Over at the Millions, Robert Fay has an essay with the provocative title, “Where Have All the Catholic Writers Gone?” Fay tells a story of decline, arguing that there has been a profound falling-off in both the quantity and quality of Catholic writers since the mid-century. (Paul Elie made a similar but more subtle argument in Commonweal a few years ago.)

In the years immediately following World War II, the “Catholic novelist” seemed to be an easily identifiable, well respected type. A list of the most prominent mid-century Catholic writers—Muriel Spark, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy—reads like a veritable Who’s Who of post-1945 Anglophone fiction. And these writers were not Catholic in name only: Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, for instance, is almost as much about Eucharistic theology as it is about adultery, and Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie offers a startlingly original (and disturbing) exploration of the tension between free will and divine providence.

In Fay’s view, these halcyon days are long gone. Nowadays, Fay writes, there are few writers who offer “searing inquiries into the nature of man and his place vis-à-vis the Divine.” He argues that “there has not been a new generation of Catholic writers to take up” the mantle of O’Connor and others. It’s not just that writers don’t fully believe in Catholic doctrine; it’s that Catholic doctrine doesn’t even really occur to them as an option. The Catholic writer, it seems, has gone the way of the dodo. Read the rest of this entry »

Someday someone will write a book about what swell people real estate developers are, but not just yet.  Anne Zouroudi’s second book,  The Taint of Midas, is another cautionary tale, this time about greed, set on the fictional Greek island of Arcadia.  The island’s sun-drenched charms have been discovered by tourists from Scandinavia, Britain, and Germany.  Aris Paliakis, developer and entrepreneur, wants their business.

Many of Arcadia’s people are saddened by the rampant destruction of olive groves and other beautiful sites as corrupt local officials change zoning laws to benefit developers; hotels and villas for foreign visitors begin to sprout all over.  One of the most beautiful sites, a hilltop with the crumbling remains of a temple to Apollo, belongs to Gabrilis Kaloyeros, an elderly beekeeper who is nearly blind.  Aris Paliakis covets that land.  Even though it is protected as a historic sight, he know which officials to bribe.  Shortly after he connives to have Gabrilis sign a document waiving his interest in the land, the beekeeper is struck by a car, while on his way to market, and left to die.

Enter the so-called fat man, Hermes Diaktoros.   Read the rest of this entry »

In a review in the last issue, Scott Moringiello described his primary criterion for judging a critic: “If a critic makes me want to read a novel or see an opera or painting, I judge the criticism useful.” I thought of this rule as I was reading Changing My Mind, a 2009 collection of essays by the British novelist Zadie Smith. And surely it is a sign of Smith’s critical power—and flexibility—that after finishing Changing My Mind I wanted to, among other things, sit down and watch Adam’s Rib, Syriana, Romance & Cigarettes, and the entire seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I wanted to read Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and President Obama’s Dreams from My Father and reread George Eliot’s Middlemarch , David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Vladimir Nabokov’s lectures on Russian literature. Finally, I wanted to go back and give two of Smith’s own novels—White Teeth and On Beauty—another shot. (I read White Teeth while spending the night in a Dublin airport; I don’t remember much except for its frenetic energy. As for On Beauty, which is a re-writing of E. M. Forster’s Howards End, I remember admiring the chutzpah it took to make such an attempt but also being unconvinced by the execution.)

Changing My Mind gathers together essays that Smith wrote over the last several years, mainly for the New York Review of Books. As my list of things to watch/read above indicates, Smith’s interests are varied. She writes on highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow topics; on television, film, literature, politics, and family history. Her writing is supple and often surprising. She is unafraid to pair seemingly incongruous subjects and see where this pairing will lead her. In one essay, for instance, she connects President Obama’s philosophical outlook to John Keats’s notion of negative capability, an imaginative responsiveness that enables the poet (or politician) to project himself into other persons and positions. (This essay was written in 2008. President Obama’s empathetic imagination seems less endearing after we’ve witnessed the consequences of his on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand manner of dealing with Republican intransigence.) Read the rest of this entry »

I grew up listening to opera.  Every Saturday afternoon at two, during the season, the Metropolitan Opera of the Air filled our kitchen with music.  My mother would raise the volume really high for favorite pieces; at intermission we listened to Milton Cross host the Metropolitan Opera Quiz, with famous guests who knew a thing or two about music.  The show was fun, civilized, and it formed in me a lifetime’s passion for music.

Listening to hours of opera recordings and seeing perhaps a few dozen performances at the Met, the City Opera, and a few other places did not make me a music critic, just a fan.  But since moving to the suburbs forty-five years ago, I have seldom gone to see an opera at the Met.  Tickets are expensive and getting there from here is not only tiring, it leaves you hostage to a train schedule.  And, in case no one has told you, the opera crowd is an older crowd.

What changed everything a few years ago was the arrival of large-screen HDTV performances in theaters.  Now, you can live a thousand miles from the Met and still see a simulcast performance of your favorite Verdi or Wagner or Mozart opera just minutes from home in a local theater.

I went to the first local broadcast at Fairfield University and it was  a mob scene.  No one anticipated such a stunning turnout and, with no reserved seating that day, everyone was anxious to be near the head of the line.  The crush of gray-haired old folks with canes, walkers, crutches, and wheelchairs was so great that I thought they had emptied out all the nursing homes in Fairfield County. (I feel it is okay to say this because this is the voting bloc to which I belong.) In any event, it was Donizetti’s The Daughter of  the Regiment and it was heaven.  For opera lovers it was paradise indeed: a small theater, close to home, with no bad sight lines and tickets priced at $20.  Performances now are routinely sold out.

When a neighbor’s plans changed last week and I had  a free ticket to see Don Giovanni, it was a mere stone’s throw from home.  Both the singing and the acting were superb, maybe even stupendous.  As a musical experience it was to be in marked contrast to the performance of Jersey Boys which I saw just four days later, a birthday gift from my two oldest grandchildren.

Jersey Boys, the story of Frankie Valli and The Four Season, is as much a morality play as Mozart’s portrayal of the dissolute nobleman Don Giovanni and his fearsome end.  The guys from Jersey, of course, got a much happier ending. And why not?  They were four  scrappy, talented kids from nowhere–gritty neighborhoods in and around Newark.  They made mistakes, some worse than others, but they ultimately handled the trials and temptations of fame reasonably well.  It’s a great story and is everything musical theater should be.

Without taking anything away from the dozen great opera performances I have now seen on the big screen,  I felt the rocking, stomping,  live energy of Jersey Boys to the bone.  This was a different kind of stupendous, but stupendous it was.  The connection between actors and audience was palpable.  It was the real thing.

The camera can only partially capture the heat of a brilliant performance.  When I saw Renata Tebaldi as Violetta in La Traviata years ago I was seated so close I could hear her shoes squeak on the stage floor.  My cousin tossed flowers at her as she took her bows.  It was unforgettable.

Even badness is more memorable when it is live.  Once, after a meal of truly terrible Chinese food, I went with friends to a truly terrible amateur performance of Lucia di Lammermoor.  The production embarrassed everyone except its benighted cast and its director, who should have been shot.  Its awfulness gave it high entertainment value, and my friends and I still reminisce about it.

Yes, I plan to continue going to HDTV performances of the Met.  They have enriched my life.  Along with a few other souls, I get into the operatic spirit by applauding when the live audience at the Met applauds; it gives me a feeling of connection.  I love to shout “brava” when a soprano belts one out the park.    And as I learned from those Jersey boys, once in awhile ya gotta get the real thing.

I tend to enjoy novels that depict students in college or recent college graduates. So some of my favorite fiction that I’ve read in the last ten years or so includes Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, and Tom Wolfe’s I am Charlotte Simmons. Needless to say, these novels differ greatly, but perhaps owing to the fact that I read them in college or just after college or that I teach college students now, I have enjoyed them all.

I can now add to that list the two biggest literary novels of the fall: Chad Harbuch’s The Art of Fielding and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot.* Like the novels I’ve listed above, both deal with students in college and just after college. In a way that surpasses any of them, these two books do an excellent job describing falling in love in college. After all, the real point of college is to fall in love. And I speak from experience when I say that it is easy to fall in love with and fall in love in a small liberal arts college. Given all the recent discussions about higher education in the United States (some of it helpful, most of it not), it is easy to lose sight of how important it is to fall in love with what you learn. You probably aren’t able to learn any other way. It is also easy to lose sight of the fact that students can fall in love with all sorts of things: accounting, poetry, chemistry, each other, God. What sets both books apart, however, is not that they depict falling in love in and with college well. Instead, what sets them apart is that the main characters in the novels learn the most difficult thing to accept in college is that they are loved. Read the rest of this entry »

The sex abuse crisis has brought many in the Church to a painful awareness that there is something very wrong in the way our clerical system operates. Many have asked: Are we treating the problem at the systemic level, i.e. addressing the institutional culture that enabled abuse?

The need for deeper reflection on questions of institutional culture was brought home to me recently as I read a feature in the Irish Times in July – not long after the release of the Cloyne Report—that asked “Where were the good priests?” The story captured some of the fear, sadness, anger, and even despair that such priests feel. Built into their very lives are features of a clerical culture that defeated or at least impeded the moral force that ought to have been exercised. Read the rest of this entry »

It was only a matter of time before the New Atheists were challenged from within their own ranks. Hitchens and Dawkins and Dennett and Sam Harris, the leading figures among the self-proclaimed “brights” (seriously, with no sense of irony) offer sometimes serious and thoughtful challenges to the possibility of theism but fail spectacularly to present an alternative vision with any charm or warmth or—let’s face it—any brightness at all. One of the first to recognize this was Terry Eagleton in his Reason, Faith and Revolution (read an excerpt here), who wittily excoriated the hybrid “Ditchkins” for a shallow and naïve reading of Christianity as an alternative to a scientific explanation of the universe. Something of an atheist himself, Eagleton saw very quickly that you can’t build an alternative vision of reality simply by a shabby misreading of religion.

Now along come more secularists in what I think we might want to call “second-wave new atheism,” killing their fathers at least by implication in The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now. The cover is wittily picked out in the reddish gingham that connotes The Joy of Cooking or some equally classic 50s guide to cuisine, most certainly not about the way we live now. But between the covers there is a serious effort to provoke secularist thought to offer the kinds of satisfactions for which religion has traditionally been responsible. Darwin and Freud and, of course, Charles Taylor, are much in evidence here as George Levine (the editor) and his contributors make a very good case for secularism as meaningful and, yes, in a way, enchanted. Of course, there’s a lot for religious believers to take issue with, but there’s a lot to agree with too. Secular or religious we are all postmoderns despite ourselves, and science presents us with more than enough wonders for most imaginations. Who needs angels when you have quantum physics and black holes? There is enchantment, wonder and ethics aplenty in this collection of essays, at once learned and intriguing, intellectually demanding without being dry or daunting (with perhaps one exception that I couldn’t finish). Read the rest of this entry »

In the last issue, Brian Davies described Denys Turner’s Julian of Norwich, Theologian as “the best theological exposition of Julian to appear so far.” I couldn’t agree more wholeheartedly. In a manner that will be familiar to readers of Turner’s previous work, Julian of Norwich, Theologian weds philosophical rigor with stylistic grace. It systematically examines the most serious challenges to the Christian faith, asking why God would choose to create a world in which sin is possible, for instance, and how we can reconcile free will with divine providence. Yet, even when considering these thorny topics, Turner’s writing is never pretentious and always lucid, an enchanting blend of intelligence and elegance. Here is Turner on sin: “Sin is real in the sense that an unreality can become the real substance of a person’s or of a society’s existence, a kind of really lived refusal of the real.” On Julian’s claim that sin is “behovely”: “that sin is behovely means that sin is needed as part of the plot—or, if you like, that the plot needs sin in the way that plots do—contingently indeed, but all the same just so.” On the relationship between Purgatory and narrative: “It is not the sins committed that differentiate purgatory from hell, but the story that is told of them, the narrative to which they belong. The souls in purgatory have all repented, that is to say, they are learning how to be able, and how to desire, to situate the record of their sins within the comedy of divine love that redeems them.”

I could go on, but instead I briefly want to draw attention to Julian’s presence in the work of two of the twentieth century’s greatest poets: T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden. Eliot discovered Julian while studying as an undergraduate at Harvard in 1908-1909, shortly after Grace Warrack’s edition re-introduced Julian to the broader world. (Contrary to popular belief, Eliot’s interest in mystical theology long predated his 1927 conversion to Anglo-Catholicism.)

Much of Eliot’s early poetry dealt with saintly mystics and bloody visions, and these poems surely were influenced by Eliot’s exposure to Julian’s showings. (They also show the influence of the other mystics he was reading at the time, including St. Theresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross.) However, it wasn’t until the 1942 publication of “Little Gidding,” the last poem in Eliot’s sequence Four Quartets, that Julian appeared explicitly in Eliot’s verse. In the third section of “Little Gidding,” Eliot begins a stanza by quoting Julian directly: “Sin is Behovely, but / All shall be well, and / All manner of thing shall be well.” It is a startling transition from the stanza before, where abstract language prevailed and Eliot mused that “history may be servitude, / History may be freedom.” Now, with his direct quoting of Julian, he moves to a simpler yet more powerful register, asserting the hope that sin is behovely and that history ultimately will be redeemed.

The whole sequence has been building to this transition. Throughout Four Quartets, Eliot acknowledges, even seems resigned to, the problems of earthly existence: the world’s ugliness (“Garlic and sapphires in the mud / Clot the bedded axle-tree”), humanity’s weakness (“human kind / Cannot bear very much reality”), and the violent need for self-purgation (“If to be warmed, then I must freeze / And quake in frigid purgatorial fires / Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars”). But, looking to Julian, Eliot asserts that all of this—disease, deception, suffering, evil—is part of a larger pattern, a pattern that we can’t know from our temporal perspective but that will be revealed in eternity. As Turner would say, all this pain is part of a happy story, a divine comedy that transforms pain into bliss, suffering into comfort.

The final section of “Little Gidding” once again looks to Julian in its concluding image of eternal reconciliation:

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

The existence of pain is not denied, but Eliot asserts that, when placed in the context of eternity, it will be understood as behovely, as fitting. For Eliot, Julian remains the best articulator of this realistic yet hopeful Christian vision.

Eliot’s channeling of Julian is hard to top, but Auden’s 1949 poem “Memorial for the City” comes close. Auden, a less devoted reader of Julian than Eliot, appears to have first come across her writing in the work of the Anglican theologian, poet, and novelist Charles Williams. Auden opens “Memorial for the City” with an epigraph from Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love that reveals a different facet of the English mystic’s thinking: “In the self-same point that our soul is made sensual, in the self-same point is the City of God ordained to him from without beginning.” It is precisely our embodiment, Julian argues, that allows us to look forward to the Kingdom of God. We are not pure souls but souls plus bodies, and this mixture is necessary for the salvation history of which we are a part.

“Memorial for the City” is wonderfully complex in both form and argument. The poem is divided into four sections. The first three survey, in order, a devastated, war-scarred landscape; history’s many failed political, spiritual, and intellectual revolutions; and the various divisions and alienations the self is subject to in our worldly existence (an Eliotian theme if ever there were one). All of these implicitly deal with Julian’s concept of the behovely. Despite the nightmares of history, we are told, “We know without knowing there is reason for what we bear.” We must remain hopeful that the story will turn out right; we must remain like “Adam waiting for His City.”

The final section is the poem’s most powerful, and the one that most explicitly looks to Julian. The speaker of the final section is the pure body, removed from consciousness or the soul. We might call it the Body, except that this allegorization would ignore the physical specificity that Auden (with Julian) is so eager to retain. Looking to Biblical and literary history, the body celebrates its own worth. “Without me,” the body brags, “Adam would have fallen irrevocably with Lucifer; he would never have been able to cry O felix culpa.” Impatient with existential angst, the body declares , “With Hamlet I had no patience”; concerned with creaturely comforts, the body complains, “time after time I warned Captain Ahab to accept happiness.”

After this long catalog, Auden’s poem ends with a vision of salvation:

As for Metropolis, that too-great city; her delusions are not mine.

Her speeches impress me little, her statistics less; to all who     dwell on the public side of her mirrors resentments and no peace.

At the place of my passion her photographers are gathered together; but I shall rise again to hear her judged.

Auden emphasizes the importance of the individual as opposed to the collective. Celebrating embodiment means celebrating the individual, embodied self, and it is precisely this individual, embodied self, the poem declares, that will be resurrected at the end of days. Then, judgment will be given; then, the body will be revealed in all its sensual glory; then, Eliot, Auden, and Julian claim, all manner of thing shall be well.

First, fair warning: this is a frivolous post, a tale of pop culture, written to accompany the eating of leftover Halloween candy.

The week leading up to Halloween brought television two new fairy-tale inspired dramas, NBC’s Grimm and ABC’s Once Upon a Time. Grimm is a police procedural with a supernatural twist (one of the cops is a descendant of the Brothers Grimm and has inherited a vocation for hunting monsters). Once Upon a Time supposes that an evil curse has trapped fairy tale characters in the modern town of Storybrooke, Maine, unable to remember where they came from, but with a prophecy about a lost daughter returning to break the curse. The monsters in Grimm are derived from the original, gory tales of the Brothers Grimm; the characters in Once Upon a Time are drawn from the sanitized Disney tales.

Of course I was much more optimistic about Grimm. I can’t stand sanitized fairy tales with simpering princesses and sugar-coated endings. So I watched Grimm first – and was sorely disappointed. The show feels like a third-rate imitation of a Joss Whedon series. The production and writing are sloppy; the plot twists are predictable; nothing about it feels original.

Once Upon a Time, on the other hand, which I expected to hate, left me impressed. The characters have complex and plausible human interactions, in the fairy-tale scenes as much as in the real-world ones. Prince Charming tells Snow White that surely the Evil Queen can’t hurt her; Snow White shoots back in a tone dripping with sarcasm: “Really? She poisoned an apple because she thought I was prettier than her.” Costume and set design are richly imagined and have a distinct realism about them – the princesses wear gowns that suggest Alexander McQueen more than classic Disney animation. Rumpelstiltskin is not just mischievous, he’s unhinged and possibly malevolent. The casting is brilliant. The story is not predictable, and the writing is tight – all the guns on the wall in scene one are fired by the end of the episode.

Once, in other words, attempts to present the Disney tales come of age, imbued with real human drama and stripped of their saccharine trappings. It’s a tall order. The promises of the pilot episode are going to be hard to follow through on. One slip in tone and the story could veer into the saccharine or even ridiculous. Pacing is also going to be a challenge: the initial setup suggests the beginning of a feature film more than a multi-season television drama, and it’s hard to imagine the premise holding for more than one season. Still, the pilot was good enough that I’ll stick around for a few more episodes and see what these writers can come up with – they might just be able to work a bit of magic. If you’re in the mood for some lighter viewing, this series is worth checking out.

My one criticism, at this point, is that its feminism might be overdone. Like the literary fairy tales of Angela Carter, Once introduces strong female characters – three of them, on whom the story centers. The men don’t have a whole lot to do; so far they seem to exist mostly as pretty faces or else pawns in a dangerous, female-dominated game. (The one exception, the male creature with designs of his own, is Rumpelstiltskin; but he is monstrous.) This arrangement felt skewed to me, a sort of reverse sexism, and brought to mind all the recent journalistic buzz about “the end of men.” It’s not that I think the princesses should go back to behaving like wilted lettuce and let the men rescue them, it’s just that having at least one fully developed male character in the ensemble (and/or a weak female character to contrast with all the strong ones) would make the story more believable. The objectification of one sex is never a good idea. Ethically, it’s unfair; artistically, it drains half the human race of its agency and therefore weakens a story, no matter which half the artist decides to favor.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled high culture.