The nigh omni-competent Garry Wills has a piece in the current “New York Review of Books” on the collaboration between Giuseppe Verdi and his last and greatest librettist, Arrigo Boito. The article is only available to subscribers, but it begins:

Verdi had a great advantage over Rossini’s Otello (1816) in composing his own Otello (1887). It was an advantage, even, over his earlier Shakespearean opera, Macbeth (1847). Verdi had as his librettist, by the 1880s, Arrigo Boito, a highly cultured poet and musician, a man as serious about getting to the true meaning of Shakespeare as was Verdi himself.

Their collaboration produced the two stupendous Shakespearean masterpieces of Verdi’s old age: Otello and Falstaff. The latter, the final operatic offspring of the eighty year old Verdi, ends famously with a cosmic fugue whose words are: “Everything in the world is a prank, and man is born a clown … Everyone laughs at others’ folly — but the one who laughs last, laughs best!”

Here is a fine performance of that final scene.

John Allen reviews a new book by Massimo Franco on the troubles in the Vatican these days. The key point is that we’re at the end of an era, when the Church (or the official Church) is struggling with the fact that it is no longer able to articulate the dominant moral sensibility of the West.

Has anyone read the book yet?

http://mondoweiss.net/2011/03/report-israel-company-recruiting-gadhafi-mercenaries.html   English

Hebrew for those able to read it: http://www.news-israel.net/Article.asp?code=24935

When I was a cub reporter in Hudson County, N.J. in the late 1970s, uncovering mob influence in local unions  was one of my  tasks. A fearsome character named Tino Fiumara was said to rule the docks in Hoboken, and the Provenzano family, suspected in the death of Jimmy Hoffa, controlled the New Jersey Teamsters from their office in Union City.

As much as I labored to report on the power of the mob in local and state government, in unions and in industries such as toxic-waste disposal, it never would have occurred to me to extend my suspicions to the New Jersey teacher’s union – as Peggy Noonan does in a Wall Street Journal column that is part of the ongoing enterprise of smearing teachers’ unions. She likens the New Jersey teacher’s union to Johnny Friendly, the corrupt labor boss in the movie On the Waterfront.

Jim Fisher, author of On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York, responds to this on his blog The Irish Waterfront:

Can you imagine how much more hysterically her piece would have read had Ms. Noonan reported that the head of the New Jersey Education Association, the teacher’s union, had once engaged in a friendly sit-down with a capo of the Genovese family, the most fearsome gangster in New Jersey for decades?

He was referring to Chris Christie’s visit to a Texas prison to speak with Tino Fiumara, a distant relative.

More to the point, as Fisher notes, is that Noonan pays no notice to Catholic teachings about the right of workers to organize. Noonan wrote an admiring biography called  John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father. She does not seem to remember that John Paul  defended workers’ freedom to join unions.

It’s true that teachers’ unions should be held accountable, especially given their influence in government. But smearing them is not the way to do it. Johnny Friendly sold out his workers, depriving them of basic human rights and dignity. That’s quite the opposite of what the teachers’ unions have done.

….especially if you live in Pennsylvania.  The  NYTimes has been running an impressive series on hydrofracking and its impact on air, water, and land use.  Today’s installment looks at the impact on drinking water and the treatment of the wastewater involved in the fracking process (releasing natural gas from seams thousands of feet below the surface by cracking open shale which holds the gas deposits).

A big part of the story includes the lobbying of oil and gas corporation to keep their drilling from federal regulation and the Clean Water Act requirements. The companies are dumping their waste water with toxic chemicals and radioactive elements into the ground and into treatment plants generally unable to detoxify them. Current drilling in Pennsylvania is the focus of much of the data the Times has been publishing (great map of toxic sites!) . Today’s story on water.  Complete series.

From H-Catholic I learn that two professors of architecture in Great Britain are organizing a symposium for this coming December on how modern architecture has been regarded and employed within the Catholic Church. Call for papers is here, with possible topics and these two paragraphs of background.

Modern architecture for the Roman Catholic Church in the twentieth century could be experimental, transgressive or progressive, comforting or shocking; sometimes it appeared within a culture of intense theoretical and theological dialogue between architects and clergy, and sometimes it challenged orthodoxy and innovated at the fringes of the Church’s complex structure. At various significant moments, modern architecture was either repressed and quenched, or welcomed and widely adopted. Architects could be concerned with the symbolic potential of modern architecture to evoke newly emphasised ideas in theology. In church architecture throughout the twentieth century, the liturgy was a central focus of development, as space and ritual were intimately connected. Monastic life was subject to modern interpretations of ancient ideals. Mission stations far from Rome might echo modern architecture’s development of a ‘critical regionalism’.

Conventionally, the Second Vatican Council has been seen as a pivotal moment in the shift towards a modern form of church space, but increasingly scholarship is revealing the Council to have been only one marker of broader trends. More recently, architects have sought continuity and reattachment to the past instead of innovation.

What has been your own experience of modern Church architecture? Which examples seem to have worked, and which did not? Why?

Apropos the film “Of Gods and Men” the heroic witness of the French Trappist monks was celebrated. Here is another witness, assassinated today.

From the Associated Press:

Militants gunned down the only Christian in Pakistan’s government outside his widowed mother’s home Wednesday, the second assassination in two months of a high-profile opponent of laws that impose the death penalty for insulting Islam.Shahbaz Bhatti was aware of the danger he faced, saying in a videotaped message that he had received death threats from al-Qaida and the Taliban. In it, the 42-year-old Roman Catholic said he was “ready to die” for the country’s often persecuted Christian and other non-Muslim minorities.

The slaying in Islamabad followed the killing of Salman Taseer, a liberal politician who was gunned down in the capital by one of his guards. Both men had campaigned to change blasphemy laws in Pakistan that impose the death penalty for insulting Islam and have been loudly defended by Islamist political parties.

“They (the Taliban) want to impose their radical philosophy in Pakistan. And whoever stands against their radical philosophy, they threaten them,” Bhatti said in a video message, which was posted on the website of the First Step Forum, a Finland-based group that promotes religious harmony, rule of law and democracy.

“These threats and these warnings cannot change my opinions and principles. I’m living for my community and suffering people,” said Bhatti, who was an adviser to the group and had asked that his message be released in the event of his death.

The slaying robbed Pakistani Christians of their most prominent advocate.

“We have been orphaned today!” wailed Rehman Masih, a Christian resident of Islamabad. “Now who will fight for our rights? Who will raise a voice for us? Who will help us?”

The New York Times adds:

In Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called the assassination “an attack not only on one man but on the values of tolerance and respect for people of all faiths and backgrounds that had been championed by Muhammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan.”

Mrs. Clinton, who recently met with Mr. Bhatti during a visit he made to Washington, called him a “very impressive, courageous man” who knew the danger he faced.

Shortly before his death, Mr. Bhatti said he knew extremists were after him. “I am receiving threats on speaking against the blasphemy law, but my faith gives me strength and we will not allow the handful of extremists to fulfill their agenda,” he said.

Yesterday, the New York Times’s Clyde Haberman wrote a column that took as its jumping-off point a recent controversy over an anti-abortion billboard in NYC.

A Texas group called Life Always…bought billboard space in SoHo to deliver an anti-abortion message rooted in recent statistics from the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. They showed that in 2009, 41 percent of all pregnancies here ended in abortion. The abortion rate for black women was even higher, almost 60 percent.

Up went the billboard on a building at the corner of Avenue of the Americas and Watts Street. It showed a black girl with these words above her head: “The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb.”

Not surprisingly, the billboard provoked controversy, and it was removed not long after it went up. You can see a picture of it alongside Haberman’s column. I’m not sure what I think of it myself. The intersection of race and abortion is a touchy subject that has not always been handled with care. But setting that context aside, I wouldn’t say it’s “racist” to encourage African-Americans in particular to carry their babies to term. (As Haberman notes, “racial and racist are not one and the same.”) It’s certainly provocative, maybe enough to backfire — which is my main concern with any in-your-face prolife activism: Is this really about changing people’s minds on abortion, or is it designed to accomplish something less productive? In this case, the potential for actually changing minds seems to be there. Still, I probably wouldn’t have funded it. (Not that it’s an option.)

I appreciate Haberman’s evenhanded assessment of the billboard. But I am also intrigued by the larger point he makes: Read the rest of this entry »

That’s what CNS’s eminence grise (well, sort of gray) John Thavis aptly calls Benedict’s take on the narrative of the trial and death of Jesus, according to excerpts released today from the second volume of the pope’s “Jesus of Nazareth” series. (He may need another volume to cover the rest of the Gospels, I think.) The book itself will be released March 10.

My report at Politics Daily is here, which includes a link to the entirety of one excerpted passage that Austen Ivereigh posted at America. The sections dealing with Benedict’s “exoneration” of the Jewish people for culpability in the death of Jesus is garnering most of the attention, which is understandable and was likely the Vatican’s aim, given the contents of the sections they released and, perhaps, given the pontiff’s problematic track record with the Jewish community during his reign.

Benedict is convincing and eloquent and very accessible, as he was in the first Jesus book (I thought), and while he seems to me to be expanding on Nostra Aetate, that’s always a good thing. And he does it using the latest scholarship, especially as regards (I believe) the growing acceptance of the historical reliability of John.

Check it out for yourselves. Mel Gibson it ain’t.

I’d add that the passages near the end of the main excerpt, on Pilate and his role, and Benedict’s observations on what they say about the relationship of truth and justice and peace, are fascinating to me — if a bit recondite to my initial reading. But I think they reflect Benedict’s “takeaway” in terms of the passage’s applicability to the modern world, and reflect consistent tropes in his thinking, and may have a “longer tail” than the passages regarding Judaism.

When I saw the headline “Huckabee: Obama ‘Grew up in Kenya’” at Media Matters, I assumed Huckabee must have simply misspoken. It’s true that Barack Obama spent some of his boyhood living in Indonesia; Huckabee must have named the wrong country by mistake. But that, it turns out, would be giving Mike Huckabee too much credit.

Huckabee appeared on a radio program, The Steve Malzberg Show, today, and was asked, “Don’t you think we deserve to know more about this man?” This man, obviously, is Barack Hussein Obama. The guy who wrote the well-received and, for a politician, surprisingly revealing memoir before he even ran for president. The guy who, our media often frets, may be “overexposed.” You probably think you know a little about him! Perhaps even too much. But certain paranoid parts of the right-wing discourse haven’t given up on their Obama-as-Manchurian-Candidate fearmongering. Even after two years in the White House, he could be capable of anything, because we just don’t know anything about him!

Anyway, Mike Huckabee, prospective presidential candidate, doesn’t seem to know that “I take the president at his word” is the standard way for Republicans to weasel out of questions about whether it’s time the GOP leadership stopped indulging all this birther nonsense. Instead, he said this:

HUCKABEE: I would love to know more. What I know is troubling enough. And one thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the average American…. But then if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.

This is not simply misspeaking. Huckabee is regurgitating bona fide quasi-birther conspiracy theories, quite similar to those advanced by Dinesh D’Souza in Forbes last fall (and subsequently endorsed by Newt Gingrich). I remember that article primarily because of the widespread scorn and derision with which it was received. (It’s hard to overstate how vile that particular line of attack is; here’s David Frum giving it a shot.)

It strikes me as alarming that Mike Huckabee would actually believe this stuff. What does he read? Does he think Newt Gingrich is a trustworthy source? If so, perhaps Fox News (where Huckabee now works) is not the best place from which to prep for a presidential run. Of course, there’s an alternate explanation: it’s possible Huckabee knows perfectly well that Obama didn’t grow up in Kenya and doesn’t endanger the nation with his dark anticolonialist views, but he’s content to suggest otherwise when he’s speaking to a birther-friendly audience. Neither possibility redounds to his credit.

The lovely poem on St. Teresa by Richard Wilbur that Bob Imbelli posted earlier today seems to me to have in mind the sculpture of St. Teresa in Ecstasy that was designed and made by Bernini for a chapel in the Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome. Below are two images, one that show the work in some detail and another that shows it in a larger context in the chapel. The erotic character of the work has often been commented on, and not always reverently, particularly by people who are unfamiliar with the erotically charged imagery of the biblical and Christian tradition, ever since the Song of Songs. Teresa’s own description of the moment Bernini’s work represents makes use of erotic language, and in this she continues a long line of writers who knew that it is not only the body that experiences pleasure and delight. I wonder if the work does not illustrate the line with which John Donne ends his famous sonnet:  “Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.”

Today is the 90th birthday of Richard Wilbur, arguably America’s greatest living poet. The Wall Street Journal has a handsome appreciation:

His productivity, never high to begin with, has slowed with age. He finishes poems at the rate that Antonio Stradivari constructed a violin. “I often don’t write more than a couple of lines in a day of, let’s say, six hours of staring at the sheet of paper,” he told the Paris Review in 1977. “Composition for me is, externally at least, scarcely distinguishable from catatonia.”

He believes over time, though, that the joints in his verse have loosened up even as those in his body have stiffened. Whereas his family once seemed off-limits as a subject, last year’s “Anterooms: New Poems and Translations” opened with a tribute to his wife (“The House”) that was heartbreaking in its reticence.

“One of the jobs of poetry is to make the unbearable bearable, not by falsehood but by clear, precise confrontation,” he has said. Mr. Wilbur has met that challenge by holding himself to the strict, outmoded view that what can’t be described well maybe isn’t worth writing down.

Few things in American life are built to last. Mr. Wilbur’s poems and translations are an implausible anomaly. Wherever English is read, tomorrow and a century of birthdays from now, their example will still be inspiring veneration and dispensing comfort.

Though I find it hard to believe, I posted a stanza of one of my favorite Wilbur poems on this blog four years ago (on the feast of Saint Teresa). Here is the entire poem:

Teresa

After the sun’s eclipse
The brighter angel and the spear which drew
A bridal outcry from her open lips,
She could not prove it true,
Nor think at first of any means to test
By what she had been wedded or possessed.

Not all cries were the same;
There was an island in mythology
Called by the very vowels of her name
Where vagrants of the sea,
Changed by a word, were made to squeal and cry
As heavy captives in a witch’s sty.

The proof came soon and plain:
Visions were true which quickened her to run
God’s barefoot errands in the rocks of Spain
Beneath its beating sun,
And lock the O of ecstasy within
The tempered consonants of discipline.