By "fans" I mean fanatics, or near-fanatics--the kind of person who likes the work enough to know all (or at least many) of the most highly-regarded recordings and can discuss in detail the strengths, weaknesses, and nuances of each.

I am not such a person with reference to any piece of music. The number of works which I have in multiple recordings is very small, and in the cases where I have a preference I usually can't say a great deal beyond "I like this one better." 

I'm asking because I have a friend who is such a person, and she recently urged me to listen to this performance of Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto by an eighteen-year-old Korean named Yunchan Lim. She described it as "an earth-shaking event in the world of R3 fanatics," adding that the words are not too strong. If you know the work, I'd be interested in hearing your reaction: do you agree that this performance is extraordinary?

As for me: I had never heard the Third. I like the Second, though it's not one of my favorite works, and I have not heard it for many years. Somehow I'd gotten the impression that the Third is inferior, or at least widely considered to be so, which was mistaken. Since I'd never heard it, I was in no position to either concur or dissent with my friend's view of Lim's performance, so I decided to listen to another. Van Cliburn's 1958 recording seemed appropriate, since Lim's performance had won him the award named for Cliburn. And it was in 1958 that Cliburn became famous even among people who never listened to classical music, including the ten-year-old me, for winning the International Tchaikovsky Competition, in which he had played both Tchaikovsky 1 and Rachmaninoff 3. I vaguely recall being aware of his fame as a young star at the time. Apparently it had Cold War ramifications.

So I have now listened to the concerto several times, Cliburn's three and Lim's twice. And I can say two things: one, I like the concerto a lot, a whole lot. It is a wild, over-the-top piece of music, and you don't have to be a pianist to know that it's extremely difficult. The piano concerto is not my favorite genre, but this is one I'll be listening to many times. It must be some kind of acme in romantic fireworks, but it seems to me to have more depth than that description suggests. 

And two, I do prefer Lim's performance, but I can't say much about why. It seems more fluid, more clear. But maybe I'm only reacting to the quality of the recording, not the performance, as Cliburn's has a sort of muffled quality. 

Although the Cliburn recording I listened to was made in 1958, it is not the competition performance that made his name. This video does seem to be that performance.

If you're not very familiar with the way real experts talk about performance, listen to some of them discuss the question "Is Yunchan Lim's Rachmaninoff 3rd Concerto the greatest ever?" Two were on the Cliburn Award jury.

I rather think the conductor and orchestra, Marin Alsop and the Houston Symphony, deserve significant credit for the performance. 

Oh, and there's also this question: how in the world does an eighteen-year-old reach not only that level of virtuosity--rare, but not the only example--but the kind of expressive depth that people in the comments on that last video describe. For instance:

I was changed because of his humanity, his ability to transcend the instrument, the music, and connect to something much higher, it almost stopped my heart from beating. I saw God in his playing.

Everybody knows, though many will perhaps have forgotten fairly quickly, of the insane episode involving the marketers of Bud Light and their decision to enlist a female impersonator named Dylan Mulvaney in its ad campaign, issuing a special can with his image on it, making an ad featuring him, and so forth. I'm not of course supposed to call him a female impersonator, or "him." But even by the standards of those who think he should be referred to as a "trans woman," Mulvaney fails: he shouldn't be considered to be any sort of woman, as it isn't a woman that he impersonates, but a somewhat bizarre version of a teenaged girl.

I really don't think there has ever in real life been a female human who behaved as absurdly as Mulvaney does. I did not realize until a day or two ago, when I finally saw the video of him sipping Bud Light in a bubble bath, just how bizarre he is. I suppose it could be comic, but the fact that we're supposed to take his "girlhood" as real makes it disturbing. (I can't find a video of the commercial itself, but if you look for it on YouTube you can find various news broadcasts that show at least parts of it.) It shouldn't have surprised anybody that Bud Light customers were not pleased, but the marketers were in fact surprised that their effort to "evolve and elevate" the beer, or rather the image of the beer, provoked a negative reaction.

So far, so typical of the stupid times we live in. But I would like to point out a more fundamental problem. Bud Light as a brand is now in trouble because the episode alienated the sort of hard workin' regular guy who is or was a Bud Light drinker. But why was he? How did Bud Light become a sort of emblem of the hard workin' regular guy? Not long ago I heard, in some public place, some pop-country singer describing a wonderful world where the supply of Bud Light would be unlimited--not just beer, not even Budweiser, but Bud Light, by name.

This is disgraceful. The long-standing mainstream American beer brands--Budweiser and the rest--have always been pretty poor beer, but they're recognizable as beer. Light, or "lite," beers, on the other hand, are so watery as to be nearly tasteless. Presumably they were invented and marketed as a way to enable the drinker to get a certain amount of alcohol into his system with roughly two-thirds of the calories that would come along with normal beer. Hard workin' regular guys are suppose to actually like beer and not be overly concerned with watching their weight. And they're not supposed to like wimpy stuff like light beer. Clearly we as a society have failed.

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I've seen a lot of progressive reaction to this and other similar controversies involving transgenderism, and most of it is disingenous-to-dishonest: "Why are you right-wingers so obsessed with this harmless stuff?" And of course "Why are  you so full of hate?" It's not trivial and harmless fun when the entire establishment, government and corporate, insists that we call Dylan Mulvaney a woman, and brings whatever power it legally can to ostracize anyone who contradicts this dogma. Physical violence is directed by "trans men" against actual women who refuse to go along with the program; Riley Gaines, a female swimmer who was beaten in unfair competition with a man and had the nerve to call it unfair, was attacked at a college campus when she tried to give a speech stating her views there. Dylan Mulvaney was received at the White House and given an interview with the president. 

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I've always found it hard to believe that anyone actually likes light beer, but I know one person who does, and proved it in a blind test. With some friends she went to a beer sampling where a couple of dozen unidentified beers were offered, Bud Light among them. I think this was at a brewery and suspect the Bud Light was included more or less as a joke. They ranked the ones they liked, and it was only after all had chosen their favorites that the samples were identified. She chose Bud Light. So she can't be accused of pretending or forcing herself to like it, the way people do with low-fat or non-fat foods. 

This is the piece (and performance) which Craig mentioned in a comment on my recent post about the young composer Caroline Shaw. It's a setting of a few sentences from Psalm 84. I was not able to figure out exactly which translation she uses, but another performance includes the text as:

How beloved is your dwelling place,
o lord of hosts,
my soul yearns, faints,
my heart and my flesh cry out.

The sparrow found a house,
and the swallow her nest,
where she may raise her young.

They pass through the Valley of Bakka,
they make it a place of springs;
the autumn also covers it with pools.

I suggest that you listen to the other performance as well. It has a smaller choir and the parts are more distinct. Also it seems to have been assembled from pieces recorded separately during Covidtide. 

And here is a very different sort of work, "Other Song."

Are either of these classical music? We can be literal and say that a genuine classic by definition cannot be very new, because the definition includes having stood the test of time: "instant classic" is just a way of expressing enthusiasm. Obviously Shaw's pieces are not that. Being less literal and referring to a tradition, we have to say that they, the second piece especially, are certainly not Bach or Brahms. And not Schoenberg or Stravinsky or even Copland. The first piece "sounds" more classical: it's performed by a trained choir, and its basic sonority of massed voices is not essentially different from Renaissance church music. "Other Song," on the, um, other hand includes elements associated with pop music--not only the percussion itself, but the rhythms used by it. The composition however takes strange turns not often found in pop music, and I don't think even the better pop singers would be able to handle certain parts of the vocal line with the same precision and clarity. 

So "contemporary classical music" is almost a contradiction in terms by the test-of-time standard, and often decidedly un-classical in composition or instrumentation or both, a tendency that has been going on for some decades now, at least since the Kronos Quartet recorded "Purple Haze" in the 1980s, and no doubt before. I think I vaguely recollect hearing of such things in the late '60s. I was mildly surprised when I read in Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise that Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead was a composition student at some university in California before the Dead got started. And the debate about whether the term still has meaning or not (apart from its historical reference) has been going on for at least as long. 

Let's just say that this is music written and performed by people trained in, and making use of, the techniques of the Western classical tradition, and not be too concerned about categorizing it. I think of the remark made apparently on more than one occasion by Duke Ellington: "If it sounds good, it is good." (Peter Schickele used that as a sort of motto for  his very enjoyable and very eclectic radio program "Schickele Mix.") I always imagined Ellington's words as a response to the listener who might say something like "Well, yes, it sounds nice, it has a certain surface appeal, but is it good?" It's not an unreasonable consideration, really. But in the long run Ellington is right, and in the long run the superficial will be sorted out from the solid. And I think Caroline Shaw's music is very good.

Philosophically, she is apparently in the contemporary mainstream, which is not really a good thing, but hardly a surprise, and her heart is in the right place. A note on that second performance says of "And the Swallow" that it "has to do with finding a home and celebrating the sense of safety."  There's nothing wrong with that, but it leaves out most of the psalm and its most important sense. And the video for "Other Song," according to Nonesuch Records, "was shot at Rise and Root Farm, a five-acre farm in New York’s Hudson Valley that is rooted in social justice and run cooperatively by four owners who are women, intergenerational, multi-racial, and LGBTQ." Well, I salute their willingness to plow and plant, anyway.

"Intergenerational" is an odd thing to be proud of as a social justice accomplishment. In the natural order of things, most groups of people are. Families, for instance. 

Much of the current issue (Lent 2023) of The Lamp is devoted to Benedict XVI, to "the life and legacy of Joseph Ratzinger," which is to say that it looks not only at the pope but at the theologian and cardinal. Most of it is only available online to subscribers, but if you don't subscribe  you can read the first article, by Archbishop Gomez of Los Angeles, here. It's very good, and of the two dozen or so contributions there isn't one that I don't agree with, The Lamp being an orthodox and intelligent publication, though naturally I appreciate some more than others. The only possible exception is the essay by theologian John Milbank, and that's only because I can't understand most of it. 

There is, however, from my point of view a noticeable lacuna in the array of tributes. Almost all the writers are prelates, priests, professors, or politicians. (I'm sorry, I couldn't resist the alliteration.) Those who are not actively engaged in ministry or theology or some other activity directly connected to the Church are public figures to at least some degree, like the British Member of Parliament Jacob Rees-Mogg, or Christopher Caldwell of the Claremont Institute. It's not a criticism of the very fine contributions made by all these men (and, a bit surprisingly, they are all men) to note that the voice of the ordinary Catholic layman is missing. 

By some oversight I was not asked to contribute to this symposium. But as it happens I am in a position to add that missing voice, or at least something closer to it: the truly ordinary Catholic layman probably does not much care who is pope or what he is doing, beyond acknowledging a certain deference to him. I am not exactly that person, as I'm more engaged than that, have written for a few Catholic publications over the years, and am in the twentieth year of this pretty Catholic blog. Still, I'm basically what is referred to, somewhat but perhaps not altogether dismissively, as a pew-sitter, or pew-warmer. 

Returning to Christian belief as an adult in the late 1970s, after a not-untypical abandonment in adolescence, I was naively surprised to find that there was a whole contingent of Christians, mostly clergy and academics, who had ceased to take the fundamentals of the faith more or less as they had been understood for almost two thousand years, and instead were interpreting the whole business as a form of literature and/or psychology. I had joined the Episcopal Church and discovered that it was split roughly between those who did and those who did not believe the traditional doctrines in anything like the traditional way. I'll call those, for convenience, the orthodox and the modernists. In practice it was a three-way split: the orthodox, the modernists, and the more or less indifferent who just wanted to carry on as they always had. But of course all the noise was made by the first two. 

I was troubled by this conflict, which was deeper than a conflict within a community really ought to be or safely can be--safely for the community, I mean--because it went to the heart of the reasons for the community's existence. More significant than the conflict itself was the absence of any authority which could resolve it. The division was not trivial; it was not a fine point of theology or an argument about the language and music of the liturgy. It represented conceptions of what the faith is which, if understood in their essentials, were fundamentally irreconcilable. Only a factional power struggle could resolve the conflict, and even in 1980 I thought it was pretty clear that the modernists would prevail, as in fact they have. 

At the same time John Paul II had been elected to the papacy, and pretty soon it was pretty clear to me that I would have to become Catholic. The question of authority was a significant factor in that recognition. 

Even before I entered the Church I was aware that the modernist-traditionalist conflict was very much alive there, but the institution seemed to possess the authority to settle the matter, or rather to clarify it: to state the authoritative teaching of the Church, and, if necessary, to name specific ideas that are contrary to that teaching. And in the person of John Paul II it seemed to have someone who was clearly orthodox. So it seemed that, no matter how many heretics were running around, an authoritative and clarifying judgment would be available. John Paul was obviously not the tyrant-inquisitor that progressives tried to portray him as. And neither was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who had been put in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, making him directly responsible for those judgments which always have been and always will be necessary.

At the beginning of my conversion I read a little theology and a little history, enough to reassure me that Rome was the right choice. But I realized fairly soon that I was not going to be a Catholic Intellectual. Even if I had had the brains I did not have the temperament, and even if I had had the brains and the temperament I did not have the time: I had a very demanding job and a growing family. I did not want to be wrapped up in intra-Church debates requiring expertise which I did not especially want to acquire and attention I did not want to spare. I did not care to be a close observer of the conflict, much less of Vatican or intra-Church politics of any sort. I did not want to be a liberal Catholic or a conservative Catholic, just a faithful Catholic layman. And I did not want to be in the state of suspicion which comes all too easily to those who are aware of the modernist-orthodox conflict. 

The conflict was however in full swing, and I was always aware of it, far too often finding myself in precisely that state of suspicion and ready for combat. It is not a healthy spiritual condition. I'm tempted here to complain about the state of the Church over the forty years in which I have known it, but I long ago grew sick of the sound of my own complaining voice. Suffice to say that the conflict has been at the root of most of the complaining--both the conflict itself and my own reactions to it. 

And now I can get to the point which makes this about the life and legacy of Joseph Ratzinger. I read the collection of interviews with him published in 1985 as The Ratzinger Report, and thought Here is a truly wise man, exactly the kind we need: orthodox without being reactionary, learned but not narrowly academic, both shrewd and generous about the currents agitating the Church and the world. 

I can't separate John Paul II and Ratzinger/Benedict. The latter was an essential part of the papacy of the former, his own papacy essentially a continuation of it, and during that long period I felt that whatever might be going amiss in the Church at the moment the trajectory was toward clarification and stability, especially clarification of what Vatican II had really meant and really intended. I had always thought that if I had been an adult Catholic in the 1950s I would have agreed with both Wojtyla and Ratzinger about the need for the Council. I could never, obviously, have been convicted of nostalgia for a Church I had never experienced, though I was (and am) deeply sympathetic to those who regretted the loss of much that they had known and loved.

And when Ratzinger became pope in 2005 I thought the tide had really, definitively, permanently turned, that perhaps in another generation the amorphous thing that opposed the faith from within the Church would have largely passed into history. It might not be in my lifetime, but I was heartened by the belief that this would be the trajectory of the coming years, that the domination of the Church's life by factionalism was fading away. That would be the legacy of Joseph Ratzinger, of the long John Paul II-Benedict XVI papacy.

I was of course entirely wrong. The only coherent opinion I can express about Benedict's resignation is that I didn't understand it, and still don't. About the papacy which has followed I can say with assurance only one thing: that it has revivified the modernist movement and given it life that will surely continue for much longer than I had supposed. In the face of one of the greatest challenges in its history, the rush of Western civilization to embrace and establish as the undeclared but actual state religion a post-Christian anti-Christianity, the Church will continue to be divided and confused. God knows why this happened and how it will work out according to his will, but I can only see it as a tragedy.

I should mention here my deep gratitude for Benedict's creation in 2009 of the Ordinariates for the continuation of the Anglican liturgical and devotional heritage. That it came thirty years too late to have the effect it might have does not lessen my gratitude, or mean that it will have no good effects, though those will be less obvious than they might have been in the early 1980s. Bishop Lopes of the Ordinariate is currently the head of the USCCB's Committee on Divine Worship, i.e. liturgy, and the drabness of Catholic worship was one of the things that for a while held me back from leaving Anglicanism, and one of the things I spent far too much time complaining about in the following years. 

I went to hear the Mobile Symphony last weekend, after having argued with myself about whether it was worth the trouble or not. That's no aspersion on the orchestra; it's just that the main attraction was Brahms's Fourth, a work that I love and know pretty well, and I was not sure the pleasure of hearing it performed live, probably not quite as well as on recordings, justified the expense (not that much) and the drive (a little over an hour). Desire to support the orchestra was one of the things that tipped me over to yes, go. 

It was worth it. In spite of what I just said about knowing the Brahms, it may well be more than thirty years since I last heard it, possibly more. I think I listened to it a fair amount when I was in college and soon afterward, when my ears and my sensibility were young and fresh, and apparently it had really imprinted itself on me. I had forgotten just how much I love it...except for that last movement. I never have been touched by it. It's a passacaglia (a structure similar to a theme and variations, but with the underlying motive a bass or chordal movement, not a melody). And I remember thinking all those years ago that the problem must be that I simply didn't understand it. I don't think I ever made much effort to follow the changes of the form; the music just didn't touch me. 

This time I really made a concerted effort to keep the pattern in mind, actually counting the measures and focusing on trying to keep the foundation in mind as a variety of structures were built atop it. That effort broke down about two-thirds of the way through--I don't know whether the pattern itself varies or I just couldn't keep up.

But that shouldn't matter. One shouldn't have to think about the structure of a piece in order to be affected by it. And, once more after all these years, it still doesn't touch me. That's okay, because the first three movements had me almost ecstatic. I remembered them more accurately than I expected. I remembered it so well, and liked it so much, that I almost feel that I don't need to hear it again, ever. Maybe now I should just listen to the fourth movement several times in a row, and see if anything happens. 

Who, you may ask, is Caroline Shaw? She's a  young composer of whom I had never heard before Saturday, but I'm sure going to hear more of her now. The first piece in the program was a to-me-forgettable overture by Weber. The second was a work for chorus and orchestra by Shaw, "In Common Time." And the third was Mozart's "Ave Verum Corpus." 

I was entirely prepared to be bored at best, annoyed at worst, by the Shaw piece. Oh yeah, we know what to expect: some aimless and disconnected sounds, some pleasant and some not, maybe some pretentious notes about how it reflects the anxieties of our times etc. I would not have been at all surprised if it was said to be about climate change.

But it won me over, and then some. Yes, it's...odd to the ears of those who love, for instance, Brahms, but that's hardly a new thing. More deeply,  there's the whole problem of modern music, as with modern poetry and painting, not simply being not very much like but also not really as good, by some semi-objective criteria, as older and more traditional classical music. It does not have either the technical or emotional reach of 19th (and some 20th) century music, just as most contemporary poetry does not come off very well in comparison with, for instance, Tennyson, or even Housman. 

But this mostly wordless piece, which started out as pleasant, went deeper as it progressed, especially when the few bits of words came in: "Years ago...I forget...years to come...let them." 

And what really iced the cake for me was that Shaw's work was followed without a break (this was announced beforehand) by the Mozart. The effect for me was profound, the radiant beauty of the second somehow resolving the restless longing of the first. Afterwards I went to the orchestra's Facebook page solely to offer my thanks to whoever it was who came up with the idea for that combination.

Here's "In Common Time." I did, I should say, find a few things about it a little off-putting: the clattering among the strings, for one, which sounded to me as if it were something more than col legno, striking of the strings with the wood of the bow. It seems gimmicky to me, not to mention ugly. And I could do without some of the vocal effects. Still, I like it. 

Many or most Catholics, and I suppose all Catholics who have an interest in classical music, will recognize "Ave Verum Corpus." 

I can imagine someone saying that the Mozart just proves the deficiencies of the Shaw. Well, what can I say?--I liked it, and I liked the combination. It was a memorable night.

I think there is in fact a good deal of interesting music being made by people trained in classical technique and sensibility. I put it that way because the word "classical" doesn't seem exactly applicable to the music itself. I'll have more to say about that sometime before too long. 

(The title is for you, Stu)

For various logistical reasons we didn't go to the Easter Vigil at the cathedral this year, or even to our regular parish, but rather to a very small parish in a very small town a bit further away than our own.

Well, why not be specific? It was St. John the Baptist in Magnolia Springs (Alabama). I'd never been there before and I was impressed. I think it was not so long ago only a mission and a relatively poor parish, and the building is small and plain. But the interior has fairly recently been redecorated, and it's very appealing. Good taste can do a lot without a lot of money. The liturgy can be described as simple but passionate, in a good way. And it included a fair amount of Latin and a great deal of incense. I don't think the church  holds more than a hundred people, and it was packed, so much so that my wife and I felt a little guilty about taking up space that some parishioner might have used. I think we were all accommodated, though.

I got the feeling that it's a very healthy parish. And that is undoubtedly in some large measure due to the young and very dedicated priest, Fr. Nick Napolitano. I've known him slightly for a while. He was a high school classmate of one of our children, and when he in seminary sometimes was an altar server in our Ordinariate Masses. He is fiercely--the word is not too strong--committed to his mission. I hope he can sustain it in the face of all the opposition, from without and within the Church, that will come to him, and from the risk which no doubt faces all priests of simply growing weary and jaded with the passage of time. 

This link will take you to a video at the parish site of Fr. Nick discussing the visual features of the church. I had not noticed the bugs.

The young priests I've encountered in recent years are all similarly committed to the traditional mission of the Church, which makes them "conservative" in the confused mind of our time. And they are very brave. The orthodoxy is not surprising, because, as has been pointed out for decades, who would give up everything a priest has to give up for an ill-defined mission of which he is half ashamed? The bravery is almost true by definition now, because in the minds of many all priests are automatically suspected of child molestation and other crimes. And the accusation obviously gives a lot of pleasure to those who already hate the Church for other reasons. I certainly would have trouble walking around in public if I thought people were looking at me with that in mind. God give them strength. 

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Post-Lenten drinking update: I had given up my regular evening drink, usually a beer, for Lent. I did, as the questionable practice allows, give myself a Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon break. And I had a few lapses, some for social reasons, but didn't too very badly. 

One thing I did not do during Lent was to sneak a little of this wonderful scotch. One of my children had brought it for the Christmas holidays, and there was a little left, which I have been saving for a special occasion. I thought Saturday night after the vigil was special enough. 

Scotch is not my favorite whiskey, but this is something else. People talk about the "peaty" taste of scotch, and I guess it's a marker of its non-favorite-ness for me that I don't think I especially like that quality. And this has much less of it than most. I don't think I would ever have applied the term "fresh" to any other scotch, but it comes to mind here. All that "nose," "palate," etc., stuff on the label, which I have a hard time taking very seriously (which may just mean that I'm a clod) uses comparisons to various fruits, which, again, would never have occurred to me in relation to scotch, but which seemed justified. Not that it tastes fruity, but there's a lightness and brightness to the flavor which I don't associate with scotch. 

I don't want to know how much it costs but I do know that it is not available in the state liquor stores here, which maybe is just as well. Happily, there is still another ounce or two in the bottle.

I also let alone during Lent another holdover from another offspring's visit: a couple of canned cocktails from TipTop Cocktails. Canned cocktails may sound like a terrible idea, but to my unsophisticated taste anyway they are extremely good. My son had brought an assortment, and one that I especially liked was the daquiri. I don't think I'd had a daquiri since I was in college (long ago). I have the impression that it's out of fashion. One of the company's mottos is "never too sweet," which was what made the daquiri better than I expected. 

Unfortunately they are not available in Alabama. You can order them online in an package of eight for $40. I don't want to bother doing that, and shipping cost would probably be pretty high, but that's only $5 for a very good drink. So if store prices are around the same they are very much worth it.

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As I have often mentioned, I have a peculiar attraction for offbeat and little-known music. One such that I found (at eMusic, of course) fifteen or twenty years ago was Voyager, an album by a group called Space Needle. A week or two ago something reminded me of an odd little track from that album, "Dreams." The lyric consists of one repeated line, which I heard as 

In time you will know that dreams no longer come true.

It spoke to my condition, as they say: I was more melancholy than usual when I heard the album. But I had only heard it in the car. When I listened to it at home the other day I thought Wait--is she saying "that" or is she saying "bad"? I decided it was the latter. I searched for the lyrics online and found only one attempt at transcription, at one of those dodgy lyric sites, and whoever did it agrees. So:

In time you will know bad dreams no longer come true.

Happy thought.

A few things I meant to say about The Dry Wood:

I'm not sure exactly what the title means. It's an allusion to Luke 23:31: 

For if in the green wood they do these things, what shall be done in the dry?

That's the Douay-Rheims translation, which is the one Houselander uses, not surprisingly. I admit that I've never been entirely sure what it means. It's part of the warning Jesus gives to the people as he is about to be led away to his crucifixion, a warning that very bad things are coming for everyone. Flammability is one obvious difference between green and dry wood, so maybe "They're trying to burn green wood, so what will they do with dry wood?" is meant.  Anyway the general idea is that bad things are happening now and worse ones are coming. 

Here's what the editors of this edition say about it:

When a perfectly good green tree is burned (that is, when Christ sacrifices himself on the cross), what can the dry wood of fallen and broken humanity expect to find when it meets with fire? Fallen humanity can follow Christ to new life, but only at a price.

Well, that's obviously true, and the novel is very much about suffering, but I'm not totally convinced either that it's the correct interpretation of the words themselves or what Houselander had in mind in using them. I wonder if she meant something a little more specific: that her story describes the kindling of a fire in the dry wood of the people of Riverside. The plot supports that interpretation.

I mentioned the character of Solly Lee, a Jewish businessman who cynically tries to cash in on the popular devotion to Fr. Malone. That is obviously a somewhat stereotypical scenario, though probably, like most stereotypes, having some grounding in reality. But if that sounds like it might be heading toward anti-Semitism, it most definitely is not. The portrait of Solly is rich, sympathetic, and deeply and seriously engaged with his situation as a secularized Jew. To say much more than that I'd have to give away more of the story than I want to.  Suffice to say that it is not a hostile portrait.

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The Trump indictment is a disaster for the nation. I say that with no sympathy at all for Trump himself. I think I've made my low opinion of him sufficiently clear over the years; search for his name on this blog if you want verification. If this involved a serious crime I would support it. But it's transparently contrived for political purposes, as the basic offenses are not only misdemeanors but misdemeanors for which the statute of limitations has expired, turned into felonies by the charge that they were committed in pursuit of another and so far unspecified crime. Even the vigorously anti-Trump David Frum thinks it's a bad case: 

From the moment rumors swirled that the Manhattan district attorney would move against Trump, many of us felt an inward worry: Did Alvin Bragg have a case that would justify his actions? The early reports were not encouraging. Many Trump-unfriendly commentators published their qualms. Over a week of speculation, though, it seemed wise to withhold judgment until the actual indictment was available to read. Now the document has been published. The worriers were right.

That's from The Atlantic, and I can't read the whole piece because I'm not a subscriber, so I don't know where he goes from there. I am a subscriber to Bari Weiss's Free Press, which has this analysis from Eli Lake; maybe you can read it. After explaining how thin the case is, he says:

All of this raises a question—not just for Bragg, but for the Democratic Party, the online resistance, and the media ecosystem that seems to exist simply to stoke outrage about Donald Trump for its overstimulated, progressive base: Is it worth it? Is the catharsis of seeing Trump indicted worth the damage a politicized prosecution of the former president will do?

Trump is bad, but it's the Democrats' reaction to him that is doing the most to tear this nation apart. Are they willing to do it because they know that Trump's supporters will be enraged enough to make him the Republican nominee next year, and believe they can defeat him? Or is it just the blood lust, the pleasure of humiliating the man they hate so much? (I was very surprised a while back to hear a progressive friend deny that she and others hate Trump. It confirmed my impression that zealous progressives are remarkably unaware of the demeanor which they present to those not of their faith.)

Either way, they are enlarging, possibly beyond repair, the rip in the fabric of our society. They are feeding the divisions that led to Trump's election in the first place. And they don't care. There are tens of millions of decent people who support Trump and believe that the ruling class of this country despises them and wants to render them powerless, or worse. Now you're encouraging them to believe that the law will not protect them if the progressive establishment goes after them. I suppose the Democrats think they can control the outcome, permanently defeating their enemies. And they may be right. But what will be the cost? 

One day, if history is told with any accuracy, they will be held in deserved contempt (along, probably, with Trump himself). But it will be too late to heal the nation. 

On that grim note, I'll sign off till after Easter. 

*

On second thought, I won't leave it on that note. Something reminded me of this picture, taken last fall at a state park in north Alabama. The light was extraordinary and though my phone didn't really capture it, it's still rather pretty.

I thought I was reasonably familiar with Houselander's work, but it came as a surprise to me to learn that she had written a novel: only this one, published in 1947. So when I saw an ad for an online seminar on the book, a joint effort from Dappled Things and the Collegium Institute, I signed up. 

There were four sessions, and of course participants were assigned a set of chapters to read for each session. Being a bad student, I usually just managed to get each week's assignment done in time for the class, except for the second week when I ended up still one or two chapters behind when the appointed hour came. Had I been an actual student, held accountable for not having read quite all the assignment, I would have been tempted to cast a little of the blame on the author, for not having made the story interesting enough. 

It is not a page-turner. In fact, after the first week's reading I said to myself This is not a novel at all, but rather a lyrical meditation on Christian themes. But "novel" is a very, very broad category, especially since sometime in the 20th century when the kind of fiction known (at least by its practitioners and fans) as "experimental" stretched the concept so that it could include almost any non-factual prose of sufficient length. For that reason among others I won't push my initial reaction.

But I can't escape it entirely. The Dry Wood is certainly a novel by any reasonable definition; the  question is whether it's a good one. Answering that question obviously requires some reasonably definite idea of what a novel is and what makes a good one. Now, having finished the book and given it some thought, I've come to this relatively firm conclusion: it's not all that good a novel, but it's a very good book. 

It is a story, and it has a cast of characters who do one thing and another. Still, my description of it as a lyrical meditation on Christian themes is justifiable. It comes across to me more as a sort of tableau, a series of pictures, than as a flowing stream of narrative. And the pictures are accompanied by words which are often...well, it's hard to find a word that doesn't have at least slightly negative connotations, at least with regard to a novel. "Preachy" is obviously negative, but not unwarranted. "Didactic" is only a little better. "Homiletical," maybe. Somewhat abstractedly theological, anyway. But whether the negative suggestion is deserved depends very much on what the author is trying to do. I think these qualities are best considered not as a fault in a novel but as a virtue in the sort of book this is. 

I think it can be compared to a couple of C.S. Lewis's books: The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce. Both these have the fictional elements of plot and character, but as far as I know they are not generally called novels. The Dry Wood is far more a novel than either of them, but it has in common with them that neither plot nor character is as finely and elaborately drawn as we expect in a novel, and like them it exhibits, contrary to standard fictional advice and practice, at least as much tell as show.  Yet those of us who like the Lewis books don't regard their un-novelistic qualities as defects; we're judging them by a different standard. 

I suppose I'm dwelling so much on this in part because I keep imagining what an ordinary secular-minded reader would make of Houselander's novel. In fact one of the questions proposed for discussion in the seminar was whether one would recommend the book to such a reader. My immediate reaction, thinking of several people I know who are anywhere from indifferent to hostile to Christianity, was an immediate and definite no. Perhaps I'm underestimating them, but I can only envision them dismissing the book as preaching, and that mainly to the converted. The homiletic element is deeply and often mystically Catholic, engaging and moving to one who sees the world in much the same way, dismissable as misty nonsense by one who does not. Someone in the seminar made me laugh by calling some passages of the book "spiritual purple prose." I think Flannery O'Connor would not have liked it; she thought even Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest too heavy on ideas. 

The basic situation in the novel is this: the saintly priest, Fr. Malone, of a parish in a poor dockside London neighborhood called Riverside has just died. Members of the parish, including Fr. Malone's successor Fr. O'Grady, believe that Fr. Malone was (is) in fact a saint and are caught up in a fervent desire to see a miracle which can be attributed to him. To this end they come together in a novena asking him to save the life of a child, Willie Jewel, who is beloved by the whole community. Born with birth defects that will prevent him from ever walking or speaking, but always smiling and responsive, and now apparently declining toward death, he has been taken to heart by the community as a sort of little Christ of their own, a Christ-child who embodies the suffering of their own impoverished life while seeming to transcend it, and to whom they can bring little things that please him. 

The story of the novel is essentially the progress of that novena and its effects on the relatively large cast of characters: Willie's parents; the agnostic physician Dr. Moncrieff who thinks Willie probably should not have been born at all; the young ex-Communist convert Timothy Green (he's the one who first made me think of The Screwtape Letters); Rose O'Shane, a fading beauty with a drinking problem; Solly Lee, a Jewish tailor and businessman who attempts to make a good sum of money off holy cards featuring Fr. Malone; Carmen Fernandez, a beautiful young woman more or less the kept lover of Solly Lee; the wise Archbishop Crecy, unsure of how far the enthusiasm for Fr. Malone ought to be allowed to go; Monsignor Frayne, a somewhat too urbane convert from the Church of England.

Those who are acquainted with Houselander's work will find familiar themes, most notably the idea that every person is Christ, fully alive in some, struggling to be born in others. There's also the sympathy and indeed love for the poor, and the necessity of the embrace of suffering. And skepticism, tinged with ridicule, of rich Christians who think they can drop in now and then and improve the poor, of activist Christians who believe that what the faith needs is a Movement led by the talented who can make it more attractive to the world. The book is not heavy on humor, but it does have some funny moments, and some of them are at the expense of these last two. 

A taste of both the style and the sensibility of the book is in order:

The sun was going down when Father O'Grady reached the Jewels', and in the warm light the man and woman looked as if they were made of bronze. But Willie, even in this light, was a child of ivory.

He was as fair as his parents were dark, and his fairness, with its contrast to his own flesh and blood, added to the unspoken and perhaps unrealized impression among the people that there was something supernatural about the child. An innocent, who is visibly destined to die young, could not fail to have a certain radiance for people of simple faith. A little creature shining as purely from the waters of Baptism as on the day when they were first poured on him, and soon to be in the blue fields of Heaven. But when, as in Willie's case, such a little creature also suffers, and suffers with a smile on his face, then indeed it is hard to measure the awe, the sense of mystery, with which poor people approach him.

For those without the means that riches give for hiding, drugging, and disguising sorrow, or the ways that more sophisticated people have of finding at least temporary escape from its realization within themselves, suffering is not in itself a thing to be dreaded, as it is dreaded by those who imagine themselves to be more fortunate....

Those who suffer always are the aristocracy of the poor. So Willie Jewel was unique in the love and reverence of the people of Riverside. Not indeed that they wanted to see a child suffer, but they did want to be constantly easing his suffering, bringing him their gifts, seeing his sudden radiant smile, and a flush of pink on his white face. They came to him as simply as the shepherds did to the Child in the manger: not exactly glad that their God shivered in human flesh and lacked all things, yet glad that, since He chose to need, He needed the gifts that they had to give....

Remember, by the way, that Houselander had been among poor people and been poor herself, so this is not sentimentality--or if it is, it has a solid core. If you think some of it is a bit much, especially in a novel, well, I sympathize with you. But I repeat: this is a good book, a book I will re-read. And though I don't know what  a reader who is unfamiliar with Houselander would think of it, I'm fairly sure that those who do know her other work will find it worthy to stand with the rest. Possibly--just possibly--an evaluation of all her work would put this one at the top, as it brings together all her themes very powerfully.

This book is one (the first?) in a series from Catholic University of America Press called Catholic Women Writers. Its aim is to re-publish works by Catholic women writers who have been neglected, or in some cases neglected works by writers like Muriel Spark, who have received fairly wide attention. The series is edited by two academics, Bonnie Landers Johnson and Julia Meszaros. Dr. (I assume) Meszaros was the presenter for two sessions of the seminar, and on the basis of that I am very happy to say that all is not lost in academia. 

I should mention, too, something very dear to my old-fashioned paper-book-loving heart: the physical production of the book is lovely and should be durable. At my age that latter quality isn't so important to me personally, but if anyone wants to read my copy after I'm gone it should be in good shape.

One of the composers on that disk of miscellaneous, indeed wildly heterogenous, classical music that I mentioned last week is Bartok. All six of his string quartets are there, and, as I also mentioned, the way the MP3 files are named means that the movements of the quartets are scattered among other pieces of music. The effect can be startling. The first two movements of the first quartet are immediately followed by the first movement of a sinfonia by J.A. Hasse. A more disconcerting sequence would have to involve, say, a bit of Berg's Wozzeck. I had never heard of Hasse before (yes, even though I own the album, Concertos for Two Flutes, on the Tuxedo label)--he was an 18th century composer, one of those well-known in his time but less so afterwards.

The little sinfonia (and I do mean little--it has five movements which all together occupy only a little over twelve minutes) is delightful, simple and very tuneful. Frankly, it was welcome after Bartok. 

I don't really know what to make of Bartok. He's one of those composers whom I think I should like, but have not really warmed to. Back in my college days I acquired this LP of his Piano Concerto #2 and the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion:

I don't remember, but I feel pretty safe in saying that the cover image was at least half-responsible for my buying the disk; surely that's a Marc Chagall painting. The other half was probably a general impression that Bartok was weird and modern and probably something I would like. But though I'm sure I listened to it at least half a dozen times back then, I never warmed up to it. And that's about all I can say about it now, as I don't think I've heard it since. And really: two pianos and percussion? Is that not in itself a description of an unpleasant experience? 

I also recall hearing the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta back then, and liking it, but as far as I remember have not heard it since. And I also remember a middle-aged customer in the record shop where I worked at the time telling me that it gave her children nightmares. 

The thing about the quartets, heard in the hodge-podge context of other music, which includes, at the other end of the scale, Schoenberg's twelve-tone Variations for Orchestra, is that they don't sound completely atonal and recklessly dissonant. At times (and remember this is based on hearing them while driving) they catch hold, so to speak, with me. And then they lose me again. I do want to pick one and listen to it attentively. Looking around for information on them, I ran across one person who ranks them with Beethoven's quartets. That's pretty intriguing. I'd be interested in hearing the opinions of others. 

*

I ran across some remarks from Chesterton the other day in which he responded to a correspondent who advocated communal kitchens:

Would not our women be spared the drudgery of cooking and all its attendant worries, leaving them free for the higher culture?

The Chesterton piece says some things with which any Chesterton reader is familiar, especially the fallacy of supposing that freeing a woman from the drudgery of home so that she can engage in drudgery elsewhere. But what struck me most was the business about freeing her, or anyone, for "higher culture." This is an idea that has long had a great appeal for people who see history as a pretty steady advance in a pretty shallow concept of progress. I don't mean political progressives in particular in the sense of any particular set of political goals, but the utilitarian mindset which sees the advance of technology and personal freedom as good in themselves (which to a large degree they are), but has no concept, indeed actively avoids the question, of what these things are for. 

I have a vague impression of having encountered those ideas in my youth, probably through science fiction, which in my youth was still dominated, at least as far as I encountered it, by the optimistic Progress Through Science and Reason school. I absorbed a vague picture of masses of people, maybe even all of humanity, freed from drudgery of all sorts, engaged in painting and music and poetry and philosophy, drifting around in a sort of  haze of wise benevolence. (Something like that vision is portrayed in the absurd quasi-hippies of the TV show Moonhaven.)

Well, here we are. In science fiction, dystopia was just around the corner. And in real life the leisure obtained by the reduction of physical labor has given us a toxic sea of anti-culture: pornography, "reality" television, a crazy cult of spectator sports, an inarguable decline in standards of education and culture in general.

It's not all bad by any means, but what is the proportion of good or even not-bad to bad? What is the proportion of people who, having the freedom to do so, have chosen the enlightened life, as pictured in the old dream, over the pursuit of mere entertainment and pleasure? One out of ten? That seems too high. One out of fifty? 

And: communal kitchens, presumably mandated and controlled by the government? I don't see why that would appeal to anyone. Except of course the people who just like mandates and control.

I'm not tough enough or self-denying enough to give up listening to music during Lent. But I do usually limit myself to classical music, and within that tend to favor works that are either explicitly religious (like Bach's liturgical music) or at least of a contemplative and reflective cast. 

To that end I swapped the CD of miscellaneous pop music MP3s in my car player for one containing only classical music. All these CDs (dozens of them) were made ten-to-twenty years ago when hard drives were much smaller and I couldn't keep all the MP3 music I was acquiring on my computer, and so had to archive some of them to CD. The music is completely unorganized except that some disks are all popular music and some are all classical. The only thing the music on any one disk has in common is that one broad classification; it's just whatever needed to be archived at the moment.

One of the classical disks is in my car now, and the music on it is a real hodge-podge, including everything from baroque flute concertos to Schoenberg. Moreover, the files are not named in any consistent way (such as album name / track number), so, as the CD player reads them, a movement from a Hummel concerto may be followed by one of Schoenberg's Four Orchestral Songs. It can be startling. 

The biggest surprise was a piece of Indian classical music. In the '60s, as we all know, there was something of a fad for Ravi Shankar's sitar music--he played at the Monterey Pop Festival. I have two or three of his LPs from that time, and I genuinely liked the music and continued to listen to it now and then long after the fashion had faded.  

What came, unexpectedly, out of my car speakers the other day was recognizably the same basic sort of music as those albums, but with the noticeable difference that it included much lower notes than I had ever heard from the sitar. When I got home and looked up the album, I discovered that the instrument was not a sitar at all, but something called the surbahar, which I will very naively say might be to the sitar something like what the cello is to the violin. 

I was immediately captivated. If you've ever listened to any of this kind of music you know that it involves a lot of what guitar players call "bending" notes: varying the pitch of a struck string by pushing or pulling the string sideways, raising its pitch in a sort of slide--I guess "glissando" is the technical term--while the note is sounding. It may be just a sort of twist of the basic note, or a vibrato. Or it may be full notes. Half-step bends are fairly easy, whole-step bends are harder, and a combination of light string and strong hand can even do a step and a half.  (You can also do "pre-bends"--bending the string before it's plucked, so that the note slides down rather than up after it's initially sounded. This is harder because you have to know by sight or feel or habit exactly where to position the string--a difficulty which is the normal playing technique for the violin family, which is why you can't just pick up the violin and play tolerably, as you can with the guitar.) It's a powerful expressive device, pretty much essential for blues playing.

These plucked Indian instruments do the same thing but with immense precision, which I think includes formally defined microtones, and notes sustained for longer than I would have thought possible on a purely acoustic instrument. I've always liked it, but hearing it done on the lower tones of the surbahar makes it, to me at least, even more expressive, with long moaning voice-like glissandos that really tugged at the apparently sympathetic strings of my heart. 

I had no memory of even owning this music, and made the lazy assumption that the album was some cheaply produced thing from the '50s or '60s, licensed by some low-rent American company from an Indian original, re-issued on LP back then with minimal care and documentation, and probably with even less care converted to MP3. Totally wrong. What I was hearing was the first of the two pieces on this album:

Far from being an old and poor-quality recording carelessly thrown into the electronic market, it was recorded in this century and originally released as a CD by a company, Arbiter Records, which has a very serious commitment to the music. You can read some detailed commentary on it here. And hear the whole album on YouTube.

I admit that by something over halfway through the 36-minute piece I was no longer paying very close attention. That's a long time for a single instrument and a piece which doesn't vary much harmonically or rhythmically. Also, it doesn't speed up to a climax in the way that I recall Shankar's music doing, which may have to do with the bigger instrument being less agile. This eventually made for a certain monotony, but I'll listen to it again soon. 

And I see there are a number YouTube videos providing an overview of Indian musical techniques. I may be about to go down an Indian music rabbit hole. 

*

I had planned to listen to Bruckner's symphonies again during Lent, justifying it partly by his being a Catholic whose music has definite spiritual intentions. So  far I've only gotten through the First. I listened to them all some years ago (ten? not more than fifteen I think?) and didn't immediately recognize this one. But then I got to the third movement, which I very much did recognize. It's intense and loud: heavy. And I thought "that's really metal." 

Afterwards, I wondered about that use of "metal" as an adjective. I was not surprised to learn that it's common enough that it may, if its use continues, get a place in dictionaries. It means, of course, loud, heavy, and intense, but more fundamentally, and not necessarily with respect to music alone, passion,  toughness, honesty, courage, and refusal to surrender. It's almost a warrior sort of mentality. Maybe not even almost.

*

This is not metal:

I loved my husband and was happy with the life we built. But I had to end our marriage when I realized I'm a lesbian

You can read more if you want to, but it's not really worth the bother. I suppose it might get a metal point or two for the attempt to be authentic. But there's no passion in it.  It's more like being bored with chamomile tea and deciding to switch to rose hip for a while. What it says about contemporary ideas of marriage among a certain class of people pretty much goes without saying.

Tristan und Isolde is metal. 

It was only fairly recently that I became aware of the term "outrage porn," but I just learned from Wikipedia that it's been around since 2009, when a New York Times writer said:

It sometimes seems as if most of the news consists of outrage porn, selected specifically to pander to our impulses to judge and punish and get us all riled up with righteous indignation.

The Wikipedia article reveals that the phenomenon has been the object of study and analysis, mainly on the question of why and how journalists use it to attract and keep the attention of readers and/or viewers. 

But I didn't need anyone's analysis to recognize the phenomenon as soon as I encountered the term. I recognized it because it obviously referred to a tendency which I long ago noticed in myself: a perverse pleasure in being outraged, normally by someone else's misdeeds. Never mind the whole question of deliberate manipulation; I don't need to be manipulated into it, because I do it to myself. 

I first noticed it many years ago in reading the Catholic press. For as long as I've been a Christian the struggle between orthodox and progressive theology has been a highly visible fact of life in the Christian world. (I'm using "progressive" as a convenient way of referring to the tendency to reduce the faith to a matter of literature and psychology.) Given two items in a Catholic publication, one offering a meditation on some aspect of the faith and the other exposing some cleric or theologian's manifest heresy, it was the latter that I wanted urgently to read. The justification for the impulse--that it was important to know about these malign influences--was pretty thin. How much of my reaction was a genuine desire or need to know, and how much of it was the pleasure of thinking Isn't that awful? Aren't the people doing it terrible? I must read more, so that I can better understand how awful and terrible it all is.

Self-righteousness is certainly part of it, but it's much more than the normal "Lord, I thank thee that I am not as this sinner." It also includes personal anger provoked by a sense of being attacked; the sinner is not just doing something wrong which you, in your righteousness, are not doing, but engaged in something which damages you, or something or someone you love.

I did recognize it as an unhealthy tendency, but I don't know that I resisted it very hard. And that was before the internet, which, as we all know, has given that unhealthy impulse an injection of some kind of growth hormone. Thinking about it now, I see that I've sometimes, or often, forgotten even to recognize that it's unhealthy, or to be restrained by that recognition.

Culturally speaking, it has become a monster. We live in an angry and unhappy culture now, and the impulse that makes us propagate and enjoy--yes, that is the word--outrage porn is making us even more angry and unhappy than we would otherwise be.

This is on my mind because Rod Dreher's blog at The American Conservative has ended, and I'm trying to decide whether or not to follow him to his Substack site, Rod Dreher's Diary, which requires a paid subscription ($5/month or $50/year) for much or most of what he posts there. Dreher has a lot of worthwhile things to say, but he also, as I think he admits, has a tendency to revel in outrage porn. And I know that's the reason why a new post from him has always been the first thing I read at TAC. I can afford the subscription, but should I? Shouldn't I perhaps just try to break myself of the outrage porn habit, or at least make a continual effort to suppress it?

Here are two current Dreher stories:

The ‘Idyllically Sex-Positive World’
Crackpot therapist showcased by BBC calls for self-drugging women for fetish freaks

Stanford Law Students Are The Enemy
By humiliating federal judge, ruling class shows contempt for liberal democracy

The second article is available to non-subscribers, so you can read it if you want to. You may have read about the incident he's referring to: the usual shout-down of an unwelcome speaker by our version of the Red Guards. It's alarming and infuriating. Dreher says:

I cannot bear these people, these Stanford Law students and their grotesque Dean Steinbach. These people are the Enemy. I will vote for anybody who will stop them. They are destroying our liberal democracy. Every one of those students are going to go into the ruling class, and will spend their careers in the law trying to oppress the people they have decided don’t have a right to be free, or respected, or anything but crushed as wrongthinkers and Bad People.

And I agree with him, all too vigorously. But is any purpose served by my reading about this? It's not as if I can do anything about it. Is it not better that I tend my own garden, reading good books, listening to music, participating in the world as it presents itself directly to me, in general pursuing the good in the ways that are available to me? Obviously one can do both: tend one's garden and stay informed about what's happening in the world. And if one's culture is collapsing one ought to be aware of it. But where is the right balance? As things are going now, it's more or less impossible to be aware of current events and not be disturbed.

I still haven't made up my mind about Dreher's Substack, but thinking about it has made me realize that I need to resist more strongly the somewhat sick impulse to seek out things that anger and offend me. 

*

I think I would be correct in saying that for most of my adult life Christians have more often than not been the villains in popular culture. I don't have any hard data for that, of course. And it's not uniform; I think immediately of the reasonable and not unsympathetic treatment of the clergyman in Broadchurch. But I watch a lot of (too many) British crime dramas, and generally when an identifiably Christian character appears he or she is probably going to be somewhere between obnoxious and wicked. This may well be worse in American film and television.

Well, okay, as I say it's been that way for decades. Still, I was unprepared for something I ran across the other day. I have a mild taste for certain video games, and was reading this article about indie games (more likely than the big names to interest me) when I encountered a description of a game called The Binding of Isaac Rebirth:

The game follows Isaac through an unknown world, as he makes a quick escape into a trap door hidden in his bedroom to flee his devout Christian mother hellbent on sacrificing him.

That opens a vista of ignorance and malice beyond anything I had imagined.

More and more it seems that a great many people, especially young people, have somehow absorbed a great hostility to Christianity without having any clear idea of what it is. 

I read the other day that Chuck Jackson had died. I recognized the name immediately, though I may not have encountered it since 1962, when his recording of "Any Day Now" was on the charts. I would have been thirteen or fourteen, and was prone to bouts of infatuation which were often called then, and maybe still are, "puppy love." Slight and fleeting though these spells were, the feelings involved were quite intense while they lasted, and I recall the way that song spoke to them. I hadn't heard it for many years, but was pretty sure that it would be one of those whose appeal transcends nostalgia, a genuinely good piece of work. And it is. 

I had no idea that it was written by Burt Bacharach (who as you know also died recently). No wonder it still holds up. Songs like this are as close to immortal as anything produced by the popular music of...I was about to say "our century," but now it's "the last century," a phrase which I associate with writers of roughly a hundred years ago referring to the 19th. 

Surely teenagers still have those experiences, but I wonder whether any pop music expresses and appeals to it in the way that those songs of the last century did, whether that kind of romanticism has been stifled by our culture of crude sex. Apparently some very large percentage of boys get their first exposure to pornography before they're of the age I was when my heartstrings were sounded by "Any Day Now." By "pornography" I mean not mere nudity, as in the Playboy magazines that I sometimes saw when I was growing up (a bit later than thirteen or fourteen, I think), but what used to be called hard-core pornography. And a certain amount of popular music is directly, crudely (and often stupidly) sexual to an extent that would have been considered obscene, far far beyond the bounds of the commercially or even legally acceptable, in 1962, or for that matter in 1992. If you don't know what I'm talking about, let it go; you're better off not knowing.

And I'm informed by a commenter at National Review that many ordinary girls "from good families" are appearing on OnlyFans, a web service where men pay to see women be sexually provocative, a term which is apparently quite broad (see Wikipedia). This, according to the same commenter, is making the young men who know these girls in real life and might want to "date" them pretty unhappy.

No surprise there. It's been some years now since I ran across a pop song called "I Liked You Better Before You Were Naked On the Internet." Wondering if my memory was correct, and if maybe the line was just a joke and not an actual song, I find that it does indeed exist and was released in 2004, by a band called From First to Last. I haven't heard it and don't especially want to. 

And the girls will be totally baffled by the negative reaction, when they were told that such behavior would be "empowering." As if there is anything new or clever in attractive women using their sex appeal to get male attention, and more, including money. They won't be merely baffled; they'll be offended, and complain about sexism and misogyny. 

What a sad mess our culture has made of love, sex, and marriage. 

It's almost always and almost necessarily true that old people feel some sadness that the world they knew in their youth is passing away, though I guess that's been exacerbated by the rapid changes in the world which have been the norm since roughly 1800, and especially since 1900. I often think of my grandfather, 1978-1973, who came of age before the automobile was anything more than a curiosity, and lived to see men on the moon. No one since has seen quite that magnitude of change. And though the technological changes since roughly 1970 have not been as dramatic and transformational as those he saw, the cultural change may be just as great. 

In any case, I certainly find myself today feeling that I'm not living in the same country I grew up in.  It's a common complaint. And I don't mean just the obvious cultural changes relating to sex and so forth, still less the technological changes. It's not even the political shifts and conflicts, in any direct and clear sense. I mean a sense that the basic idea of what this country is, how it is governed, what our responsibilities to it and each other are.... It's hard to articulate, and I think for now I'll just leave it with the thought that large numbers of our citizens, or "citizens," no longer see the nation in anything at all like the way the constitution describes it. I wonder if they even share with the men who wrote the constitution anything resembling the same idea of what a human being is, much less what a good system of government ought to be.

I keep hearing from a number of people that they feel like something really, really fundamental has changed over the past few years. Sometimes they describe it as a sense that something has broken. Often they mean the pandemic, and the extent to which we were misled and abused by authorities we really need to trust if our system is to function, and the way anyone who dissented was shut down, if possible, and ostracized by the alliance of government, media, and big technology--though it's cause for a little hope that much of that misbehavior has been exposed. 

I wouldn't argue with that, but it seems to me that if there was any single thing that broke the already very strained mental fabric of the country, it was Donald Trump's election. Trump was and is a fairly terrible man, but he himself didn't do most of the damage; rather, the reaction to him did. His success was in great part due to pent-up frustration on the part of millions who felt, quite correctly, that the people running the country not only did not care about them but were actively hostile to them.

People went crazy both for and against him, and those against him were the ones I just named: government, media, big technology, the most powerful people and institutions in the country. For them, Trump and his followers were and are an abomination which must be destroyed at all costs in order to save "our democracy," a term which they all seemed to latch onto simultaneously as if they'd received instructions, and which, after I had heard it a dozen or so times, I began to understand to mean "rule by Democrats." So they made things worse by a dishonest attempt to depose him, which further inflamed his supporters. Then came Biden, who might have had a shot at calming things but chose instead to be as divisive as Trump. 

Anyway, I don't think most people can sincerely say "We're all in this together" about the country as a whole anymore. The reds are red together and the blues are blue together, and each views the other as a mortal enemy. What can change that? 

Anyway, I don't think this country, the one in which we now live, can produce music like "Any Day Now."  And I miss the country that did. 

I have now, as I mentioned a week or two ago that I was planning to do, seen Dune, the recent one directed by Denis Villeneuve. I enjoyed it, enough that when someone suggested watching it again I was quite willing. It's very impressive visually, and I don't mean by that to suggest mere spectacle, though it has plenty of that. It's rich and often beautiful in the same way that many scenes in Villeneuve's Arrival are (and sometimes horrifying, which Arrival never is), and I was reminded of Arrival almost immediately in the opening scene of Dune. Villeneuve likes to make his alien technology mysterious, curvy and vague rather than angular and coldly mechanical, as in Star Wars. 

Taken entirely on its own terms, as a film, it's very successful. Even at two-and-a-half hours it didn't seem too long. Compared to something like Star Wars or one of the Marvel movies, it's slow. But it's still full of action, perhaps to a fault; I say that because I'm pretty sure that it glosses over the complexity of the book in favor of action--battles and such.

Before I say more I should say that I read the book more than forty years ago, in the mid- or late '70s, and don't remember it in any detail. But I do remember that it's a big novel with a lot of detail about its invented cultures and peoples. And there's not much of that detail in the movie. I noticed especially the one-sentence explanation of the importance of "spice," a drug necessary to the whole economy of the empire depicted in the book: that it helps spaceship pilots "to find a safe path between the stars" or something like that. Well, I remember enough of the book to know that that hardly begins to touch the nature of the stuff, which gives its users very extraordinary mental powers. I won't attempt to say more because I don't remember much more, but it's an extremely important part of the story. 

We all know that it's more or less intrinsically impossible to do real justice to a big novel in a movie, even a two-and-a-half hour one, or even a five-hour one--this is only the first of two planned movies. So I don't say that this is really a fair or valid complaint, only that there is a lot missing, and, as with the Lord of the Rings movies, what's missing is important, and can only be gotten by reading the book. Which I plan to do in the fairly near future, at least before Part Two is released, currently meant to happen this fall. In fact I think the desire to (re)read the book is the strongest effect that the movie had on me.

What should I say about the actors and, given the strangeness of the world depicted in the movie, the combined ability of the actors, the director, the cinematographer, and the costumers and others to make the characters believable? Well, they all worked, though I thought some worked better than others. For at least the first half of the film I thought Timothée Chalamett seemed too frail, even weak, to be Paul Atreides, the central character. But that may have been deliberate, as he began to grow and strengthen throughout the film. I must say I was reminded of the generally disliked portrayal of the young Anakin Skywalker in the generally disliked film (whichever one it was) where he grows into Darth Vader. I hope that impression won't continue in the second half. 

I'll mention one actress and character who struck me as especially good: Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica, Paul's mother. Her full name is Rebecca Louisa Ferguson Sundström, and she's a mixture of Swedish and British ancestry. As Paul's mother, she is appropriately warm and empathetic. As a member of the mysterious and powerful quasi-religious Bene Gesserit, she is, when the occasion calls for it, fierce and hard, bordering on scary. I suppose she has some Viking ancestry. She would make a good Kristin Lavransdatter.

Oh, and Stellan Skarsgård is completely unrecognizable as the evil, repulsive, and Jabba-the-Hutt-level obese Baron Harkonnen.

It occurs to me that Villeneuve also directed Blade Runner 2049, which I have also seen, and I wonder now why I never thought of it while watching Dune. I found it disappointing, but that was mainly for reasons having to do with the way it developed the original story. Maybe it would be worthwhile to see it again, focusing on the visuals. 

I wonder, not for the first time, why science fiction depictions of the far future seem almost instinctively to turn to empires, emperors, nobles and noble families, knights and ladies, and swordfights. Is it because there is something archetypal in them? Or are they just a cultural memory that keeps coming back because it offers dramatic possibilities that democratic thinking does not?

And it's a little curious that Frank Herbert (author of the book(s)) incorporated so much of Arab/Islamic culture into the native peoples of Arrakis, the desert planet of the title. His biography at Wikipedia doesn't mention any acquaintance with them, but I remember noticing it when I read the book, and it's certainly present in the movie. And in the score, by Hans Zimmer, full of drums and ululations. It struck me as good but a little overdone. It's probably just as well that I didn't hear it in a theater, at the over-the-top volume levels which have become normal there.

This is, obviously, not on Arrakis, where most of the story takes place, but on Caladan, the home planet of the Atreides clan.

My wife thought the ornithopters were really cool. 

I've been meaning to mention this novel, and putting it off because I felt that it deserved a fuller treatment than I had time to give it. But today I'm giving up. I have a busy few days coming up, and rather than put it off again I'm just going to say a little and then direct you to more extensive reviews.

"On Mondays I cleaned the rectory for the good of my soul." The speaker is Kirsty Sain, a widow in her...well, I'm not exactly sure about her age, but let's call it early elderly, as she seems to have been an adult in the early '70s. The next sentence suggests the way the story is going to open out from this simple and even dull routine: "I did it, too, in those days, for the good of Father Schuyler, who was young and untried." As the story goes on she's going to be called upon for the good of several others, including a most unlikely cat (but don't worry, this is not a cutesy cat story).

The rectory belongs to the small Catholic parish in a small North Carolina town in which Kirsty has lived for many years, for most of her adult life, but where she has never entirely fitted in: "stranded on the wrong side of the world," she says of her arrival there as a newlywed. She had grown up in the Shetland Islands, and I have to say I was initially puzzled by that as a fictional choice; it seemed arbitrary. But it works, the stormy, isolated, half-Nordic environment of one of the smaller islands prefiguring the isolation of her life in the U.S.: married, but childless as a result of a disaster in her youth, since her husband's death almost entirely alone, and not uncomfortable that way.

I was happy, or something like it. All my life I had lived among people. Now, although perhaps my days sound dull, I was well enough satisfied with my own company.

There is nothing very dramatic in the way she is slowly drawn out of that somewhat isolated self-sufficiency. Small occasions in which she is needed arise, and she responds, somewhat passively, somewhat resignedly, maybe reluctantly but not unwillingly. One such is her involvement with an anarchic Catholic family with children of such number that Kirsty has difficulty fixing the exact count in her mind. This family encounters great suffering, which Kirsty cannot undo or heal. But she is stalwart in doing what she can. 

Before I turn this over to serious reviewers, I have to say that this is one of those books where the simple act of reading, sentence by sentence, is enjoyable. I cannot say that about, for instance, Dostoevsky (though maybe that would be different if I could read Russian). Kirsty's narration is often wryly funny, often poignant. Her account of being photographed for the parish directory:

On my appointed day, I had shown up in a spirit of grudging resignation, to be jollied intolerably by the photographer and to enter my name and address on the appropriate paper form. In that issue of the directory you can find me still, looking every inch the retired lady berserker, my faded hair standing out in puffs either side of my face. My expression betrays the itchiness of my best moss-green wool dress and the lameness of the photographer's jokes. I am recorded in those pages as the worst species of witch, who eats children for breakfast and enjoys every mouthful.

The "berserker" reference is to her northern ancestors.

And another thing: one of the great pleasures of Sally Thomas's book of poems Motherland is her skill with the visual. (I wrote about it here.) That's very present in the novel:

The October days looked caught in amber. Amber was the color of the land as it rose and fell beneath the high, dry sky. At night the moon rounded and rode above the soft edge of the trees, breathing its calm blue light. The word at this time of the year felt enormous, tall and wide and empty. 

It's from Wiseblood Books, by the way, who are doing great work, and if you want to buy it you might want to order it directly from them.

Those more serious reviews:

Joan Bauer in Tiny Molecules

Tessa Carman in Plough

Fr. Dwight Longenecker in The Imaginative Conservative

Aarik Danielson in Fare Forward 

*

I had never heard of the first and last of those two publications. The last one, Fare Forward, is intriguing. The phrase is from the "Four Quartets," and the magazine is 

a Christian review of ideas founded in 2012 by a group of young Ivy League graduates. Trained by our time in the campus journal movement (now known as the Augustine Collective), we set out to start a publication that would be creedally orthodox, intentionally ecumenical, politically unaffiliated, and welcoming to all readers, regardless of faith or lack thereof.

Good for them. I cannot help saying that any group calling itself a "collective" is automatically a little suspect and/or ridiculous in my eyes. But they're young and probably don't have the same associations with the word that I do. 

*

Another note on Big Star: I listened, not very attentively, to Alex Chilton's solo album Like Flies On Sherbet. I'm not sure whether my impulse to give it a fair chance (i.e. several hearings) is strong enough to overcome my wish not to hear it again. Either way, I can't imagine that it could ever be anything but a big disappointment compared to Third / Sister Lovers or for that matter the other two original Big Star albums. AllMusic says it "isn't quite the car wreck it once appeared to be." Praise can't get much fainter than that. 

If you don't know that Big Star is a band, you probably don't care. If you do know, you probably have your own opinions, and might or might not be interested in hearing mine. But what's the point of having a blog if you don't opine on what interests  you?

Big Star, by the way, is also the name of a regional grocery store chain. I've always supposed that name of the chain suggested the band name, with the fact that they were a brand new band whom nobody had ever heard of making it funny. (Wikipedia confirms this.)

A capsule history of Big Star: The band was formed in Memphis. In 1967 sixteen-year-old Alex Chilton became, in fact, a big star, but not under his own name. As the singer in The Box Tops, he had a hugely successful Top 40 hit, "The Letter." By 1970 he had left that band. In 1971 he formed Big Star with Chris Bell, Jody Stephens, and Andy Hummel. They recorded two albums for Stax Records, which were well reviewed but not well promoted or distributed and were commercial flops. By 1974 the band had effectively broken up. Chilton and Stephens recorded a third album in 1975. It was deemed commercially non-viable and not even released until ca. 1978. The band, their three albums, and Chilton himself became legendary, the other members less so.

I never even heard of them till the '80s, when R.E.M. named them as an influence, and it was another twenty years before I heard them. A friend sent me a mixtape (way back when) of the third album, or, more accurately, his selection of eight or ten tracks from an album which contains as many as nineteen, depending on which release it is. Before I say anymore about that I'll back up and mention the other two. 

I figured that the title of the first album,  #1 Record, reflects the same sense of humor that got the band its name. I didn't realize until a few days ago when I read an interview with Jody Stephens that the title of the second one, Radio City, does, too. There was at the time, maybe still is, a common figure of speech in which the word "city" was a sort of emphasis: "It was cop city," i.e., there were a lot of police there. So "radio city" was exactly what the first album had not been, i.e. heard on the radio.

#1 Record / Radio City is the title given to a two-CD set of the first two albums, and combining them was a good idea. They're so similar that only someone who was already familiar with them separately would notice where one ends and the other begins. I guess I've heard the whole set at least five times now, twice within the past couple of months, so my opinion is probably pretty well fixed. And I'm going to have to damn with faint praise.

It is praise, though. It's only damning when compared to the wild enthusiasm with which many people, and most critics, speak of these two albums.  This is very good music; I just don't think it's absolutely great, landmark, essential, desert-island music. I'm perfectly willing to chalk that up to personal taste. I can point to one specific feature of many of the tracks that bothers me: a jerky, stop-and-start quality. The first track of #1 Record, "Feel," is as good an example as any. 

There's a lot of Beatles influence in that song as in many, especially the backing harmonies, and sometimes specific guitar tones, and those horns in the break, which remind me of some particular Beatles song that I can't quite place (I'm not a true Beatlemaniac). It's all extremely well crafted, but I don't love it. And that applies to at least half the tracks on the two albums. The lyrics are so-so, and there aren't a great many memorable tunes among the up-tempo tracks, though the riffs are catchy, as in "Feel." I find that the songs I like most are the simpler ones. And as for tunes, and just for overall appeal, "September Gurls" [sic], which appears near the end of Radio City, is probably my favorite of the whole two albums. 

("I was your Butch"--Butch was a dog.) I should also mention "Try Again," a poignant song about sinning repeatedly but never giving up. I could and may create a playlist of my favorite ten or so tracks from these albums, and that might add up to a desert island choice.

But then there's that third album. I spent some time with it over the past couple of weeks, and now it's definitely on my list of all-time greats. To get straight to the point: it's like Astral Weeks or Nick Drake's best work. The means by which it accomplishes this, as with the others, is a musical and lyrical package that's unlike anything else, and that somehow creates an emotional world of great depth and intensity. And just as with Morrison and Drake, some people just don't react to whatever it is that seems so magical to others and makes fanatical devotees of them.

It turns out, as I mentioned earlier, I had never actually heard the whole thing. My friend had selected the best tracks, certainly, but the inclusion of a few others, and some attentive listening, made me appreciate it all the more. It's not very much like the other Big Star albums, and that's partly because it isn't really a Big Star album at all, but rather an Alex Chilton album, with the participation of Jody Stephens and a host of session musicians and other guests. Chilton and Stephens were all that remained of Big Star by the mid-1970s when the album was recorded. 

Not all that much remains of the Big Star sound, either. There's Chilton's voice, of course. But there's relatively little of the basic guitar-pop sound that characterizes Big Star. Instead, there's a wide array of instruments, including on several songs some lovely and/or strange string arrangements. The lewd-sounding title of "Stroke It, Noel" puzzled me, as it's a pretty and delicate song. Then I noticed in the credits that the violin is played by Noel Gilbert. The title is indicative of a sort of self-subverting spirit that appears now and then on the album. Is "Jesus Christ" really the odd Christmas song it seems to be, or is it a joke? How much of "Thank You, Friends" is sincere, and how much is sarcasm directed at those who "made this all so...probable"? The ellipses are for a distinct pause in which your mind expects "possible," only to hear "probable" in what seems distinctly a sneer.

The album is strange to say the least, the songs veering from celebratory to anguished and almost disoriented--maybe not even almost. One reviewer says it's the sound of a band breaking up, but it had already broken up. Is it the sound of Alex Chilton breaking up? Some of the songs sound that way. But there are also several love songs which are sweet and beautiful and devoid of anger, irony, or bitterness--"Blue Moon," especially, stands out. Part of the answer seems to be that Chilton was in the middle of an intense, stormy, and ultimately failed love affair. Jim Dickinson, the producer, said the album is about deteriorating relationships, and that seems as good a summation as any. 

It's intense, beautiful, and different from anything else I've ever heard. Trying to describe music is frustrating and not all that useful, so I'll include one song here, with the proviso that it shouldn't be taken as typical of the album, which I'm not sure has any "typical."

One of the oddities of the album is that it's been released several times with significant differences in both the selection and the sequencing of tracks. Even the title, which you may have noticed I haven't mentioned, is questionable. The most frequently seen is Third/Sister Lovers. It was released under each and now both of those titles. Third is self-explanatory. Sister Lovers is not, as you might fear, some perversity, but a reference to the fact that Chilton and Stephens were dating sisters.

The double title belongs to what is apparently the definitive edition, in what Dickinson says is the originally intended sequencing. That's important, because putting, for instance, "Thank You, Friends" at the end creates a very different experience from ending with "Take Care," as sweet and sad a goodbye song as you'll ever hear. 

That edition, however, also contains four bonus tracks, only one of which, "Dream Lover" (not the Bobby Darin song from the '50s),  really belongs with the rest of the album. The others may or may not be interesting in themselves but don't fit. So make yourself a playlist, maybe putting "Dream Lover" somewhere in the middle, but put "Take Care" at the end.

There's a very well-done and very interesting documentary called Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me in which someone relates Alex saying "Music is something I can take or leave." It seems significant, because his career after the third Big Star seems to have been somewhat desultory. I haven't come across anyone saying that his later work is desert island material. 

Somehow Animal Farm escaped from the boxes where most of my books still reside, and I picked it up and started reading it on a whim. I had read it in high school and not since. I don't recall having a very strong opinion or impression of it, beyond the obvious satirical-polemical intent. And it's referred to often enough in political discussions that I didn't feel like I needed to re-read it. After all, it's a pretty slight book, once and maybe still favored for book reports by un-bookish students. How much more can there be to it than the grim news that revolutions, in this case a clearly left-wing revolution, can turn repressive? (I imagine everyone knows this, even if they haven't read the book, but just in case you haven't: it's a sort of allegory in which farm animals stage a revolution, drive out the human farmer, and set up a regime which quickly turns into a new form of oppression in a very Soviet style.)

It's better, both funnier and sadder than I expected. The justification for the revolution, the genuine oppression to which it's a response, is made clear. The rebellion begins with a stirring--really--and presumably sincere speech from an old pig, but he dies soon afterwards, and the revolution is made by others. The animals, both as species and as individuals, are sketched in a way that makes me think Orwell had a fair amount of knowledge of and sympathy for them, especially the horses.

Several pigs--Snowball, Squealer, and Napoleon--are the clever scoundrels who take advantage of the revolution to rule others for their own benefit, though Snowball is subject to a Trotsky-style expulsion and thereafter blamed for everything that goes wrong. I don't know whether it's true or not that pigs are actually quite intelligent--what little contact I've had with them argues against it--but that of course does not in the least prevent them from acting in the way that has caused us to make "pig" an insult. 

The dogs are loyal but malleable, and loyal to the wrong person, soon becoming Napoleon's bodyguards, enforcers, and executioners. The cat (singular) looks out for number one. There are three horses, two big draft horses named Boxer (male) and Clover (female), and Molly, "the foolish, pretty white mare who drew Mr. Jones's trap." Boxer is pure nobility, "as strong as any two ordinary horses put together," and not only a more productive worker than anyone else, because of his strength, but more diligent as well. But he's not very smart. He believes everything the pigs tell him, even when he thinks it doesn't really sound quite right, and his response is always a resolution to work harder. So he works himself nearly to death, and then is despicably betrayed. Molly only cares about sugar and ribbons for her mane, and is soon lured back to human service. 

The hens and cows mostly do as they're told, most of their attention absorbed by the production of  eggs and milk, and aroused to anger only when that is interfered with. One rooster becomes a gaudy sort of mascot for the pigs, marching at the head of parades. An old donkey named Benjamin is the only one who seems to see what's happening, but he's a cynic and doesn't do anything about it. 

And then there are the sheep. Next to the pigs, the sheep are the worst. They are fools, the useful idiots once praised by Lenin (or one of those guys). Having reached the limits of their intelligence in learning to repeat "Four legs good, two legs bad," they bring to an end any meeting of the community in which disagreement with Napoleon is expressed, or seems about to be expressed, by drowning out with their chanting of their six words the voice of anyone whose speech threatens to be "problematic," to use a word favored by our own sheep. I never have thought very highly of protests that involve marching and chanting simple slogans. And now whenever I see a crowd of students shouting down a speaker I'll think of those sheep.

It's really quite brilliantly done, and might have remained popular even if it had not remained relevant. The probably-most-quoted bit from the book has been on my mind lately: "All animals are equal. But some are more equal than others." Examples of this syndrome appear in the news every day. There are the many politicians and officials who, during the COVID pandemic, laid stringent restrictions on the rest of us which they felt free to ignore.  There are the wealthy climate activists who demand sacrifices of us while showing no inclination whatsoever to stop flying around in private jets and in general living at the upper end of wealth and privilege. And there is the current flap over the illicit possession of classified documents by important politicians: from what I've read, immediate dismissal and loss of security clearance is the least that would happen to an ordinary government employee who so much as leaves the building with classified documents, and jail would be a definite possibility. (Maybe you remember the case of Sandy Berger, who just flat-out stole classified documents, for reasons which as far as I know have never been definitively revealed, and who actually had his security clearance restored after a three-year suspension.)

But these are just more or less typical human behavior: one set of rules for the rich and powerful, another for the masses; business as usual. So comparisons to what's happening today are loose. Certain parallels are clear, but we've had no revolution, and comparatively little physical violence. What strikes me most in the way of resemblance to our own situation is the conversion of falsehood into truth. I say "conversion" instead of "substitution" because that's the real difference between totalitarianism and ordinary lying. I said many times during the Trump administration that those who took his blatant falsehoods as a sign that we had entered 1984 territory had either not read the book or did not understand it.

What makes the regime of 1984 so powerful and frightening is that it has the power to make you acquiesce in its lies. The pigs rewrite their own history, and punish anyone who tries to point out the change. If someone tells you an obvious transparent lie, and you know it's a lie, you can ignore him or scoff at him or point out the lie or whatever else suits you. But if he has the power to destroy evidence of the truth, and not only to punish you for contradicting him, but to force you to say you believe him on pain of losing your livelihood, or worse, you are in a very tough position. Today's progressives are much more willing and able to do this than Trump ever was or could dream of being, given the forces opposing him. The offense, which would be a crime if the progressives had their way, of "misgendering" is maybe the best example, but there are many others.

*

The adventure of the Chinese ballon (sounds like a Hardy Boys title) made me think of this song.

Dixon, as you will have guessed, is Franklin W. Dixon, the author's name on the cover of the Hardy Boys books. He did not actually exist, at least not as the author of those books, which were a group effort, and not always the same group. Usually there was at minimum an outline written by one person and a manuscript produced from the outline by another. You can read an overview of the various people involved here, and details of who did what in each book here. It was all done at the direction of the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Knowing that, you won't be surprised that the same company produced the Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, Bobbsey Twins, and other similar books. Goodbye to Carolyn Keene.

All of that suggests something less than a sincere creative effort on the part of a Mr. Dixon, and I'm glad I didn't know that when I was ten or twelve years old and discovered the books.

I used to spend the night sometimes at the home of my maternal grandparents, and the little room I slept in had a bookshelf which held a number of books belonging to my uncle Al. He was the youngest of three, and only a dozen or so years older than me. I had been sleeping in that room for a while but apparently had not thought the grown-up-looking books would be of interest to me until one day I picked up one with the intriguing title of What Happened At Midnight. I was quickly hooked, and eventually read all of the two dozen or so on the shelves in that room. As best I can remember in consultation with a chronological list of the books, I read every title from the first, The Tower Treasure, published in 1927, through The Sign of the Crooked Arrow, published in 1949 (though of course I had no idea of their order of publication, or interest in it, but just picked up another when I finished one). 

It seems there were at least two that I took home and never returned: The Disappearing Floor (1940) and The Clue of the Broken Blade (1942). How they managed to stay with me from my late teens  until now is a mystery. Perhaps they didn't stay with me; perhaps they just stayed at my parents' house for over thirty years and I appropriated them when they moved in 2000.

A few weeks ago, partly because those two books had surfaced even though most of our books are still in boxes after moving (awaiting final determination of bookshelf placement), and partly with the thought that it might be a pleasant exercise in nostalgia, I decided to read one of them and picked up The Clue of the Broken Blade.

What a disappointment. The book is colorless and lifeless. Frank, Joe, and their father are blanks. The prose is not just wooden but ill-made, like furniture banged together crudely from the pieces of a shipping pallet. The plot seems barely coherent but that may be partly my fault, as I chose to read one chapter a night in bed, when my mind is pretty sluggish at best. I could not find in my reaction any trace of the enjoyment I had at twelve or so, or even a perception of the reasons for it, even though if no longer operative, as might happen with an old episode of Gunsmoke. I must have thought the story was exciting and suspenseful, and I know I liked what Frank and Joe represented, and wanted to be like them. Maybe, just maybe, if I had not been reading when drowsy, I would still have felt some sense of the mere what's-going-to-happen appeal of the plot. But the best I can do is assume that I must have felt it at the time. 

The most I can say in favor of the book is that the simplicity, naivete, sincerity (by which I mean the absence of irony), and absence of vulgarity were mildly refreshing in contrast to much or most of what's offered to, or pushed at, young people today. But it's so very unreal--and maybe that sheds some light on what's happened over the past half-century. 

*

At the opposite extreme: two unrelated incidents caused me to watch a 1980 BBC production of The Winter's Tale. First, a recent issue of The New Criterion includes an article on that play by Anthony Daniels. He's always an interesting writer, but although I had read the play some years ago (twenty or so, maybe?) I didn't remember it very clearly, and I didn't want to read the article without better knowledge of the play. And my Shakespeare is still packed away in one of a dozen or so large heavy boxes stacked in a hallway, and I don't know which one. 

Second, a comment on some post somewhere online informed me that subscribers to the BBC's streaming service, BritBox, have access to the BBC Television Shakespeare, which includes essentially all the plays--thirty-seven of them, and I say "essentially" because there is apparently still some scholarly disagreement about a couple of them. I had not known that the series even existed, much less that I had access to it. 

So I immediately looked for, and found, and watched, The Winter's Tale. I cannot overstate how much I enjoyed it. I was almost rapturous. The marvelous Mozart-like flow of language was a non-stop pleasure. It was just as well that I didn't have the text handy, with notes, because I would have been constantly stopping and starting the film to figure out some knotty figure or to explain an unknown or obsolete word or usage. After twenty minutes or so I decided to just let those go by, since I could follow well enough without them, and surrender to the flow. 

And the story: this is a late play, and it seems to share with The Tempest a sort of mellowness, neither tragedy nor comedy, and it ends with events described by that term Tolkien gave us, eucatastrophe. The "catastrophe" part of that, as we commonly use the word, is applicable: it could almost be termed violent in its reversal of what came before. And a critic could fairly call it dramatically unconvincing, or worse. 

Moreover, the play is oddly constructed, and fairly criticized for that. It's in two parts, and the first part is a sort of mini-Othello story, the second part a sequel which takes place some years later, and redeems the tragic first part. This makes for something of a stitched-together quality, and it can't be considered one of Shakespeare's best. But I was greatly moved by it, and will certainly turn to it again. I guess I'm something of a pushover for a story which has that general arc. I like to think that's because it is fundamentally true to...well, I shouldn't say "true to life," because in general use that  phrase implicitly refers to earthly life, but true to the deepest realities. At any rate I was greatly moved, and will certainly turn to this play again. 

And I hope this video will continue to be available so that I can turn to it. A list of the play's productions (on Wikipedia, I think) called this one "orthodox." That's probably not meant to be a compliment, but it's fair enough: there is nothing gimmicky about the production, nothing that smacks of someone trying to put his own personal stamp on the work, or to render it somehow more fitting or engaging or palatable to a contemporary audience. In this case "orthodox" means excellent acting and appropriate, fairly simple, stylized but unobtrusive staging. I could quibble with this or that detail of either, but it would be just that, quibbling. 

Somewhere online in the past day or two I saw an advertisement for a Shakespeare in modern language. Well, it's true enough that in many cases the plot alone of many of the plays, and the plain matter of much of the dialog, has plenty of appeal. Still, that seems like Raphael in monochrome. 

This is another trip into the only partially explored territory of music I bought in MP3 format when it was very inexpensive at eMusic.com, and I could experiment in a way that I never could have before. 

His Name Is Alive: Livonia

To some of us, the phrase "4AD in the 1980s" suggests magic. 4AD, in case you don't know, is the name of a record company, and in the 1980s it released some of the most wonderful popular music ever made, including most of the work of the Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil. And that continued into the 1990s and beyond. (I'm not dismissing later releases, but I haven't heard many of them.) Most likely it was those associations that were responsible for my having bought no less than seven albums and/or EPs by His Name Is Alive, a band I had not previously heard of. 

I decided to start with their first album, Livonia, released in 1990. Livonia is the name of the town in Michigan where the apparent mastermind of the project, Warren Defever, grew up. From what I've read "project" is a better term than "band," as it seems to involve a constantly shifting cast of musicians with Defever as the only constant. You might expect--at any rate I expected--that an album named for the midwestern home town of the writer would be a rootsy sort of thing, an Americana sort of thing, straightforward light rock or folk-rock with lyrics reflecting on the writer's origins. But it's every bit as other-worldly and mysterious as anything else in the 4AD lineup. 

If you aren't listening closely much of it will seem simpler than it is, and fairly uniform throughout: a single female voice, usually with a noticeable amount of reverb, singing pretty tunes with lyrics that tend to run from the vague to the cryptic, though sometimes evocative. But when you turn it up and listen more closely you hear an elaborate background of mysterious and distant sounds: voices, instruments, noises. 

It's difficult to pick one track as a good example, but this one, "If July," will do.

They follow me here then I know what I have
If I swallowed it whole they'll show me the path
Pretending to pray this is missed once a day
Please allow faith to find what's new is her first name

I look forward to hearing more of their work. According to AllMusic, music meriting at least four stars has continued to be released under this name until at least 2015. Of the more than twenty albums listed, the most recent I have is Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth  (I love the title), from 2001. There are over twenty albums altogether. There's bound to be some great stuff in there. 

One song on Livonia, "How Ghosts Affect Relationships," begins with a line from Yeats, "I dreamed that one had died in a strange place," from "Dream of Death." I wonder if I missed other literary allusions in the lyrics. 

Faith and the Muse: Elyria

This is not a 4AD release. But the second song on the album, "Sparks," certainly sounds like it could have been. Specifically, it sounds remarkably like the Cocteau Twins, so much so that you might mistake it for them if you heard it from across a room. But it's the only track that sounds like that. The rest of the album is as extravagantly varied as Livonia is consistent.

If it fits into any box, it would be the one labelled "Eclectic." It could quite justifiably be called progressive rock, if that term is meant to include complexity of any kind, not just the instrumental virtuosity with which it's often associated. It's big, romantic, dramatic, and ambitious, encompassing some fairly hard rock, the complex artsy work (musical and lyrical) of women like Kate Bush and Loreena McKennit, folk music (including one actual folk song, "The Unquiet Grave") and vaguely medieval-renaissance classical music. Goth and darkwave need to be mentioned in there, too. I've seen some photos of them in which they're seriously, almost comically, goth. 

One remarkable track is a song by the Elizabethan composer-poet Thomas Campion (an old favorite of mine), "When To Her Lute Corrina Sings." The tune, which I think is not Campion's, is straightforward, but the accompaniment is very dissonant piano and cello (I think) that sounds like it could have come from "Pierrot Lunaire" or some other early 20th century work.

Possibly the most effective description of the music is that it sounds like what you might expect of someone who looks and dresses like this (and is an extremely gifted musician).

(From Wikimedia Commons)

Why, knowing nothing much about this band, did I buy four albums by them fifteen or more years ago? I suspect it had something to do with their name. That's intriguing, isn't it? Faith and the Muse. Maybe I thought they dealt with Christian themes, especially as one of the albums is called Evidence of Heaven. But there's a simple explanation for the name and it has nothing to do with the noun or the concept "faith": the group is primarily two people, William Faith and Monica Richards, the latter (pictured above) presumably being the muse.

I'm not including a video clip because to pick one would not be truly representative. But there are plenty on YouTube. Some may find the music pretentious and overblown. Personally I like it very much. 

*

Speaking of music, the past couple of weeks have seen the deaths of two well-known figures from the '60s, Jeff Beck and David Crosby. Beck, if you don't already know, and if you don't already know you probably don't care, was one of that trio of flash guitar players who passed through the Yardbirds, and later achieved personal fame as very visible members of much better-known bands (Cream, Led Zeppelin), and later on their own. I strongly suspect that he was, in the end, the best of the three, as the other two (Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page) seemed to more or less rest on their accomplishments, musically speaking, of the '60s and '70s, while Beck continued to be adventurous. (By "best" I mean produced more worthwhile music over a longer span of time.) Much of his work was in the jazz-rock fusion genre, which is definitely not a favorite of mine. But if you fancy electric guitar at all you should hear, really should hear, Live At Ronnie Scott's.

Hear and maybe see, as it's available as both audio and video. The benefit of the latter is that you get to see Beck and a very impressive band at work; the drawback is that Beck has some annoying physical mannerisms. And, as he was 64 at the time, I suspect that black hair is not all his. And why is a guy at retirement age still wearing that sleeveless shirt-vest thing? It's funny, really--as adventurous as he was in his music, he seemed to want to continue to look exactly like he did in 1970 or so. 

Guitarists and guitar fans sometimes talk about the great music Jimi Hendrix might have made if he hadn't died so young. Maybe he would have. Or maybe he would have been one of those '60s stars who faded after the age of 30 or so. That's more or less how I think of David Crosby: for me he is significant mainly as a member of the Byrds. Personally I prefer their work and Buffalo Springfield's to anything I've ever heard by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and/or Young, together or separately, with the exception of some of Young's solo work. CSN and CSN&Y made some undeniably brilliant music, but I never really cared about it in a way I did that of their earlier bands.

This brief obituary of Crosby at The American Conservative contains a strikingly accurate summary of what happened to the hippies: "the counterculture’s collapse into Clintonite politics." I can't think of anyone I knew from those days who isn't now a conventional, often near-fanatical, Democrat. 

The collection of writings by Alfred Delp, S.J. which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago has a long introduction by Thomas Merton. I'm not a Merton enthusiast, having found what I've read of his work (not all that much) a somewhat mixed bag, but this essay, dated October 1962, is excellent.

Fr. Delp reminds us that somewhere in the last fifty years we have entered a mysterious limit set by Providence and have entered a new era. We have, in some sense, passed a point of no return, and it is both useless and tragic to continue to live in the nineteenth century.... [T]here has been a violent disruption of society and a radical overthrow of that modern world which goes back to Charlemagne.

Now, sixty years after Merton wrote this, roughly eighty years since Delp wrote, the truth of these words is hardly arguable. The end of the Christian era and its impending replacement by something yet to be known had already been a frequent topic of notice and speculation since sometime in the 19th century and has continued ever since, so neither Delp nor Merton can be credited with any unusual insight on that point alone. The difference between them and, say, Matthew Arnold ("two worlds, one dead") or Yeats ("what rough beast") was that they were seeing the likely shape of the new age: violent totalitarianism.

Delp was, naturally, speaking mostly, and with the utmost personal concern, of Nazism and the devastating war it had brought upon the world. And much of Merton's essay takes up a similar theme. After quoting Delp that "Modern man is not even capable of knowing God," Merton says:

In order to  understand these harsh assertions by Fr. Delp we must remember they were written by a man in prison, surrounded by Nazi guards. When he speaks of "modern man," he is in fact speaking of the Nazis or of their accomplices and counterparts.

Delp and Merton both feared that violent totalitarianism might be the most characteristic face of the new age, though both were wise enough to see that it was only the face, and that the inner nature of the thing involved, in fact required, a revolution in the idea of what human life is, what it is for, and what it can be. 

The Soviet Union continued to carry the totalitarian banner until 1990. And when it fell there was a sigh of relief: that danger had been quashed, maybe or even probably forever, and modernity, understood as a general application of classical liberalism, was free to continue on the wide bright road illuminated by the twin beacons of Science and Freedom. But liberalism had either turned into or been replaced by something else: the same philosophical or religious disease that had produced fascism and communism, the faith and hope that mankind (or, in the case of fascism, a certain subset thereof) can achieve self-salvation by transforming the immanent world.

This involves the liberation of mankind, either collectively or individually or both, from the limitations which thwart us. It requires, first, liberation from God, who always in one way or another says "Thou shalt not" to something that man deeply wants to do. And then it involves all other constraints once thought (still thought by many) to be an essential part of the way things are, not subject to removal. These include, especially include, physical reality. As for moral reality--well, is there any morality apart from that which produces a result which makes us happy? And don't trouble yourself too much about analyzing the nature of happiness: how can it be anything but a condition of comfort in both mind and body? And every person will have his own view of what that entails.

In apparent, but not actual, contradiction, this total liberation requires molding and controlling people to make them fit inhabitants of the new age. If it doesn't begin with explicit totalitarianism, it eventually arrives there, because people won't naturally become what the ideology requires that they become. The fanatical progressivism that has seized so much of our culture is of this cloth. At bottom it's of a piece with fascism and communism, in that it is an attempt to create a new humanity. It isn't very violent now and may never be, because it exercises so much power without violence, and is steadily gaining more. If it can, for instance, close off certain important lines of work to anyone who dissents from its program, or shut down the public expression of dissenting views, it doesn't need violence. (If you think it isn't working on those and achieving some results, you aren't paying attention.)

I'm hardly the first or only person to make these basic observations. I'm working up to saying two things:

1) We can now see pretty clearly the shape of the new ideal of civilization that is replacing the Christian one. And we can see that it is in essence a product of the same force that produced fascism and communism, even though progressivism, loathes the former and doesn't take the crimes of the latter very seriously, and in principle abhors violence. But compulsion may be exercised without violence. Relatively non-violent totalitarianism--"soft totalitarianism," as some have called it--may succeed where violent hard totalitarianism failed.

2) The thing that I refer to as a "force" is the spirit of Antichrist. I've never been one, and still am not one, to make judgments about whether we are or are not in the end times. Maybe we are, maybe we aren't. And I don't claim that we are now or soon will be under the rule of the Antichrist. What I think is pretty clear is that the spiritual driving force of the current effort to remake humanity is the same one that will become or will produce, if it hasn't already, the Antichrist. "You will become as gods." It may not be the regime of the actual Antichrist, but it is of the Antichrist.

Rod Dreher recently quoted a letter of Pope Benedict: 

We see how the power of the Antichrist is expanding, and we can only pray that the Lord will give us strong shepherds who will defend his church in this hour of need from the power of evil.

In short, this is What Is Actually Happening, and it's important that Christians recognize it and have no illusions about it, especially as the humanitarian aspects of the Antichristic spirit are often superficially similar to Christian ethics. The essential difference is that the former always points and leads away from God, where the latter always points and leads toward him.

*

These thoughts were provoked not only by Delp and Merton, but by a remark in a fascinating book which I recently began to read: Jacques Barzun's history of the modern world, From Dawn to Decadence. This was another case when I picked up a book from the library discard shelf, let it sit around for a couple of years, and then, when I moved recently and had to pack up the books, considered giving it back to the library. But I leafed through it, read the opening pages, and decided to keep it.

The book begins with the Protestant revolution. In discussing Puritanism, Barzun says this:

Revolutions paradoxically begin by promising freedom and then turn coercive and "puritanical," to save themselves from both discredit and reaction.

Is that the meaning of the frenzied efforts by fanatical progressives to restrict any and all speech that contradicts their views or even causes them distress? Many institutions and areas of life are now well under their control, but there is certainly reaction. Maybe the intensity of the effort to suppress it is indicative of a grip not yet as tight as it wishes to be.

I was working on a post earlier today but didn't have time to finish it, and may not tomorrow, so, briefly:

A remark from a priest seen on Facebook on Thursday: "I thought I was having an epiphany this morning but it was transferred to Sunday."

This evening my wife and I were shamefully late for Mass. We deserved to be escorted to the front pew and mocked, but fortunately that's not done. We sat on a bench in the lobby with a woman and a girl, presumably mother and daughter and presumably also having been quite late to Mass, though not as late as we were. (I know "lobby" is not the right word, but this is a fairly modern building and that's what it feels like. Fortunately, for the kind of architecture it is, the building is not unpleasant.) The doors were closed but there's a speaker in the lobby which is wired to the priest's microphone. That made for a slightly odd effect, since we could hear the priest very well, and during the hymns a few voices from people who were especially close to the priest or especially loud, including one especially loud but not very tune-capable one, and not much else. The choir was audible but muffled.

Feeling that we really ought not to receive, we remained where we were during communion. During that ten minutes or so I couldn't hear anything much except the soft near-whisper of the priest: Body of Christ. Body of Christ. Body of Christ. I could see people leaving and returning to the pews, including a little boy who looked no more than eight and is in a wheel chair and seemed eager. So many people, so many unique little worlds full of unique and yet universal thoughts and cares and hopes and pleasures. 

It was quite beautiful to kneel there while that was going on, to watch the people, to hear Body of Christ. Body of Christ. Body of Christ, on and on, like little waves splashing quietly on a shore. 

The choir sang "What Child Is This?" As you probably know, the tune is an old English folk one called "Greensleeves," and no words of mine can do justice to its beauty, which will last as long as music does. But I had never given any thought to the English words written for it. I had unthinkingly supposed that they were traditional, too, or at any rate anonymous. But they were written in the 19th century by William Chatterton Dix, and they are extremely well-wrought. Since I was old enough to notice and understand them I've loved these two lines:

Good Christian, fear, for sinners here
The silent word is pleading.

I think it's that paradox of the silent word that gives me such a sense of reverence bordering on awe. "Fear"? Isn't that out of place? No, not if we really grasp what's going on. And I always notice that it's "Christian," singular. Not a collective but you, me. 

So Joseph Ratzinger aka Pope Benedict XVI has left us. It's an odd and not really very relevant association, but seeing his obituaries in the press makes me think of a remark by a non-Catholic friend of mine early in the pontificate of Pope Francis. His view was based on the appearance of the two popes, mostly as they were seen on television, and my friend admitted that it was superficial. He thought Benedict looked (I don't remember his exact words) stern and vaguely mean, and all too much like the Emperor Palpatine. That latter resemblance was enjoyed by some of Benedict's detractors, and "superficial" is probably too generous a word for any conclusion drawn from it. (Of course you know that Palpatine is the super-evil Sith Lord in Star Wars.)

Francis, on the other hand, struck my friend as open, generous, etc. I think it's pretty clear now which of the two is more likely to speak maliciously. Well, impressions based on television news are apparently as accurate as one might suppose. As far as I know Benedict was never snide or cruel in his public speech. Nor was his concern for preserving the inheritance of the Church--not just his concern of course but his duty--exercised in a brutal way, though I know that for some any resistance to post-Vatican-II progressivism is intrinsically brutal. I have never read anything by Benedict that was not carefully and generously worded, even when it contained stark criticisms and firm directives.

But I suppose millions of people have my friend's image of Benedict as the closed-in, introverted, cruel authoritarian, and can never be persuaded out of it.

As for his actual thought, one of the first things that comes to my mind is a remark quoted in a book-length collection of interviews with then-Cardinal Ratzinger, published in the 1980s as The Ratzinger Report: 

It must be clearly stated that a real reform of the Church presupposes an unequivocal turning away from the erroneous paths whose catastrophic consequences are already incontestable.

That's true as an abstract principle: if you're headed in the wrong direction you can only correct yourself by changing direction, not by going faster or pumping up your commitment. And it's as true as a description of the state of the Church as it was almost forty years ago. As I've written more than once here, the internal conflict within the Church between what I will call, tendentiously, the drive toward acceptance of the faith as a species of the therapeutic (see this post) and the determination to preserve it as itself is not going to be resolved in my lifetime, and probably not within yours, no matter how young you are.

I can at least tentatively agree in general with this obituary by Michael Brendan Dougherty, Why Future Generations Will Celebrate Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, and with its conclusion:

Benedict XVI was the greatest mind to reach the papacy in a millennium. I write his obituary now. But centuries hence, he will be recognized as the man who buried the dictatorship of relativism — and the doubts of the 20th century.

I take Dougherty to mean in that last sentence a philosophical, theological, and just plain logical burial. Obviously the thing is still very much alive. Is it, as a cultural force, a dead man walking, mortally wounded and soon to totter and fall? Or is it about to rule the world for a time? I don't know. And I have to admit that I haven't read enough of Benedict's theological writings to judge whether "burial" is too strong a term. But he was a great man of the Church, and I put it that way because I think his importance, influence, and achievement are greater than his papacy alone. 

*

I long ago lost what little inclination I ever had to make a big celebration of New Year's Eve. I believe it was a New Year's Eve party back when I was in college that played a role in dampening my enthusiasm for the custom. I drank at least an entire bottle of cheap Chianti, and though I don't remember for sure it may have been most of two bottles. It's possible that I smoked something besides tobacco as well; I don't remember that, either. At any rate, the next day was by far the worst hangover I've ever had. I recall waking up with a terrible headache and a dire thirst, going into the kitchen and drinking a big glass of water, and immediately throwing up. I staggered back to bed and slept, not very comfortably, for the rest of the day. Later in life, as a more prudent adult, I just never felt much excitement about marking the stroke of midnight. Ok, well, that's that, here we are, good night. And I'm lucky in that although I very much enjoy a drink and a mild buzz, I have no inclination at all to go much beyond that. Perhaps cheap Chianti was an influence there.

*

Just when I'm finally ready to enjoy the Christmas lights, most people have taken them down. There were still a few last night when I went to my usual Friday night Adoration hour. And in a development that seems providential I was asked several days ago if I could substitute for someone in the 11-till-midnight hour tonight. This seems a good, maybe the best, way to mark the turn of the year. I hope there will still be some Christmas lights to be seen on my drive home afterwards.

Last night I had an opportunity to explain Eucharistic Adoration to a non-Catholic. I don't think I did very well. It is a really weird thing, isn't it?

Happy New Year to all. 

MARCELLUS: It faded on the crowing of the cock.
Some say that ever ’gainst that season comes
Wherein our Savior’s birth is celebrated,
This bird of dawning singeth all night long;
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad,
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallowed and so gracious is that time.

HORATIO:
So have I heard and do in part believe it.

--Hamlet, Act I Scene 1

"It" of course is the ghost of Hamlet's father. I once saw, or received, or sent, a Christmas card that had Marcellus's speech for text. That was a long time ago and I can't visualize the card very clearly, but I know it was very handsomely produced. The last line was firmly and permanently impressed upon my memory as a part of Christmas. Permanently, yes, but not with 100% accuracy: until I looked it up just now I thought it was "the time." Not a significant divergence, though.

And I had forgotten Horatio's response. That might be taken as a motto to be placed at the entrance of the modern age, or whatever you want to call the period that began a bit before Shakespeare's time, and which now seems to be ending, to be replaced by something which as yet has no agreed-upon name. For a long time that age, like Horatio, couldn't decide whether it was Christian or not. The decision seems to have been made now, culturally speaking, and the new age seems to be a considerably darker time than the capitalized version of that phrase promises. Still, so hallowed and so gracious is this time. 

Although I grew up on a cattle farm, I never heard the word "manger" in any context other than that of the Nativity scene. I imagined it as it's frequently depicted, a box or basket lined with straw as a makeshift bed, crude but cozy. I did not connect it with the trough from which our cattle ate. I was well into adulthood before I realized that it was exactly the same thing for which we used the term "feed trough" or just "trough,"  a feature of every stall in the barn into which I poured oats and whatever else I was told to give the cattle. There was nothing cozy about it. It was just a dusty wooden niche, a shelf with sides, attached to one wall of the stall, and when the stall's resident was dining somewhat dampened with bovine saliva. In his homily this morning Father Steve, maybe suspecting that many of us failed to appreciate just how mundane, how low, a thing a manger really is, emphasized it, using the word "trough" repeatedly. "And laid him in a trough" has a much different connotation, doesn't it? 

One of my favorite Christmas albums--and there aren't many--is A Tapestry of Carols by Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band. It's a very, very English folk rendition of a number of traditional carols,  also mostly very English (e.g "The Holly and the Ivy") and it's wonderful. But it isn't the only Christmas album they made. There's another, called Carols and Capers, as well as a compilation, A Christmas Caper, that draws from the other two. I listened to it today and was very surprised to hear what seems to be an African-American song, "Poor Little Jesus." It's a striking departure from their usual repertoire, and very beautiful, I think. 

This year I have to a great extent managed to stay clear of the un-Christmas, the festivity now generally referred to in public as Holiday, or "the Holidays." That was partly because of various circumstances that kept me even more at home than usual. And it was partly the silver lining in Alabama having lost two games this season. I loathe TV commercials in general, and rarely watch TV that includes them. But when I do see them it's during football season, and from some time in October until the end of the year many of them involve Holiday, and thus are doubly, no triply, annoying. But Alabama football was over at the end of the regular season--no SEC championship game, no watching other games that might affect Alabama's place in the playoff picture--but also no more Holiday commercials. (I only care about the NFL when former Alabama players are prominent--congratulations, Jalen Hurts.)

And it was partly just the latest phase in a general re-orientation of my feelings at this time of  year. I've realized that one element of my hostility to Holiday was the way it had come to seem like something of a parody of Christmas. So it seemed like a cheat, making me struggle not to dislike it, even to hate it.

But as the divergence has continued I find that the two are now more separate in my mind. I wrote about this last year in my very brief career writing for The Lamp. And I find that this year I've been more able to take my own advice, and that Holiday does not much intrude on my observance of Advent. I'm even mildly cheered by the lights and other spectacles at people's houses, though walking into a store pretty much sours my mood, as does the Holiday music (which naturally gets stuck in my head).

Which does not mean that I've been very good about observing Advent by treating it more like Lent. But I have done something, and in this department something is always better than nothing. And one thing I've done is to begin reading a book that I've had for several years and that is very well suited to Advent: the prison writings of Fr. Alfred Delp, S.J.

Delp was an opponent of the Nazi regime, and in the last days of the Reich he was arrested on a charge of involvement in a plot against Hitler. He was not involved, but the prosecutor was determined to convict him of something, and as is almost inevitably the case when the law becomes a tool in the hands of power, he succeeded. It was late 1944 and early 1945, when the Reich was clearly doomed, and its enemies were pouring destruction upon Germany; the consequences of the nation's madness were being made brutally clear. The prison writings are the voice of a man unjustly imprisoned by and facing death at the hands of unreasoning and implacable enemies, a man stripped of any impulse toward sentimentality and false hope. It's a voice I need to hear. 

Unless we have been shocked to our depths at ourselves and the things we are capable of, as well as at the failings of humanity as a whole, we cannot understand the full import of Advent.

If the whole message of the coming of God, of the day of salvation, of approaching redemption, is to seem more than a divinely inspired legend or a bit of poetic fiction, two things must be accepted unreservedly.

First, that life is both powerless and futile insofar as by itself it has neither purpose nor fulfillment. It is powerless and futile within its own range of existence and also as a consequence of sin. To this must be added the rider that life clearly demands both purpose and fulfillment. 

Secondly it must be recognized that it is God's alliance with humanity, his being on our side, ranging himself with us, that corrects this state of meaningless futility. It is necessary to be conscious of God's decision to enlarge the boundaries of his own supreme existence by condescending to share ours for the overcoming of sin.

It follows that life, fundamentally, is a continuous Advent; hunger and thirst and awareness of lack involve movement toward fulfillment. But this also means that in this progress toward fulfillment humanity is vulnerable; we are perpetually moving toward, and are capable of receiving, the ultimate revelation with all the pain inseparable from that achievement.

While time lasts there can be no end to it all and to try to bring the quest to an ultimate conclusion is one of the illusory temptations to which human nature is exposed. In fact hunger and thirst and wandering in the wilderness and perpetual rescue by a sort of life-line are all part of the ordinary hazards of human existence. 

Akenfield, subtitled Portrait of an English Village, is a book I've wanted to read for thirty years or more, and have finally done so. I first heard of it in the old Common Reader catalog, a treasure killed or at least assisted toward death, I assume, by the Internet. The catalog was published by and for book lovers, and was itself an excellent read. (I first heard of Alice Thomas Ellis there as well.) I fear too many of its readers were like me, reading the catalog avidly but not ordering from it very often. In my defense, I had much less free cash in those days.

Ronald Blythe was the subject of one of the first entries in the 52 Authors series here: Week 9. Akenfield is a famous book, but I'm not sure it's Blythe's most famous. That might be Word from Wormingford, one of several collections of weekly columns he wrote for the Church of England's Church Times. (I'm just guessing about that, on the basis of which books I've seen discussed.)

I don't recall ever having heard the term "oral history" before some time in the 1970s, but the thing certainly existed, and Akenfield, which was published in 1969, is a prime example. It is in a sense slightly misleading to call Blythe its author, because most of it is the transcribed voices of the people who live in Akenfield, a pseudonym for the village in which Blythe lived.

All the facts about the economy, the population, and social life of Akenfield are drawn from a village in East Suffolk; only the names of the village and the villagers have been changed.

Blythe, then, was not a journalist who dropped in to inspect colorful rural life and went back to the city or the suburbs to write about it. He was writing about a place and people he knew intimately (though that is perhaps not the right term for his relationship with some of the very reticent people). He was in his forties in 1967 when he decided that the changing culture of the village was worth documenting--what it was changing from, what it was changing to. The former, as has been the case for more than a century now, was fast passing out of living memory, with whole trades, such as thatcher, and the knowledge and skills involved in them ceasing to exist. So he talked to, or rather listened to, dozens of people, from the elderly to teenagers, to assemble this absolutely fascinating picture of a place and a culture. His introductory commentaries on the interviews are a pleasure in themselves, rich in both perception and quality of writing. 

I wonder how many of us mentally prefix the word "quaint," or at least some unarticulated sense of that idea, to the phrase "English village." I've begun to have a grudge against the word. I hear people apply it to any place or structure that doesn't look like it was newly erected in and for suburban sprawl. By now the word is not all that far removed from "cute." It's usually, among other things, patronizing, with suggestions that the thing so described is somehow removed from "the real world."

I can imagine someone approaching this book and thinking, if not in so many words, that he is about to view a picture of something quaint. Picturesque. Charming. And so forth. Well, it may in some ways merit those terms, but not in any sense akin to that of another that sometimes goes along with them: idyllic. There was nothing idyllic about the agricultural life which was still, in 1967, the foundation of Akenfield and which not so long before had been more or less the entirety of it. It was a hard life in its nature, and was often made much harder by injustice, by landowners who held more or less life and death power over farm workers, literally working men to death at times in a condition of near-slavery. The first section of the book is called "Survivors." Here is the first voice, a seventy-one-year-old farm worker describing the situation ca. 1910:

It must seem that there was war between farmers and men in those days. I think there was, particularly in Suffolk. These employers were famous for their meanness. They took all they could from the men and boys who worked their land. They bought their life's strength for as little as they could. They wore us out without a thought because, with the big families, there was a continuous supply of labour. 

Neither Blythe's villagers, nor Blythe himself when he introduces their commentaries, shies away from these dark things. The very long hours of very hard labor were rewarded with bare-subsistence poverty. There was vast ignorance, there was stifling insularity. And there was often a great and quite understandable eagerness to escape the village which seemed defined by those things. 

I'm over-emphasizing the negatives here, in an effort to knock away any expectation that the book is anything less than clear-eyed and hard-headed about rural English life between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, that it is in the least sentimental. But that is far from the whole story. For all the hardship described, there is in fact a great deal of charm in the picture, the deep charm of stable and deeply-rooted human ways. And what comes through in one interview after another is that most of these people are or were in touch with reality, especially the reality of the human connection to the earth, in a way that few of us are now, especially younger people. And it gives them an elemental wisdom hard to find and maintain in the whirlwind of distraction that is contemporary culture.

Akenfield is not explicitly philosophical at all. There is hardly a trace of abstraction in it, but nevertheless it forces one to think about what it means to be human, and whether our luxurious culture makes us less so. How is it that the life depicted here seems to have a depth that can't be found, or at least is hard to find, in a world of advertising and sensational entertainments, that in fact seems to be mocked by them?

Flight from the real is now the single most striking feature, the most ardently pursued goal, of life in our culture, at least for certain prominent and often dominant elements of it. There seems to be a fair number of smart people--"smart" in the sense that they would score well on an intelligence test--who believe that it's possible and desirable to escape entirely from the physical by some technological means. I don't think it's at all unfair to call this insane, even if we set aside the fact that what goes on inside a computer is as physical as what goes on at a construction site. The invisibility of the electronic allows these same smart people to believe that it's something different, something disembodied, more like the mental.

Suppose it were. Suppose it were possible and desirable to live a purely mental existence. Suppose even that it could be supported by technology. We have no technology which is not directly dependent on machinery, whether mechanical or electronic, which in turn had to begin with the stuff of the earth and with physical labor, and which could not continue functioning for very long without physical maintenance. There is no path, even in theory, by which we can sever this dependence. I doubt that anyone interviewed for this book would entertain that sort of delusion for a moment. Maybe "sanity" is the most important idea here, the most essential of the things of which it reminds us.

This very nice 2015 edition, published by New York Review Books, includes an insightful introduction by Matt Weiland which mentions a 2004 sort-of-sequel, Return to Akenfield, by Craig Taylor, in which he visits the village and interviews as many of the people from Blythe's book as he could find. It's probably interesting, at least, and maybe very good in its own right. But somehow I don't really want to read it. 

Our new house is on the water, and I now have the privilege of watching the sun set over Mobile Bay every evening. I was doing so one day a week or so ago, standing on the front porch. I only caught the last moments before the sun went below the horizon, but frequently that's when the real spectacle begins, and goes on for twenty minutes or more. I stood there until it was almost fully dark, and I was about to go in when something odd in the water caught my eye.

Like almost every house on the bay, ours has a pier. I don't know exactly how long it is but it's over two hundred feet. Out a bit past the end of it, between our neighbor's pier and ours, there was a weird thrashing in the water. And when I say "weird" I mean to suggest some of the old connotations of the word, those which made Shakespeare call the witches who helped to doom Macbeth "the weird sisters." 

There was something not right about what I was seeing. It was not any of the normal disturbances of the water. In the bay one often sees mullet leap out of the water, sometimes travelling several feet before they fall back. One sees gulls swoop down and snatch something out of the water, or try to; there's a quick and shallow splash, and they spring away. Hunting pelicans, big heavy birds with a wingspan of four or five feet, climb, hang, then drop like bombs with a noisy splash on whatever they have seen, going well under water. And when they surface they often sit for a few moments or more, perhaps enjoying their catch. Getting back into the air again seems to be a lot of work for them. Now and then there are diving ducks, marvelously slick and cool swimmers and divers; they hardly disturb the surface at all. 

And then there are the dolphins, with their well-known arcing plunge, dorsal fins out of the water in a way that momentarily spooks anyone who's ever seen a movie about sharks. And once in a long while one might see something that looks at a glance like a floating log, but is too low in the water and has a couple of rounded knobs at one end: an alligator, its eyes a little higher than the rest of it. Mobile Bay is an estuary, and though the river delta which empties into it is full of alligators, I saw only a few over the span of the thirty years that we lived in our old house. It was roughly ten miles south of the delta, and now we are another ten miles down. So I may never see an alligator here; the Gulf of Mexico is only a few miles away, and the water is saltier than suits the gator. 

This was none of those things. It was a slow clumsy flopping and thrashing along the surface of the water, almost a hopping movement. But there is nothing that normally hops on the surface of the water. For a few moments I felt a creeping uneasiness. For a few moments I felt I was seeing some unknown and perhaps menacing form of life. I'm not sure whether the word "monster" actually entered my mind or not, but what I felt was something like what I imagine one might feel on spying an actual sea monster. As much as I love being near the water, I also have, at times, a trace of primitive fear of it, the fear that Job implies when he praises God for confining the sea to its limits: "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further." And whatever I was seeing touched that nerve.

I walked out to the water's edge and soon realized what the thing was: a bird, apparently injured, trying to swim with its wings. It was like a person doing the breast stroke, that absurd method of swimming which seems designed for maximum inefficiency. The poor bird thrashed at the water with its wings and was propelled forward for a foot or two, paused, then thrashed again. It was moving parallel to the shore, and up the bay, which is to say more or less northeasterly, away from the Gulf. 

Then the more-strange began. I was standing on the bulkhead, at the foot of the pier. The bird got a little past the end of our pier, then made an abrupt hard right turn and headed toward me. I stood there and waited for him--I will call him "him" because that's what my wife always does with any wild creature unless its sex is obvious (even when, as with a spider, it may be inaccurate) and I rather like that, and because I soon had a sort of relationship with him which the use of "it" would seem to disrespect.

I stepped out onto the rocks and concrete rubble which constitute the bulk of the bulkhead. The bird continued toward me. I sat down on the rocks. He came to them and very slowly struggled up a few feet over the rocks until I could reach him. I picked him up. He offered no resistance and did not seem alarmed. I took him to the porch, where there was enough light to get a good look at him. 

He was a seabird, a tern, not very large. He was hopelessly, and without human assistance fatally, entangled in some kind of very fine, very strong, pale green nylon (or other synthetic) thread. I thought at first it was fishing line, but I've never seen any fishing line so extremely fine. Some kind of net, perhaps? I don't know. But everything except his wings--his webbed feet, his long pointed beak--was immobilized. He could not properly swim, and he could not open his beak, and so could not eat. I don't know why he could not fly but I suspect that he had at one time been able to, but had completely exhausted himself, so that one flap every ten seconds or so was all he could manage, enough to keep him hopping along the surface of the water but not enough to get him airborne. The thread was also tightly looped around his neck, deep within the feathers, which may have been doing further harm. 

I called for someone to bring me a pair of scissors, and together we spent ten minutes or so snipping away at the thread. The bird remained still and unresisting, though he did manage one squawk of fear or outrage after his bill was freed and he could do so. When we had finished, I set him on a piling by the water, from which he immediately fell. But, feet now free, he paddled over to the sandy shore of the vacant lot next door, stepped out of and away from the water, and settled down onto the sand. 

I offered him a bit of bread and a bit of tuna (they eat fish, don't they?). But he was not interested. He just sat there perfectly still. So I left him there. An hour later I checked on him and he was still there, but at my approach he got up and walked into the water. An hour or so after that I checked on him and he was gone: on his wings, I hope. 

Now, maybe this means nothing. Yes, it was an odd incident. But purely naturalistic explanations are ready to hand and plausible. He had been struggling for God knows how long and come God knows how far. Perhaps initially he had been able to fly, but, unable to eat or free himself, he had gradually become so exhausted that the thrashing breast stroke, wingbeats a couple of seconds apart, was absolutely all he could do. And the exhaustion would certainly explain the docility. 

I'm a natural skeptic and not one to turn quickly to supernatural or even merely providential explanations for phenomena that might suggest them; in fact I probably err on the skeptical side, probably more reluctant than required by strict adherence reason to see the hand of God at work. Physical causality and coincidence can explain almost everything if you want them to.

But as I listen to the interior voice that would explain away this incident I keep being stopped by that hard right turn. That is an accurate description: it was as direct a ninety-degree turn as you would make to turn right at an intersection. The bird turned right and came straight toward me. Considering that it had miles of water in which to decide--by whatever means a bird decides--to head toward shore, the fact that it did so when it was directly opposite me is at minimum a very striking coincidence. And it only did so when I had come out to get a better look at it. And it came straight toward me, in contradiction to the normal behavior of wild things, in which fear and flight are the instinctive responses to the human, not hesitating even when it was only a few feet away, climbing out of the water and struggling over the rocks directly to me. 

It was as if in that extremity the bird's natural barrier broke down. He was going to die if he were not freed from the thread that bound him. And somehow he saw in me the possibility of help, and came to me, against his normal instincts, as the only alternative to death.

I am one of those people, those perhaps somewhat ridiculous people, who are disturbed almost to the point of nihilism by the pain of the world. I'm a little ashamed of this, because my own circumstances are quite comfortable. Get a grip on yourself, I say to myself. But Dante's picture of the love that moves the stars seems untenable in the face of the suffering that happens at every moment of time on this planet. There is nothing in what we can see that plausibly suggests that the cycle of birth, pleasure, pain, and death is less than an absolute rule for all creatures in all places at all times, or that there is any reason for it beyond whatever immediate circumstance produces it, or that any of it has any meaning independent of the subjective experience of the creature.

This bird's approach to me, and my ability to help, was for me a moment when something else shone through material cause and effect. It was a bit of evidence that although all of creation "groaneth and travaileth" there is something beyond, a justification for believing that the promise of redemption and healing is not a fantasy. "Coincidence" is not an adequate word for the force that brought bound and helpless suffering together with mercy and a pair of scissors. 

The word "monster" shares an etymology with words like "demonstrate": Latin words rooted in the basic concept of to show, to point out. The direct ancestor of "monster" diverged early on to mean specifically a strange and uncanny thing, often serving as a warning or omen. But though all monsters startle, the message they bring is not always bad, at least if we have properly understood it, and anyway is almost always one we need to hear.

"Monstrance" comes from the same root. 

As best I can determine, he is of the species known as the Royal Tern. 

Between trying to get settled in a new house, the Thanksgiving gathering and feast, and a bad cold, I haven't had any time and not much inclination for writing over the past four or five days. The cold is a bigger factor than perhaps it should be, as it's been accompanied by a fairly bad headache which makes me want to avoid exercise of both mind and eyes. But it's better today, enough for a brief post, at least.

The term "cozy mystery," or simply "cozy," refers to a species of detective fiction in the Agatha Christie mold: low in violence and other sensationalism, set in a small community, with an amateur detective. If you've read any Christie at all, or similar others (and who hasn't?) you'll understand the term (and probably already know it). The cozy usually depicts a decent and orderly world, and the killer or killers is/are not terrifying psychopaths or habitually violent. It doesn't usually give you the feeling that you're looking into the abyss; the orderly world is not deeply shaken by the crime, and order returns.

I'm not particularly drawn to the cozy mystery, but I get the appeal. And the detective stories I like most serve a similar purpose for me. It sounds absurd to suggest that there is anything cozy about the worlds of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald's work, but there is something in my attraction to it that's similar to the appeal of the cozy. In Chandler especially it's a dark and violent world, and there isn't so much a breakdown of order as an established and conquering disorder into which the detective forces a very limited and often unwelcomed ordered space. And in both writers there's a pervasive melancholy with a romantic streak, a sense of the world as a fundamentally sad but beautiful place. That's the cozy-ness of it for me, and it's enabled by the knowledge that, unlike some contemporary crime fiction, there is not going to be a sudden injection of truly sickening violence, the kind of thing that will disturb me to the point of not wanting to read further. (That's probably a sad testimony to our culture's increased tolerance for realistic depictions of violence in books and film--and to mine.)

When we were packing up books to move a few weeks ago I held back The Midnight Raymond Chandler because I wanted, in the midst of all the stress, the kind of "comfort reading" I'm talking about. It's a collection containing several novellas and two full novels. I read the first piece, "Red Wind," a fairly early novella which, I just realized, is a Marlowe story which preceded Marlowe--that is, he first appears by name in The Big Sleep in 1939, which was after "Red Wind." But he's essentially the same character. 

"Red Wind" begins memorably:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen.

Crypto-Marlowe goes to a bar where the only other customer is a man who seems to have been drinking there for some time. A well-dressed man walks in and asks if anyone has seen a woman, whom he describes. The drunk...well, I'll let Chandler describe it:

[The newcomer] took three or four steps and stopped, facing the drunk. The drunk was grinning. He swept a gun from somewhere so fast that it was just a blur coming out. He held it steady and he didn't look any drunker than I was.... The drunk's gun was a .22 target automatic, with a large front sight. It made a couple of hard snaps and a little smoke curled--very little.

"So long, Waldo," the drunk said.

That's how they wrote 'em for Black Mask, where the story appeared. The story that unfolds from there involves a woman who is still pining for her first love, and who talks of him and that love in almost mystical terms which it is possible that they do not entirely merit. 

Then I skipped to the last work in the volume, The Long Goodbye, which is also the last novel Chandler wrote, published in 1953, and was a little surprised to find in it another woman speaking in much the same way of the same sort of lost lover. It's a big part of the plot in both works, and it makes me think that there was something in Chandler's life that made it an especially powerful device for him.

As far as I can remember I read The Long Goodbye once long ago, probably the early 1980s or maybe late '70s, and not since. It's as good as I remembered, though I can't say that this reading confirmed my opinion from back then that it's my favorite, since it's been more or less as long since I read the others. Suffice to say that it has all the vivid California color, romance, sleaze, and sadness that one expects of a Chandler work. 

The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers.... There was a girl beside him. Her hair was a lovely shade of dark red and she had a distant smile on her lips and over her shoulders she had a blue mink that almost made the Rolls-Royce look like just another automobile.

I don't recall that Marlowe explains what he was doing at such a ritzy club. The "girl" with Terry Lennox is his wife, who disdains him and, when he slides out of the Rolls onto the pavement, drives away without him. Marlowe rescues him, gets to know him a bit, likes him a bit, and they have a sort of friendship that mainly involves meeting now and then for a drink. Then Lennox's wife, who, not surprisingly, was chronically unfaithful to him, is murdered, and he, the obvious suspect, disappears. And it seems for a while as if that little story is over and apparently unrelated to what comes after, in which Marlowe gets mixed up with an alcoholic novelist and his wife, but of course it isn't.

I'm quoting this passage not because it's important to the story but because I like it so much; it's a good instance of Chandler's skill:

I hit the office about ten, picked up some odds and ends of mail, slit the envelopes and let the stuff lie on the desk. I opened the windows wide to let out the smell of dust and dinginess that collected in the night and hung in the still air, in the corners of the room, in the slats of the venetian blinds. A dead moth was spread-eagled on a corner of the desk. On the window sill a bee with tattered wings was crawling along the woodwork, buzzing in a tired remote sort of way, as if she knew it wasn't any use, she was finished, she had flown too many missions and would never get back to the hive again.

There is a twist in the denouement which struck me as implausible. Very implausible. In fact there are several incidents in the plot which struck me that way, but only the last one broke through the suspension-of-disbelief threshold. You might suppose--at least I did--that the title is just a way of referring to death, like calling it "the big sleep." It doesn't, though, at least not primarily; it's more poignant than that. 

The Blue Dahlia is a 1946 movie for which Chandler wrote the screen play. It's Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, and William Bendix again, this time Bendix playing a good guy but still a somewhat unbalanced one, due to a brain injury in the war. 

Three newly discharged veterans return home--to Los Angeles, of course. One of them is married, and after a couple of farewell drinks he leaves the others and seeks out his wife. She is not at all glad to see him; she has been living a life of partying, drinking, and infidelity. (That kind of betrayal was apparently not as rare as one would like to think.) He leaves, determined to have nothing more to do with her. Sometime in the following hours she is murdered, and of course he is the prime suspect. (As this pattern occurs in The Long Goodbye, it's worth noting that the film came first.)

As a whodunit puzzle, and just in general as a movie, it's very good, definitely one to see if you like this type of thing. Somehow, though, it didn't engage me as strongly as some others in this vein; not as strongly, for instance, as Detour, maybe because it isn't as noir. And it isn't a Philip Marlowe story; the hero is somewhat on the vague and ordinary side in comparison, but then he's not a detective, either, just a good man with a bad wife. 

Maybe it should have been in color. The effect of the blue dahlia is rather lost in black-and-white.

Lat week when I wanted to check certain details about The Summerhouse Trilogy but didn't have access to the book, I looked around on the web a bit for reviews or summaries which might help. I didn't find any, but I ended up looking through all the reader comments at Goodreads. Most were positive, and at least one reader says that she reads the book every year. But the negatives...well, they say much more about the reviewer than the reviewed.

Some seem not to have paid very close attention, as the full story is not "retold" in the three sections, but rather revealed gradually and cumulatively. Unless my memory is wrong, which it could be, or I missed something, the most startling bit is not revealed until the third section. But these folks didn't get it. Or maybe they're just that jaded:

I could have done without the third re-telling of the story.

I had hoped this final chapter would shed some light on things, but it really didn't. I wish I had given up after the first chapter spent time with a book I enjoyed.

And these two people, especially the second, seem to be the sort for whom anything not of the present day and culture is for precisely that reason dull and irrelevant:

Depressing first section in a supposedly funny British satire on trite callous middle class values.

Gah. This book did not age well at all. It was awful and prehistoric.

I don't see exactly how "callous" comes into it. I do have some sympathy for those who found the book dull, as much of it is subtle and without visible drama. Several readers complained about Margaret, the miserable girl of the first section--"a dishrag," one said. That's not unjustified, but it's an aspect of Margaret's problem. Still, these three apparently would have preferred a romance or thriller: 

A perfectly adequate, well written, thoroughly dull book. Not even hashish, sex and suicide could save this book from the monotony of the characters.

I am still reading this book, which is a book club nomination. It is awful! The characters are extremely unlikeable (except for Aunt Lily, and that is only because she is intoxicated most of the time and wears garish clothes). Even the dog has no name. It is the most uninspiring, slow moving, non-interesting book I have read.

Blecchhhh! I can't believe I finished reading this book, or that anyone would think it was interesting enough to make a movie out of! I hated it to the very last page.

At least that last one did push through every hated page.

This one I rather liked, and would suggest to the reader that she keep thinking about the book:

The author is an English Catholic whose work I’ve seen compared to that of Flannery O'Connor. She does not provide a nice, tidy, Christian ending or even tidy Christian answers. If I had read this book in my youth, I think I might even have interpreted it as anti-Christian.

*

Detour is an excellent example of the noir genre, apparently considered one of the classics. It has a pretty simple plot, which makes it different from many of its type. A famous story has it that William Faulkner and another writer working on the script for The Big Sleep were puzzled by a plot point and asked Raymond Chandler for clarification--and he didn't know, either. 

A young man and a young woman are working together as a night club act in New York. They plan to be married, but the young woman leaves for Hollywood, hoping to become a star, and the young man stays behind. (It isn't entirely clear to me why he didn't go with her, but never mind.) Later he decides to follow her after all, and begins hitchhiking across the country. He gets as far as Arizona when he gets a ride from a man in a big expensive car. Thus begins the detour. 

It's a low budget movie, starring people I hadn't heard of before (Tom Neal and Ann Savage), and it's not much more than an hour long, but it really works. 

*

I'm often struck in these older films by little things indicative of the degree to which many things have changed since the films were made. Many big things are striking, too, of course, but I mean the almost trivial ones. When was the last time you heard someone say "Give me change for a dime"? Or one which I think I may have heard as a child or a teenager, but which has disappeared for very good reason: "That's white of you." I mean that it's disappeared as a compliment. You may still hear it today, but if you do it will be  as an insult. 

Before the young man leaves for California, he calls his girlfriend. Remember long-distance calls? His brief New York-Los Angeles call costs him five dollars. That's eighty-two dollars in today's money, according to this site, which says that the dollar has lost 94% of its value since 1945. That sounds like a catastrophe, doesn't it? 

Another phrase you don't hear anymore: "sound as a dollar."

I'm going to be more brief than this book deserves, because it's been several months since I read it and I want to refresh my memory about certain things, but I've just moved to a new house and almost all my books are still in boxes awaiting the resolution of questions about bookshelves. And I have no idea which box this book is in.

I think it was Charlotte Bronte who said of her sister Emily's creation, Heathcliff, that she was not sure that the creation of such a being was morally justified. I had a somewhat similar thought about Lili, the central character in this book. When I say that she is central I don't mean that she is what we usually call "the protagonist," that it is her fate which mostly concerns and engages the reader. But she is central in that she is the agent whose powers of action cause so much else to happen, or, more importantly in this case, not to happen: this is the story of a wedding that does not take place. And she is in a sense more than the others: not only her human self, but the expression, at least, of a powerful, mysterious, and fundamentally unholy force. If "strong female character" is one of your criteria for value in fiction, you'll certainly get your money's worth from this novel. 

In fact it is effectively an all-female cast of characters, though not all are strong. There are men present, but they're more or less stupid, unfortunate necessities. The book is not so much a trilogy as a trio of novellas (or three very long chapters) telling one basic story from the point of view of three different women. The three narrators are all very much a part of each other's lives, and the contrast between what each sees and assumes about the others, and the others' inner life, is striking--as striking as it probably would be in life. It's a technical tour de force, the points of contact among the narratives polished and precisely fitted. I recall one brief incident in particular, involving a dog's attention to a woman's foot, which is very different and rather more significant when seen for the second time and from a different point of view. 

The first section, The Clothes in the Wardrobe, takes us into the mind of Margaret, a young woman who is about to be married. The marriage would be against her will except that she doesn't seem to have much of a will. She has suffered a romantic and religious trauma which has sent her into despair, including the specifically theological sense of that word, resigned and indifferent to the pressures exerted by her mother and the suitor, a boorish older man, Syl. Significantly, Margaret's narration begins with a description of Lili. 

The second book, The Skeleton in the Closet, is the viewpoint of Syl's mother, Mrs. Munro, a somewhat embittered older woman who doesn't think a great deal more of Syl than does Margaret. Alice Thomas Ellis is not the only novelist to give us strikingly different views of a character from outside and inside, but the movement from the first section to this one is a particularly effective turn. Margaret has had much to say about her future mother-in-law, most of it negative and also inaccurate, and we are a little surprised--well, at least I was--to find her so different, and so much more sympathetic. She thinks Margaret is making a mistake. But she is as weary of and resigned toward the troubles of others as she is of her own.

The Fly in the Ointment gives us Lili as she really is and not as we have been seeing her through the eyes of Margaret and Mrs. Munro. She is among other things the sort of person who is often described, with a touch of envy, as a free spirit, or, with a touch of dread, as a force of nature. She is also more or less amoral in many ways. But it is she who not only sees the disaster into which Margaret is sleepwalking but acts to prevent it. I think I can promise you that you won't forget what she does.

When I finished this book I made this comment in an email to a couple of friends:

My reaction is a kind of astonishment, not 100% positive. I read the last paragraph, closed the book, and said "Golly, what a book." Not "golly" but "gah-LEE," the "golly" of someone coming out of a storm shelter after a tornado and taking a look around. 

This was a reaction not only to the closing incident but to the whole thing, superbly executed by an intelligence that sometimes seems a little malicious. The atmosphere is so full of feminine resentment, suspicion, and struggle that I found myself wondering if this sort of thing is what goes on in the minds of most women most of the time. There is an almost cold, almost merciless quality about Ellis's intelligence and wit (there is a fair amount of humor here). I keep the word "almost" because there is more than cold clinical skill at work. The quality which makes me think "merciless" is an unflinching willingness to see these people as they truly are, to let them, so to speak, get away with nothing. And in the end there is mercy, though it comes in such a manner as to lead one to the old question about good coming from evil. This is a religiously grounded work, but, like Flannery O'Connor's and in some ways even more so, hardly comforting. At least two reviews that I came across used the words "witch" and "witchy" of the author, and I can see why. 

*

For various reasons, none especially good but some better than others, I've gotten almost entirely out of the habit of watching serious movies. My Criterion Channel subscription has gone mostly unused for months, and I've wondered whether I should keep it. But they're calling this month "Noir November" and are running a number of noir titles which piqued my interest. 

The 1942 adaption of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key is a good one, starring Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd. I admit that I have a thing for Veronica Lake. After watching it I would have immediately picked up the novel, because I want to know whether the somewhat happy ending is Hammett's or not; I suspect not. But that book is also packed away.

The plot is complex, as one expects of Hammett, and the film is more genuinely dark than some of its kindred, especially in the sequence where the hero, Ed Beaumont, is held captive and beaten repeatedly by thugs. It's rare in these movies to see a depiction of the effects of violence that's remotely plausible. Beaumont is beaten almost to death, and we believe it. Far from bouncing back with a band-aid or two on his face, he spends a significant amount of time in the hospital. I have a vague childhood memory of William Bendix as a likeable cloddish sort of guy in a TV series called The Life of Riley, so it was a bit of a surprise to see him as a malicious brute. 

I also watched Call Northside 777 and This Gun for Hire. The former is not really noir, but it features Jimmy Stewart as a reporter trying to exonerate a man convicted of a murder he didn't commit. The latter stars Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake again, so is automatically appealing to me. It's based on a Graham Greene novel, modified for an American audience in the midst of World War II, and maybe a notch below The Glass Key as a film--less plausible on the whole, for one thing--but still very worthwhile for those who like this sort of thing. And anyway, Veronica Lake. 

Image swiped from this site which sells prints. I'm not usually drawn to the Hollywood Blonde types, but there is something about her that charms me. 

Continuing the discussion of the success or failure of Vatican II, from this post: Ross Douthat (as quoted by Rod Dreher, because I can't view Douthat's entire New York Times column) asserts that the council was and is a failure on its own terms. The measures intended to invite and draw "modern man" to the Church have been accompanied not by growth but by decline, as measured by membership and activity, at least in Euro-American civilization. That's a plain fact. Whether the decline would have been greater or lesser without the council can only be speculative. I'm sure that question has been studied and answers attempted, but it's the sort of thing where sociologists can probably make either case, depending on what questions they ask and how, and on their own predilections. (Is sociology a science? Not really. Statistical methods are no doubt mathematically sound, but they don't choose or interpret their own data.)

In that post I linked to this one by Larry Chapp which goes ferociously after the follies that came and have continued, following and often in the name of the council. Let's call that Chapp 1, because there is also Chapp 2, which says that the council was "a success, in spite of the many deviations from orthodoxy and sanity that followed in its wake."

Success or failure, then? It's largely a matter of the time frame in which one makes the judgment. Douthat is looking at the time from the end of the council till now, and in that frame it is certainly true that the council has not succeeded in making the Church any more of a factor in modern life than it had previously been. One could argue about whether it is less so--I think it is--but it is clearly not more so. "Modern man" in the mass has only drifted, or in many cases run, away from Christianity at large and the Catholic Church in particular. In fact it is not at all fantastic to foresee, a century or two from now, the reduction of the Church to a few tiny bands of holdouts, as in Robert Hugh Benson's Lord of the World, at least within that part of the world which was once known as Christendom.

The argument of Chapp 2 is really twofold. The first part, that the council has been a great success, is really not based on a measurement of success in the terms Douthat examines (in fact Chapp agrees with Douthat's assessment in that respect) but on the assertion that many or most of the council's changes (the actual changes, not those speciously done in its name) were for the better--the vernacular liturgy, for instance--and are now taken for granted. Some of those, the liturgy in particular, are, as we all know, still very much debated, but I agree with Chapp that they were good. It's only an accident of history that I appear to be a "conservative" Catholic; I've always said that if I had been an adult Catholic at the time of the council I would almost certainly have sympathized, at least, with its aims and the documents produced by it.

The second part of Chapp 2's argument is that the council will in time be truly successful, contributing powerfully to the long-term health of the Church and the effectiveness of its mission. Chapp 2 accepts that these things can take quite a long time--centuries--to work themselves out. I certainly hope so and am willing to believe it, but none of us will be here to see it. (I personally, as I lamented in that other post, cannot look forward to anything but continued intramural strife.) Chapp presents a picture of a renewal which he believes the council intended, and which he believes may yet come, and I very much share that view and that hope.

As for the present, though, Chapp 1 presents a grim and discouraging picture, not nearly as positive as Chapp 2. For me the grimmest single item in that piece is the mention of the progressive party, encouraged by Pope Francis, as viewing the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI as an "interruption" of the council's work. This view represents nothing less than the abandonment of authentic renewal and the re-energizing of the destructive forces which would turn the Church into something like liberal Protestantism, a voice of solicitous approval for whatever is demanded by and for the therapeutic mentality.

Philip Rieff saw this very clearly at the time the council was actually in progress:

What, then, should churchmen do? The answer returns clearly: become, avowedly, therapists, administrating a therapeutic institution--under the justificatory mandate that Jesus himself was the first therapeutic.

Some of the psychobabble I've seen attributed to the "synod on synodality" supports--no, expresses--that view.

*

The emergence of the very well produced cinematic work for which the term "television series" is inadequate is, like craft beer, one of the compensations for living in a culture which seems to be falling apart, both in an organizational sense and in the sense of mental breakdown. I've just finished watching a new one from the Brits, Sherwood. It falls into the pretty conventional category of "crime drama," but a very very good one. It's set in a place referred to bitterly as a "former mining town" in Nottinghamshire; both Sherwood Forest and an archer are involved. 

The story takes place in the present day but has deep roots in the mining strikes of the 1980s. I don't know very much at all about those, but I know the British left hated and still hates Margaret Thatcher as much as the American left hated Ronald Reagan, so I don't necessarily take the show's view of those conflicts as the last word. But I don't doubt that they were as bitter as portrayed. 

It's a very complex story, very well done, on a level with Broadchurch, among the best in this genre. Maybe no single character is quite as memorable or as memorably performed as those portrayed by David Tennant and Olivia Colman in Broadchurch, but anyone who watches a lot of British TV will recognize many faces, if not the names that go with them. It's available on Britbox via Amazon. 

*

Donald Trump is a jerk. That's been pretty obvious all along. His presidency had some very good results (and some very bad ones), but his basic and base nature didn't improve. He did not, as some hoped, rise to the office. What his supporters liked to dismiss as "mean tweets" were often expressions of a really deep ugliness. He's now vilifying Ron DeSantis, a popular conservative  who actually cares about and is skilled at governing, because, as Rich Lowry says, DeSantis is in his way:

Trump will have no compunction about crushing the future of the party to maintain his grip for another two years and possibly beyond.  

It's grimly appropriate, I guess, that a nation in such decline as ours, committed to narcissism as a way of life, would have two presidents in succession who are men of such plainly bad character, each in his own very special way.

Or so it seems. I can't post comments though I see two people have managed to do so. There were lots of apologies from Typepad for the much longer than expected outage, and it looks to me like there are still some "issues" (that's another language complaint--why do we now say "issues" instead of "problems"?).

On the other hand I'm still in the process of moving and internet access at my new address is still iffy, so maybe the "issues" are on my end now. 

UPDATE Saturday Nov 4, from Typepad's blog:

Over the past few weeks, Typepad has experienced a number of complications that have compromised the level of service that we know you have come to expect. This started occurring as we prepared to move to a new data center. The migration was completed on Sunday, and Typepad is now in its new home. However, following the migration, we encountered a number of unexpected problems that took some time to address. We have had our team working around the clock to get service restored. Thankfully, we are seeing progress. Now that we are able to deliver consistent service, we will use the new resources to address any lingering issues that may be occurring.

You should be noticing improvement with the loading of blogs and display of images, in addition to faster navigation as you work within the Typepad application.

A few of the lingering problems that we are still working to address are incorrect times in the referrers list in Statistics and 503 errors when attempting to download an export file. We also want to see quicker load times within the application.

We are continuing to investigate to determine what happened, and we will learn from this episode. When we have more detailed information to provide to the Typepad community, we will share it with you.