classy ride, although Leo did not like it ending up flying over the Magic Kingdom as fireworks burst. Unfortunately, Tinkerbelle was not splattered on the windscreen of whatever craft soared over this climactic panorama, this Buena Vista.

The weather, not too hot but very sunny and no breeze and therefore an accumulation of exposure that does wear me down after a couple of hours outside unless I am in (missing Santa Cruz) a sylvan glade (is there any other type of glade? dell? lea?), did just that: wear me down. Still, frequent interior escapes and shady respites helped. Poor Niall was tuckered out after perhaps one too many rollercoasters, and lay on the concrete planter's buffer next to me (trying out the IPod I inherited from my generous and/or tech-challenged wife; those ear-buds are impossible to fit into the cavity and I have no idea who on earth has ears shaped so to invite such entry) as we waited for our Fast Pass time to enter the Tower of Terror, a fine re-creation of the Roosevelt Hotel in haunted Hollywood. The TT turned out to be a gravity-defying drop, that let you down just enough for a moment or two of g-force weightlessness in your seat. We even have the picture to prove it--my face looking so long that it makes Jay Leno's look round. Niall pulled himself together, and we all enjoyed the silly ride of a few seconds, so it seemed.

Speaking of round, at the Animation Academy we all took a cartoon quiz that matched our faces, personality preferences, and I suppose sheer randomness to find our appropriate character. They did fit well, Leo being madcap Timon from what in his innocent youth was his favorite flick, The Lion King. Niall found his mate in the dependable clockface Cogsworth in Beauty & the Beast. Layne proved to be Cinderella herself. I on the other hand became the doppelganger for the fearsome misanthrope Shere Khan from Jungle Book. Then, off to ESPN Zone where the Dodgers, down 2-zip in the division playoffs as the wildcard team set against the champion Mets, sought to stay alive. We had to wait an hour or so. Leo and I went to a tiny imitation of a Barnes & Noble simalacrum of an old-tyme indie bookstore. The latte vendors, it being an imitation and not the venerable merchant of tomes, wore a black apron with "Compass: the West's oldest independent bookstore since 1851." Wait: wasn't this the long-departed Hunter's motto? I guess some other indie bought out that indie.

The pickings slim, nowhere to sit inside and read. I bought Leo a latte and he thought that term meant it was cold. I explained that it meant milk in Italian and not a temperature. The chai was boiling hot; he got a cup of ice to put in it, but then the flavor dissolved into a mundane liquid faintly tasting of fake spice. Seeing his interest in a book, a rarity too long, I offered that he could pick out a title for a room of his own. He chose one of the guides to Lost, with my help as the two competing ones, while good, were more spiritually oriented--one by Orson Scott Card, the other on the religious and critical contexts behind the show. They actually made the series sound intellectual. Leo took the one that gave a more chronological account of each episode. Anything to get him to read.

The ESPN Zone set us center floor in front of a massive screen surrounded by eight smaller "feeds"; the game had just begun and already it was 3-0 Mets. Happy to find Fat Tire Amber ale on draft, the Big Daddy 25 ouncer was mine. Repeated, since it was a slow game. The bar food, chicken wings, sliders, and a surprisingly good pile of onion rings, did my regimen of watching my intake no good, but in the spirit of the evening as well as being plain hungry, I even added a rum carrot cake--a fine combo even if I could not finish the last few bites. Angered by the presence of Mets fans behind us and off to the side in the form of a snide young man who ostentatiously clapped and cheered at the enemy's victory, we managed to keep up hopes as the 3-0 became a 4-3, or was it 5-3, lead in the 5th or 6th. But, the Mets soon rallied and the 9-6 score sealed the Blue Crew into a doom of their own hapless making once again. Even our heroic Nomar Garciaparra, hobbling up for one at bat that was very key, failed to pull a Kirk Gibson miracle play with the bases loaded. Niall wept after he ate his dessert. We saw the bitter end upstairs as he pitched (37! 42 mph!) at a sheet in an ersatz batting cage, and Leo indifferent as ever used up Niall's game card on air hockey and some intense folderol.

The evening by then allowed me a so far rare chance to wear my own mighty fine b-day gift, a blue-gold letterman jacket vintage -- so old that it said made in the USA --with John O stitched on the front (almost my name, and the O is the start of the Irish, so) and San Francisco Conservation Corps on the reverse. It had aroused some cutting remarks when I put it on after a Dodger game last summer, but in Angels turf I suppose it was neutral ground. Layne liked her dessert of angel food cake and berry sorbet, Leo is keeping admirably to a non-four foot diet, and Niall, well, we tried our best to comfort the bereft boy who would not get to use his tickets for the playoff game the next day.

Happy Birthday, Dear World!

Niall and I were at the Dodger game last night, erev Rosh Hashanah 5767. Tommy Lasorda appeared, on his natal anniversary, and got a cheery wave and huzzahs from the 45,000 of us. But, of course,– being spawn of a film archivist expert in the dangers of litigation, the benefits of public domain, and differing from more generous-devious country-cute (Gretta so disparaged in “The Dead;” cf. Dev’s nickname not to his long face compared to the ‘Spanish onion in the Irish stew’of the “cute hoor,” cute not being necessarily in either case an Irish endearment) me when it comes to self-defined “fair-use”– well, our Niall observed sagely of we 45,000 unwittingly law-abiding revellers, “they can’t sing ‘Happy Birthday’ since they’d get sued.” Dodgers? Tommy? Us? Still, no one I could hear burst into that iambic quatrain, all the same.

I can attest by observation that Frank McCourt’s wife, being ‘of Jewish origin,’ was not in shul last night but at the park. As were we. Sometimes family trumps even observance. Conviviality deserves its place wherever we can grasp it in this bewildering whirling globe. And, Frank and his wife waved to us– dear Niall in cap of course particularly– as they walked across an empty post-triumphant verdant expanse towards the team bus behind the bleachers (why are they called “pavillions”?); Niall and I had been leaning over the fence 360' back discussing the field’s dimensions as the crowd dispersed. The security guards, at the moment the couple approached, albeit from 50 yards away, shooed us away as if we were perched on a grassy knoll with sniper scopes. A dull game, but we enjoyed the walk to and from the stadium and the fresh evening air.

I had written into my wife’s MySpace a New Year entry but one click of a hurried hand whose manipulator had been summoned to dinner had erased it irrevocably from this Book of Life. So, again my mournful existentialism. Since turning, if a bit later than Dante, this past year into the middle of my life’s way precisely, if I hit 90, I have felt mortality, Big Questions unresolved, the lack of purpose or the hidden reason or the sheer accident of my existence as if nearly constantly. They say when you hit 30, or 40, you’re supposed to, but at 30 I was caught up in the double turmoil of a fresh marriage to begin and a lingering PhD program to finish. 40 I remember by my surprise party at the short-lived Museum of Death in Hollywood, but not any angst, at least no more than the usual heaping spoonfuls ladled into my consciousness before I even remembered. Thus my purgatorial research, my eschatological fascination, my apocalyptic schadenfreude.

Anyway, if you want to read such musings you can pick them with far greater insight up from Camus. I have been meditating, if that’s the word as I loosely apply it, when cutting strawberries at the sink or washing dishes (more since the dishwasher died last week and I ladled out for an hour as if in thimblefuls by the end all the standing water from the bottom of the machine), that scene in Die Grosse Stille when the Carthusian brother’s cutting up the lettuce into the leaves presentable and those discardable. As with nearly all the 2'45" film, the silence magnifies the sound. When viewing this, the cumulative effect of, as Philip Groening sought, time’s passing and its permanence sinks in deeply. I have consciously sought the “be here now” (that Dick Alpert neé Ram Dass sure got the short end of the roach thanks to Tim Leary, although I am only at about 1964 in Richard Greenfield’s Leary bio) when continuing to chop away the fruit and dunk the mug. At least this moment in the day reminds me by my small task of ‘ora et labora,’ the Benedictine injunction of combining prayer into work so, I suppose for monks, they can strive towards their seamless integration into the soul and body permanently, as time passes.

Quite catholic if meant with little “c” along the big. Is it praying? Maybe not as the faithful think it so much as the thoughtful. Not that the two are contradictory: this is one of many manners how “learned” adepts condescend to those without abbreviations after their name. I find as I get older that taking what I can value from a variety of spiritual and intellectual traditions enriches me, however minutely or fleetingly. Pope Benedict mused (before his professorial if perhaps brusque medieval citation of a papal delegate’s critique of a devious Islam that deigns to sway the world by violence rather than by love) recently in his native Bavaria of how in our age that we have amplified our own voices and diminished God’s message. It’s difficult, he mused, and I paraphrase and rephrase, to hear the divine when we clump about the planet as if we own it. Europe, as the nine centuries of Carthusian tradition attest, has a venerable tradition that still calls a few; but what of we many “extramurals”? The way to the Pure Land, to Seventh Heaven, to the Ein Sof, has always been that, as Muhammed envisioned, of the knife-edge we must walk on or slip – at least in his infernal cosmology– into the lake of fire. What use do such metaphors have, however, for those of us who do not reckon such a fate awaits our post-mortem condition?

Most Jews, many Christians (statistically most of all Catholics), and I deduce lots of Muslims such as share my workplace who I see munching away during Ramadan place little if any credence in terrifying injunctions to resist the lures of the secular or suffer unending torment. Secularized Europe, relativistic (no matter what both the left and the right say for varying purposes) America, and in time I suppose the rest of our fellow earthlings all will reach their own entropy. Sam Harris’ The End of Faith, David Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, and the reflection I read recently by I think Arthur C Clarke all predict a non-theistic endgame. Clarke in a thousand years imagines that if anyone invokes religious belief, they’ll be shunted off to the loony bin. Still, as with the deifications of Mao and Lenin for purportedly deterministic regimes, the people need their illusions. The pressures of materialist consumerism, capitalist capitulation, and rational thinking all press upon billions. Like the Chinese censoring the Net and insisting upon communist fealty or the Islamists who cannot comprehend the existence of a “liberal” Muslim, perhaps for now the campaigns to enforce by threat or punishment a loyalty to a cause that has receded from instead of beckoned towards ourselves will endure. Yet, if the Church could not command fidelity once technology’s appeal, literacy, and the exchange of marketed ideas and goods began to spread among its adherents, how can a billion Muslims or Chinese be expected, in such another revolution of goods and flurry of messages, to remain behind a wall or a border?

A survey taken in America identified today four types of a God. Those in the East tended towards a critical deity: one who disdains our faults but prefers to mark us down silently for demerits rather than catch us by the scruff of our neck. The South leaned under an authoritarian deity who ladled out condemnations and, if more rarely, approval. The Midwest liked a benevolent God who seemed happy when people followed the righteous path. The West preferred a distant deity, who perhaps set it all spinning way back but who now huddled out of sight off-stage to watch our performance. What would the Creator of the Universe, melekh-ha-olam, say from Sinai if he read today’s copy of the Forward? The mailbox opens, the page unfolds, Matisyahu’s playing on his GameBoy; a black rapper embraces Orthodoxy; a man “of Jewish descent” claims that his Bubba Pig’s Café near Branson, MO’s the target of racial and culinary wrath; George Allen Jr, thanks to the Forward’s etymological hunches about Ladino “macaca,” is found to have a Jewish mother who only told her son a month ago the truth; and thanks to Mexican immigrant initiative, a kosher slaughterhouse is found to have hidden 127 lbs. of pot. Such is our Jewish America, 5767.

Vashti Bunyan, Tim Leary & Carthusians

She's one of those cult figures, like Anne Briggs or Davy Graham for folk-trad, or Syd Barrett and Captain Beefheart for psych-rock, who dropped out due to drugs or temperament or both, and became reclusive. Mojave Desert for CB, Cambridge house for SB, I guess London flat if not some Moroccan souk for DG, and the Hebrides or the North for AB. (Image credit: representative LP cover.) It took CB longer, fifteen or so years, than the rest, to make his escape, but all four and more have in common the ruralist dream of the intellectual or artist, to flee the city to hear the voices in the wilderness, live on locusts & wild honey, and I guess cloak one's self in rustic garb: think of Scorcese's "Last Temptation" as the repulsive John the Baptist emerges encrusted from his Essene-adjacent digs as any anchorite must have been, logically. They all did what the rest of us urbanites daydream about, and as my mind keeps skipping back to the dell and the waterfall and the sight in my mind's eye of Niall aglow in sun-dappled dazzle in Zayante Creek, the pull of such a rural idyll tugs mightily if delicately.

Here's the NY Times review "Back From the Bucolic Life After Decades Without Fans" by Ben Ratliff of Bunyan's (is Vashti her real name or her assumed?) return to the spotlight, of B0wery Ballroom--a truly gritty urban opposite to her bucolic hideaway?--Sept. 16:

When the first act on a triple bill appears on stage in a red robe and a baritone ukulele, and the first lyrics out of her mouth are “Fairies softly singing,” and the crowd reacts not by ignoring or revolting but by patiently waiting, you may be sure that you have reached the deep end of a special-interest zone.

Thursday night’s show at the Bowery Ballroom was headlined by the 60’s-era British singer Vashti Bunyan, the great rediscovery of the current fairy-folk contingent. But the opening slot was given to Danielle Stech-Homsy, a young American who played rather plain, medieval-sounding figures and sang in a light, steady voice. One of the rules of this subcategory of folk is a rigorous kindness toward all things in creation. (Another of Ms. Stech-Homsy’s songs contained the violently twee line “Sometimes a mountain’s too gentle to climb.”) Yet the subgenre has a hierarchy of patience and kindness, and performers like Ms. Stech-Homsy are essentially Vashti Bunyans in training.

In 1968, Ms. Bunyan made her first album, “Just Another Diamond Day,” between two legs of a horse-drawn journey through England, northward from London toward an artists’ colony on the Isle of Skye and then, upon finding that the artists’ colony had already run its course, to the Outer Hebrides. It was a 700-mile journey, and it took two summers. Her story — or what is known of it from her interviews and her songs — is a perfectly preserved hippie tale, full of ideals, heartbreak and sleeping outdoors, and not arriving on time.

But she had children and stopped making music, defeated by a lack of interest in her work. So the narrative has a long break. It picked up again only after her rediscovery, when she finally had a sufficient number of admirers to persuade her to make a second album. She did; it was called “Lookaftering,” and it came out last year, 36 years after the first one. (Now she is 61, and has left the bucolic life for Edinburgh.) The lyrics in “Lookaftering” are wiser, and address her own feelings rather than presenting animistic visions of the outside world, but they are sung the same way: in a quiet, slightly frightened coo. It sounds as if she found her singing voice at night, in a small house, trying not to wake anyone up.

If in between Albums 1 and 2 she had led a life like any other — or at least more like any other than a medieval person — that was no part of Thursday’s concert. The crowd was there to look at a woman who had made a heroic act out of patiently waiting. Ms. Bunyan, now as then, is tall and beautiful, transparently and charismatically kind, and her empathetic young band sat quietly around her, communicating deference in body language. She gawkily introduced every single song, unable to get over how strange it was to be wanted at last.

Her songs are slender, miniature things with simple guitar-picking patterns, but they have been made bigger through collaboration. Most of her recorded work on both albums was done up handsomely by the same arranger, Robert Kirby, and the seven-member band for her show on Thursday night adapted those arrangements, for flute, piano, cello, violin and guitars. Some of them were arranged in rounds, and they were carefully played. Her music couldn’t have been presented better, but sharing in her shyness and vulnerability — as well as her approval-starved reaction to all the applause — became curiously exhausting.

Between Ms. Stech-Homsy and Ms. Bunyan came Espers, a young sextet from Philadelphia, playing and singing droney songs with electric guitar filigree, similar to late-60’s Fairport Convention but without the spark of life. The two singers, Greg Weeks and Meg Baird, seemed disembodied; the band’s sound grew bigger and deeper, but never quite exploded. There was no relief. When they moseyed off stage, and a few Bowery Ballroom tech guys walked on and started swiftly moving cables around, the atmosphere of the room changed: this, by comparison, was real charisma.

Now, I still am saving the Espers II CD I bought naturally in back-to-nature emporium Santa Cruz for close headphone debut, so I cannot comment on Ratliff's take yet, but I will. Ms. Stech-Homsy (what a cumbersome clunky surname, out of early T.S. Eliot or later David Lodge: the name says it all as it did for Dickens or, for that matter, George Eliot) will not have to worry about a place in my music queue. Nor will Miss Bunyan, no offense to her undoubtably winsome talents at last shown now to be evidently worthy of rediscovery. I find Sandy Denny about the extreme of what I can take in this female-folkie songstress direction, and when I criticized June Tabor's latest disc, "At the Wood's Edge," for Amazon, I got chided by some of her acolytes. Going back to Santa Cruz, how many who tuned in and out made it this far back, Rip Van Winklish, to our crueler and craftier decade with their sensibilities intact and still refined?

Well, I am now in the thick of the Tim Leary biography, around the time he claims Harvard kicked him out for LSD but the record shows he seems to have ditched his classes and headed West, as he was wont to do, with two kids in tow after mom killed herself in the garage and the family car that night in Berkeley a few years earlier, after Tim's mistress showed up to wish him a happy 35th. Quite the Pied Piper. Is he to be honored or blamed? Or, like Piper (if not always at the Gates of Dawn, thanks to Messrs. Grahame & Barrett), are the children to blame for their own gullibility or idealism?

Leary's calculated charm reminds me of Mick Jagger as observed chillingly, circa Performance filming, by a cronie in Shawn Levy's account of Swinging London, "Ready, Steady, Go!": he knew consummately when to step from observing the edge to participating with those who tipped over the abyss, but Mick always darted back and away at the exact moment, perfectly timed, even as his new and evanescent friends would perhaps plunge, wondering where the Stone had rolled off too so suddenly.

A background interest and partially why I'm reading it: with such a moniker, I have always wondered about his cultural background. West Point chapter's engrossing, in its inherent tension between one seemingly so suited to any but the life of martial discipline. He did have gumption, and even when "silenced" stood his ground well, and morally I might add, in the face of overwhelming pressure. Prepared him for his scrapes with the Establishment, in and out of Harvard, in the coming decades. Bit of Holy Cross before his fateful year-and-something as a plebe, but due more to stereotypical ma and uncle the big shot in the Church's pull, which helped in later scrapes as well with the Man. Not much similarity on the surface at all of what I'd have expected of a kid the same age (gulp) as my own parents--born around 1920. Strange, no treatment of "his grandfather emigrated from County Cork in 1849" sort of intro, either. Just his grandfather being the real character and the influence for rapscallion lad. Tim's father ran off, as would the son, from the women who evidently would not remain compliant enough. Which I suppose has to be, as he was the one who kicked against the pricks. Hard to place this guru next to one's parents and parents-in-law and think all five of 'em were raised the same time. No generation gap, but certainly for Leary a rebellious one, the kid who sasses back, the smartass who the quieter if equally resentful students cheer on as the principal fulminates and pastor fumes.

Well, West Point dropout, Berkeley PhD in only three years: the best psych program in the country and Dr Timothy Leary--as the marquees would proclaim his bonafides--seems to have simply wandered in and sailed through. Would students in today's fanatical applicant race have been admitted to the top grad school if they had been booted from the academy? Or cobbled coursework for the MA together willy-nilly while serving (sic) in a semi-bogus posting in the military that kept him, Ronnie Reagan or GW Bush jr or Clinton-ish-ly out of the fight? Bright, obviously. Driven, but not to be the doting father he imagined himself but the intrepid daredevil, the one to challenge Freud and behaviorism and ticky-tacky boxes, despite his own comfortable manse once upon an early time of his career (and who could afford such an aerie at such a time now?) in the Berkeley Hills. One of the first to pop the mescaline, the magic mushrooms, to send to Sandoz a note and get back a bottle of lysergic acid gratis for his research. If you discount first wife's suicide, mistress-second wife's rapid failure in matrimony, he gets an endless string of partners, male and female, fawning acclaim from the get-go except for his Harvard department, who can't get hip to the persistent fact that he seems not to be the objective, detached researcher as he conducts his orgies, forms his cult of personality among the grad students, and generally's zonked albeit managing I cannot fathom how to sometimes drive, walk, and teach. Frequent jaunts to Europe, Mexico, the West.

Not much Irish Catholic influence, as he was pretty petit-bourgeosie, son of businessman, if failed one, from the families who were lace in Springfield Mass and not shanty.
Leary, like Mick, apparently could entice the best of the countercultural bards; tellingly, when Kerouac declines to hop on to the "psylocibin pony" (a phrase from the first Cars album), he then falls out of sight as far as the 60s go, while Ginsburg, Burroughs, Corso, and the Beats manage to hang on to become the hippies' elder statesmen. Leary could too step aside when the going got rough and sidle out of town on the night train; the bio's only about 30% into his long strange trip.

The hazards of seclusion vs. the rat race are many, but what of its comforts? Leary and beats and some of those hippies musically talented or not went into the sanctum by means of chemical alteration as well as natural stimulation. And, often, accompanying spiritual exaltation. Catholic men and women today, on the surface the opposite of hedonistic hipsters but also surely much truer as a persistent if quiet and self-effacing counter to today's secularized European culture, still vie to enter the most austere observance of a way of life that goes back if not all the way to Elijah on Mt. Carmel (bombed in the most recent of the anciently-spawned strife for that same contested corner of the Mediterranean) than at least to the Desert Fathers who fled Rome's colonized Middle Eastern, Vegas-like, bread--Doritos? Big Mac? Starbucks? --and circuses--CNN? MTV? You Tube?-- urbi for a true Outward Bound experience, exploring the inner vastness while enclosed in remote fastness.

St Bruno founded an order that for nine centuries, "never reformed because never deformed," remains the toughest in the Church with a 98% attrition rate, the Carthusian hermits. After viewing "Die Grosse Stille," the astonishingly rendered nearly three-hour documentary of La Grande Chartreuse by Philip Groening, earlier this summer, I have been intrigued to return to reading I had rummaged in first when working on my diss. about this legacy of medieval, and ancient, renunciation of the fleshpots of Egypt then or Paris now. What can explain except determination --perhaps shown by the West Point plebe who also endures "silencing" and mental exertion and physical exhaustion-- this attempt by a few men to live among silence, amidst hardship, and to endure until the end in one severely built if not ungraceful haven, each day the same rhythm, each night the same purpose, broken in sleep halfway for three hours of prayer, a practice unlike any other community and one surely to test the sound sleeper and the persistent insomniac alike? And, despite the cider, the largest penance at least for me of all: a vegetarian diet, and from Advent to Lent (at which time I doubt the fare improves). usually in a mountain monastery in wintry Europe, one small meal a very long and exacting day. (I review three books on Amazon about the Order: "An Infinity of Little Hours," "Halfway to Heaven," and "Sounds of Silence." The quality of the respective titular quotes follows the general merit of each book accordingly.)

From a link from the Carthusian-centered Yahoo group at IFSB, a link to a priest from England, Fr. Tim Finegan. In his "The Hermeneutics of Continuity" (a reference to our current Pope of more in another post by me here to come soon) blog he narrates briefly a well-illustrated visit to the world's biggest Charterhouse (memorably evoked in Nancy Klein Maguire's "An Infinity..."--self-promotion, if for her good cause: she asked if she could quote for her own site from my Amazon review, which is humbling since I gave only a measured four stars to this evocative if rather lopsided account, astonishing all the same as its best sections are) at St Hugh's, Parkminster: http://tinyurl.com/jv77n

Blogs: Parasites?

The current Harper's Magazine has in its center and cover story about "Literacy in an Age of Video Games" a roundtable forum. It concludes with the musing that blogs, being parasitic as they quote each other endlessly, are not destined to be great art. In fact, the panelist opines that in the future, great art will no longer emerge, merely lots more--thanks to the Web's access--of so-so, good-enough, art. Well, Chaucer all sorts of sermons, folktales, ballads, romances, and classical tales to combine, as a blogger, these sources into his own galliaumfry, to use a bastardized Middle English term (as is "humongous," from the Middle Scots I think). Shakespeare took Holinshed's Chronicles, cut-and-pasted lots of treatments, as they'd say in Hollywood, and worked them into a new and fresh rendering of old stories, luckily before litigation and Digital Millennium Copyright Act (aka The Mickey Mouse Act) of 1998.

What's lately been happening? Post Santa Cruz letdown. I miss the forest and fog and ferns. (Image of bridge over Zayante Creek.) I have books checked out from LAPL on Tim Leary (new bio); universities in the age of digital, corporate, and occupational threat; Patrick Kavanagh's Tarry Flynn (which reads just like, of all things, The Green Fool: the former fiction, the latter fact, but both about a dreamy farmer in Monaghan who turns away from church, cows, and colleens to meditate, daydream, and moon upon all things great and small in the fields that he sees. Daydream Believer, circa 1940s. It is not a quick read, densely arranged if deceitfully light-hearted on the surface of mean ol' ma and prancing virgins (so they say), and scheming neighbors. But, as with Flann O'Brien, underlying this not superficial but subtly seeming transparent backdrop, there lurks insecurity, existential doubt, and despair even at having to in a Catholicized (so they say) society to hearken back away from the monotheistical, the everlasting, and the commanded to that free of God with capital letter, doomed to decay, and determined to live free or die trying. A haunting book, deeper far than the backcover Penguin Classics blurb--they should've known better than to put this out as if the reader was to find within a sort of gelded Christy Mahon. Marketing savvy.

Which reminds me of Lee Templeton's wonderful Come Back Horslips page and project, that revives that legendary 70s glam-folk-prog band's originators, imitators, and celebrators in spirited fashion. Marketing expertise makes the muse of this site also savvy at spreading the good word to latecomers such as I, who forget that even if I checked the net late 2004 not to find much on the band, that New Year's 2005 all changed utterly, and CBH was engendered. The pace, as I told my Tech-Culture-Society class the other night, is so quick. We heard of Friendster maybe three years ago, My Space broke out and surpassed its former rival about a year or so ago big time, and now You Tube is racing along after a few months it seems of visibility, while this fake-gal-on-MySpace promo hoax 'lonelygirl15' in Blair Witch style makes a story (who is she really) on Thursday, the break over the weekend, and the denouement on Monday: less than the nine-day's wonder of old, the phrase taken from poor Lady Jane Grey--good little film with Cary Elwes and Helena Bonham Carter, and a moving portrait of the doomed queen that was my favorite when seen way back around 1989 in the National Portrait Gallery.

I hit Amazon's top thousand reviewers only last week but went from 997 to 991 to I thought 971 back down to 977 and now 981 today but who's counting. So, whoever you may be, see the link to my profile, vote well and wisely and often to maintain my august rank. Who reads there, or here? Let me know if this gets out to you, as otherwise vox clamantis--Barry Devlin writing as Barny Drivel on CBH revealed his ability to rattle off Latin phrases in his post; I recall he had studied in a Franciscan seminary at one time! As for me, I study Irish, laboring over the intricacies of lenition and eclipsis regarding numbers 1 and 2 and then changed for 3-6 and again 7-up in ways that boggle me, as difficult to grasp as were oxidation-reduction equations when I was grappling with chemistry at the age of 16. How students can wrap their minds around such details amazes me. I think of the head of our Yahoo Cois Fharraige group progressing in Mícháel Ó Siadhail's notoriously user-unfriendly (not on purpose but seemingly by inattention) "Learning Irish" textbook. David Webb's in China in some mountain village studying that language while on the side somehow shepherding himself and us around the planet through the printed bogs. And, he had his tonsils out, ordered a slew of books in Irish from Ireland and had them shipped back and then forward again and is still slogging along, although at an understandably slower pace.

Of such altruism as Chaucer may have once showed, along with being the first professional writer and perhaps the first Englishman we know who could comprehend Italian, and as for the Bard who knows, but for such heroic strivers as our Miss Templeton and Mr Webb today on the net, blogged, yahooed, and otherwise corralled, still showing that learning and sharing and enjoying learning for its own sake, like Chaucer's imperfect clerk of Oxenforde, his forty bound books of Aristotle prized on his shelf over his bed, makes the proverbial royal road to learning that none can find but all do seek worthwhile: "and gladly would he learn, and gladly teach."

Singing out against the waterfall

I did take a brief trip with the family up to Central California the last few days. Escaping heat here that in our absence only increased, it was a pleasure to walk about in 60-degrees and wisps of fog. Coming back, two hours going up the Grapevine at a crawl in 105-degree heat due to a brushfire being contained at the summit did not raise my spirits. But a great meal of pollo encebellado--the bistec tempted but we're all (?) -- post-Leo's return from Minnesota State Fair with Uncle Richard where Leo softened at animals to be slaughtered-- trying not to eat four-foots...Niall did have a burger, at Tita's in Buttonwillow ("Cotton Center of California") founded 1895. The meal did merit Layne's raves and those of her Chowhound informants.

My patient wife assured me that if my dream came true and I actually could live somehow in such climes free of job (at least one requiring a commute in smog, crowds of teeming masses, and noise all about as the three houses rise around ours, the neighbors remodel, and that lot next door that was refused us to buy by greedy landowner--that price downturn nationally does perhaps like Pandora's box keep Hope quivering inside still, not flying away yet) rich of pocket (for such is the real estate) and relocated as if by magic to such a demesne, well, I would be cold. As in, when winter hits here, the basement where I type this is so icy to me that my fingers freeze and no manner of space heater or blanket or sweater (I wear one as Jimmy Carter requested in his fireside chats about energy-fueled OPEC malaise, in my youth) can warm them.

Still, I liked the cooler weather. My three used CDs at Logos show my tastes these days well: Hawkwind Live at the BBC 1972; Espers II; Songs of the Travelling People [artists formerly known as tinkers, England/Scotland/Wales; Margaret Barry's on some tracks; books were otherwise unobtainable Brit imports: Historical Maps of Ireland; The Famine {National Library of Ireland]: AVisual Documentary by Noel Kissane-- both of these kind of skimpy but you never know when they will provide the detail needed years later in research, so... and similarly a slim remainder, a London published copy with Jamie O'Neill clumsily imitative preface of Flann O'Brien's Cruiskeen Lawn columns on the clichés of Keats & Chapman and the short essay on "The Brother," which is not available in the US, much to my relief after I checked after buying hesitantly this and the Hawkwind, a band often duplicated and anthologized beyond recognition like The Fall, purchases].

If I had known prior to running back to the meter with a minute to spare that another used record store was on Pacific Avenue I would have allowed time to check it out, but such is the lack of loos due to the press of street people, speaking of Travellers in another guise/ time/ place that I had to run to SC Bookstore to use theirs. One sign by sink begged us not to vandalize. Toilet had seat cracked off, with sign: use at your own risk. Borders, first time I had ever darkened SC chainstore doors, had no restroom facilities for poor wayfarers. So I will never have to cross its threshhold again. Surprisingly, lots of corporate stores downtown, in one of the places that I thought would have held out. But Chris explained that locals do not patronize them; and if locals were in front of them or in them (as can be observed at Starbucks), they are not the paying types, so to speak. Thus in my search for respite I was propelled back albeit briefly to Bridget Mongan my great g-mother who was apparently one of the band of wanderers along East Mayo's borderlands.

Speaking of on the road, I saw upended at the strenously neo-hippie trustafarian (jealous, moi?) Big Sur Bakery at which Layne had to stop for what seemed an hour, Jack Kerouac's eponymous account in Penguin; as opposed to Henry Miller's with that Bosch-oranges title before BS, New Directions 'paperbook' as the spines used to say, bought at UCLA's LuValle Commons when she and I returned from our very first trip to Cambria (and perhaps my only one until now--there we talked to Emil White neé Weiss via Vienna who was back then in fall '88 the elderly caretaker of the Miller manse by the highway, CNN-TV blinking away and probably cats too as he puttered about the dishevelled wares and we bought four postcards of his local paintings of Bixby Creek Bridge and the like as souvenirs?) and the same Sea Otter Inn. This time, a great room 111 at the end of the hall. Niall and I were mad-dogged by two Euro-looking young men, perhaps a couple, who did not speak audibly but looked to me German but Layne who had also heard them thought Irish. They later were again right behind us as we returned from the Sea Chest. Leo had to face his veggie ambitions as he did not like fish and had to eat the only other offering that he did not like, same as his father, salad, until rescued by, same as his father in other situations where fish did not frolic onto my plate, a plate o' pasta. As opposed to 'plate o' shrimp' in Repo Man, out on DVD now. Good Edna Valley (local) chardonnay, which I never drink usually, followed by walk along boardwalk and lack of sidewalk while kids watched MTV and Layne reclined to read George Saunders' newest collection. An author we both actually like. Even have his previous two books autographed by him; we had to miss the reading this tour since Niall had a Dodger game or someone was sick or something.

There at the Sea Otter, I left Niall's Dodger lunchbox, with a beer for me and two drinks and a ice-chunk portable sack, in the hotel fridge. I only realized this when 150 miles away, and felt dejected. But, he took it well and will get another one at the next Dodger game he attends. My best sight that I wanted to commemorate to spark memory (and as I don't carry a camera or a cellphone) was Niall swimming in Zayante Creek where it meets Bean Creek, at the waterfall fed by a spring near Mt Hermon (non-Palestinian, the large Christian youth camp there for a century having given said site its portentous name;I wish I had my camera, all I can find is this mounthermon.org snapshot on Google as a poor pale memorial): about 6 p.m., as the reflected water shimmered on the rock face above the creek, he in yellow swimtrunks threw rocks in baseball fashion and looked, in trunks and pale white skin, as the sun bounced about and around his illuminated figure, like the proverbial angel. So the biblical nomenclature proved fitting even if my creed differed from the owners of the beauty spot.

And, let history chronicle how Leo trekked down the trail a mile or so to bring Niall a towel. He can be a good brother, although I think he required a 'smores kit in return for the generosity from Chris & Bob. I read on Bob's recommendation some John Donne in an attempt to deal with my thanatophobia, but it helped little; still a great line was found in one poem that I must retrieve and put down here, perhaps in revision. Chris as usual was a great source of local lore, although telling them both the little I knew about Holy City and finding out (thanks to Wikipedia) about its stereotypical Californian crazy cultish founder and head honcho (like some Mormon polygamist, very long lived), was a new joy for us all. Other tome of weekend: in Frank Mitchell & Mitchell Ryan's Reading the Irish Landscape, the post-rocks, prehistoric onwards parts I read, therefore 2/3 of weighty book, since it was on the shelf, Ireland around 4370 BCE encountered agriculture, a man ate 6 lbs. ( I have read elsewhere 10) per diem of praties (in Conamara 'fataí') , and bogs preserve butter due to their anaerobic condition. Often monks and those on the land ate nothing but white food, that is milk and dairy, for much of the year, causing me to wonder the effect on digestion.

Bob mentioned that when Siringe came to where Niall romped earlier with her two fellow Tibetan friends; the three women stood at the foot of the waterfall and sang out, since their tradition was to sing against or over the noise of a waterfall.

If a Tree Falls in the Forest....

According to Daniel Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music (Dutton, 2006, $24.95), if there's no one to hear it, no sound is made. Why? Without the sound waves finding a receptor--like the flutters and vibrations and fluctuations around a tiny membrane in our ear-- no pitch results, thus no sound can be registered. I suppose even if a recorder was placed there, no one could know if it had worked properly until the playback confirmed what possibly a seismographic-type of inscription had scrawled. Levitin claims that our musical taste is usually formed by 18-20, as adolescence ends. But I tend to agree with Layne; she thinks it's more like 14, and I'd say closer to 16, but then both of us were music fanatics from early ages. Alzheimers' patients, curiously, can often remember their favorite tunes from when they were 14. Poignant.

KZLA, the country-music station, went over lately as so many have to Spanish-language programming. The reason, as stated in the LA Times, was that the 'demographic' in LA liked more rhythmic music; 98% 'Caucasian' KZLA's listeners did not apparently have the beat. Classical music critic Mark Swed, in the same paper (all three articles I think Aug. 20) has a long piece on the changes in technology and how the on-line experience of sampling and then buying music is replacing CDs in the same way as our long-discarded cassettes, 8-tracks, and LPs of various speeds. Sony tailored the CD's length to allow for the duration of Beethoven's 9th. Swed notes how music has shifted from a social to a solitary pastime. He observes that the vinyl record duplicated in its bobbing as it traced the wave form the very pressure of sound waves (as Levitin explains too) hitting the ear and the electronic impulses carried to our brain for practically instantaneous conversion into what we call music. Lasers hitting shiny discs at least replicate this activity. But with bits and bytes, and with I-pod buds inserted deep into that same tender receptacle of audial bliss, "we have, as McLuhan again predicted, an electronic medium becoming an outright extension of the nervous system." Global villages may be rising, but that does not mean that we'll all be tuned in to the same station. A couple of decades ago, rock music, say, could command 20% of the listeners in a radio market. Now, with the fragmentation of genres, the increasing numbers of young'uns tuned out of music, the older folks tuning out of anything new (and how I often feel closer to that, as I do not listen to the radio but only tapes; if I want to find out about a song or artist, I used to and still do read up on it, and maybe sample if I can on AMG or Amazon or Leo's I-tunes, but given my rarified and esoteric tastes, often I cannot hear ahead of time what I buy) , and the remaining radio listeners breaking up into smaller niche markets. Without a big chunk of those with disposable income tuning into the Fab Four, I suppose that the advertisers have gone as their audiences have from broad to narrow to egocasting.

Swed blames the demise of double-bankrupt Tower (home of the $20 CD, so who cares) and the diminishment of Ameoba's classical shelf space (hey-- I did buy a Gregorian chant CD from the back room last time I was there) on this phenomenon of isolated audiences for music. As for me, except for ironically classical or folk, I can and could never endure amplified concert volume; my ears hurt for days and my ability to hear shrank long after-- while all my friends seemed to walk away unscathed. But, as Swed notes, fewer middlemen between the Man and the Music maaan, may not be that bad. He does think that I-Tunes cannot render classical music with the fidelity it deserves. He likes Magnatune, and also recommends archive.org. I tried the latter and shrank in horror as 856 concerts by The String Cheese Incident were the #1 musical feature. But, in time, perhaps sense will return to this admittedly great source, as the Wayback Archive has already helped me resurrect the vanished lessons for Learning Irish by Nancy Stenson, at least most of 'em. I spent hours on the Ch. 12 cleachta ach níl freagraí ansin. The numerical representation of nouns and numbers cardinal ordinal I don't know is one of the hardest exercises in any language I have ever encountered. It's either worse or better without the answer key to cheat with.

Bart, Homer, Greeks, and U.S./us

Here's a Reuters filler from today's L.A. Times, "We Know Bart, but Homer's Greek to Us." I'll have to try out these questions on my suffering captive classes! See how you'd do, if somehow you could cover up the answers. (I can't get this published--this marks my try.)


NEW YORK — Three-quarters of Americans can correctly identify two of Snow White's seven dwarfs while only a quarter can name two Supreme Court justices, according to a poll on pop culture.

Asked what planet Superman was from, 60% named the fictional planet Krypton, while only 37% knew that Mercury is the planet closest to the sun.

According to the poll by Zogby International, commissioned by the makers of a new game show, 57% of Americans could identify J.K. Rowling's fictional boy wizard as Harry Potter, but only 50% could name the British prime minister, Tony Blair.

Just over 60% of respondents were able to name Bart as Homer's son on the television show "The Simpsons," compared to 20.5% who were able to name one of the ancient Greek poet Homer's epic poems, "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey."

Respondents were far more familiar with the Three Stooges — Larry, Moe and Curly — than the three branches of the U.S. government — judicial, executive and legislative. Seventy-four percent identified the slapstick act; 42% the branches.

Twenty-three percent of those surveyed knew Taylor Hicks was the most recent winner of the television talent show "American Idol," but slightly less than half that number were able to name the Supreme Court justice confirmed in January 2006, Samuel A. Alito Jr.

The pollsters spoke to 1,213 people across the United States. The results had a margin of error of 2.9 percentage points.

Book Review: Light, Freedom & Song

I sent this off to The Blanket; a shorter version I posted on Amazon. A sample of my lit crit for that common reader Woolf sought. Maybe it's you.

Many collections of essays by literary critics tend to be an assortment of talks, reviews, articles, and anecdotes strung together, closely or loosely as the arranger deems. For David Pierce, of the University of York, he in his new book places within frameworks that stretch over the past century many topics perhaps temporarily orphaned, perhaps, after being presented at 'Joyce symposia and Irish conferences' across the world. But, here James Joyce's treatment of cricket finds probably its first analysis, along more familiar subjects as Yeats and the Rising, the Celtic Revival and cultural nationalism, and the Troubles or the famine from over the past 150 years in literature.

These chapters, then, play off extended riffs. What need do we have, still, for another professor's compendium? Pierce pursues the game of the harp vs. the crown. Caught up in the paper chase, he charges past British and Irish fences. Pierce asks how authors stalk a quicksilver Irish colonial-postcolonial phantom. In Beckett, appropriately, Pierce finds a master of evasion and redeployment. Beckett jolts his words, however sparingly arrayed, to transmit precision and defiance. The latter quality, Pierce judges, energises tired clichés and rudimentary utterances. 'Beckett's language is always more than simple texture or local colouring, and not infrequently it seems to belong to a form of slippage, an Irish sense of defiance that can be seen as underlying all his work'. (113) Nothing human is foreign to me, mused a Roman a couple millennia back, and this universality, which we often associate with Joyce in his verbal largesse, also applies to Beckett, who pared down what his predecessor had heaped high.

Beckett's ambiguity as Parisian-Irish, foreign member of the Resistance, Anglo-Irish, non Irish-Irelander, Dubliner schooled in the North at Portara, satirist in English prose who chose the discipline of French: this marks a hybrid character who--as with Yeats, Wilde, and Swift elsewhere scrutinised-- becomes an emblem for Pierce. In his highly recommended anthology, Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century (Cork UP, 2000; reviewed by me on Amazon and a great bargain to boot), Pierce edited a massive tome that crams in fiction, fact, oratory, travelogue, diatribe, song, and verse and combinations thereof. This stirabout, this mulligan stew, satisfies its compiler, who explains movingly in a preface that in its personal revelations exemplifies the value for a scholar to show the hand he's played rather than hold his cards close to his vest, posing with an objective sang-froid none of us can sustain. Pierce, he explains about himself, was born in post-war England but son of an Irish mother, and drawn to the summers spent in his maternal homeland and then back to his own native but not quite home turf. This attraction and retreat, comparatively, marks a writer only beginning to be taken seriously now after years of silence. A decade ago, his first three plays, the Leenane trilogy, teased mid-90s London audiences with their disturbing mix of Synge and Tarentino, Beckett and British television satire (at least that's where I place him early on in his career). Surely the nemesis of the remorseless INLA and tender cat-lovers both (a combination rare indeed?), Martin McDonagh's other early play, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, has been revived recently. He wrote seven plays, or most of them, around 1994. Suddenly, he succeeded. And, with his recent stage success after nearly a decade of lying low, The Pillowman (which is not addressed by Pierce), McDonagh again confounds-- with a non-Oirish setting of a grim taleteller collared in a police state-- jaded hipsters expecting another send-up of Man of Aran meets Father Ted.

Why bother with McDonagh? Pierce considers him only momentarily, but McDonagh for me plumbs Irish doldrums: folks mired but happy as a pig in slop. This is our greedy, ironic, twitchy mentality. Pierce seeks hybridity. Well, ghosts of Gaelic haunt the syntax of McDonagh's eagerly anglicised Gaeltacht folk. Even as they revel in cartoonish violence in his 1990s plays, they-- and I would align McDonagh's The Lonesome West cautiously with moments in Tarentino's 1994 Pulp Fiction-- trip upon a threshold beyond which beckon meanings hidden within but inimical to a tawdry existential wasteland. As an aside, Pierce's anthology includes all of Lonesome, less prominent than Beauty Queen of Leenane or Cripple of Inishmaan, but in my judgment his best Irish play to date. Speaking to Fintan O'Toole in the 6 March 2006 New Yorker, McDonagh recalled the 'lunar' landscape near his father's birthplace around Lettermore. 'Skulls in Connemara'. And, so we return to Godot. Beckett's anguish finds itself prolonged rather than terminated or abandoned, through the career of a Londoner who went back during his summers to Connemara found himself taking in much more as a teen in the 80s than he probably expected. John Lydon in Rotten tells of his early disappointment, a couple of decades earlier, when he was ridiculed on his holidays by his Galway relatives-- Lydon being a fine Connemara name, by the way, not far from Leenane in many clan manifestations. McDonagh credits listening to the Clash around 1982 (at twelve) with inspiring his distrust for regimes, whether paramilitary, clerical, or familial. For McDonagh, propelled straight after his own media blitz manipulated by/for Johnny Rotten into the notoriety enjoyed by Tarentino a dozen years ago, the self-taught playwright produced drama in a Hiberno-English that seemed to emerge without his intention, as he heard the voices of his relatives in the characters he created. He credits the Pogues for their example: the trash could be separated from the treasure that Irish tradition still offers us. With the anarchy that punks mimicked and terrorists perverted, McDonagh taunts us further. He shoves his characters within this garish spectacle. He forces them and so us to witness a neglected, fragile, all-too-human soul.

Think of Johnny Rotten onstage in the spotlight, before the mike, eyes unfocused, dazed in a too-large wooly sweater, weary, hands wrapped around his skinny frame: a well-known circa '77 snapshot. Shane McGowan hushing the mosh pit to make them listen to Eric Bogle's lyrics as 'The Band Played "Waltzing Matilida". Tarantino's protagonists wondering what light emanates from the suitcase, and why one says it's the most beautiful sight he's ever seen. Or, Pierce invites, ponder The Lieutenant of Inishmore. 'Very few characters or situations in modern Irish literature lie outside the known or familiar. Padraic tells his distended victim: "If it hadn't been such a nice fella I would've taken one toenail off of separate feet, but I didn't, I took two toenails off the one foot, so that it's only the one foot you'll have to be limping on and not the two".' (qtd. 42) Pierce observes what could be said of Beckett or Tarantino (where to place Lydon: "we're the flowers in your dustbin, your future"?): McDonagh knows his stereotypes, of the nutting squad, of republican comrades who find themselves victims of yet another INLA split to find themselves hung inverted about to be split. Recent reviews often contained warnings to the potential audience-- likely more to weep for the fate of a cat than of the torture of three men. So weary are he, we, and they of such Jacobean revenge. McDonagh parades violence but subverts power's futility.

Irish tendencies towards gallows humour, mordant moralism, superlatives, the speed of craic at 90: this element rears with McDonagh but then fades in Pierce's study. Pages whir by with asides to authors and their texts, many barely mentioned. Still, as with an itinerary that must speed us past minor points-of-interest to better spend our tour at our destination, the journey's worthwhile. No matter how familiar you are with Irish literature, you will discover in this book writers you never knew. Much more could be said. Areas of merit: he opens up fresh perspectives on Northern feminism against and within the republicanism of the 80s. He places John Banville, John McGahern, Glenn Patterson, Denis Johnston, Francis Stuart, Robert Ballagh's art, Julia O'Faolain, Kathleen Coyle, Derek Mahon, Jamie O'Neill, Medbh McGuckian, and Aidan Mathews alongside much acclaimed Irish scribes. From Padraic Fiacc, an unjustly overlooked Belfast poet, Pierce cites his horrifying Missa Terribilis [1986] from 'Crucifixus' and 'Introit'. These poems transfix Christ-figures in agony, one from sectarian murder and another in the immolation of British soldiers. Even within academia, some on this list get short shrift by critics infatuated with Heaney's new verses. The reading public's more likely to hear of whatever Malachy McCourt's press agent's promoting. I would have wished more space given to newer arrivals. Only in passing does Pierce notice Ursula Rani Sarma (...touched and Blue), Conor McPherson (a hurried nod to Shining City), Hugo Hamilton (his enigmatic memoir The Speckled People), and Rosa González in her critical essays on 'the cultural greening of Britain'. With the predictable exception of Cathal Ó Searcaigh's treatment of homosexual desire, Irish-language writing receives little notice. Still, in hundreds of references, Pierce offers plaudits to both bestselling celebrities and those still humble (both feted at 'symposia and conferences' as he attends) for the success of recent Irish writing.

One failing of this otherwise solid book is that the illustrations-- often apropos from unexpected sources-- do not always match what Pierce is on that page explaining, and what he discusses could have gained more clarity if he had selected an appropriate postcard or photo. Few errors remain, but Westland Row station was not Connolly station pre-independence (136; Amiens=Connolly, Westland Row=Pearse). Irish-language lenition as rendered into English "h" is garbled and in one case misspelled in the captions translating Seán Ó Sullivan's map of Corca Dorc[h!]a from Myles na gCopaleen's An Béal Bocht. (A novel that I find anticipates McDonagh's charmless squalor praised by tourists to this Wild West.) However, a superb semi-bird's eye view map on pg. 138 from The Sphere paper, 6 May 1916 showing locations for the rebellion reveals graphics surpassing the flat perspective we see on conventional diagrams of the Rising. The book's atypical format, halfway between standard and small 'coffee table/art book' size, makes a heavier volume to hold but worth the price for its wealth of colour and, as in the Rising map, better rendered pictorial details previous studies did not know of or could not afford to reproduce. Pierce's diligence, although intermittently erratic in its distribution, of the archival as well as the textual research gathered (as in his anthology) shows an eagle-eye rivalling that of The Sphere. He enriches context with a 1930 AA roadmap or plastic bullet photo or the infamous shot taken of Countess Markievicz with pistol ready. He displays the cover of the 2 July 1953 BBC weekly The Listener to indicate this 'extraordinarily time-warped sentence' to bolster his point about imperial British fealty: 'Her Majesty will today receive and reply to addresses of loyalty.' (30) Pierce's meticulous attention enriches his effort. This BBC caption is in tiny print under a large photo of the Houses of Parliament. Only a sharp-eyed reader would notice this regal reference on a mundane magazine page.

Pierce in his enthusiasms to link Clongowes Wood to The Crying Game to MLR James via West Indian cricket, for instance, proves unwittingly how even when he cannot stop interpreting (for then he dashes into comparing them to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano), he manages to keep you reading. Inevitably, we must give way to the trailblazer. We lag behind Pierce's furious cogitation as he associates everything he's ever read to the purported topic. (A fault I sympathise with generously.) Pierce-- as veteran anthologist-- recalls snippets from hundreds of literary works, so to deploy the mot juste, check off that text, and hurry on to another dozen references from often equally overlooked books to back up his latest bold assertion. You'll have a hard time keeping pace if you lack the stamina. The chapters are best read one by one, with pauses for mental or physical refreshment. Knowledge of Irish literature, from Pierce's own anthology or a refresher from Neil Corcoran's After Yeats and Joyce (OUP) or Seamus Deane's A Short History of Irish Literature (U of Notre Dame P), would be a wise pre-requisite. Rarely tainted by jargon or puffed with theory, Light, Freedom and Song is not for absolute beginners. But, if you already know your Yeats from your Keats, it follows one man's trail into the blizzard of print from an island prolific to the extreme in its inhabitants' wish to have out on paper what's been too long stored up inside as potential poem or persuasive prose.

No Wonder This Review Quotes Beckett!

This discouraging summary in the Sunday L.A. Times Book Review, August 13, of someone arguably more depressed than even the author of "The Unnameable." My Irish reference!


I can't go on, I'll go on
*The Way We Are. Allen Wheelis. W.W. Norton: 160 pp., $23.95


By Jonathan Kirsch, Jonathan Kirsch is the author of 11 books, including the forthcoming "A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization."

IN his 90s now, San Francisco psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis has spent a long lifetime in search of the secrets of the human psyche. " 'Say everything that comes to mind,' the analyst says to the analysand, 'nothing must remain hidden,' " he writes in this dark valedictory, "The Way We Are." And yet he is compelled to confess that the whole effort has been futile. "Below the deepest uncovering one yet deeper is possible," he contends. "Dirt is endless. Fur and feces and bones, and ever deeper, but no bedrock."

Ironically, Wheelis is best known for "How People Change," a book whose title holds out the cheerful promise of self-improvement. Now he declares himself disillusioned with "the promise of psychology" — the notion that we can achieve happiness if we try hard enough — and he is understandably "obsessed with death," a condition he characterizes as "not a private terror but the unchanging backdrop to the stage of our existence." Prodded by his own terrors and obsessions, he seeks to understand and explain nothing less than "the human condition itself" or, as he puts it in a lyrical moment, "the ways of power and the ways of the heart."


"What is the minimum penalty for being a conscious and self-conscious creature living simultaneously in an eternal symbolic world of our own construction and in the natural world in which, looking straight ahead, we see our oncoming death?" This is the question he poses.

If you are bummed out by these preliminaries, be forewarned — the book doesn't get any brighter.

For example, Wheelis confronts us with the unpleasant but unavoidable fact that life feeds on life, no matter how diligently we distance ourselves from what goes on in the slaughterhouse. "Poet and philosopher sit to meat, speak of love, charity, rights of man, sacredness of life," he muses. "Far away blood flows, cries rise in the night." And he insists that human beings do not simply kill to eat and eat to live: He draws an unbroken line from the abattoir to the worst atrocities human beings are capable of committing. "There is no good man," he concludes. "We all are killers, we live on others."

His mind's eye searches anxiously for meaning in human history, ranging from the savannas of prehistoric Africa to the monuments of ancient Egypt to the smoking ruins of Dresden and Hiroshima. His conclusion is that we are not so different, after all, from wild and ravening beasts. "The violence that individuals have given up in the course of becoming orderly and moral has not been eliminated," he writes. "It is passed on; it is handed upward. It collects at the top, in the White House, Number Ten Downing Street, the Reichstag, the Kremlin."

Indeed, Wheelis holds that the lower orders of life are far better off than Homo sapiens precisely because, as far as we know, animals are not cursed with self-awareness. "There is no knowledge of death, no watching of one's fateful progression, no history, no vision of one's actual condition," he writes, "hence no need to transcend that condition." After a million years of evolution, the human animal has finally achieved consciousness, but it's all bad news, according to Wheelis. "This is the Fall," he intones. "Culture is about to begin."

Culture, according to Wheelis, is only a way of describing the various "schemes" by which humankind seeks to redeem itself from the sure knowledge that life is nasty, brutish and short. "If [man] can find such a scheme and make his life 'mean' something in it, that is, contribute to it, make a difference, he will have ferried something of his mortal self across the gulf of death to become a part of something that will live on." But Wheelis seems to suggest that all such schemes are essentially pretty lies we tell ourselves to hide an unendurable truth. "The immediate horror man perceives is his own death, but beyond that he begins to see the entire life process as carnage, as eating and being eaten," he writes. "A terrible screaming pervades the universe. Man is the first to hear it. This is the vision we cannot accept. It drives toward madness or despair."

Wheelis dismisses religion as a collection of failed myths that established moral and sexual boundaries but only until they began losing their power to bedazzle us. "There is no God to establish any position; so every position is arbitrary," he observes. "With no authority beyond humanity, by what standard can we designate anything as absolutely wrong?" Nowadays, the redemptive solace formerly offered by religious rituals can be found in chess playing or stamp collecting. "One seeks distraction," he concedes. "[O]ne may achieve briefly the illusion of mastery. But not for long. Within the confines of a single life, death is unmasterable."

When he shifts his gaze from the individual to the community, Wheelis sees even greater moral squalor. "The state would like to eat up all individual power, all independence, discretion, freedom, autonomy," he writes. The stirring words of John F. Kennedy, "Ask not what your country can do for you … ," remind him of Adolf Hitler: "The unison of Sieg Heil by the packed and disciplined masses at Nuremburg, that is what the state wants…."

Wheelis pauses now and then to recall a vivid childhood memory or engage in a "thought experiment." He admits to his own struggles with sexual temptation. "I want to be fair to my wife," he allows, "but fair also to myself." At one point, he evokes the pleasures of Cape Cod in August and describes in intimate detail his own fantasies on beholding a scantily clad young woman at play with her baby. "I think she knows she is torturing me, making me want to do with her what she is doing with the baby," he confesses.

But even his carnality is the occasion for yet another joyless revelation: "These fantasies are anti-mortality dreams….We all swim upstream against the overpowering current, ever more doomed and desperate, trying at the last moment to throw something ashore, some little thing that will remain, bear witness that we were here."

Wheelis may well connect with the audience that made "Everyman," Philip Roth's gloomy contemplation of death, a bestseller. But I suspect he is content merely to wrestle in public with his own devils — "My plight, my curse, my demon, a savage yearning for something I'm never going to get," as he puts it. For the rest of us, "The Way We Are" turns out to be a sobering and even a shattering experience, the heartrending cry of a man who has lived long, seen and done much and ended up in the grip of cold despair.