Why the NY Times beats the LA Times

I read the Sunday papers. I found nothing noteworthy in the hometown press. I turned to the NYT. This is why I save the best for last. Here's highlights.

Ben Stein in Business: We are like a drug lord who sells off his family's heirlooms to support his habit. Analogy for how we thrive temporarily by lower interest rates and foreign investment as we hand over control of our nation's economy to the rest of the world eager to outwork us and outsave us until they call due on our largess.

Irvine Welsh reviews a book on Warsaw's underground economy. "Our cultural hegemony has its downside; our imagination is increasingly filtered through the marketing lens of escapist genre fiction, and our so-called literary novels often feel like rehashed classics brazenly trumpeted as original work. Our novels affirm rather than challenge our sense of ourselves in the world."

Tina Brown's book on the usurper Princess of Wales asserts that Diana and Charles were alone only 13 times before the wedding. He previously bedded married women so they'd stay quiet.

Alex Beam reviews "Richistan," into true wealth's realm-- $10 million's the price of admission these days above the merely "affluent" Rolex and Benz owners. In 1985, there were 13 billionaires; now there are over 1000. In 2005, 227,000 became millionaires. North Carolina has more millionaires than India. One millionaire identified as an "inflatable- pool- toy magnate." Due to their often middle-class origins those at the top hate being called rich. Today, most nouveau riche enter Richistan not by inheritance but a "liquidity event," when their company's bought out. Here's hoping it happens to my wife and her five loyal employees.

The NYT Magazine's theme: Wealth-- well, more explicitly than most issues, thinking of the real estate ads that fill its back pages weekly. Since 1979, the top one percent of Americans has increased its share of the take from 9 to 16%. (A day after I wrote this, I open the NYT to find a disturbing update: 2005 marks the top one percent, who average $1.1 million a year, taking in 21.8% of our national wealth-- a figure rivalled last in...1929.) Since Nixon's administration, our average wages, by comparison, have stagnated-- at best.

George F. Will reviewed a book on how postwar abundance transformed the U.S. The average teen's weekly allowance in 1954: $10.55. A family in the early 1940s had this much disposable income. (In 1970, not even in double digits in age myself, I earned 50 cents weekly for my first allowance, had chores daily, and got a nickel raise each birthday.) In 1900 less than 2% of Americans took vacations; funerals consumed twice as much spending as medicine. 1/4-1/3 of income for working-class families came from childrens' earnings. By 1950, there's more college students than farmers for the first time. Over two-thirds of women who turned 18 in the '50s admitted to more than one sexual partner before they were 30. In the '70s, 2% confessed to such restraint. The left, by then, welcomed the mass affluence for its liberating potential, but despised the institutions that created such possibilities. The right supported the institutions but rejected the social dynamism let loose.

Andrew Kuo on a blogspot.com site "Earl Boykins" makes colorful graphs that send up obsessions of fans with indie rock. The NYT sent him to a week of Bright Eyes concerts. Charts reproduced in the Arts & Leisure section. I read them even though I have never knowingly heard a Conor Oberst song or have the slightest interest in him.

Arthur Phillips in the Week in Review gives a well-modulated meditation on his three beagles so far in his life. Averaging 15 years each, he tells how their whole span can be collapsed into a fraction of our own time on earth. Yet, we witness their whole flourishing and their gradual decline. Phillips contemplates how his latest beagle, Hamish, chews a dog toy. The novelist calls it a "gnarled leathery stick." The gal at the shop who sold it assured the buyer it was "100 percent bull penis."

My Son the Irish Cuban Cop

Leo performed the role tonight defending the glorious people's socialist democratic republic dictatorship in all its contradictions in his latest Silver Lake Children's Theatre Group performance, the spring play "Havana."

Actually, the cast and writers put on quite a complicated show, with 51 scenes, original songs by a crack band of pros. You followed the actors about the theatre complex; we proud parents following our son, who played and looked the part adroitly along with another, even more trigger happy partner, a girl surnamed off stage O'Brien. Compare garish image here of an androgynous Garda Pat from the oul' sod. (By the way, a fetching real-life TV reporter's named Soledad O'B. I read yesterday in the Forward of a girl at the only non-denominational, so naturally mixed, Jewish boarding school in the country, one Shoshanna O'B, who maddened her Orthodox mom by becoming Reform while there. As with the philanthropist of the NYC Orthodox who died a decade there, surnamed Murphy but nobody dared to ask why, a story lurks. As does why "soledad" gets redflagged by MS here and not "shoshanna." Spanish Nuesta Senora de solitude, fittingly also a prison name in desolate unbrotherly treeless southern inland Monterey Co. vs. Hebrew shoshannat ha-amakim, "lily of the valley." Who controls this media, anyway, nu?)

The surroundings added to the context. A few blocks south hard against the 101 is La Mirada Ave, home of the City's Worst Gang on the top #10, beating out our own neighborhood's Avenidas, the LM Locos. The play's held at the h.q. of the Assistance League, a ladies who lunch dignified teahouse and philanthropic organization founded way back when this area was glamorous, in the 20s, to help the poor of all creeds, complexions, or crustiness. At the break, out for fresh air, I glanced up to Sunset and saw, in an attempt I guess to cash in on the yuppification of Hollywood and the train station nearby, if not the massive Home Depot and the non-union Food 4 Less that replaced the union Ralphs for the area's immense East Hollywood barrio-Armenian-Thai enclave, another of those roughly 7600 Starbucks! Down the block past the Spanish-speaking strollers stumbled a drunk trying out his own bilingual skills on the folks out for a smoke. He literally crashed into two puffers in a row asking sort of for a match or a cigarette or both in some confusion.

Enhancing this multicultural LA moment was an earlier one. As both I entered for my "Visa" ticket and it also to be stamped, who else but the Oscar (TM)-winning editor of the contrived "Crash" preceded me. His son was on the Little League team last spring with Spuds, and the editor signed a poster for the Theatrical Child. Never talked to the prizewinner myself, but I appreciate his gesture.

I recall that he thanked pointedly his present helpmeet (who looks half his own age) in his Oscar speech. Got back at the alimony paid off to starter-wife? Point is, presumably this current partner crashed past me not once but twice while I was waiting in "customs." Talk about a poorly edited culture clash. Guess the insistent and sudden juxtaposition of disparate moderns, germane to the entertainment the editor and the play of the evening both shared, had rubbed off. Ham-fisted coincidences migrated from editor's labor to companion's leisure. Quite rudely and obliviously accomplished in person as opposed to on screen, she kept cutting across me. New Yorker squawk, gum chewing, leggy, svelte, low-cut blouse, deep tan plus olive skin, long permed tresses, donning her nametag: "Bunny."

Now that we are on public displays of self, I wore as a surprise that embarrassed my wife dearly a Quicksilver formerly called a field or train engineer olive hat ("super trendige im Fidel cap" goes one German caption on Google images). Ensemble enhanced by a black-and-rosy latinate shirt that my own olive-skinned spouse picked out for me Dios knows why years ago. I think she forgot all about la camisa tan suave. This to blend into the nightclub's tropical mood that complements my pale skin, blue eyes, and sandy greying hair so well. Que lastima.

Anti-capitalist, anti-communist dad here did admire the semi-jamonfisted way "Havana"'s agitprop emerged from the mouths of teens under our Broderick's inimitable direction (for more see this week's post by my wife at Casa Murphy at the link on the homepage of my blog). Part of that same "Crash" Hollywood community by extension-- along with my dear wife and 99.99% of the audience. But Brod's liberal heart beats even faster infused with Jewish humanism that energized the founders of the SCTG-- before they got ejected from the Los Feliz JCC!

Broderick's script, under the exegesis of his three young proteges, managed to make Castro's ambitions, megalomania, and idealism palpable. Well, as much as can be done by a scenery-chewing, lovable seventeen-year-old in fatigues, fake beard and geriatrically wobbly accent. Compare image here, surprisingly elusive on the net, of cap AND cigar in one snap of our Jesuit graduate and former prospect for Los Yanquis de la Nueva York. The police state there in Cuba vs. our own suppression of liberties post 9-11 seemed to also be implicit topics for elaboration. Since we only by its nature could see part of the play unfold, this may well have emerged behind another closed door during the evening's complext drama.

Given that probably the entire crowd save Leo and I loved "Crash," our "Havana" played to the same demographic and the same creators of such messages in our media. Better than jingoism, dogma, or T&A. Getting us to imbibe our ethical duty along with our escapist delight isn't easy to swallow. As it's been from Aristophanes or Shakespeare to whatever Hollywood's creators and laborers concoct for us each Saturday night... for the past two-and-a-half-thousand years.

Regardless of the medium, the question of why the rest of us corporate sellouts cannot let Cuba develop in its own custom after Fidel exhales his last habanero remains a neglected conundrum. We outside of Eastside or Westside, Starbucks vs. Consumer Whore latterati trudge 9-5 treadmills. Irish wanabees or Cuban emigres, we fuel our wage-slave debt-ridden, happily unequal, and cynically amoral economy. Meanwhile, 90 miles across shark-infested tropical seas, ice cream's cheap along with a two-system medical care (Michael Moore's "Sicko" in his own Oscar-pandering fashion simplifies the truth) system for foreigners vs. natives. Dollars speak louder across the world. Still, the oppression of Castro's regime (how'd they keep the effeminate performer in "Havana" out of prison granted his deviant tendency?) does uneasily jostle against tangible advances for its destitute. I heard a Chicano Marxist (almost synonymous adjectives?) professor boast that democracy need not be the goal of a nation. He defended Cuba thus.

Not that I agreed with him two decades ago or now. But, this play made me wonder.

Is this Communist double standard any less mendacious than our own free-enterprise, stockholder-appeasing paradise of Miami and points north by northwest? HMO/PPOs for a dwindling few peons vs. County General's mismanaged setup for the pobrecitos as we fatcats and anorexics irrevocably totter? Penthouse gusanos wherever they were born served by us robots. As we do to the affluent here, the rest of the planet caters to us the same. Reminds me of the film "Metropolis."

Does this status quo for the "developed" world represent the failure of any State to care for its masses? Can a socialist nation survive in our multinational hegemony? Locally, the overwhelming predicament of our city, county, and nation shows the results of a market economy that loves cheap labor and turns a blind eye to its borders. Democrats welcome new voters and Republicans woo old cronies. We who actually have to live outside the Westside face the consequences: too many impoverished and too few workers footing the tax bill. What happens to morality when we pay $180 billion for a war in Iraq as we slash basic services?

Down from la caja de jabón. Proud of you, Policiero Leo. Yo estoy orgulloso, mijo numero uno. End of lecture.

My Son the Starbuck(s) Scholar

Niall came with me (and then we treated my dad for-- in South OC-- a rare find, lunch at a non-corporate, family-owned restaurant chosen by him and not my wife after a preliminary visit to Chowhound! Commercial break-- shameless plug: visit her site Manifeasto via my link, and bug her to post more) to hear a presentation by the student end-of-term fourth team for the course Technology, Culture & Society on Starbucks.

The four seniors analyzed the cultural, psychological, environmental, and business impacts of this quintessentially boho (to use it in the David Brooks neo-con sense) sign of hipster commodification. Well, that's how the chattering classes would put it. One of these fellow scribes, Michael Hoover of Seminole CC (in Florida, surprise), wrote for the socialist (formerly communist as I recall pre-fall Berlin Wall) Monthly Review a concise overview of this earnest Seattle corporation. http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/hoover270705.html

Now there are 7600 stores. (By comparison, McD's has 30,000, half of those abroad; local faves In n' Out "quality you can taste" have in the two hundreds, let's say novenas that the heiress' granddaughter does not franchise its Double-Doubles all over creation). Trader Joe's, now caught up in its own imperial phase, sold out to a German conglomerate, and Tesco's is counterinvading soon with its Fresh and Easy mini-stores to battle TJ's on its home turf!

As with In n' Out's fresh products and Christian ethos that blessedly leads to fair wages, worker benefits, and satisfied customers-- even Eric Schlosser admits if you have to eat a burger after reading his "Fast Food Nation," they'd be the reluctant choice of the best by far of a much worse (feed)lot-- not to mention Starbucks' insistence upon its sustainable policies and CAFE standards and full-page ads insisting against unseen foes its unassailable ecological virtue and morality as pure as its Ethos brand water, now we have Tesco's following with recyclable packaging, natural lighting, and chilled rather than frozen products for sale.

Hoover's skeptical about this puffery at Starbucks. Reminds me of when you have a law that all employees working 40 hours get such and such, you make a cut-off for the majority as wage slaves clocking in at 37. Not to forget the sudden promotion of managers to avoid unionizing those hapless enemies who find themselves suddenly given supervisorial duties over some underling, thus earning enmity of those downtrodden toilers and their supposed betters living large as the 2% of our nation are apparently who have the cash to blow on $600 bottles of $30 liquor and hire a woman to lie naked on a table adorned with sushi (which is extra). A report on a new hotel in San Diego with stripper's poles, fur cuffs, and see-through showers next to ample beds targets the suits who philander and party like its 1999 still, news to you and me, I assume if you're stuck home as I am Friday night typing this.

We beaten-down, indebted products of a liberal education gravitate now to an activism that shows itself at the checkout line more often than the protest march. In the image above, those waving placards (snapped for the MR site) that "Starbucks chose Israel, we choose [unintelligible other place" and that care for children presumably means no fraps for toddlers are in the non-silent minority but outnumbered by those who'd rather look cool. Of course, the Consumer Whore sticker symbolizes the crux.

Being seen cradling and sipping and blowing over a literary allusion, if now cropped and no longer buxom, let alone with aureoles, nipples or curves, the double- flippered siren of Starbucks graces a far simpler logo. She has been downsized and censored to meet the demands of the moral police from both left and right, I suppose. Holding a cup with that tastefully natural-textured paper ring denotes sensitivity. The fact you pay more for a cup o' suds or smoke rather than a McD's percolated spout or Dunkin' Donuts downmarket dribble connotes a class distinction.

A Mexican student commented how in Guadalajara the Starbucks had valet parking and the drinks were twice the US price; McD's there is a dress-up spot where a couple of Big Macs and a drink or two of the soda fountain type'd set you back equal to US $20. A Puerto Rican student told how there vanilla beans and whipped cream were extra or unavailable. In Durango, a third commented, they charge more for a McDonald's burger that does not meet the usual assembly line prep, or lack of such. Apropos, the McDonalds' manager in our class commented on his employers' summer campaigns for teen coffee drinkers, cold blended drinks, redesigned labels, softer store colors, breakfast confections, and tastier than the competition's black coffee. McDonalds opposes frou-frou foam, microwaved croissants, and promises no new Macca (first OBE of the week's blog-- see below for his pop successor) CD laded out to the goateed and tattooed across the street! How sick will the impecunious non-union "partners" be of the Cute One's croon? Or the patrons, encouraged as they are to hang out and blog and wifi and sip and as the new billboards urge us, to "Meet Me at Starbucks."

I heard Bono on NPR today, purveyor of his own combo of fashion and conscience with the RED label. Post-Wall fall, U2 achieved what few musicians could: they reclaimed a decade after they hit the charts the top of critical and popular acclaim. My attitude towards our market economy is resignation rather than enthusiasm. I admire such PR, and he plays into the "counter-cultural" zeitgeist that Michael Hoover analyzes in his Monthly Review piece, which although obviously on the left side makes its points clearly and fairly. He cites David Brooks and Thomas Frank fairly. (I also critiqued on Amazon Frank's "What's Wrong With Kansas?" but received an enormous amount of negative ratings for having the temerity to give a mixed review for his lack of in-depth analysis as opposed to Overland Park suburban summer anecdote. Please look my comments up on a search engine and restore my good name in the other Seattle behemoth's standings.)

Frank and Brooks represent despite their differences the dominant current criticism of our capitalist juggernaut. The resistance to The System comes not so much from a practical alternative as an admission that we have to keep the brakes on the Hummer now and then or risk obliteration. Beyond that, I lack faith in the dictatorship of the proletariat, the withering away of the state, the messianic era of Schneerson or Moschiachs of any name, or the ecotopian recovery of innocence. Unless, as James Tiptree, Jr. (sic) mused in a memorably grim fable, a demonic doctor on a mission of mercy jet-sets for a month and wipes us all out in 28 days by a chain of contagion from his wonder pathogen of doom, so as to save Gaia or Peggy Suicide.

Julian Cope represents this attempt at reclaiming this ancient wisdom. See his Head Heritage site. Bono, on the other hand, unlike his former contemporary in the post-punk early New Wave British (sic) era, opts for the corridors of power and National Public Radio. Usually I avoid the mealy-mouthed tones, but the classical station bored me. This morning, he talked sensibly and with knowing self-deprecation in just the right amount, about the G-7 conference. Again our fearless leaders debate what the rest of the world should do to clean up our mess. WTO redux, protests galore. As it should be, but like the placards above (a typical shot from such media as MR; their rivals would also earn my rebuke as anyone does who reduces complex issues to bumptious slogans and bumper stickers) and the recently announced British academic union's boycott of the Zionist entity as the Worst Nation Ever, the myopia of certain self-labelled progressives in ignoring Darfur, the Congo, Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, East Timor, or China by comparison reveals marked lack of acuity. Or at least scale of perceived atrocities.

Back to a more experienced if as self-absorbed public activist, Bono does possess a winning sense of his own incongruity on the diplomatic stage. His doppelganger (and more recently band editor- biographer) Neil McCormick in his memoir "Killing Bono" (see my Amazon review) documents firsthand so well how U2 stays ahead of the fickle curve for two decades. I'm not even a real fan of the band, but I recognize their ability to extrapolate from the present curve's direction and chart where their advance should turn. Like Gordie Howe with the puck, they do not look at where the puck is at, but where it will be next. Their savvy, for me, makes Mick J look the jowly if buff dinosaur he is and Macca the predictably well-meaning but often sappy pop dittyist he always returned to being best (in a manner of singing/speaking/being).

I guess I begrudge (great Irish pastime) U2 for semi-morally jumpstarting the Irish musical and cultural and economic scenes although I do wish dear dirty Dublin was less frenetically eurotrashed, overrun, and trafficked. Signs of a thriving capitalism but also of a dangerous hubris. Do we need another cellphoned, gridlocked, packaged, and relentlessly retailed down into the hinterlands that fill up with malls, tracts, cement, asphalt, and bulldozed farmlands? A million and a half people filling up Meath, down to Wicklow, back past Fingal near to Newry? Tara's threatened by the motorway to speed more commuters-- see my earlier "Save Tara" post two months ago. Perhaps Julian Cope prayed to the right Peggy of his 1992 vision; a recent dig found another ancient monument directly in the way of the motorway immediately after excavations commenced; may the eternal curse of Macha resound further south on evil hordes who caused and began this destruction of our ancient legacy.

Back to a more immediate voice resounding from Ireland on the radio, I admit that I recognized that a Dubliner was speaking. This even though I did not know it was Bono for a long time into the interview I wandered into. I impressed myself if not captive Niall with this dialectal identification!

A third of all Irish, and a third of los chilangos irlandeses by now Litvaks or Nigerians or Chinese perhaps, now in el districto federal, but it's telling, as we discuss on globalization in an Irish perspective, that the accent is creeping more into the mid-Atlantic softening and elongating of the Anglo-American drawl elided by so many of Bono's own ilk and those who followed his success into the roaring Tigger that U2 helped themselves fund and goad along the past two decades. As for Paul Hewson, no brogue, steady soft regional tone similar to many Brits, but the lilt and the rhythm distinguishes our second OBE of this week's blog to be straight outta Ballymun-- home of our blog's recent "Irish Heritage" cover girl as our very recent First Communicant.

The late Bewley's in Dublin was founded in the middle of the 19c by Quakers, one of the rare Christian groups with a social conscience during the Famine. Coffee and other Third World stimulants we First Worlders crave, as in Elizabeth Kuti's recent play "The Sugar Wife," carry fraught connotations of exploitation that its importers and purveyors must overcome or ignore. Lessons for those of us who idolize the marketplace too. By consuming so much coffee, sugar, tea, cocaine, marijuana, Chinese electronics, Bangladeshi-sewn cotton clothing, Polish-outsourced tech support, migrant-labor processed ground beef, what are we doing to accelerate these habits? Ireland's an intriguing cause-and-effect as both software producer and hirer of immigrants to feed its voracious demands pent up after centuries of suppression.

Much as I suspect big business, at least the firms I have been discussing above try now to divert, or better, finally begin to lessen, the tide of destruction all of our greed has unleashed. Shade grown plantations. How that noun contends against its modifiers. Fair-trade. Workers loaned money and equipment by the corporation. Students asked if this was liberation or indentured servitude. Who owned the land if the farmers reneged on their loan from Howard Schultz? Could the shade-growers trade fairly elsewhere, or were they locked into serving Starbucks? The company pays 75% more than the (probably very low) standard rate for coffee, to its credit. If another buyer offered to match the Seattleites, would the farmers have a sustainable choice? Questions we did not have answers to, and good food for thought. Goats ate beans, got frisky, farmer noticed this, ate beans, got frisky. Port of Mocha, near Mecca. Arabian blends. Traders met and drank. Dinner was in mid-day, but as work filled the hours of budding capitalists, the time got pushed back further in the day. A few decades or reigns later, dinner blurred into supper. The workday for London's predecessors to Wall Street extended all day. Got frisky. Coffee fueled colonialism.

In 1999 at the WTO protests in Seattle, fewer vendors of the black bean roasted with clear water, but there must be hundreds of coffehouses in its birthplace, I wonder? This image from the site above is of Seattle's finest protecting the outpost of hipsterati against trustafarians. The other image's a classic illustration of a "Classics Illustrated" Moby Dick, as my son answered a presenter's inevitable question: "Does anyone know how the store got its name?" I raised my hand, only since none of the students had, but so did my boy! And he was right: S. served the crew coffee, as first mate.

I have only been in one twice, once to get Leo a drink with a $5 gift card I was given by a publishers rep after I had lobbied for adoption of a textbook when such actions were still possible before my own institution's standardization and the unfortunate "chain store mentality" of limiting our own textbooks to one book mandated for the whole system occurred. The second time was wretched. My dear spouse got us hopelessly lost and going the wrong way on the 10 on a 100-degree plus day, into the heat of the Inland Empire where it was 108 last July one day after we had seen my dad and had already been on the road hours on end. We staggered off the San Berdoo Freeway into oven-temperature Chino and entered merciful air-conditioning. I think I had a vanilla frappucino, according to my son's masterful recollection, but all I recall was froth and sugar and sweetness. The calories, we found later when examining its content, were enormous. I wonder, vs. McDonald's, if it's worse than their chemically-laden vanilla shake?

Infinity & Beyond

Cosmology: starstuff, we are golden, gotta get back to the garden. You know the ditty. If the hippies of Laurel Canyon were right on, we're the material world. If we carry around our surroundings in our breath and touch and neurons, we live forever. But do we know this after our brief spurt between conception and flatline? Can we gain comfort from this brevity, or despair in its enigma? Is living forever, as Tiresias moaned, a curse? Better to merge into the beyond as a drop in the ocean? Not to know where we begin and the water ends? Oblivion as a blessing? Or rage against the dying of the night? Or fear the "undiscovered country, from whose bourne no traveller returns." King of infinite space? Except, "I have bad dreams." Shrink from "what dreams may come?" You see I'm teaching the Gloomy Dane himself this week, and Hamlet's got me thinking, wouldn't you know.

The other day I wrote about Merton and Eckhart and emptiness that the Zen master promised would comfort us. I recall a Tibetan lama's assurance that we need not fear the void, as before our existence we had no fear of it, so why should we have any in the time to come. The difference, alas to me, is awareness and recollection. While I cannot recall the womb, I can imagine the grave. What comfort may come then? I suppose Merton and many more monks have listened a lifetime for equanimity here.

Yesterday I read of our ever-expanding universe that in time will push out all other galaxies from our sight save six, so our descendents will have no idea of even the dark matter and the quasars and the red shifts we puzzle over. The Big Bang may have shoved any previous universe out of our sight in its first moment. Nothingness exists unless the charged particles feel like showing themselves, otherwise they do not, and stay non-existent. Zen masters and Rheinland meisters, what did you know of such a starlit realm? The very stars are leaving us, fading, and in an eyeblink of time we will look around into a near void above us. Incomprehending as it is now, in a few more billion years there will be less to comprehend still, into a slowing chill.

Can there be a loving God who made us and this hauntingly vast cosmos that spreads into infinity and emptiness? Dennis Overbye's "The Universe, Expanding Beyond All Understanding" NY Times article (June 5, 2007) quoted Einstein: "The Lord God is subtle but malicious he is not." Well, the ways of the Divine passeth all understanding.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/05/science/space/05essa.html?ex=1338868800&en=09ec590393d03bc7&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Does she look like my wife?

The Countess de Castligione was the Bjork muse to the Matthew Barney manipulator circa 1863-66, collaborating with the French (of course) photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson. This pioneer artiste worked with this mistress of Napoleon III (I have a coin with his image) on seventeen portraits, including this one, a rare albumen print of which was bought by Richard Avedon. Like Avedon, Pierson revelled in the artifice of the medium and its mediums.

Our guardian of objets d'art from the rich and famous, fellow archivist Barry, told Layne she struck him as the very incarnation of La Divine Comtesse, after "Scherzo de Follia" (Game of Madness) graced the cover of a trade magazine recently.


http://www.metmuseum.org/special/LaDivineComtesse/comtesse_more.asp

"The Intimate Merton": Book Review

Intimate Merton: Reviewing his journals

Posted on Amazon US today in condensed form, this reviews "The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals," eds. Patrick Hart & Jonathan Montaldo. (Harper San Francisco, 1999). Can't think of any diaries I have bothered to read before this one. Can't think of a more rewarding look into this fascinating, poignant, and engaging character.

In Notebook 17, Thomas Merton writes “I am thrown into contradiction:/ to realize it is a mercy,/ to accept it is love,/ to help others do the same is compassion.” (269) From a year or two before he died, this recognition shows what his journals, excerpted here from the seven complete volumes, chart. He struggled towards God and, in a quote on the same page from a poem, “The Strange Islands,” muses: “It was a lucky wind/ That blew away his halo with his cares/ A lucky sea that drowned his reputation.” This collection takes you past the familiar Merton of the bestsellers into a more pensive, conflicted, doubting, and self-sacrificing fellow pilgrim we can understand.

These pages begin in 1939-41, as he wrestles with being rejected by the Franciscans, works with the poor, and contemplates his fate. He reads, drinks, dates, and thinks at Columbia and upstate New York, and as war looms he decides to enter the Trappists. His fervor as a recent convert energizes his visit to Cuba. Strange to think of it as the thriving Catholic nation he tours. He is full of ideas and energy, but seeks and needs focus. Early on, he realizes the trouble with a journal. If it’s written for publication, “then you can tear pages out of it, emend it, correct it, write with art. If it is a personal document, every emendation amounts to a crisis of conscience and a confession, not an artistic correction.”(12/4/1940; p. 21) He decides to keep his diary for posterity, for others to read.

The second chapter, although dated 1941-1952, begins five years after his entrance to the Order, at the end of 1946. He has written his soon-to-be if surprisingly bestselling memoir. He prepares for the fame that he desires but recoils from. His ordination in 1949 enlivens his spirits, and the monastery has not yet wearied him. Even then, the wish for solitude begins to take hold, to be apart from what will be, in the wake of “The Seven Storey Mountain,” a rush of aspirants for Gethsemani Abbey. Ironically or justifiably, he will be appointed Master of Novices and later of Scholastics, these students attracted by his very writings. Surprisingly, he reveals little of the daily conferences and dealings with his fellow monks in this journal, perhaps out of respect for their confidings, but also, one suspects, out of a disenchantment with the noise, the cheese factory, the tractors and the press of new faces into what had been for him the place where he sought to be alone with God.

This contradiction drives him towards a hermitage on the property, a compromise he battles out. He is famous, but he seeks anonymity. He wearies of the demands of a public to speak to, yet welcomes old and new friends to his retreat. He learns that his freedom allows him to go out on the town with his visitors, and temptations arise. Still, he does not shirk truth. In 1949, he faces his true vocation: “to become as plain as a Host in the hands of everybody, Perhaps it is this, after all, that is to be my way of solitude.” (9/1; p. 73) His calling as a priest is to be a writer, to try for simplicity and integrity. “To be frank without being boring, It is a kind of crucifixion. Not a very dramatic or painful one. But it requires so much honesty that it is beyond my nature. It must somehow come from the Holy Ghost.” This tension will, in time, become more dramatic and painful.

1951 sparks a burst of mystical longing. His journals begin to reflect his maturity, as his time alone increases and his duties to the Abbey lessen somewhat. By the mid-50s, he is living full-time at the hermitage. He thrives on study and meditation. “Perhaps the Book of Life, in the end, is the book of what one has lived, and, if one has lived nothing, he is not in the Book of Life.”(7/17/1956) He seeks wisdom from the Eastern Christian and Asian traditions. He reflects on D.T. Suzuki’s quote from a 17th c. Zen master. Merton ponders: “So he who faces death can be happy in this life and in the next, and he who does not face it has no happiness in either. This is a central and fundamental reality of life, whether one is or is not a ‘believer’– for this facing of death implies already a faith and an uprightness of heart and the presence of Christ, whether one thinks of it or not.” This passage took me some time to understand, a sample of his profound understanding of paradox of how we can achieve freedom by accepting our loss of power over death, and “to set one’s foot gladly on the way that leads out of this world.”(11/25/1958, pp. 132-3) He calls himself one most at home in the 14th c. of Tauler, Eckhart, Ruysbroeck, Chaucer, Langland, and the English recluses– “more an independent and a hermit than a community man, by no means an ascetic, interested in psychology, a lover of the dark cloud in which God is found by love.”(3/11/1961; p. 170)

About St. Ambrose’s insistence that “all must rise from the dead,” Merton shares how life is our destiny, like it or not. We can not be merely ephemeral. “If he wills to be evanescent, to remain in what he is not, he is a living contradiction.”(5/7/1961; p. 173) Contradiction, as in a powerful earlier passage on the sign of Jonas, remains Merton’s touchstone for transformation.

Musings on Boris Pasternak, Marxism and Latin American struggles begin to enter his journal, followed by Civil Rights and antiwar activist reports. He wishes to be drawn into the world he once thought he would and could leave behind. The predicament deepens as he becomes a spokesman for the progressive Catholic peace movement. His advice is sought out by many, and the refuge he once imagined becomes instead a visitor’s center. This is partially by choice, and partially by fame.

The reforms of Vatican II appear to have come slowly to the Order and not altogether smoothly. He laments the end of Latin prayers and Gregorian chant; he records Dan Berrigan saying a non-canonical Mass circa ‘66 that presages the daring poses of relevance that unsettle Merton, who eschews violence and grandstanding by his more radical, media-hungry, confreres. But, he knows that he can no longer remain within the walls of the monastery in this post-conciliar upheaval. He wrestles with loyalties.

On the fourteenth anniversary of his ordination, he feels defeated. Untraditional, unable to conform, he agonizes. “Perhaps that is good. I am not a J.F. Powers character. But the frustration is the same.” Although neither Greene’s whiskey priest nor a despairing curate as in Bernanos, his sincerity seems a charade. He acts a lie. Depressions grow as he nears fifty. “People think I am happy.” He does seek solace in the Mass. “I suppose that in the end what I have done is that I have resisted the superimposition of a complete priestly form, a complete monastic pattern. I have stubbornly saved myself from becoming absorbed in the priesthood, and I do not know if this was cowardice or integrity. There seems to be no real way for me to tell.” (5/26/1963; pp. 206-7) The next few years of revolt and reaction outside the monastery and travel within and beyond its no longer totally enclosed walls will test his indecision severely and unexpectedly.

In an ambiguous entry, he expresses his own pain. “For Origen, a man’s ‘adversary’ is his bad angel deputed to keep him firmly in subjection to the angelic prince of his nation or tribe, so that he will not free himself and belong only to God, in Christ (Who is above all nations and has vanquished all the powers).”(12/23/1964 pp. 232-3) But, hope follows his recovery. “I am called here to grow. ‘Death’ is a critical point of growth, a transition to a new mode of being, to a maturity and a fruitfulness that I do not know (they are in Christ and His Kingdom). The child in the womb does not know what will come after birth. He must be born in order to live. I am here to face death as my birth.” (10/6/1965; p. 260) He contends against the “invisible powers” that in legend assaulted his eremitical role models.

Such a battle now turns visible, and all too touchingly vivid. He falls in love and– although not explicitly stated in these excerpts– finally and fully consummates a relationship with a nurse who seems about half his age, who cares for him in a Louisville hospital in the spring of 1966. These are the most human and gripping entries of the volume. We witness in the first-person– if at an oblique angle that increases the harsh perspective of fragile realism-- an intelligent, tender, and righteous man break his vows. But what makes for me such an admirable Merton is what follows. (Off the record, I favor the Eastern Christian model of the option for married parish clergy while keeping the tradition of celibate bishops and religious communities.) Despite the post-Vatican II tendency for so many priests to break their vows and run off, Merton renews his commitment at great personal and psychic and physical sacrifice. He learns to treat “M” with dignity. He does the right thing by her and himself, and reconciles his failing with the immediate joy he has foolishly if understandably embraced briefly.

In his fifth decade, Merton grows up. “Vocation is more than just a matter of being in a certain place and wearing a certain type of costume. There are too many people in the world who rely on the fact that I am serious about deepening an inner dimension of experience that they desire and is closed to them. It is not closed to me: this is a gift that has been given me not for myself but for everyone, even including M.” Tempted again to sneak into the city to see her, he realizes: “In the end I would ruin her along with myself.”(6/22/1966; p. 295) Here, Merton’s saintliness shows itself most movingly to me. I recognize my own faults in his, and now realize his own utter integrity.

He quotes one of my favorite citations, from Meister Eckhart (wish I knew where). “Blessed are the pure in heart who leave everything to God now as they did before they ever existed.” I have long been intrigued by the (Platonic? Wordsworthian?) idea of return to a pre-created state of nothingness. The day he wrote this, it was five days past my fifth birthday. I remember from that age or so wondering about going back to a condition from which I was born, regressing into happy emptiness of soul and body.

Merton, in the aftermath of his affair, returns to this medieval friar “who was my life raft in the hospital, so now also he seems the best link to restore continuity; my obedience to God begetting His love in me (which has never stopped!).” He learns that he has placed too much importance on his own freedom, forgetting the need for restrictions and limitations. Necessary reminders as the age of Aquarius dawns; he knows how tempting it is to jump the walls, tear off his habit, and make his own public entry into the crowds who would throng his lecture tour and snap up his latest memoir, post-Gethsemani. Instead, he opts for “Gehorsamsopfer–To offer oneself to God as a sacrifice of obedience in faith.” This bowing to what seems an opposition to achieve a deeper liberation confronts him. (6/30/1966; p. 300)

Near the end of his short life, on his pilgrimage in India with the Tibetans in exile, he writes of what liberty the contemplative life must create. It should open “a space that can enjoy its own potentialities and hopes– its own presence to itself. One’s own time, but not dominated by one’s own ego and its demands. Hence open to others– compassionate time, rooted in the sense of common illusion and in criticism of it.” (12/7/1968; p. 351) Here again, the contradiction that speaks from silence, the freedom resulting from discipline, the love emanating from one apart from allegiance to one woman so he can embrace us all.

The same date, a month and a day before his death, he records three types of “bodhicitta.” Kingly ones save one’s self and then others. Boatmen ferry themselves with others into salvation. Shepherds guide others first and enter salvation last. I think of Merton, so near unawares his own sudden “liberation,” as one who by his writings and example led many into spiritual heights. These pages record how he labored, lonely among hundreds of other monks. How many, I wonder, who resented his popularity, worshipped his celebrity, or benefitted from his writing and the nights of loneliness that flowed into his pages? He lived as a flawed monk among others no less so, and this obvious but gradual admission comes to bring him and his community and so many other millions of readers the past fifty years the grace to accept the need for guides wiser than us to help lead us into nirvana.

On the other hand, as pictures show and perhaps Merton himself is too abashed to admit, he is frequently pictured as puckishly laughing along with the novices and scholastics and visitors around him. There is included a photo by John Lyons of Merton mugging for the camera shot that he captioned “This is the old Hillbilly who knows where the still is.” Jesus was famously described as “the still point in the turning world.” If I had a holy card to St. Thomas M., it’d feature a similar snap, unfortunately neither found on the Net nor in this volume. He’s leaning back with a smile that a bodhisattva would envy, on a rustic bench with a Kentucky hick’s straw hat perched atop his tonsure on the day of his ordination.

Philo-Celtic Society/ Cumann Carad Na Gaeilge

This society was started by Michael O Lochain in Brooklyn in 1872, and grew throughout "Nua Eabhrac" in the later 19c. "An Gaodhal" magazine published 1881-1904 in Stait Meirecea Aontaithe articles in Irish. (For more: Mícheál Ó Lócháin agus An Gaodhal le Fionnuala Uí Fhlannagáin, An Clóchomhar Teo., Éire, 1990) Classes were taught under the auspices of "The Gaelic League," inspiring Douglas Hyde's own efforts back home for the Celtic Revival. Often, American learners of Irish suffer derision or at least patronization by Irish-born speakers. The colonists' fate.

But this example of reverse-engineering (to borrow Ray Kurzweil's concept I introduce to my "Technology, Culture & Society" students!) should counter Hibernian condescension. With the explosion of Gaeilscoileanna throughout Ireland and the rise of the Net, those of us who come to Irish without Christian Brothers (none left anyway) and carrot-and stick incentives for paper-pushers or mandates to force Irish upon the unwilling lads do it for the love of it. Historically and recently, the determination of PCS makes Hyde's idealism a tentative reality. Revivalists, much mocked by militant republicans, vicious satirists (La brea, a Myles!), and phalanxes of Lambeg drummers.

Language advocates, as Padraig O Snodaigh and Aodan Mac Poilin have both written movingly about in the Six Counties, defy sectarian, social-climbing, or D. P. Moran & The Citizen caricatures. These adult learners, Catholic, Protestant, dissenter, and unbeliever (admittedly the last is difficult for an Irish-speaker for "an teanga beo" embeds in its very greetings Mary, Padraig, God... and the saints go leor if you keep sneezing) fight for our right, wherever we live and from whomever we trace our heritage, to learn Irish. With Net, tapes, texts and Skype perhaps, we encourage others, not out of getting into UCD or scoring a Leaving Cert or acing a Gardai exam.

My own ancestors emerged around the frontiers that by the middle of O Lochain's century began to collapse as Irish-speaking communities. They lived in the 1930s at the edge of the official if not actual (it figures) Cois Fharraige Gaeltacht in Bothar na Tra/ Salthill on the west of Galway city. In Hyde's manhood, a generation before, they grew up in the splintering regions post-Famine a long stroll south of blind bard Raftery's once monoglot realm in East Mayo on the Galway county border, and a day's ride across the Roscommon line near Castlerea. Near-neighbors to Frenchpark and Hyde's own "informants" who taught him the language, who among my engenderers last spoke native Irish? Who among their children recalled the language? Perhaps understanding but not responding to it? Songs and phrases? Mutters behind closed doors away from the children? Resigned to its loss as they left the farm for the city? Relieved not to be burdened with Irish in a pragmatic era? Ashamed of a badge of poverty and pigs? Vowing to return weekly as adults to recite lenitions and eclipses in schoolrooms from a traveling teacher on a bicycle after a day's labor's done?

This elliptical path, spinning to Meirecea and back to Hyde's estate and then to its tenants who passed it unwittingly in its dormancy down to me, is not the perfect trajectory of language transmission. It's drawn by human hands, with skips and elisions. Now sketched by the virtual community of we on An Idirlion, Gaeilge ar an Ghreasan, the loop traces, a hundred years after the first one led to partial independence and mismanaged idealism, our own Revival.

http://www.philo-celtic.com/

Beginning to learn Old Irish

"In the Good Old Irish Way..." Here I type away a beginner, a foghlameoir fasta, an adult learner of modern Irish and already I find myself, thanks to looking up tidbits (or my fellow indie scholar in more ways than one, Lee from Come Back Horslips-dot-com and her sister site "HorsLit: Literary Sources for Horslips' lyrics" would call them Saturday's smut) in the Old Irish sagas in their own Tolkienishly truncated, pleasingly warped, and linguistically clipped, bog latinate, and Indo-Europeanishly decaying style. I woke up in the middle of last night saying "Blasaim" as if to imperatively command a dreamtime blessing. My Irish is off-kilter, the usage well-intended but inaccurate. Still, the sentiment of my subconscious becomes the motivator of my waking hours. So, this the first of a review (tarted up here, however-- posted to Amazon US today) of a learner's "vademecum" for Old Irish. (Yerra, my image isn't "Celtic," but a sprightly cover, no? P.S. Since two O Murchu brothers made a "Briathra na Gaeilge" 50-page booklet for the modern Irish verbs, no other has appeared. If we have 501 Arabic Verbs and Lithuanian is now on the Leaving Cert in Ireland, why not a comprehensive book for modern Irish verbal conjugations?)

Antony Green's "Old Irish Verbs & Vocabulary"

Lately some fresh titles invigorate the standard and small shelf of works assisting newcomers to early forms of Irish. The shelf already has been long filled by Rudolf Thurneysen's Old Irish Reader, Osborn Bergin's Old Irish Paradigms, John Strachan's selections from the Tain, and E. G. Quin's Old Irish Workbook. These venerable works, published in English around the postwar period in Ireland, favor examples from OI glosses to medieval Latin texts and assemble graded (but not with answer key) exercises building upon and often cross-referenced with the enormous Grammar of Old Irish of Thurneysen that originally appeared in German earlier in the 20c.

Since then, students like myself come to Old Irish expecting livelier excerpts from the sagas and commentaries, and with unfortunately less years of Latin given its decline at the university level of teaching-- not to mention prior to college. Many of us need to catch up and if we are not professional linguists or blessed with the talents of born philologists, we may find the standard works for OI too daunting at first. This is my case, and may be so for many students and independent scholars or similarly motivated learners outside the classroom.

The books listed above tend towards the advanced linguistics postgraduate, and like the Ruth (R.P.M.) & W.P. Lehmann "An Introduction to Old Irish" (1975; updated 1992), they expect too erudite a patience from absolute beginners to Old Irish today. For better or worse, given the reality of current preparation, that's where coaches like Wim Tigges' handsome clothbound (but scarce outside Holland) "Old Irish Primer," David Stifter's hefty but fairly priced (at least for a scholarly book from Syracuse UP) "Sengoidelc," and noted professor Kim McCone's expensive Maynooth monograph "A First Old Irish Grammar and Reader" (and some Middle or Medieval Irish) come in to urge on us rookies. Antony Green's own reference work aligns with the 21st-century paradigm for OI newcomers. Tigges, Stifter, and McCone try to integrate more cultural context into the presentation of grammatical data and linguistic terminology that often overwhelms learners of OI. (Or Latin nowadays, come to think of my own encounter. I only understood English grammar after having studied Latin.)

Green's simply organized. Lists of verbs akin to those found in a 201 Spanish Verbs or 501 German Verbs text are given, followed by a glossary of common words, with the grammatical data included briefly but clearly. This improves on the older standbys in at least two ways.

1) It is easy to read, in a handsome typeface and wide margins. The older volumes from Strachan, Bergin & Quin are now often found paperbound in a difficult to keep open format (unless you break the fragile binding and risk losing the smallish, closely printed, and darkish pages). Thurneysen's Grammar is enormous and intricate; his thin OI Reader's more of a Teutonic monolithic mode of instruction. Green's attractive book gives you no frills, but the lists of verbs and the glossary are easy to use and easy to scan in a hurry, which is what a reference book should be for at this stage for those readers eager to consult OI patterns and lists without getting bogged down in linguistic minutiae at the early stage. As a medievalist and one familiar with Modern Irish, I may add that readers coming to OI after recent Irish will find these contents also intriguing.

2) This book is a good value compared to the earlier volumes. Attractively produced, and easy to hold in the hand or prop to a page. Durable, yet affordable. It also takes account of recent scholarship after the mid-century pioneers who produced those first small volumes for the Royal Irish Academy and the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies. Thurneysen & co., after all, write for a generation schooled from infancy in the classics plus at least two or three contemporary European languages, the norm once, and we must admit that nowadays students will almost certainly lack this rigorous preparation and sustained training. Therefore, a handy source such as Green should supplement too those learners entering OI with more recent materials for beginners such as from Tigges, McCone, or the more widely distributed David Stifter's "Sengoidelc." Stifter himself was a quick learner; he started about '95 and within a few years he was teaching others in his German university. That gymnasium training.

Back to me off Amazon. We do have, as with modern Irish, Internet resources. CELT from UCC, now NUI Cork, provides the textual corpus. But, as with later Irish language forms, where to plow through the off-line options challenges the curious. I do wish, as with Mark Nodens' Welsh course, we had a full-fledged online course in not only contemporary but medieval forms of Gaeilge. The foundations begin to take shape. Begun by David Webb who also started the Cois Fharraige "Beginning Irish" Michael O Siadhail textbook group, a Sengoidelc OI exists on Yahoo Groups, but it seems (as with the CF after his departure) dormant now.

We await the messianic era of free classes and boundless enthusiasm provided us free of charge! An Gaeilge gan deora. Gradus ad Parnassum. Maranatha. Tiocfaidh ar la? A few of us acolytes in our own stumbling rituals make our rounds in the hours before dawn.

Apropos, I acknowledge a former classmate of mine, (at least semi-indie scholar?) Lisa Spangenberg, who studied medieval lit concurrently with me at UCLA. She doubtless has no idea who I am or was; she evidently wandered off where I wished I could have gone, into Patrick K. Ford's Old Irish courses (before he upgraded to Harvard to teach and run Ford & Baillie that morphed into Celtic Studies Publications). With devotion to recondite lore & dedication to VSO P + Q Celtic languages, her well-titled site introduces how to study OI. It features Celticry's resonances in pop fiction, literary arcana, and/or dryasdust academica. (We each got a head start I suppose; I unearth OI a dozen years after my PhD was earned; she now revives I am pleased to read from a recent visit to the site her dissertation!)

http://www.digitalmedievalist.com/

Primo Levi's "A Tranquil Star"




This is my review posted today to Amazon US. (Images: the grey mugshot cover's British, the other one the American, which looks cheerier!) The book marks the twentieth anniversary of his death. He is one of the people, along with Thomas Merton, JRR Tolkien, and Dennis Potter, about whom I have read (or, with Potter and Levi, seen on documentaries) that I have a particular identification with...Potter and Levi even more than Merton-- who's a bit more cocksure and extroverted and privileged, I suppose!-- to my own surprise. I do envy Tolkien his Oxford tenure, although now I know why Merton left Cambridge after a cryptically terrible year. But that'll wait until my forthcoming reflections on his journals excerpted in "The Intimate Merton," my current bedside book.

This is between a three and a four star effort compared to the best of Levi already published, but it remains for those of us limited to English-language versions for Levi's work a welcome arrival on the small shelf of his writing over nearly forty years. These stories appear in English for the first time, commemorating the twentieth anniversary of his death.

This thin anthology gathers seventeen short tales—not all of them are full-fledged stories. They range from a park full of figures from literature who survive there as long as they are remembered (a conceit that has another twist in Kevin Brockmeier’s recent novel “A Brief History of the Dead,” also reviewed by me on Amazon) to a deadly little weapon called a “knall” to a gladiator fight pitting cars against hammer-throwing humans. Some are more fantastic, recalling Italo Calvino’s fables but with more of an edgy or jaundiced view towards human weakness and unpredictable foibles. These, of the magic paint “tantalum” that works great until the user’s bath time, or a kangaroo in “Buffet Dinner,” or the Kafkaesque “Bureau of Vital Statistics,” remind me of similar reflections collected in the earlier volume “The Mirror Maker.” Tales in “A Tranquil Star” like “The Fugitive,” “The TV Fans,” or “The Molecule’s Defiance” (great title admittedly) fall into this mode. But these, in my opinion, are not as gripping as those closer to reality, or at least allegory!

If you have come to “A Tranquil Star” without having read Levi’s earlier pieces in this mode, the subject matter may seem light and inconsequential compared to the Holocaust narratives for which he is most known in English today. The introduction gives a quick run-through of which stories appeared when; they range over the whole career of Levi, and the anthology does shift in tone and topic accordingly. The earliest entry powerfully dramatizes a partisan’s last minutes of life, and “One Night” hints at wartime allegory, “Fra Diavolo” sounds practically autobiographical out of Fascist 1930s Italy. But even those stories with no Italian or European mid-century setting express the author’s consistent concerns. All of Levi’s prose contrasts fragility vs. dominance, clarity vs. confusion, and detachment vs. annihilation all occur.

In unsparing, yet graceful and calm expression, in this volume I find these topics treated most poignantly in the title story that concludes this book, about an expanding star. As the star bursts, the story suddenly switches, to a Peruvian astronomer’s thoughts as he compares the photographic plates of what seems to be the same supernova. He then wonders what he will tell his family.

The universal and the immediate collide. Here is how the fate of a planet under the star is summed up. “After ten hours, the entire planet was reduced to vapor, along with all the delicate and subtle works that the combined labor of chance and necessity, through innumerable trials and errors, had perhaps created there, and along with all of the poets and wise men who had perhaps examined the sky, and had wondered what was the value of so many little lights, and had found no answer. That was the answer.” (160) This excerpt shows the quality of Levi’s voice at its clearest, and the transparent translation that brings these stories to us marvelously rendered.

Not all the stories are flawless. “The Girl in the Book” seems to fall flat, giving us what happens in real life rather than in fiction as its conclusion, but this does not satisfy after the buildup of the tale. Levi can be a tough entertainer. He prefers to separate himself from his tales, and perhaps his rigor leaves the weaker tales here floundering once they are separated from their teller’s warmth.

They tend overall towards the brief elaboration of a clever image or idea. Like much fiction of this genre, the narrative arc fades. The teller’s voice forces you to listen, to see, to enter into what he describes. This is the same as the Holocaust narratives, and Levi’s skill appears in fiction to be less of a craftsman of the ornate prose style, the intricate plot, or the in-depth characterization than many other modern writers. Instead, he illuminates a train forced to halt one night and then backs away after he tells you in an eerily objective voice how it and the tracks around it were completely and silently dismantled. Parts of the rambling but engaging “Bear Meat” are the liveliest pages here. He sets up a mountaineering story (and like the “element” in “The Periodic Table,” I wish Levi had written more about the peaks he loved to once climb) with appealing citations from Dante in “Bear Meat” but halfway through a second narrator interjects another anecdote, and then the story stops, the two halves settling but not joined neatly.

The kangaroo’s dinner attendance is recounted, but after predictable mayhem, the beast jumps away into the evening and that’s that. “Censorship in Bitinia” ends up exactly where you expect—it’s clever, but not profound. “The Magic Paint” switches from the discussion of “tantalum” into Fessio’s fate after his glasses are coated with another substance, and the narrator then halts. This jarring assembly may be intentional on Levi’s part. It does mimic our own patterns of relating stories to each other in fragments and elisions and jerks and starts and stops.

But, for those seeking elegant fables and erudite wit, these fictions (what seem to be the last ones untranslated by now, so this may account for their uneven quality as stand-alone pieces) may reveal to you a handful, among the seventeen, that will prove as memorable as to me the title story. My other finalists are “The Sorcerers” with its predicament of two smart academics unable to convey the how-tos of all the technological wonders of the First World to a tribe in remote Bolivia’s rainforest, and “One Night” with its disturbing abandoned train imagery. These leave me admiring again Levi’s talent.

Irish Heritage vs. Bottom Lines

This snap (straight outta Bono and his pals' own hard teen streets o' Ballymun) sent by Lee to me via her Hibernian pals sums up much about how we postmoderns view Irish culture, mingling those pagan fertility festivals with Catholic ritual processions and eating the dead god in sacred groves with sanctified garbing of young maidens. First Communion meets Riverdance if not Flashdance. Queen of the May or the Moy. The other day I read of the Archer School in Brentwood having a mysterious May Day pole erected on its lawn without warning or explanation the past few years. The paper called it delicately a "Celtic renewal" symbol.

Fintan O'Toole speaks in the Irish Times about delicate reticence regarding bureaucratic Irish attitudes towards the real remnants of a bastardized and blessed pre- and once thriving Christian and now coldly mercenary, post-Christian culture in an Irish academic climate chilly to its fluid multiculturalism. An exchange across Europe and the Atlantic, not to mention if you read Bob Quinn the Mediterranean and North Africa. A trade of ideas and goods millennia older than the EU or "diversity."

I heard Daithi O hOgain at the IASIL in Debrecen a few years back dazzingly discuss ancient Irish texts with flair matching O Corrain for O'Toole. I agree that our intellectual leaders can draw connections that make the recondite relevant. This is ignored by bean-counters running our universities as if they are MBA generators and nothing more makes our best colleges into diploma mills. Not to mention the rush to mediocrity in those colleges not in the top tiers. First the American schools opened campuses and admissions post-WWII out of a mingled ideal of class and race access beyond those with the "gentleman's 'C'" and the silver spoon. But this now means we prop open the doors to career-oriented education, not only where it has the right to be, and I should know from where I teach, but in the liberal arts and humanities in traditional research bastions. What goes for electrical engineers and accountants should not go for classics majors and Sanskrit scholars. Yes, I can in my spare time study Irish in all its forms in my own time, but without the grants and resources and leaves and seminars that a university provides those "professing" advanced knowledge in a field that they in turn advance by research and conferences and publications and teaching, scholarship stagnates. This is already the case in many areas of medieval studies, at least from what I have been told by professors in the fields in which I was trained but am not now employed.

We need all these-- familiar and obscure both-- positions to be filled from our colleges, not only those that draw hordes of MBAs at job fairs or entice immediate placement for PR firms for those web-savvy enough to work not out of a cubicle but from a coffeehouse. There should be room for all scholars in all pursuits to mingle with the eager dentists and teachers and salespeople who emerge with diplomas. Idealism, I confess. But how often is today's wish for such academic reform cherished vs. the lip service, affirmative action, massive social and political and lobbyist pressure brought upon the reforms that led to the opening of higher education in postwar America and Britain, so regardless of class or race one could perhaps attend, and at one time afford, higher education? What began as well-intentioned updating of curricula in the 1960s has been perverted by the Thatcher-era British and the anti-meritocratic French and now the budget-addled Irish higher education elites in the name of profit.

With my own doctorate in medieval literature and my own considerably eclectic, arcane, and unrenumerative pursuits paid out of my own pockets vs. my own position at a proprietary technical and business institution, I face daily this bottom line rationality. Funding all but the registration fees to travel to conferences where I present, and buying my books and my materials to learn, I recognize the plight of "the independent scholar who happens to teach." There are fewer places in academia for those trained in these rarified realms, and this is the grim game I went into knowing my ignorance of the "it's who you know" rules. But, the chance to play was there for me to make when I entered graduate school. It should be there for others today, nearly a quarter-century later.

However, after the Reagan-Thatcher years began this concerted push towards income over intelligence in our advanced educational centers, the opportunities to enter the competition have narrowed. The classics, medieval, and Celtic studies areas all depend upon dedicated learners little regarded by most universities. Once UCD eliminates OI, it will be like a tenure-track line for the Chaucerian, Latinist, Irish-language or Welsh Arthurian expert that is slashed to make room for the flavor of the decade post-Atlantic, Lacanian or trans-whateverist (we being beyond post- and into transgression in this new century's snug coteries). I lament too how the Irish counterparts of my own technologically centered institution take the trouble to imagine and create bolder innovations than more traditional bastions of higher education regarding fresh thinking, think-tank idea factories, and interdisciplinary ventures.

26ú Bealtaine 2007

Afraid to speak out about universities

Culture Shock: A letter from a senior academic, who cannot be named, reveals the extent to which our third-level institutions have ceased to be centres of free inquiry, writes Fintan O'Toole.

Last month, after I wrote in this column about UCD's decision to end its degree in Old Irish and what it says about the narrowing of minds in our universities, I received a long letter from a very senior Irish academic. He is in many ways an exemplary figure: a hugely popular teacher but also a prodigious writer and researcher who regularly publishes work of the highest quality. But I can't tell you who he is. The saddest and most startling line in his letter is one in which he says that, although he would be quite happy to speak out for his own sake, he fears that doing so would have adverse consequences for his department.

It is possible, of course, that such fears are unfounded. But my correspondent is a calm, amiable man, not given to obvious paranoia. His anxieties are ones that I have heard expressed by a number of academics in a number of institutions. And the very fact that such fears exist within our universities is itself a cause for deep concern. Universities are supposed to be centres of free inquiry and of intellectual curiosity. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the radical restructuring that is currently affecting most of them, there is something utterly askew when even very senior academics feel that they cannot engage in an open and honest discussion of what is happening around them.

My correspondent's letter is about what he calls the 'managerialist' culture, 'which is running riot in our university system, particularly in the two largest universities, Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin". His view of this process is worth detailing, especially since it involves subjects other than his own, and cannot therefore be dismissed as the mere product of academic amour propre.

'Classical languages,' he writes, 'once a distinguished tradition in UCD, scarcely are known any more. Ireland used to produce distinguished classicists; nowadays we import them from Britain and elsewhere. Medieval studies in UCD, once a jewel in the intellectual crown, is being let die; again, we used to produce medievalists of world stature, now we import them. Similar and equally scandalous assaults on the teaching of modern languages have gone unnoticed by Irish journalism. Again, the attempts to force shotgun marriages on subjects that are dissimilar have been ignored. History, sociology and political science have been forced together in Trinity in a way that threatens the identity of all three. At one stage UCD proposed a shotgun marriage between classics and philosophy, betraying a ludicrous ignorance of the nature and content of both intellectual areas.'

His argument for the intellectual autonomy of different subjects is not, however, an argument against 'intellectual synergy'. On the contrary, he argues from his own experience the relevance of a broad, open-minded education, even to specialised areas of research such as his own: 'The social sciences and the humanities depend on each other intellectually: you cannot become an adept in my subject without some background in philosophy and a reading knowledge of several languages other than English. My old-fashioned classical secondary education is a boon to my present-day teaching of the subject. In the United States, a PhD in the subject from a good university usually requires a testing in at least two foreign languages.'

THE OLD IRISH system of broadly-based undergraduate degrees in the humanities, he argues, 'has offered historically an extraordinarily rich variety of subject combinations to generations of undergraduate students. It has produced a large share of our writers, academics, public servants and political leaders, and Ireland would be much poorer intellectually and culturally without it. That richness is under threat . . . '.

I was thinking of this letter earlier this month when I was fortunate enough to hear the UCC medieval historian Donnchadh O'Corrain at the Burren Law School. He was engaged in something that most sane people would assume to be profoundly pointless: the exegesis of a number of early Gaelic legal texts. He is probably one of a tiny number of people in the world who can not just read these texts, but place them precisely in the context of European intellectual history. In the new 'managerialist' culture of our universities, there will be little place for people like him. Of what economic utility is a professor who specialises in Brehon law? Yet his talk was both riveting and utterly contemporary, effortlessly connecting the old words with present-day concerns about the Iraq war and political corruption. It was a reminder that people who really know one subject actually understand a lot about most things.

There are particular ironies in the current narrowing of minds in our universities. It is happening at a time when there is a burgeoning interest in Irish culture abroad, so that we may eventually end up importing scholars of Old Irish from English or American universities. It is also happening at a time when the institutes of technology, supposedly more narrowly career-focused, are widening their remits (the Institute of Technology Tallaght, for example, hosts the National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies) because they recognise that critical thinking is increasingly important in the real world of jobs and business. And it is happening at a time when the arts, as the huge increase in State funding recognises, are becoming increasingly central to national identity. If our institutions of learning are narrow and fearful, how can we sustain a vibrant, innovative culture?

© 2007 The Irish Times (via Gaelport.com)

"Yu Ming is ainm dom"

Daniel O'Hara's award-winning short (14 min.) film {"My Name is Yu Ming"} viewable at Atom Films's site below, shows the reality of the "first official language" (a phrase of Dev's to be sure, given its exactitude and canny realism aligned with aspirations of the truncated and incomplete Free State in its constitution) as experienced by a young man from China. More would give too much away. I note that when Yu Ming checks out a book on Gaeilge, it's the exact one that I reviewed earlier today, "Gaeilge agus Failte." Yu Ming, careful student (ta se ag foghlaim go curamach!), would not have made the misapprehension if he had read the book as carefully as he must have! But that'd spoil the plot. The film does take poetic license with Yu Ming's perceptions of today's Irish within today's Ireland, however, to hone its dramatic point, poignant and comic both.

http://www.atomfilms.com/film/name_yu_ming.jsp">

Paul Elie's "The Life You Save May Be Your Own": Book Review

"Predicament Shared in Common"

Paul Elie's “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” combines the lives of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy into “An American Pilgrimage.”

He examines these luminaries of literary and social culture in postwar, mid-century, pre-and post Vatican II Catholicism. He's an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the publishers responsible for so much of the cultural and literary leaven of the middle of last century. I did expect more about his own publishers' relationships with the authors from his access to FSG archives, but perhaps by now with the fame of the writers and the diligence of the scholars combing papers scattered about university vaults by now, the publishers themselves have no secrets left. Inevitably, the attempt to merge four writers into one narrative that reviews their correspondence, books, essays, pronouncements, talks, and travels makes for an uneven journey. Percy’s Christian existentialism by contrast with his determinedly contrary if congenitally eccentric fellow Southerner O’Connor’s keen eye and bitter comedy comes off as aloof, bookish, and not that interesting if by no fault of his own. His novels nearly all pale by comparison with her best fiction, and Elie has difficulty making some of his lesser novels even minimally engaging.

Day, by contrast with Merton, herself suffers from asceticism! While the two converts and one-time near counterparts in NYC progressive political and au courant literati circles in the years between the wars (albeit at some remove from each other’s direct influence and circles of friends) share roots in what we’d call the typical avant-garde movements of Modernism and experimentation that generally any bright young thing in an urban East Coast environment has wandered into over our past decades, Day comes across as markedly more inflexible, so as to anchor her pacifist and anarchist commitment to individual choice to live the Gospel as “fools for Christ” must. Merton learns by contrast to adjust whether to his moral shifts before he entered the Trappists, his infatuation with the Abbey of Gethsemani and his sudden fame after he wrote his memoir, his diagnosis by a shrink as a “narcissist hermit,” and his love affair with a nurse in the mid-1960s just as so many of his clerical colleagues were reneging on their vows and falling in love themselves with women rather than, or as well as, their calling to separate themselves from the ties that bind most of us, or used to.

Elie makes the best out of the enormous secondary criticism that has accrued around O’Connor, and of the correspondence and previously censored material now available to Merton scholars. He gives instructive close readings of “Wise Blood” and “Everything that Rises Must Converge” as well as contrasting the letters to Elizabeth Hester that show her public manner as preserved for posterity vs. hints of a more combative and much less PC Jim Crow-era attitude in her letters to Maryat Lee. The hints of what happened to Robert Lowell as a result of his manic visions of God and Caroline Gordon’s own descent into a rigid form of Catholic scrupulosity needed more detail, however. Also, we have almost no sense of what Flannery did in college or during her MFA years in Iowa City, not to mention her own NYC stint prior to her diagnosis for lupus. I wanted more connection of her own urban flourishing to tie in to Merton’s previous trajectory there, and Day’s own movement away from the secular boho to the Catholic boho contigent, but perhaps such tracks remain too vague for serious biographers to retrace or imagine.

An aside, a correction. Elie: "J.F. Powers had stopped writing." (453) He had not, circa the 1980 death of Dorothy Day when Elie makes this claim, Powers, although very much below the cultural radar admittedly post-Vatican II, had kept working on his fiction, albeit in his very slow and careful manner. After publishing his third collection of stories, "Look How the Fish Live" (1975) Powers prepared on his last novel, "Wheat That Springeth Green," published in 1988. Admittedly, with only two novels and thirty stories anthologized, Powers preferred quality to quantity. I am not sure if Powers after the death of his wife kept writing after 1988. Few writers, possibly O'Connor herself would serve as an analogy in her fiction if not her voluminous correspondence from a life less than half that of Powers, achieved so much with so brief a volume of stories. And, you have to admit that Powers did not have his juvenile efforts memorialized in his 2001 NY Review Press story collection (unlike as Elie points out the willy-nilly lack of editing that dumped Flannery's grad-school exercises next to her finest tales in the Collected Stories FS&G fat volume) that select only to reprint those three slim story collections assembled from the mid-1940s until near his death in 1999.

Back to Elie. Great photos, for once, in "The Life You Save" enliven some familiar faces. A happy young Percy strolling a German farm trail, carefully fenced with twigs. Flannery's radiant as she holds her first novel at a party for the publication of "Wise Blood." Dorothy Day, in the Bob Fitch snapshot shown here, arrested at a UFW protest in Fresno. My favorite is a Merton glancing sideways, eyes and brows mischievous, straw hat atop his habit as he slouches happily by some rustic bench outside on the day of his ordination.

Percy appears genial if gloomy. The loss of much of his correspondence, unlike the stacks of carbons that fill up the enormous epistolary collection “The Habit of Being “ for O’Connor and the letters and diaries for Merton posthumously published may explain Percy’s diminished presence vs. his other two rivals for literary and spiritual audiences. Day seems not to be much interested in writing even though she dutifully published her memoir, carefully glossed as was Merton’s for a more reticent era, “The Long Loneliness.” Day early on appears to have chosen a lifestyle and a manner committed to renunciation of her own early fling, her sexual adventurism (although by our standards she and Merton are the norm, more or less, for those raised less religiously at least today), and her flirtation with Marxist and leftist movements. I like Merton’s advice around the time of the grandstanding Berrigan Brothers agitprop: “I think the best thing is to belong to a universal anti-movement underground.” (qtd. 396)

Elie is at his best in this section, as he shows how Day separated herself from the peacenik hippie priests and those playing to the camera while “the whole world is watching” in the later 60s for revolution that made Jesus a proto-Che. Elie explains that Day took pains to empathize with the other side, always, and not to place any dogma or manifesto between her and her identification with those who may have not wanted war in Vietnam but who could not be led to sympathize with guitar-strumming hippies and angry Jesuits spilling napalm and blood on shredded draft documents as cameras rolled. Merton, too, as Elie takes great care in documenting, struggled to be a leader of the Catholic reformers and the progressive left from his hermitage on the Abbey grounds where civil rights organizers and leftist luminaries made their own pilgrimages to meet with him and where he attempted to stay in touch from behind the monastery walls with a world that he knew needed his advice even as he vowed to stay faithful, at terrible and necessary personal cost, to his promises to remain a loyal priest and obedient monk. Merton too shrank from the violence that inspired young people to immolate themselves as burnt offerings against the war, and soon enough he too would meet the One to whom he ended his “The Seven Story Mountain”. At twenty-seven he entered the Trappists; twenty-seven years later he would find “The Christ of the burnt ones” himself when he was bizarrely electrocuted in Bangkok as he stepped out of his bath mid-day to slip and catch a whirling fan.

O’Connor, being like Merton the more familiar of the four writers, comes across like him as the one you might like to meet and chat with, although unlike Fr. Louis I would fear reading about myself in her letters after the fact. Day’s harder to make appealing, as her severity and devotion to seeing the Lord in the shattered ones kept her focused upon the less prosaic and less easily dramatized side of life that eschews sentimentality and exalts the utterly assured recognition of the Messiah in the poor and the crazed and deluded ones. Her choice, despite the convulsions of the Catholic Worker Movement and the fact that she could rarely find the time alone that Percy, Merton, and O’Connor needed to become speakers to the rest of us, “making oratory out of solitude,” does make her active apostolate all the more admirable.

I conclude with a couple of passages. Elie compares O’Connor with Merton, Day, and Percy. Discussing an admittedly unlikely essay anthology in the tumultuous days of ’69, “Mystery & Manners,” Elie describes how she combined “objectivity and fierce personal conviction,” speaking out of “aloneness and absoluteness,” and how her Southern allegiance in the North, as “a believer in a disbelieving literary society,” as “an artist in a church of philistines,” transcends loneliness or alienation. What she and her fellow writers share is what all believers today share: “the aloneness of the religious believer generally.” (426) She knows faith, the “substance for things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” as I paraphrase the old Baltimore Catechism (as Elie I recall did much earlier in his book).

If O’Connor derived her power from her inflexibility, Elie continues, Merton by his sudden death escaped the end-time days of rage constant upendings of the 60s. His fluidity enabled him “to represent and call forth the aspirations of others.” (427) He could from his semi-cloistered perspective benefit from what the Benedictine Rule (and after all the Trappists are post-Reformation 17c “Cistercians of the Strict Observance” of the 12c Cistercian reform of the 6c Benedictines!) calls the particularly monastic vow of stability.

Elie finds his appeal in his “radical identification of himself with another” that evoked in his readers a similar identification. Merton was able to mature and recognize that his smarts, his charism, his desire for the spotlight could be used to turn attention from himself as the bestselling contemplative, the talkative monk, the literary talent submitting his work to censors (well, at least most of the time—the love letters he sent his nurse Margie notwithstanding, and showing the humanity that endured and made him ultimately a better monk and a kinder Christian at again what must have been enormous sacrifice and, at fifty-two, having to “grow up” even more). He had the gift of getting us to feel as if we were in his sandals, observing wryly and compassionately and righteously what he could see from beyond the walls around his hermitage, and beneath his own defenses within himself, schooled as he was in all the trends of the literati at the shrink.

A year and a half before his death, Merton in the thick of the antiwar campaigns addressed his brothers outside the monastery. Elie points out how “Seven Storey” ended with a poem to his Merton’s brother, John Paul, who had died in the Canadian RAF in WWII. Merton now that I think of it entered the monastery three days after Pearl Harbor, and although not a pacifist had strong reservations about WWII and the types of wars fought by capitalist powers for their own enrichment more than a high moral cause. Reading Camus, Merton came to realize the existential predicament for the believer mattered as much as for those like Camus who could not return to believe what they had left behind. Merton reflects in the letter to his superiors that he has moved beyond the “answers” that his early years in the monastery once led him to think that he had gained.

“Can a man make sense of his existence? Can a man honestly give his life meaning merely by adopting a certain set of explanations which pretend to tell him why the world began and where it will end, why there is evil and what is necessary for a good life? [. . . .] I have been summoned to explore a desert area of man’ s heart in which explanations no longer suffice, and which one learns that only experience counts.” (qtd. 402)

This journey into the arid regions impels the monk. He leaves the world’s distractions to concentrate upon the battle within, and behind the defenses of the cloister he stands vulnerable “to remain open to God wholly and directly.” Whether God answers is not up to the monk. Earlier this month I read (and see my blog for May 6) how Mother Teresa endured half a century of doubt after her initial epiphany calling her to leave her convent walls and serve Calcutta’s destitute. Why keep bothering with religion if its rewards are so few and so nigglingly and unpredictably dispersed? Merton finds God must be known, not proven. “To seek to solve the problem of God is to seek to see one’s own eyes.”

Elie on the last page sums up how the writers’ predicament is now that of any believer, half a century and more now since these four writers thought and argued and prayed. They all knew what any believer or unbeliever today knows: authority lies not on the institutional Church, for that is collapsing, as my two blog entries previous to this one have shown and pondered vis-à-vis David Brooks’ column and Philip Groening’s interview. The reform of today, for Catholics, or anyone “quasi-religious,” in Brooks’ phrase, might be abandoning the idea of a true faith. Elie tells us now that “clear lines of orthodoxy are made crooked by our experiences and complicated by our lives.” (472)

All of us look for signs. Readers, we are trained to and thrive by our own pilgrimage for meaning. Elie notes that “the burden of proof, indeed the burden of belief, for so long upheld by society, is now back on the believer, where it belongs.” I could not have said it better myself—Ireland now finds itself in the same philosophical position, like Merton mid-life and mid-crisis having to wrench himself out of the past habits into a bracing, and harsh, awareness of life as it must be met and improved and sustained without the sureties that in younger and more innocent days comforted us daily and kept us calm at night. Now we have the testimony of Day and O’Connor, Merton and Percy, who all had to balance their unwanted label as “Catholic writers” or intellectuals in thrall to the Vatican with their own real tensions and longings and upsets. They imagined their own afflictions and some made poems and fiction out of it, others and other times these became editorials, letters, diaries, and conversations. But they wrote them down themselves, whereas even for Jesus all we know is a few lines written to the rabbis in the sand at the foot of the “women taken in adultery.” And, the four new evangelists all speak to us, as evangels, messengers, of the pilgrimages they too stumbled through to their uncertain conclusions, far from Jerusalem, Canterbury, or Campostella, path along the Milky Way, that ended at land's end, Europe's last finestierre, in a “field of the stars.”