John Kelly's "Sophisticated Boom-Boom": Review

Posted to Amazon US today in edited form. William Gibson recommended this in summer 2003 as a light read, and it lives up to that, filling my commute today. Professor Cheryl Herr mentioned this 2003 novel in her IASIL lecture two months ago in Dublin, "Stories for Boys," but all I caught was Horslips in concert for the twelve-year old narrator at a jamboree held at to me the unlikely grounds of "Mt Mellary [sic] in County Waterford." Any reader of Joyce's "Grace" will recall the rumor repeated here of the monks who sleep in their coffins, if not that about living high on the fatted calf there and skipping away without paying for your spartan room & board while on the mend from demon rum. The band plays at Jamborama '77 and gains mention elsewhere on occasion, if not as much as Thin Lizzy, whose Phil Lynott proves the icon of Celtic myth and bad-boy pose that Horslips, in what Kelly labels as being a "glam" band, could not sustain as the decade shifted from prog to punk.

This shift, as the perfectly positioned protagonist and stand-in for the author Declan Lydon (symbolically resonant, surprised he does not have Shane as his middle name) shows, gives the power of living as a teen within the North of Ireland who finds his escape from Fermanagh's 365 lakes and market-town stultification. My half-hour layover at the woebegone bus station in Enniskillen was plenty. The ennui of being twelve and suspicious of pasta or vegetarianism or wine or sex or jogging as dubious fads expresses well how little had changed since Joyce. Small wonder the boy and his pal Spit Maguire gravitate towards former Portora Old Boy Sam Beckett, if not so much Oscar Wilde, both of whom attended the posh school outside of their hometown decades earlier in the times Joyce described and which echo here, amidst profaner utterances, the blare of TV and disco, and more violent times.

The book, however, is more a series of brief vignettes than a coming of age "bildungsroman." It does not strive to be "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," sure, but the casualness with which Kelly writes, probably honed by long years as one of Ireland's most prominent music journalists and radio personalities (also provider of a fine show on the Aer Lingus in-flight channel), does undermine his thinly disguised fictional "how I grew up in a small town" genial tale's sporadic strengths. Kelly's excellent at summarizing the links between old legends, the ballads like "On Lough Erne's Shore," and his own enlightenment that Horslips, Lizzy, punk, and Dylan all could get along on his turntable. At the end, he grows up and finds that Cohen & Costello prove more fitting gurus for his maturer reflections than metal or rawk.

He shows how the "bubble" lived in during the mid-80s by himself and his student peers at Queen's U. in Belfast provides a sane alternative to the mayhem all around. Van Morrison, Philo, and a showband C&W meets West Ulster phonetically rendered Seamie Sheridan all enter briefly their spotlights. The narrator learns to listen to Coltrane and the Delta blues with sophistication, and while he fails to match as often such suavity in his dealings with young women, the stability that music gives Lydon-Kelly despite his amateurish bands fake (The Children of Prague as the provincial counterpart of The Virgin Prunes) and real offers insight into how a critical respect for music develops for the many who will never find fame on stage.

The difficulty is that the quick pace, the leisurely asides, and the fragmented chapters (despite great quotes taken from Kelly's real-life interviews with musicians) all detract from his overall presentation. Like his real-life autobiography, the intriguingly titled "Cool About the Ankles," (1997) and his sub-Flann O'Brien caper "The Little Hammer," (2003) in which Planxty's piper Liam Og O'Flynn becomes along with Phil L the narrator's obsession. This latest novel repeates his rather random array of musings, akin to his hit-and-miss sketches (filed in UCD's library under "humour") in "Grace Notes & Bad Thoughts" (1994). Much of the weakness of his other three books repeats here, in the slapdash mix of sporadic depth and topical superficiality. Perhaps unavoidable given the shelf-life of much he writes about, but an author needs greater care in setting out his wares. The misspelling of Mount Melleray provides a telling example of Kelly's lack of care. The glitter's all piled up here, as at a garage sale, and we have to paw through the tawdry and dusty to extract the treasure.

He offers grand craic once in a while-- as in a reverie about the French if they had won in 1798 to turn Hibernia into "Irlande Erotique"-- but you have to endure long detours and enter cul-de-sacs or blind alleys more often than not before finding a way out into the bantering pause that refreshes. But, here's one, contrasting Spit & Declan's learning of Lynott's death by drugs in 1986 with their "only previous exposure" when...

"someone called Billy Chemicals came to the school to warn us of the danger and told us how he had wasted his youth taking every drug he could get his hands on-- impressing upon us the foolishness of throwing away our lives partying.

"Some fuckin' chance of that! groaned Spit." (101)

As he's but four years younger than me, I confess despite growing up half a globe away, the Catholic school dance, the hours spent spinning vinyl, the utterly fanatical distrust of somebody with the wrong hair style or worse the wrong taste in music, and the slow realization that you grow up along with your record collection all made for moments of "epiphany." While I may not find that moment in Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" as Kelly-Lydon has, I know where it lurks. At least our protagonist, like me and his real-life doppelganger, relate Joyce to our wonderfully silly, delightfully trashy, but ultimately rewarding popular music and our shared love and wish to perpetuate the best of our innovative, fluctuating, determinedly raucous and thoughtfully slagging native culture.

Ulysses: En-Gendered Perspectives: Review

Posted on Amazon US today. Yeah, I know, the title makes it sound either intriguing or boring. Following Clive Hart & David Hayman's often dull "James Joyce's Ulysses: Critical Essays" (1974), this 1999 collection follows suit a quarter-century later with feminist, queer, performative, colonialist, familial, gustatory, and consuming modes supplanting earlier psychoanalytical, historical, and textual scholarship. I cannot say I found more pleasure in the po-mo sequel, ed. by Kimberly Devlin & Marilyn Reizbaum, but neither did I waste my time.

The contributors are major scholars; some featured in a complementary essay collection devoted to "Penelope," Richard Pearce's edition of "Molly Blooms" five years earlier (also reviewed by me on Amazon & this blog last month). Garry Leonard takes on mockery, heresy and those troublesome white corpuscles in a typically thoughtful essay on "Telemachus," Robert Spoo examines genderized history in "Nestor," Cheryl Herr excavates "women's ways of knowing" from what's been deemed old wives' tales of discovery in "Proteus." Gynecology (male) vs. midwifery (female) takes a dichotomy in the chapter and shows how this epistemological distinction separates "patristic knowledge" from the marginalized tales of milkmaids and their croned cronies. Given these are Stephen's chapters, scholars have considerable ingenuity to test their theories on what seems unpromising material, but all diligently unearth much-- this being Joyce's inexhaustible work-- to back up what are generally sound, if unsurprising and commonsensical (such is the skill of veteran critics) conclusions about the author striving to further his modernist rebellion while being a prisoner of his early 20c mindset. Logical enough times three.

Carol Schloss looks at what many scholars have peered into, Milly & the Mullingar photo shoo, for "Calypso." Maud Ellmann takes what many would see as a mere factoid, that of skin disease, and builds a reading of "Lotus-Eaters"; Devlin dismantles the en-gendering of death in "Hades." Patrick McGee's wise virgins hum industriously in "Aeolus," Karen Lawrence differentiates legal from pulp fiction in the mastications of "Lestrygonians," Joseph Valente in characteristic fashion goes on too long compared to his peers in navigating "perils of masculinity" in "Scylla & Charybdis," and pioneering Joyce feminist Bonnie Kime Scott takes a similar course to chart "diversions from mastery" amidst "Wandering Rocks." With the exception of Valente's overstuffed essay, I found these entries again solid, if largely stolid.

Jules Law on "Political Sirens" ambitiously traps the male gaze and the female contempt for such; Reizbaum adopts her book on the "Judaic Other" to study "Cyclops"; John Bishop takes apart "a metaphysics of coitus" into the coupling forms and aspired contents of "Nausicaa" Enda Duffy takes his book on subalterns and colonialism into condensed and therefore rather overwhelmingly dense analyses of that formidable text "Oxen"; Margot Norris on "Circe" manages to compress a series of vignettes on critical issues into her overview of "Circe." It's shorter than I anticipated, and does not exactly flow from sub-topics set out, but in a manner suited to the form of the chapter Norris brings up an array of valuable observations.

Colleen Lamos has published elsewhere on Joyce and queer theory, like Vicki Mahaffey. Here they take on respectively "Eumaeus" & "Ithaca," and given the challenges these chapters offer, emerge with respectable reactions to doubling and panic that build on contemporary peers in erudite and often inventive fashion suited to these far-ranging fictional texts. Christine van Boheemen's "Penelope" thoughts remind me of Norris' approach-- given the richness of such chapters, both scholars choose to offer a judicious sampling of perspectives rather than attempt a comprehensive reading that would require far lengthier room to roam within.

So, this summarizes much of what has replaced the types of criticism, often male-dominated, in the Hart & Hayman anthology. The attention given women, queer theory, labor, domesticity, and perception attest to the interest in the social construct of the body, the fringe categories, and the inverted presences which preoccupy many recent critics. One wonders in another quarter-century what new issues will excite Joyceans who will further research gathered here, as the cycle moves on.

(Blog image: Fionnula Flanagan's 1985 video "James Joyce's Women")

Heat Wave Lifeboat Ethics: an L.A. vignette.

This sums up the dichotomy between the haves and have-nots in our city of teeming masses panting to breathe free, our f&%^#-d up planet that we eighteen million (and rising) in this barren microclimate occupy in this era of global warming, and even a bit of sympathy I as a dog-lover can muster up despite my curmudgeonly mien.

Garrett Hardin, the kind of conservative who argued pro-abortion in 1960 since by reducing unwanted births you'd save money for welfare moms and prisons (as argued by Freakonomics' Stephen Leavitt & Steven Dubner forty-five years later), pioneered at UCSB the field of Human Ecology. He proposed the Tragedy of the Commons as we all seek to maximize our share of what's held as a public trust for our equal use, and Lifeboat Ethics to rationalize that when the First World's threatened by the hangers on the lifeboat, you whack with the oars and keep rowing. Visit http://stalkingthewildtaboo.com for more on such contrary scientific chums, contrary thinkers, and no-nonsense egghead types, Cassandras instead of Pollyannas.

L.A. Times, below from an article on power outages. Blame the plasma HD-TVs that suck up a third of an air-conditioner's needs on half-century-old transformers, while you're at it. And that in the past century as we concretize the dirt that once cooled the air, the night temperature has risen 7-9 degrees in the Southland basin, as the weather prophets call our niche on the Pacific Rim. Meanwhile, the open space around our home continues to be paved under. Water ran down the street from the mini-lawn that was sprinkled prior to the open house last Labor Day weekend. Hope it never sells.

Around the corner on La Jolla Avenue, marketing executive John Wagner, 48, was packing up his three bichon frise dogs to evacuate them to his second home in Palm Springs.

"It's ridiculous. I'm going to have to drive 113 miles to a place where it's probably 115 degrees to get some relief," said Wagner, adding that he spent 90 minutes on hold Tuesday morning when he called the DWP, forcing him to recharge his cellphone in his car.

Image: "three Bichon Frise dogs." Jeesh. I wonder what car it was? A Miata? Beemer? At least it wasn't a Hummer. Talk about stereotypes for WeHo & Poodle Springs-- as Raymond Chandler renamed the infernal gully of Frank S, G. Ford, B Hope, & Palms.

Delusions & Sex & God

A short entry, on "The God Delusion" not yet read. I admit that I came across a random excerpt by Richard Dawkins and found myself disappointed at its sloppy tone. The assertion by our eminent don, whatever it was, even I recognized as erroneous, so it must've been a whopper. I came across John Scalzi's entry from his blog "Whatever" a year ago in a Google search for what Warren Johansson coined around 1980 as the "sodomy delusion." This term stems from the medieval panic that this "peccata contra naturam" occasioned-- once you go bareback as it were, you never go back. The Church feared the mention of this "mute sin" but had to inveigh against its contamination. Confession had to elicit it from those in the know and make them feel guilty, yet the pastors did not want to let on to the supposedly innocent penitents that a whole underground community existed who were up to more perverse offenses than the garden, or barnyard, variety practiced surely by so many in a farm-based, six-to-a-flea bitten blanket, poverty-stricken and itchily randy (aren't we all) culture. Did you know that besides, given prohibitions against sex (even for procreation only, limited to that one position), married couples could only engage licitly at one low point in the 7th century-- and that risked them sinning by too much enthusiasm, or "libido" which to theologians is a sinful state-- once a week at worse? And that blanket term against nature covered a multitude of sexual sins. I recall a riposte to "natural law" about instruments God made being put into unnatural orifices: if a hammer is used to pound nails, is it sinful if you make it smash nutshells?

The trouble is, that this impossibly ubiquitous injunction was cruelly placed not only on the backs of those who sought love in another man's embrace ("homosexual" is a dubious term from 1869 when a German theorist sought to place in a "third sex" those who presumably were unavoidably attracted to the genitals of their own body when seen on another) and not only against male-on-male intercourse, but widened to practically any sexual activity, given the lack of control that Augustine knew well before he abandoned his mistress (and his son Adeodatus) and eloquently lamented. At the same time, as my earlier review last month of Mark Jordan's book notes, the classification compressed into an assault on narrowly defined, yet frustratingly elastic, actions against "nature." This jumble's still classified under what Foucault rightly calls "that utterly confused category" of "sodomy," as much a mess today as it was in the time of Peter Lombard, if not Augustine in his understanding (sic) of the outrage committed by those men who wanted to "know" (yada yada yada) the male guests rather than the poor virgin daughters tossed out into the raging crowd of inhospitable bitumenites (my coinage).

Back to the entry on Dawkins' screed. As my friend in Belfast mentioned to me on my visit, it's often poorly written, evidently. I mean to plow, if quickly through it. Didn't Emerson advise to wait a year before reading a bestseller, anyway? Scalzi's riposte that tenured folks get to vent not on those of us outside the protections of academia on blogs but in books hits the target!

Blog image: http://dericbownds.net/2006_10_01_archive.html
Dawkins review by Scalzi & long thread of responses: http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004467.html

"The Stories of J.F. Powers": Review

"The Stories of J.F. Powers": Review

I have reviewed on Amazon and this blog the earlier collections in their original format, "Prince of Darkness" (1947) and "Presence of Grace," (1956) as well as the novel "Morte d'Urban" (1962). The collected three thin volumes, thirty stories total, are reprinted as "The Stories of J.F. Powers" in 2001 from NY Review Press, as well as reissues of the two novels. As another reviewer on Amazon (where this appeared 9/2/07) here noted, I too prefer the original volumes, but the fact that NY Review Press has reprinted the five books (the two novels and this anthology) in handsome editions after Powers (1917-99) languished as a cult favorite and, curse and blessing for him, status as a "writer's writer" who took years to create, it seems, a single story, judging from over forty years and the small shelf of five thin books as originally printed 1947-88.

Denis Donaghue provides an efficient introduction to this rather prickly author, whose moral backbone, no-nonsense manner, and ear for the telling phrase and the revealing pause made him one of America's most talented recorders of fictional priests, laity, and in two great stories a cat as the narrator of Midwestern foibles, dreamers, and ordinary folks, whether in rectories or social halls. His best stories do involve the clergy, as any reader of Powers will recognize, but these at their best emerge more vividly when included among the lesser attempts at themes such as baseball, the space race, race relations, wife-swapping, and a chillingly rendered Welcome Wagon lady.

Powers took his good time writing these stories, so take yours reading them. If you would like more advice on each of the thirty, take a look at my reviews of "Prince," "Presence," and "Look." There, I briefly comment upon each story in the order they were originally printed. This anthology preserves this order, but outside of an introduction adds no new stories to the small but, if you take the best of the clergy stories, memorable tales. As Powers explained why he as a layman wrote about clerics: a man taking out an insurance policy provides no real tension usually. But when a priest takes out an insurance policy, you have material for a story...

Blog images: cover of Stories; "Comma" (1986) by Mary Farl Powers, daughter of JFP.

J. F. Powers' "Look How the Fish Live": Review

This, the third and final collection of his stories, picks up in the era before (Vatican II, with selections as early as 1957, although given the slow nature of Powers' preparation, these ten stories did not appear in one volume until 1975! They show a changing Church, obviously, and Powers appears to be, as his colleague Jon Hassler called him, "a saint with a bad temper" as he grumpily tries to-- as one of his priests tries to put it, answer the unanswerable question. "How can we make sanctity as appealing as sex to the common man?" The friar answered the seminarian merely that we must keep on trying, that's all. This commonsensical, quite Midwestern and drolly American reply from mid-20c Minnesota, as lived by Powers and fictionalized if thinly in his two novels and his thirty stories, on second thought leaves out one of the key problems facing his priests and laity as they grapple with a world where Holy Resting Place is proposed as a less off-putting name for the parish dedicated to the Holy Sepulchre, where guitar masses and clergy yearning to break free of celibacy contend with old-school clerics and restive bishops before and after being put out to pastoral pasture in the rural diocese of Ostergothenberg.

The dilemma is this. Sex and sanctity confounded the clergy, as "Priestly Fellowship" maps in the post-conciliar era. But, for the laypeople determined to toughen it our by the dictates that Powers sincerely lived by and doggedly believed in, I suppose that the harsh reality of an unpampered life as a critical favorite who sold few stories and fewer books and with a wife who longed to break free of her childraising duties to get back to writing (she managed but a handful of published stories and one novel, 1964-9 "Rafferty & Co.") did get the pair of talented artists but destitute breadwinners down in the dumps. Even Powers and his wife, writer Betty Wahl, contended with as he admitted once five children when they were not really cut out to be parents. One wonders if they had been able to avail themselves of contraception in their own procreative years if Powers & Wahl could have devoted themselves more to their shared craft, and if fewer mouths to feed (Thomas Merton recalled on a visit in the 1950s to the Powers home near St John's U in St Cloud five children lined up by size bringing in the beer steins to celebrate the monk's dinner as a detour from Merton's attendance at a psychological conference at the monastery in Minnesota) could have meant more fiction from the happy couple. Instead, much of this slim volume must have been written during their stints back and forth from Ireland and in teaching in various colleges here. Powers' painstaking concentration meant few stories over what here's nineteen years since his previous collection and thirteen since his first novel.

The results, as they say, are mixed. The title story opens promisingly, a suburban father (modelled on the author and his own family's set of fated foreclosures on their homestead) who finds that whether DDT, nature's cruelty, Civil Defense, the expanding local college, parking lots and dorms encroaching and then obliterating his home, domestication has its downsides. The wild, the unforeseen, and the military-industrial complex all subtly bear down relentlessly upon one harried paterfamilias.

"Bill" will later be incorporated and expanded into his last novel, the 1988 (see about slow preparation?) "Wheat that Springeth Green", as will "Priestly Fellowship." Here we find Fr. Joe Hackett, forty-four, dealing with a new curate whose name the pastor never finds out-- and Joe never comes out straight and asks!-- and then the curate's pals, one an ex-seminarian proudly atheist but still team-teaching a class in Scripture with his old seminary professor; the other clerics reflect one cautious man who Joe pegs as a future bishop, one who seems overwhelmed by the changes, and one who embraces them to the point of relativism and folly. It's not hard to see where Powers' sympathies lie.

The other clerical stories take place in the same world as Powers' earlier fiction. "One of Them," although perhaps a bit long-winded as are all of the clerical stories here (but one can blame Powers little for stretching out and elaborating his wonderfully wry diocese and its familiar, fatalistic, and flawed priests) good-naturedly examines a convert, Simpson, who is ordained and sent to a nearly monosyllabic, extremely laconic old Irish pastor. Simp must learn the ropes and finds, as in a marriage, becoming more like his housemate than he bargained for. This story reminded me of earlier stories in "Presence" and its tone takes more from the 1950s-era by the quaintly dated nature of the pastor's attitudes as compared to the newer, post-Vatican II-era clerics being minted. We also return to a minor character from "Presence," Fr. Beeman, who will appear in a similar role in "Wheat."

"Keystone" takes a long look at a bishop of that certain diocese who aims at a new cathedral lacking what the newer Church and trendy architects dismiss as no longer needed: an arch cementing the portals together to bear their weight. Written originally around the time of "Morte d'Urban," when Vatican II was in session, this long tale explores more of the power struggles that John Dullinger, bishop of Ostergothenberg, must contend with along with his up-and-coming auxiliary, Msgr Gau.

After the auxiliary takes over, John retires, more or less, but finds renewal in "Farewell," filling on "livery-detail" for small parishes on short-term loan-- much as Fr Urban had in "Morte." Bishop Dullinger begins to rediscover his vocation, and his true calling, until, just as the Clementine preacher had in the novel, the bishop too finds a sudden deus ex machina while out in the open. These two stories show Powers operating with accustomed ease in his own imaginary terrain, not too far from his real surroundings.

Brief pieces for the first time enter a collection of Powers' short works. "Moonshot" purports to be a play, but it's more of a sketch, a rather shallow send-up of the Cold War race in space to build moon buildings out of pumice rock. It's very slight. The even briefer "Folks" attempts to poke fun at wife-swapping and the end-of-the year holiday letter sent another couple who's drifted away from such conviviality, but again the tone is arch and the style forced. Better is "Pharisees," which taken in light of the ex-sem Conklin in "Priestly Fellowship" as the ex-Pharisee makes more sense. This short tale's a send-up of the Publican & Pharisee parable, and reveals the only direct parody of an actual bible story that I can recall in Powers. It's a novelty, but it grows on you with repeat readings by its sly knowing wit.

"Tinkers" ends with Powers' only story dealing directly (in a manner of speaking) with his Irish experience. A great counterpart to his wife's novel, which was all about their South Co. Dublin suburban sojourns on-and-off in the 50s and 60s. As Jon Hassler's noted, it's so understated at times that a reader risks missing the point, but it's an oblique commentary on itinerancy, the pretensions of returning Yanks, and the indomitable attitudes of their Hibernian hosts towards those with a bit more cash and lots less sense than they think. Powers and Wahl both send up their own American pretensions at the hands of Irish landlords, workers, and neighbors who manage to undermine any hope that, as Powers and Wahl once believed, they could actually live in Ireland in a time half a century ago far less expensive than now and save money from paying rent in Minnesota, enough to get by on savings and simply write!

(Blog image: "Cloud Torso" (1986) from Mary Farl Powers, daughter of Jim & Betty, who was born in Ireland on one of their sojourns and returned there to paint.)

Mother Teresa, Patron Saint of Agnostics?

James Martin, the Jesuit priest whose "My Life with the Saints" (reviewed by me here and on Amazon) noted Mother Teresa's dark night of the soul apparently lasting from at least 1959 to her death, has written in the NY Times (link below) about her "noche oscura" in moving terms, occasioned by the publication of a journal of hers, which made not only the cover of Time, as I glanced at on the train yesterday over an Asian man's shoulder, but AOL's come-on blurb about "Mother Teresa's Secret Life, or Dark Secret," I cannot remember which. In a day that saw me take our neighbors to the train with news that both their fathers were ailing, one in hospital, my father-in-law elevated to life support, and seeing with my two sons my own father in critical care at the end of a long Labor Day-induced traffic jam two hours to the south and this in the carpool lane, I reflect again, aided by a decades-old Zinfadel I figured I better drink in this remodelling detritus, on our own mortality. And, on our own frailty.

I had asked my wife last night, after coming home with news of both our fathers' decline, about Mother Teresa's news, for if AOL & Time (Warner, now asunder) both carried the lead on this Albanian sister's revelations as well as the paper of record and the Amazon recommendation yesterday that popped up for me, I figured Mother T. was the talk of the chattering classes, albeit on a slow holiday weekend of little to note beyond the tenth anniversary of one woman born a week after me, and her fiery death as the former wife to the (usurping) Prince of Wales. I was bitter as a child when I read in National Geographic of the investiture at Caermarthen in 1969 of Charles, and I remain opposed to the English seizure of the Welsh throne, and any claims by its hangers-on to rule over this purported Principality.

Mother Teresa has an Irish connection, speaking of Celtic realms, as she was I recall trained there for the Sisters of Loreto (O. L. of L. by bilocation of the Holy House where Jesus supposedly was born-- I saw the copy on Prague's left bank-- and therefore the patron saint of television & media, Internet geeks note-- cooler than the wax doll Infant of Prague down the street but a few blocks). I find it sad, but therefore fitting, that Mother T. had to suffer so in her lack of firm belief for four decades hence.

Perhaps Christopher Hitchens, who I also admire if reservedly for his typically British air of lefty Oxbridged erudition mixed with a delight in taking on all comers in the journalistic agora (despite his air of noblesse oblige shared with child of privilege "The Nation"'s Alexander Cockburn), will show some mercy from his previous attack on Mother T's resigned attitude towards "the poor you will always have with you" that he savaged in his ad feminam attack-- for her connivance in the Keating [good Irish Norman Catholic name} scandal in Swiftianally titled polemic "The Missionary Position.")

The parable of the unjust steward's one of the tough ones for preachers to expound upon. The conclusion came to mind as I thought of Mother T's alliances with such as the Duvaliers of Haiti. "And the lord commended the unjust steward, because he had done wisely. For the children of this world are, in their generation, wiser than the children of light. And I say unto you, make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, that, when you fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations." Hitchens labels his antagonist's contrary position as "cognitive dissonance," but believers might recognize it as reality, for in the Catholic tradition especially, "la noche oscura" may never end.

As Fr. Martin in his book had already revealed, the dark night of the soul that Mother T. had to endure perhaps does not mark her as a depressed avatar for those of us-- ah that Celtic affliction-- also tainted by melancholy-- but rather an appropriate saint for our own afflicted age? "Has she been received into everlasting habitations?" We, like her on this earth, can never now-- at least yet? I hope she has found peace, as I pray the same for the two men around ninety who most directly are in my own thoughts as I write this entry tonight amidst wine, pizza, heat wave, my own acedia and weariness.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/29/opinion/29martin.html?ex=1346126400&en=6e005755eb67c616&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Mary Douglas' "Purity and Danger": Book Review

Why do we let those close to us lick the same spoon, or eat off the same dish? Why kiss away tears but not snot? How do we learn to live with some filth and yet recoil at other dirt? And how does this all relate to "primitive" ritual, magical belief, and ethical culture?

This book manages to be accessible for the non-anthropologist or historian of religion, yet too densely argued and scattered for the novice. How can it be both? Douglas writes in a no-nonsense style that I enjoyed, when I could grasp her points. Too often, like many critics, she's engaged more in a grudge match with previous academics and uses a considerable amount of this text settling scores, some from the time of "The Golden Bough" and the formative years of her discipline. While she makes her own argument known, the details of tribes, the skipping about that many of the chapters engage in through time and culture make her intricately developed thesis appear probably more fractured and piecemeal than she intended.

The centerpiece, therefore, stands out as the lasting reason for which this earlier book is known, and you can see from her later work that she returned to Leviticus with gusto. "The Abominations of Leviticus" pioneered a cultural approach to the laws not as health codes -- although she notes that ethical control, hygiene and dietary concerns may well be by-products of these Mosaic restrictions and allowances -- but as aesthetic counterparts drawn from the natural world to the cohesion that the military camp and the Hebrew tribes demanded for survival and identity. She reads the proscriptions and prescriptions as conceptual structures of what fit the divinely mandated order that the Hebrews strove to impose-- following God's will as they understood it-- on their natural surroundings. Here, Douglas provided a paradigm shift for scholars trying to figure out what had eluded them about these seemingly arbitrary do's and don'ts. I have to admit I was reminded of a Monty Python routine that takes glee in enumerating similarly detailed provisos and prohibitions.

Of value, too, remain cogent observations late in the book (my battered 1970 Pelican paperback may have different pagination) that relate to our own times. Most do not keep kosher or follow "primitive" rituals, but Douglas cautions us. We too follow our own elaborate yet apparently "natural" habits of cleanliness, and our own magical formulae. Douglas notes that when religions filter down to the masses, ordinary folks tend to minimize the philosophy and maximize the material benefits. Moral conformity and adherence to ritual guarantee, adherents are assured, continued prosperity. But, how long can the magic lamp be rubbed, she wonders? The danger comes when the magic, the pizazz of the ritual becomes vulnerable to disbelief. Too much stress on the ritual may lead to the exposure, as I compare it, of the charlatan and not the wizard behind the curtain. How does a religion safeguard itself against dissent? How keep the rituals potent and their promise fresh>

How do religions sustain their aura? Douglas suggests three ways. 1) Suggest an enemy's to blame for undoing the religion's good effect. Demons enter on cue and sinister forces can be blamed at work here. She faults this as a half-hearted answer that makes the religion appear weak, as if it cannot explain the whole of existence without resorting to boogeymen.
2) Attend to fine print, or else the incantation will not be efficacious. She likes this approach better, as the devil or angel as it were may lie in the details. Also, the audience and priests need to be cleansed, guilt-free-- again if the ritual fails, scapegoats often can be found close at hand to take the blame. This method also establishes moral purity and aspiration to a higher sense of communal goodness to bind the worshippers more closely to assure the success of the religious ritual. 3) Change its tack, as Douglas puts it. Religions can alter to meet the times, the mood, the circumstances.

Considering various "faith communities" in our curious parlance of our own generation's bureaucracies, applying Douglas' three responses to the present day secularizing drift and fundamentalist tendencies proves, now over forty years since its first publication, a salutary exercise in putting beliefs to the test. This book remains admittedly too much a collection of notes and readings rather than a tightly-knit thesis. Overall, its chapters move along fitfully, but Leviticus insights and the closing "The System Shattered & Renewed" retain their own verve for today.

(Image: the Routledge cover's genius, compared to my mangy, bird-nibbled, unclean $1 used Pelican 1969 copy with its René Magritte monochrome painting, pretty boring; this appeared 8-30-07 on Amazon US)

Richard Pearce (ed.) "Molly Blooms": Review

"A Polylogue on 'Penelope' & Cultural Studies" (U. of Wisconsin, 1994), gathers twelve articles by various literary critics exploring the ultimate chapter of James Joyce's "Ulysses." Kathleen McCormick surveys the reactions to Molly's chapter over the past century, from outrage to awe, from shock to praise, and finds that each decade reflects in its reception the unsurprising fact that the social mores, intellectual currents, and scholarly understanding of Joyce's bravura eight sentences and thousands of words that provide Molly with her scripted thoughts provide a mirror into the changing attitudes of earth mother or shameless hussy that have polarized much of 20c response to her performance. Pearce follows with a brave if awkward attempt by a "male feminist" to transcend the "male gaze" to scrutinize how we look at Molly, especially if male critics, even as his essay is inevitably, like Joyce's, framed by such a gender-constructed and linguistically daring but role-bound limitation.

The performative aspect of Molly's recital provides its own "star turn," what Joyce proffered as the 'clou', the closing act to bring down the curtain after Poldy went to bed, inverted next to her, and his own narrative ended with a big (or small?) black period. Cheryl Herr's analysis confronts the chapter as Molly's "period piece" with the multiple meanings this phrase carries. Herr, building upon her work in the 1986 'Joyce's Anatomy of Culture,' emphasizes the staginess of the drama-- which is not a stream of consciousness in its pauses addresses to the audience, role-playing, and although a monologue, it is a text and a speaker aware that the chapter plays with the melodramatic conventions of 1904 Dublin.Therefore, Molly acts out her role, yet she speaks her lines while holding back total revelation. Herr even argues that Molly's menstruation, seemingly the undeniable sign of the character's female self, remains in Joyce's portrayal "playacting." We can never truly know Molly, Herr insists. Mrs Marion Bloom sticks as an Irish citizen and a woman, to a "script forced on her." (78) Inside, she holds her secrets, keeping her interior feelings hidden from their external expression in the closing pages of Joyce's exploitative media.

Kimberly Devlin follows by contrasting masquerade with mimicry, as if Marilyn Monroe were set alongside Madonna the singer for contemporary analogies. Devlin argues Molly's closer to Ms. Ciccone in her willful appropriation. Carol Schloss raises the issue of colonialism with marriage, Susan Bazargan explores the Gibraltar aspects of Molly's memories, and Brian Shaffer employs Bakhtin. These three essays lack the inventiveness of Herr's contribution, but remain organized, cogent, and of interest to cultural studies scholars. Joseph Heinenger nears Herr's earlier work in contexts within which Joyce placed the novel by examining advertising language of the actual products peddled which Molly uses; Jennifer Wicke matches this with a dense, rather theoretically dependent article that enters the realm of consumption and the place not only of Molly but ourselves as consumers of these works. This essay, by the way, finds in the second ed. (2005; reviewed by me also here & on Amazon US) of the Cambridge Companion to James Joyce a counterpart in Wicke's longer piece on this topic; similarly, Garry Leonard-- another fine contributor to the CCJJ, on Dubliners-- here in Pearce's collection provides a spirited Lacanian look at the erotics of shopping, display, and performance. I particularly liked his close reading of Molly's decision not to return her "laddered" stockings before she meets Boylan as an example of pre-coital as opposed to post-coital shopping!

The book closes with Margaret Mills Harper on drapery in both the Odyssey & the chapter, and Ewa Zietek's ambitious study of technology, memory and "the female body." Again, while some essays, notably Herr & Leonard, stood out from the rest personally, this remains a solid anthology of in-depth investigations of Molly's enigmatic, shape-shifting, and fittingly masked and webbed persona(e).
Dated a bit by references to the Real Roxanne, Imelda Marcos, and "Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous," nevertheless the ties that continue to be made to the media of a century ago employed by Joyce and that through which you read my comments today show that Molly indeed transcends the time and place that she ineluctably remains tied to so vividly for us a century hence. She is part of the "transparent showcart" Bloom ad man imagined with "two smart girls" rolled through Dublin, hawking yet another cultural studies artifact to sell to us.

(Image: Festival de Occidente, Venezuela, Maria Fernanda Ferra's single-laddered stocking performance 2006: "La noche de Molly Bloom.")

Norman Mailer's "An American Dream": Review

I remember Ancient Evenings for its erotic charge, its graphic battlescenes, and the smells and sights of Egypt that it conjured up. I also remember it for tedium, excessive languor, and pages and pages of dreamlike half-sense as characters floated in and out of each other's consciousness. The roots of this later fiction, as well as the philosopher-villain (as Pierre Klossowski analyzed Sade) of The Executioner's Song, can be traced to this post-JFK novel. Dated inevitably by the hipster slang, and the stylized verbal sparring between Rojack and the cop Roberts, the jive-talking Shago, the overheated moll Cherry, and the languid lockjaw of Kelly, still, Mailer does capture a fantasy of the mid-Sixties, as Freedom Riders prepared for the coming a few years later of the Armies of the Night.

Curious about the novel after Kate Millett's evisceration of Rojack's sexual assault- turned- arousal with the German maid Ruta, I read the entire book to find that Millett exaggerates one early episode, and seems not to situate Ruta within the context of the later revelations that confront Rojack in Kelly's lair. Shades of Chuck Barris playing a CIA operative on the side while he entertains the masses on a TV show! Rojack's public persona, similarly, is caricatured, and you fail to believe he was a Harvard grad, let alone a professor and noted pundit.

Still, whenever he is grilled by the police, threatened by Shago, or taunted by Kelly, the novel does flicker into life for pages at a time. However, the slow passage of time manages to live up to the title of the work, for stretches of this defy verisimilitude unless one was strung out on speed rather than java. The Mob element surprisingly hovers rather than enters the scene, although this shadowy presence is intentional from the storyline. Nearly all the novel takes place in but a couple of days with apparently very little sleep for the protagonist, the anti-hero that Mailer clearly relishes as his alter ego-- one who keeps wondering if he can get away with murder, between the sex, the taxis, the dancing, the clubbing, and the fear of being clubbed to death or pushed off a penthouse parapet that Rojack fears.

Incest often throws off an otherwise respectable plot, and it's used here by Mailer in my judgement as an easy out to get Rojack off the hot seat. The theme causes the climactic scene of the novel to feel hackneyed. The coda anticipates if in more measured prose Hunter S. Thompson's road trip crossed with Tom Wolfe's account of Kesey's Magic Bus; Mailer's half in tune with the counterculture zeitgeist, half catching up to the New Journalism, celebrating the White Negro, and predicting Radical Chic.

Parts of this book I found winning, notably in the character of unfairly maligned Ruta. The lustful intensity of this episode comprised the finest writing in the book, following a harrowing encounter with the four Germans Rojack killed during the war. These two parts cannot be extricated from each other. You cannot get outraged about the sex with Ruta taken only on its own, when previously the novel opens with the moonlit night two decades earlier that foreshadows the werewolf-like frenzy that Rojack enters into once again, with dramatic results. Lunacy rises fearfully.

Often, the novel failed to move me, as with Rojack's unaccountable lust for Cherry, who lacked an iota of sex appeal as sketched on the page. Shago's long sparring match with Rojack, physically and verbally, veered near self-parody for Mailer, which is saying a lot. But, as with the assault on and then with (a crucial qualifier Millett cannot understand) Ruta and the Nazi attack earlier, other sections succeed. While paragraphs drift off into showmanship, sentences shine coldly, in the uneven near-monologue Kelly delivers. Once in a while, then-- and probably more often than his peers as judged four decades later-- Mailer hits the target. He enters the zone of manic creativity that his fiction and journalism both have shown, before and after this experimental novel, him to be able to sustain, if in the short spurt rather than the long run, for most of his published oeuvre to date.

(I reviewed Mailer's Ancient Evenings & Pierre Klossowski's "Sade My Neighbor" as well as the above book on Amazon. The British Flamingo cover unaccountably gets cover girl status rather than the male backside Vintage reprint, and the former captures the tone much better.)

Pierre Klossowski's "Sade My Neighbor": Review

This translation of "Sade mon prochain" collects two essays by Klossowski, brother of Balthus, and a painter- philosopher- translator-critic who lived quite a checkered life from 1905 through the end of the century. The first, "The Philosopher-Villain," (1947) attempts to explain his concepts of integral monstrosity and a negative anti-theology testing if supreme evil could indeed triumph, as Sade may have imagined and the Holocaust (the author was from a partially Jewish background, and married a concentration camp survivor) may have verified. It's a very dense treatise, despite the attempts of its translator, Alphonso Lingis (sounds like a Sade character himself!). The essay, like this short book, goes on about twice the length it needed to, and the point of perversion needing the normative to forever react against it, to transgress the moral standard, to overcome the natural order, is a sensible reading of Sade, although little of the original author remains cited or analyzed in depth.

The next essay from 1967, "Sade my Neighbor," reads easier, if only by comparison. The style is less turgid, and the argument clearer. It efficiently compares Sade's thought with the French revolution, and then outlines his system, and looks deeper into its purportedly atheist tenets. One of the most intriguing points is buried near the end, when Klossowski wonders if our being is our ultimate prison, where "duration in the unendurable length and emptiness of time is an experience of being chained to one's condition. Beyond the wall, there is the freedom of nonbeing, the freedom of God, who is accused of incarcerating his creatures in the prison of being." (99) But such passages are rare by their pithy clarity.

"Delectatio Morosa" again raises near the conclusion interesting ideas about its appropriation by Sade for his creative drive, that which renews the pervert's contemplation of the act he commits as if perpetually, driving him on in a frenzy of anticipation over and over again. "The Christian soul give itself over to God; the romantic soul to nostalgia; the Sadean soul to exasperation." (115) The erotic differentiates perversion by counterbalancing an instinct for propagation; perversion refuses this possibility for regenerating the natural order, preferring to annihilate the race rather than continuing its progeny. The essay stops at this point, however, just as this idea is raised only to be set aside. Too bad, as the erotic opposed to the Sadean project of a dystopian evil, however exaggerated to the point of tedium or exhaustion, would have provided promising material for more speculation.

This monograph contains a short introduction by Lingis, but a reader without more knowledge prior of Sade's works will likely be challenged and perhaps a bit wearied by this compact, but at times rather leaden, pair of essays. Scattered throughout are valuable ideas, but the lack of treatment given the erotic imagination vs. the Sadean obsession diminishes the total impact of this volume.

"The Lord is in this place. How dreadful is this place."

A weekend trip to San Diego so my wife could see the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the Natural History Museum, the Mustangs at the Automotive counterpart in Balboa Park, and the Salk Institute in La Jolla at a fundraising dinner and outdoor symphony filled the past couple of days. The four hours it took each way made me grumble again about the overpopulation of our coast. The weather, ten-to-fifteen degrees cooler, made me wonder why I live in heat and smog. The food, however, made me appreciate my wife's cooking even more, despite the fact it's that lack and the fact we don't have a kitchen that spurred this very excursion south 120 miles.

Here's my factoid: David slew Goliath and a scribal error gave the "giant" a height of nine-and-a-half rather than six-and-a-half feet. Still WWF size in those days when, as the sandal found at Qumran shows, the equivalent of a lady's five today. The exhibit, quite informative, reminded me of J.F. Powers in the lavish abbey where he taught, now the sponsor of the largest new project of the scriptural illumination for our new millennium. St. John's illuminated bible pages, perhaps nearly three feet each, were shown as samples of a work in progress; I believe one page, credited to Donald Jackson's calligraphy, is likely the same man who spoke at our high school when I was a senior and he was the city of L.A.'s official scribe.

Quite a jolt to see tiny coins of the Jewish revolt, Nero, various Herods, an Antoninus, a John Hyrcanus, and assorted Roman rulers and collaborating satraps. Or, a few dried date pits. Not to mention a hair net and a comb with microscopic lice eggs and blood still preserved.

I stood behind a stocky girl-- tattooed "Kwuiipa" (Uh, Guapa translated into the Pacific realm?) between flames up her nearly bare brown fleshy shoulders-- for a considerable time as her beau nuzzled her ears continually. They were in the long line for a half hour as we crept towards the shards of scroll fragments past the quite nuanced but definitely "humanistic" take on the abuses and uses of religion that introduced the timeline of events that began with the Venus of Willendorf to end around the 1700s, oddly. I wanted the curators to clarify when chapters and then verses were added to scriptural texts. Although mentioned, the dates were not given. Erasmus did place chapter & verse in his edition around 1520, a very humanist text!

Speaking of chronology, a testy seventy-ish visitor after handing in his audio headset sounded a bit aggravated about BCE & CE. This had been footnoted on the commentary as an optional number to key in to find out why these terms were used, but neither he nor I evidently had remembered to do so. I wondered if all museums use this terminology, or if it had not been a primarily Israeli-sponsored exhibit (and Jordan helped, as noted carefully in the museum credits with three fragments shown), would they have reverted to Anno Domini? The kind docent-- and I credit all the Balboa Park staff with unfailing patience and polite manners-- explained deftly why the terms were employed. "Sounds like you're changing history," the plaintiff mumbled as he stalked off, but the silverhaired, spectacled docent-- the same age and style as his counterpart but perhaps more skilled in what we call "critical thinking," called him back! The man half-turned, and the docent reminded him that "even many Christian scholars" had adapted the BCE/CE usage. The first man smirked, undoubtably skeptical at such liberal revisionism. The naysayer probably forgot too the small reminder in the great mass of simplified complexity that rendered this intense debate into few thousand words for us great unwashed that very little of what has been found at Qumran had any impact on what most people believe on the CE side of the great divide. And CE won, not the post-hejira or the time since the Birthday of the World 5760-odd years ago. Time split in two with the Incarnation, even if, as the docent noted, it was four years off!

Unwashed and perhaps never knowing about the crucifixion of a minor rabblerouser from Nazareth a generation before, those at Qumran may have exposed themselves to the mikvah in vain hopes of renewed purity. I wished these new discoveries had been mentioned in the presentation, but Neil Folberg's splendid photos of the desert and a eight-foot blow-up shot (not his) of a large date palm grove at the mikveh stage of our tour took precedence. Instead, as this article about "the Essene hypothesis" I read last year (see URL below) hazarded, the Essenes buried their waste, keeping over a century of occupation nasty germs alive under the soil. Essenes relied on runoff water stored in a cistern from three months yearly rain; no other water source existed. They recruited presumably healthy members at twenty or so. But by forty, they had but a 6% chance of making it to middle age, or elderly age back then, compared to a 50-50 chance up the road in Jericho. Why? Because they could not stay unwashed.

The Essenes, obsessed by cleanliness, had to reenter the mikveh each time they returned from defecating. At the latrine, while Bedouins leave their stools to dry up and break up on the dessicating desert surface, the Essenes by burying their waste ironically kept microbes alive from their dung. If they had cuts on their feet, out of those tiny sandals, they'd take the dirt from this waste dump back to breed. They left the latrine to wash and took the bugs with them rather than eradicating the tapeworms. Each time a man entered the water, it'd stir up the germs again. This swirling sump led to infections, and the life of those desert scholars, or perhaps fanatics, if monks are such today, shortened dramatically, hastening their return back to the God they sought so desperately in a Mideast retreat from the falling empires, imperial shock, and mystical awe that we too know so well with each NYT front page today.

Blog title today thanks to those Anglican folk-rockers who titled that one-minute busker plainchant recorded in some Muswell Hill-adjacent C of E echolarium by this Psalmic phrase that came to mind when I viewed this terribly awe-full image from Neil Folberg, In a Desert Land, 1998. Santa Katerina (the Sinai site of the monastery) in snowstorm. http://www.abbeville.com/Products/Product0789201259.htm

Total immersion, in water up to nine months stagnant, many times a day. Eyes, ears, mouth, nose, throat. To quote from Prof. Tabor, leader of the dig: "As a group the men of Qumran were very unhealthy, but I think this would have been likely to have actually fed the Essenes' religious enthusiasm," said Tabor. "They would have seen their infirmities as punishment from God for their lack of purity and then have tried even harder to purify themselves further."

Does the tetragrammaton, the unnameable YHWH have a twisted sense of humor or what? Talk about "Purity & Danger." What would Mary Douglas say? (I got halfway through that eponymous book from 1969 before losing it in remodelling, but I found it again last week! I tried to explain her thesis about the (il)logic of Leviticus to my wife at dinner; a scrap unearthed we both noticed on display indeed proscribes wool with linen. No mix & match. Everything in its place. Exogamy verboten. And, for the most committed, no endogamy either, far off in the land where the devil took Jesus to the high mount to offer him all the kingdoms of the world, the desert's stark allure. Where prophets, madmen, shepherds, tourists, mystics all meditate.)

Essene Hypothesis:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-11/uonc-rlr110306.php

Mark D. Jordan: Review

Is it a sign of my own complicity that when reading "The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology" (U of Chicago Pr, 1997) on the train, I taped a Post-It over the large noun in the genitive case featured prominently on the cover? Am I too to blame for the history of shame? Jordan, of Notre Dame's Medieval Institute, seeks to recover the multivalent, flexible, and surprisingly non-same-sex context of the original term. I am not saying "sodomy" is not a sin, nor is he, but that it does not have the fixated meaning that roots it in forbidden and often male-male sex. On the other hand, what I find fascinating and frustrating is that even this limited denotation has inescapably permeable connotations, which puts us back in the same maddening dilemma where we started. Talk about an unmentionable sin that must be never known but always confessed. This is the whole problem, Jordan might argue, with the noun.

I wish in fact he explained the original interpretations and their range of adaptability much more, but his short work focuses on around 1000-1270 during the rise of theological, exegetical, penitential, and didactic texts that span roughly Peter Damian to Thomas Aquinas. This is my Amazon US review, posted today. I hope readers treat my considerations fairly, but as with other reviews on such hot-button books as Francis Collins claiming God's behind DNA and Sam Harris denouncing God's beneath our genes, Amazonians tend to rate you not on your critique but on the subject matter of the work itself and how it plays into their own prejudices. Ironic, isn't it?

I agree with earlier comments posted by others about this book's strengths & weaknesses. Jordan writes with verve. The account of Pelagius & the caliph as interpreted and embellished by hagiographers, the twists of an approach that threatened the sinner with doom if he confessed and yet appealed to the sinner to surrender for his own good to the harsh mercy of the punishing Church that Peter Damian's "Book of Gomorrah" promulgated, and the confessional manuals that had to elicit admission of an unspeakable sin-- all these sources elicit a reader's interest. Think of how a manual advises penitents and priests, but without letting the sinner in on the secret that in fact the offense that had to be elided had been named, that others practiced it, and it was perhaps more widespread than the sinner had imagined: these all provide evocative moments than most erudite studies which I have read on exegetical and didactic texts during the Middle Ages. It left me wondering how many men and women lived with their temptations and endured their own secrets for so many centuries.

Apropos, Jordan, who only "came out" when he received tenure at Notre Dame, bitterly and as he explains for just cause in his opinion, rejects classification under moral theology for a mature understanding of same-sex, or non-procreative different-sex, relations. This is a difficult challenge to the Church's sustained, if for Jordan unsupportable, position, admittedly. Perhaps ideally, Jordan envisions a more enlightened and tolerant climate in which Christians can express themselves in love (and presumably playful lust) as fully able to enjoy the pleasures of the body within a wider range of activity than one approved position for procreation, options feared by terrified canonists a thousand years ago.

If, as Jordan asks us, we do not look to these hidebound sources when investigating Newtonian inertia, then why do we insist on these narrow-minded, relentlessly minatory texts as guides for our informed and open-minded sexual diversity so many centuries later? If the clerical authors with so little genuine science and no real psychological sophistication then could not explain away the persistence of a natural desire for non-reproductive copulation and connection within a creation-centered spirituality, we should not look to such antiquated tomes for our own decisions. We know what the earlier authors did not about attraction towards others, and how what they called sin we can term desire-- an astonishing, and for Jordan, body-liberating, soul-nourishing difference.

The latter part of the book shifts towards this spirited conclusion, by dismantling the arguments left unsaid by Alan de Lille and especially Albert the Great. I did find the latter doctor treated less thoroughly than earlier authors had in Jordan, and the chapter drifted about noticeably. Thomas Aquinas gains respect, and Jordan often corrects the exaggerations of John Boswell in reminding us that Thomism is not the original teaching of the Angelic Doctor-- which was left unfinished at his death. Jordan tries his best to be fair in his evaluation of what Aquinas actually codified, as far as we can tell from a Summa lacking full realization. There is far less attention to same-sex relations than modern-day revisionists might have anticipated, Jordan cautions, and you can sense his admiration for what Thomas managed to accomplish despite the friar's familiar fulminations, albeit perhaps more gently phrased than earlier medieval clerics.

Such a free-floating signifier, the word "sodomy." Think of the many ways you have seen the word applied. That's the trouble with this term, used to obliterate any opposition by the very elasticity of the utterance. We fear it, but we struggle to define it.

While Jordan never answers as directly as I wanted my suspicion-- if not this word than surely some other would have condemned the same action between men-- he does show the gradual erosion and expansion of this terribly vague term. Being misattributed, taken out of already dreadful contexts of threats against angels and gang-rapes of men and virgins, the destructive potential inherent in Genesis 19 widens into a napalm blast of fulmination against a category-- Jordan quotes Eve Sedgwick-- both made a minority and a universal class of those to be despised and damned. The term carries a shadow over it, feared by those to whom it is directed, so unstable it threatens to undermine the surety of those who use the term to condemn others, for fear its very vocalization will in turn taint he who dares to speak its name.

Therefore, the term once made not an adjective but a noun becomes fixed, an abstraction that can be applied to specifics that in turn disorder the careful categories of "natural law" that, as Albert & Alan show, do not fit a neatly ordered plan. Jordan takes on not only the medieval lack of logic in fitting "sodomy" into unstable classifications, but our modern lapse in allowing for so long a lazy mental habit that leads to our own contemporary failing of ranking somehow a small anomaly in the order of how people fit together into an enormous error against nature herself. We by now should know much better, Jordan chides. His final pages leave us with the admonition that Christians today need to follow a higher Law than that calling fire & brimstone upon those segregated and banished from the company of sinners to which all in the Church equally belong. Rather than exclusion, Jordan seeks inclusion, tenderness, and understanding to heal us.

Two minor lapses: the merit of this book is its brevity and relative clarity for non-specialists, but often there are in the footnotes inconsistently translated Latin passages; sometimes you get the Latin original, often you do not. Also, the inter-testamental changes in how the Jewish texts interpreted the tale of Sodom and I assume Leviticus gain no attention at all here, and only one sentence in the entire book even nods to this surely momentous change that would influence Christian theology. I know his subtitle looks at the Church and not the rabbinical sources, but this background needed at least a few pages of explanation.

I recommend this despite these gaps, filled in by Michael Cauden's published dissertation on the biblical history of the term "Sodomy." This incorporates Jordan's study into an examination of the misattributions in Christian teaching up to the Reformation as well as Hebrew sources; Cauden supports Jordan overall in rereading the texts as he advocates a gay-friendly theology to supersede and correct the errors that liberal Christians reject in traditional interpretations. This quest, in turn, enters the realm of the social constructionists and gender theory, although Jordan shies away from total identification with Foucault regarding his views on how earlier cultures defined and understood same-sex desire. But, that's a whole other long shelf already written.

{Blog image credit: Nuremburg Chronicle in that heavyhanded Teutonic style, but whose linear clarity and cheery palette remind me of coloring books with crayons and nice thick outlines. The folks leave Sodom & Gomorrah. Except Mrs. Lot. In Islam, 'luwat' is the equivalent, or "Lot-ery." Some jackpot, although Lot's wife looks oddly content. Limbless, easily held, a salt shaker's body in her simplified, petrified, but calmer form. Lot's two daughters seem to have a sororial twinkle in their eye as they lead Pops off (away from the angelic escort, who's seen his share of the singles scene after his last night in Sodom, and that city's bacchanal to end all) to put the wine-and-grind moves on zayde. I think of Eric Gill's erotic sketch of a full-figured backside hovering over the prone, nearly invisible, body of her progenitor, as if he was indeed the last man on earth and the girls gamely doing their covenental duty to make more members of the tribe.

Try Googling the noun Jordan discusses and see what pops up. At least I have "safe search" images left on.}

It's Frank's World, We Just Live in It?

So my wife's button long lost once summed it up, purchased at the one-time, pioneering, before Silver Lake became uber-hip Amok, scary store that as she said you would not want your credit card information given over to, this in the pre-Net days; they did have a creepy netherworldish mail-order catalogue, the upended Whole Earth gnawed, the underside of the Northern Cal bliss. Well, whether Sinatra or God or Some Guy on the Couch is running us, it's still a Sims game, no?

John Tierney's NY Times August 14, 2007 article raises the supposition that The Game of (Our So-Called or in my case So-Cal) Life is happening to us as a computer simulation. I immediately thought of Anselm. (I read an assertion in Mark Jordan's book perhaps that he-- not Jordan although he is too once he got tenure at Notre Dame's Medieval Institute where I had once dreamed of going, and imagine my job prospects now-- was gay as was Aelfric and another medieval Mr. A. See my review blogged earlier this month of Toni Bentley's "The Surrender" for more tie-ins if not tie-me-ups or downs) As he theorized in his ontological proof, "God is a being greater than which cannot be conceived." The a priori reasoning of this has been attacked for a thousand years; remember his response to Gaunilo, who goes down in history as "the Fool"?

Yet, how is Anselm's Unmoved Mover any different, fundamentally, than Dr. Bostrom's model? I recall Frank Tipler's "Physics of Immortality" idea that some future beings can reconstruct all bodies that ever existed. Recently atheists ponder non-theistic afterlifes; they suggest that information once created never dies. Tipler earlier pondered a related model of the cosmological anthropic principle, that we evolved suited in such a way to understand the universe that created us-- this makes my head spin back to Anselm, or worse yet the Fool.

Blame or credit all this to my lunch at Caltech's splendid Athanaeum today. There I like to pretend I am a tweedy laureate in splendidly realized arches and shadowed corridors amidst Olde Spanish Revival California. Not to mention the hundred-degree smoggy heat of Olde San Gabriel Valley that plagued half my life and corroded half my lungs.

Here is the conclusion of Tierney, with a link to the whole article "Our Lives, Controlled from Some Guy's Couch." http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/science/14tier.html?ex=1344830400&en=2300cf446929c707&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

It’s unsettling to think of the world being run by a futuristic computer geek, although we might at last dispose of that of classic theological question: How could God allow so much evil in the world? For the same reason there are plagues and earthquakes and battles in games like World of Warcraft. Peace is boring, Dude.

A more practical question is how to behave in a computer simulation. Your first impulse might be to say nothing matters anymore because nothing’s real. But just because your neural circuits are made of silicon (or whatever posthumans would use in their computers) instead of carbon doesn’t mean your feelings are any less real.

David J. Chalmers, a philosopher at the Australian National University, says Dr. Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis isn’t a cause for skepticism, but simply a different metaphysical explanation of our world. Whatever you’re touching now — a sheet of paper, a keyboard, a coffee mug — is real to you even if it’s created on a computer circuit rather than fashioned out of wood, plastic or clay.

You still have the desire to live as long as you can in this virtual world — and in any simulated afterlife that the designer of this world might bestow on you. Maybe that means following traditional moral principles, if you think the posthuman designer shares those morals and would reward you for being a good person.

Or maybe, as suggested by Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, you should try to be as interesting as possible, on the theory that the designer is more likely to keep you around for the next simulation. (For more on survival strategies in a computer simulation, go to www.nytimes.com/tierneylab.)

Of course, it’s tough to guess what the designer would be like. He or she might have a body made of flesh or plastic, but the designer might also be a virtual being living inside the computer of a still more advanced form of intelligence. There could be layer upon layer of simulations until you finally reached the architect of the first simulation — the Prime Designer, let’s call him or her (or it).

Then again, maybe the Prime Designer wouldn’t allow any of his or her creations to start simulating their own worlds. Once they got smart enough to do so, they’d presumably realize, by Dr. Bostrom’s logic, that they themselves were probably simulations. Would that ruin the fun for the Prime Designer?

If simulations stop once the simulated inhabitants understand what’s going on, then I really shouldn’t be spreading Dr. Bostrom’s ideas. But if you’re still around to read this, I guess the Prime Designer is reasonably tolerant, or maybe curious to see how we react once we start figuring out the situation.

It’s also possible that there would be logistical problems in creating layer upon layer of simulations. There might not be enough computing power to continue the simulation if billions of inhabitants of a virtual world started creating their own virtual worlds with billions of inhabitants apiece.

If that’s true, it’s bad news for the futurists who think we’ll have a computer this century with the power to simulate all the inhabitants on earth. We’d start our simulation, expecting to observe a new virtual world, but instead our own world might end — not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a message on the Prime Designer’s computer.

It might be something clunky like “Insufficient Memory to Continue Simulation.” But I like to think it would be simple and familiar: “Game Over.”

{Blog credit: French 13c. God as the Universe's architect, geometer at hand. More elegant than a Simpsons' Comic Book Guy type of Creator with one ring to rule or encompass us all, at least.}

J. F. Powers "Morte d'Urban": Review

Re-reading this novel, the winner of the National Book Award for 1962 and the author's first full-length fiction after his stories collected in "The Prince of Darkness" (1947) & "The Presence of Grace" (1956) after a few decades, many of its scenes remained vivid. The scotch-fueled reveries of a Father Urban, middle-aged preacher, about what he could if not should have been if he had drifted away from the faith and became an easygoing, silvertongued womanizer before settling down with one gal-- she who's trying to seduce him as he wanders into "what if" even as she waits on Belleisle, a little crenellated castle in the middle of a Minnesota lake. The struggle of a deer to avoid drowning at the hands of the priest's benefactor as he and the crony take an ill-fated canoe trip in search of fish. The endless conversations of his superior, Fr. Wilf, about how best to sand the shelves-- you go with the grain-- as the urbane sub-Fulton Sheen finds himself toiling at a new vocational calling at his third-rate Order of St. Clement's retreat house on truly a woebegone lake.

This droll tale, constructed out of short stories that Powers had been writing on as he created the Dioceses of Great Plains and its suitably downmarket dreadful neighboring see of Ostergothenberg, takes the pacing of his briefer narratives and generally sustains it for pages of effortless tragi-comic insight and deadpan commentary, filtered through a likable but slightly vainglorious success story in a religious community too good for him, or so he-- and we-- think. Critics have not always praised the deus ex machina (or bolus ex dei?) which brings Father Urban's apostolate at golf course and retreat house, visiting parish assistant and man-about-the Midwest for his Order to a jarring halt. The shift in the novel I find on perhaps my third reading of this novel appropriate, even if the coda remains rather too nuanced and low-key for full clarification of the novel's denouement.

Yet, this is Powers' intent. If "God writes straight with crooked lines," and if the Church's once-vaunted efficiency as a monolithical power "second only to Standard Oil" finds that the divine plan and the clerical bureaucracy will both recruit Fr. Urban for their own slightly opaque purposes that neither we nor literary critics nor the faithful can follow, so be it. The novel does show its scaffolding, and not all of it moves so smoothly. The Malory references and the whole Lancelot-Guinevere analogy appear strained and their incorporation may have come from shorter segments that Powers shoehorned into the larger framework at a oblique angle. I do sense that portions of the novel appear more polished than others, and one does read the whole with the suspicion that the stories were cobbled together and intervening sections had to be created to provide stepping stones from one narrative rock to another across a more fluid, less stable patch of multiple possibilities and competing directions for the author's quest.

But, the tonal adjustments add to the verisimilitude both of Fr. Urban's life and the craft of Powers, who must have worked a half-dozen years on this novel if my knowledge of his extremely slow rate of composition is any guide. Powers rests his reputation on the five or so best stories of his first collection-- among them his two best, "Lions" and "Prince." He adds to his achievement with the consistency, if slightly less awesome peaks, of the more unified stories in "Presence." And, with his novel, he entered, albeit briefly, the ranks of the most esteemed American writers of four or five decades ago.

This, published as Vatican II was in progress, ironically foreshadows the decline of the Catholic ghetto and clerical domination that the novel limns and critiques and celebrates somehow all deftly. It remains the best portrayal of how the Church once ruled Middle America, and those who have grown up since may marvel at the rapidity of the decline in clerical power. But, Fr. Urban and Powers seem to agree, such a fall from supposed grace had to happen if the Church was to remain intact and true to its divided calling. Whether or not Powers or his fictional priests and parishioners would have wanted the Church to shift so dramatically, or whether such a move was inevitable, I leave to you readers.

(Images: 1963 Red Letter cover; 2001 New York Review Press reissue.)