When I was studying in England, one of my teachers asked me if I was “one of those American intellectuals who loves baseball.” American? Absolutely. Intellectual? Hardly. Loves baseball? Well, that’s complicated. You see, I’m a Mets fan, and so loving baseball means loving the Mets, which means hopeful Aprils and heartbreaking Septembers and lots of heartache in between. The perennial success of the hated crosstown Yankees with their rich history and big payroll doesn’t  help matters.

There have been a few bright spots this season. Johann Santana threw the first no-hitter in the franchise’s history. (The beloved former Met Tom Seaver threw a no-hitter when he was a member of the Cincinatti Reds, and former Met David Cone threw a no-hitter as a Yankee.) All Star third baseman David Wright has returned to form after a sub par season last year.

There is also R.A. Dickey, the Mets knuckleball pitcher, who has won sixteen games thus far this season, has a 2.76 ERA, and has thrown 186 strikeouts. He has also written (with the Daily News’s Wayne Coffey) an outstanding memoir, Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity, and the Perfect Knuckleball. You don’t even have to suffer as a Mets fan to enjoy it. Read the rest of this entry »

Allegra Goodman, one of my favorite novelists, announced on her blog that she has completed a complete manuscript of her new novel, Arcadia. (A surprising choice for a title considering Lauren Groff, the talented young author of The Monsters of Templeton, just published a novel with the same title this past year.)

The novelist, poet, critic, and biographer Jay Parini will be writing a full-length biography of his close friend, Gore Vidal.  For an appreciation of the late, great Vidal, see Matthew Boudway’s post here.

My good friend Craig Fehrman has an essay on David Foster Wallace as a midwestern writer in this week’s Chicago Reader. Craig also describes his disappointment with D. T. Max’s new biography of Wallace, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, which is set to come out on Friday. Having just finished the book, I can tell you that Craig is being overly kind–the work is a real disappointment.

Fleet Foxes, an indie band that I’ve talked about here before, is launching a literary magazine.

Compazine

The book jacket of the recently reissued, Crusoe’s Daughter, asserts that the author Jane Gardam is the “best British novelist you never heard of.” This is a fair comment in that Gardam has published eighteen works of fiction (and three children’s books) to critical acclaim, but she has a small following in this country. The question should be not why so many American readers have missed her but rather what have they missed. Much, clearly. Gardam’s works stand quite happily next to those of her rough contemporaries, Penelope Fitzgerald and Beryl Bainbridge. She shares with them an acute sense of social class, the ability to summon up the not too distant past, and a quirky inventiveness in plot development. Her style is effortless and laconic.

Crusoe’s Daughter, an early work, introduces the themes that preoccupy the writer, eccentricity of character, the force of religious belief, and profoundly ironic movements toward self-discovery and acceptance. Her characters appear stripped down by fate, sometimes harshly, sometime through slow processes of family or professional demands. However conventional their stations or professions, their lives are always unconventional. Polly Flint, the daughter of Crusoe of the title, is abruptly orphaned and finds herself living with her maiden aunts in a rambling old yellow house abutting the “German Sea” on the coast of Yorkshire. The late Victorian setting brackets the child with idiosyncratic, no, down-right odd, maiden aunts whose religious fervor forces both observance and precocious sensibility on their niece. The tale is complex and focuses on the time of the First World War, with all its attendant losses and displacements.

Polly narrates the tale with the hindsight of some fifty years in time.  The perspective alters with Polly’s age and psychological state, yet it is to Gardam’s great credit that we never lose the sense that we are listening to an aged voice, adapting in memory to childhood impressions, alcoholic depression and romantic frustrations. The narrative form changes accordingly: her letters to her aunt carry the account of her first meeting with a wider, artistic world just as the concluding play for voices offers a magical resolution to her relationship with her fictional father.

If we take the title at face value, Polly is, in some sense like Crusoe, a castaway: isolated, self-dependent, and struggling to master the environment she inhabits. Too often it appears that people create the environment that challenges her. Yet it is Crusoe’s moral temper that she so deeply imbibes and defends against those who would dismiss Defoe’s novel as prosaic or childish. Crusoe is the moral standard against which she measures herself and by whom she finally stands approved.

It is impossible to convey by quotation the delicacy and wit of the characterization, and the disarming self-revelation of the chief character. Her eccentric family and larger than life neighbors are rendered, as it were, from the Crusoe perspective: a wariness that is won over by staunch weighing of danger and strength.  Uncle Thwaite has an elliptical warmth in speech and appearance that begs all indulgence, which Polly indeed gives. The Vicar’s Alice, who arrives a necessary helpmate, offers her a mirror of Crusoe-like organization and resourcefulness. It is Alice who steels Polly’s character when she is in danger of abandoning herself to whiskey and helps Polly become the teacher that we all wish we had (or were). There is nothing sentimental in Gardam’s world; death and old age make their stark claims, and the conclusion shows that Polly, who locks herself away in her singular battle with memory, is as realistic with herself in judgment as was her favorite character.

Gardam’s range is considerable. Her recent works, Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat take us far away in place (Hong Kong) but we dwell there only to return to familiar territory: rural England and challengingly old eccentrics – ones whose memories constantly taunt them to honesty – and affirmation of life. She is a rare novelist, but too few of her works are available here. We can be thankful that Europa press is publishing her novels in this country and can hope only that they fill out their list with all her titles.

Wow. I suppose we should get right to the thing I know everyone wants to talk about from last night’s Breaking Bad: the use of the terrific but little-known Monkees song “Goin’ Down” to underscore the meth-cooking montage! I’ve always felt Micky Dolenz was one of the ’60s’ most underrated great pop vocalists. No?

OK, let’s jump and talk about the episode’s big shock: Read the rest of this entry »

Another week, another chance for me to recommend something Emily Nussbaum wrote in the New Yorker: this time it’s an essay on the way Breaking Bad keeps us watching as it goes into ever darker territory, and specifically how “Breaking Bad has always put children in danger, to the point that it’s practically the show’s trademark.” (We were discussing that theme a bit here in the comments on last week’s episode.) Nussbaum’s explication of the “Mr. Chips-to-Scarface” trajectory is particularly relevant this week, I think:

We’re deep in the Scarface stage; the hero of the show is now its villain. There are only ten episodes left, eight of them due next summer, a welcome deadline that has allowed Gilligan to shape his ending without the vamping that mars so many multi-season dramas. But, even if his show ends brilliantly, he’s already told us that it won’t end well.

And on that note, this week’s episode… Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Hughes died last week at the age of seventy-four. Most famous for his three decades as Time Magazine’s art critic and for The Shock of the New, an eight-part TV series on modern art, Hughes was the Orwell of the art world: both skeptical and idealistic, often severe but never catty, persuasive in his enthusiasms but most eloquent in his indignation. Indignation, not cranky reaction, was the right response to much of what was happening in the art world while Hughes was writing about it. The rich legacy of Hughes’s modernist heroes was being squandered by confidence men and obscurantists. Good work was still being done, and Hughes celebrated some of it (he was particularly good on Lucian Freud); but, more and more, the art world was being ruined by the art market, a corrupting combination of opportunism, hype, and gullible wealth. Here’s a clip of Hughes at his surliest, confronting one particularly clueless and powerful collector:

For Tom Wolfe, the art world was merely farce; for Hughes, it was also tragedy. In the week since his death, there have been several eloquent tributes. From Simon Schama:

Hughes’ sticky-fingered relish for the material texture of life, for its savors and flavors, its warp and woof, always immersed in the thick of being, and the skilled gusto with which he set it all down, ought never to be mistaken for indifference to complex ideas and deep analysis. Bob’s beef with much (though not all) of conceptual art was the vacant banality of the concepts. Jenny Holzer’s visual utterances he memorably compared, and not to her advantage, with the homilies embroidered on an embroidery sampler. He could, if he chose, do dueling discourse at dawn with the best of them, but he preferred instead to invite the regular Janes and Joes who thronged the Met or MoMA into the subtle web of his thought, and let them emerge more thoughtful, more attentive, before the work itself. He was the benevolent enabler of Everyman’s epiphany.

From Howard Jacobson:

Has anyone ever looked out of a television screen with more critical menace? [The Shock of the New] was a series in which the viewer was made ashamed of being stupid. That’s to say it was the opposite of most art programmes now. The words flowed, the passion burnt up the screen. He made it manly to look at art, not Sir Kenneth Clark refined and in-the-know, or John Berger ideological, but manly in the democratic sense, engaging our humanity. He hated theory and the linguistic pallor of those who used jargon to shut the uninitiated out of art.

From Adam Gopnik:

There are few critics whose work can be read for style alone, and many of the best of those are essentially impressionists or appreciators, like Whitney Balliett and Henry James, idiosyncratic enthusiasts who wrote most often to explicate a new, if sometimes baffled, love. There is a still smaller number who, though passionately opinionated, and as often inclined to damn as praise, manage to turn opinion itself into a kind of art form, who bring to full maturity the moral qualities that hide in violent judgment—qualities of audacity, courage, conviction—and make them come so alive on the page that even if the particular object is seen in a fury, the object seems less interesting than the emotion it evoked, while some broader principle always seems defended by the indignation. Of that still rarer kind, those who come first to mind in English might be Tynan and Shaw on the theatre, Johnson and Jarrell on poetry—and to those names must be added that of Robert Hughes…

I hope you weren’t watching the closing ceremonies of the Olympics last night instead of episode 5 of Breaking Bad, because you guys, I need to talk about that episode. But I will be nice to the stragglers and put all the spoilers after the jump.

First: I found this piece Emily Nussbaum wrote for New York magazine (where she was the TV critic before her current gig at the New Yorker) about catching up on the first three seasons of Breaking Bad in a week to get ready for season 4. I found it highly relatable, since I watched the show the same way — and I’ve been watching a number of shows this way, detached from their original airing schedule, since my kid came along last year. There is much about Breaking Bad that feels more like a movie than a TV show — production values, but also continuity of images and plot and character and timeline — and so, as Nussbaum says, it lends itself to viewing in big chunks. (Too many episodes in a row would probably make me an emotional wreck, though, so proceed with caution if you’re thinking of a Breaking Bad binge.) I already can’t wait to watch it again. But in the past year my husband and I have also worked our way through The Wire, Men of a Certain Age, and Deadwood, and it is nice to experience a show as a completed project. (Even if, as I’ve been warned in the case of Deadwood, that project doesn’t come to a satisfying wrap-up). We’re free from the worry and stress that comes with getting attached to a show while it’s still “live” — we don’t have to wonder how many seasons the network will let it go on. We don’t have to watch it dwindle, like The Office, and wonder each week if it’s still worth watching. We don’t have to be afraid the network will pull the rug out from under it, like with Arrested Development or Community. And we don’t have to endure the long waits between seasons that are standard for cable dramas. It’s just there, in a box set, ready for us to watch or not watch as we please.

The down side to this approach is that it’s harder to find people to talk about the show with as you watch. (Boy, season two of The Wire kind of stank, didn’t it?… What do you mean you can’t remember what you thought about it nine years ago? I’m ready to discuss it now.) And, of course, as Nussbaum says, ” if everyone watched this way, no great series would make it past the first season.” So someone will have to keep risking heartbreak, I suppose.

And now on to this week’s Breaking Bad, because nothing stops this train (ha ha ha ha): Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes we are simply lucky. I was, fifty years ago, when I heard William T. Noon S.J. speak on David Jones (1895 –1974), the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist. Some years later I was fortunate to have Jones as a correspondent. I was also lucky to become an early member of the David Jones Society, begun by Anne Price-Owen, a professor and Jones specialist at Swansea Metropolitan University. And I was lucky to be staying in Baltimore last March when an email from Anne Price-Owen gave notice of a Jones convention in nearby Washington Adventist University. For years I had been receiving prospectuses for academic gatherings and events centered on Jones but of course they had all been held in the UK. I had now a chance to travel by MARC and Metro to what would prove to be more than a series of lectures. The conference came as something of an answer to the plea of G.M. Hopkins: “Send my roots rain.”

I have been reading David Jones, with what I hope is increasing comprehension, ever since Father Noon’s talk. Jones had a place in my academic research, and he sent to me an extraordinarily patient set of answers to questions I had posed about his work. I tried to collect (and read) as many of his printed works as I could find, and I made my one foray into the world of art prints to purchase a Jones’ engraving. I parsed my way through the difficult In Parentheses and The Anathemata with the critical studies written by those who were to be presenters. For me the two day event was to be more than trip by train and subway.

If any readers are interested in Jones, the conference program is still posted on-line (http://www.wauhonorsprogram.org/djconference.html) ; the presenters included specialists from both sides of the Atlantic, British, Canadian and American. The host of the conference, Bradford Hass, Director of the Honors Program at Washington Adventist University, also co-edits FlashPoint Magazine which featured Jones in a recent (on-line) issue (http://www.flashpointmag.com/index13.htm); some of the papers were authored by presenters at the conference. Readers can get a sense of the range of the topics and the perspective of the scholars.

There are not a great many Jones admirers in this country, but they are enthusiastic and focused. Besides Dr. Hass’s honor students, the participants in the conference barely exceeded the presenters. That is to the loss of all those who did not attend. I was finally able to meet Anne Price-Owen, the director of the David Jones Society, whose vivacity and scholarship has brought so much to the study of Jones. William Blisset, one of the first Jones scholars and the artist’s friend, lectured with the all the benefit of his ninety years on the evolution of Jones studies and their direction. Thomas Dilworth, the author of a remarkably informative guide to the poet, Reading David Jones, presented his analysis of the engravings Jones did to Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Derek Shiel, an artist in his own right, offered the second of his two remarkable films on Jones as artist and poet. I would like to mention all those who did presentations, but memory and notes fail me; the web site indicates who lectured and the range of their talks.

There was an intimacy and ease in the conference; this had to be because of the scant separation between presenters and participants. The talk about Jones, especially the anecdotes recounted by those who knew him, went well beyond scholarly commentary.

I came away invigorated: the artist’s passionate struggles, with his materials and with his faith  evoked, indeed, corresponding passions. The formal demands upon his readers made by Jones and the difficulties of his style foment an interpretive recognition of genius and a corresponding joy of discovery. Jones as an artist rewards in reading and rereading and rereading. Perhaps that aspect of the discussions dominated: the movement of Jones’s art, a development of his sacramental vision and his works’ liturgical structure. The analyses I heard said much about the struggle involved in his artistic creation and vocation.  His unwavering modesty about his education lies so much at odds with the erudition of his work and the intricacy of its detail.

The conference left me buoyed by the enthusiasm of the presenters, ready to face again the demands of The Anathemata and In Parentheses. I hoped to look with somewhat better trained eyes at the poetry and at the prints, the calligraphy and the paintings. There is a certain satisfaction in being humbled by the work of such an artist and in being encouraged  by those who gathered last March.

A friend passed away on Monday, and my shock was compounded by the fact that I first heard the news on NPR. Mark O’Donnell was a kind and generous mentor to me and a litter of other younger writers fortunate enough to have made his acquaintance. He was a Tony Award winner, having co-written the book for the Broadway musical hit Hairspray (as well as a follow-up John Waters musical project, the underappreciated Cry-Baby). He was a playwright, novelist and humorist worth knowing about. And he was someone I feel immensely blessed to have known.

My good fortune started when I gained admittance to the very popular humor-writing seminar Mark taught at Yale. Mark was formidably brilliant, but also kind and encouraging, which came as a surprise—the atmosphere in a room of comedy writers is frequently competitive and curdled. Mark genuinely wanted everyone in that room to find their potential, and he shared his ideas, his punchlines, and his time to help us get there. In my case that generosity continued long after the class was over.

When I started looking for work in New York, Mark wrote an effusive reference letter, and he also helped me get a babysitting gig. He introduced me to old friends of his who happened to be minor heroes of mine. When he wanted to downsize his book collection, he set aside a volume of essays by Mary McCarthy with me in mind. He cheered me on when I reported small writing victories (I’d been published…I’d been paid!). And when I encountered a setback, he encouraged me to use it for creative fuel. “ ‘Out of the frying pan and into the file.’ I quote myself. Love, Mark.”

I can see now that I was one of a crowd of writers who looked to Mark for approval, guidance, and encouragement as we made our various ways in the world. We acolytes and friends have been trading remembrances online over the past few days, and it seems Mark’s unique combination of wit and kindness was something no one could ever quite get over. He was “really, really brilliant,” a friend of a friend recalled on Facebook. “Like, ‘Why is this brilliant person being so nice to me?’ brilliant.” And Mark’s twin brother, Steve (also a comedy writer), told the New York Times that Mark was “almost unearthly in his sweetness.”

It’s the Hairspray gig, and the Tony Award it brought, that has gotten the most attention in notices about Mark’s death. (It so happened that Marvin Hamlisch, who wrote the score for A Chorus Line, died the same day, and so the two names were yoked in Twitter tributes lamenting the blow to the theatre community. One young musical-theatre fan tweeted something like, “It’s so hard to believe, two Broadway composers in one day!” which struck me as the sort of thing Mark would have found funny.) But there’s much more he should be remembered for. Read the rest of this entry »

In the July issue of Harper’s, Christopher Beha has an essay (subscription required) examining several books by a group of writers–the philosopher Alex Rosenberg, the neuroscientist Sam Harris, and the general man-of-letters Alain de Botton–that Beha terms the New New Atheists. If the New Atheists (memorably named “Ditchens” by Terry Eagleton) defined their project negatively–here is why religion is childish and unreasonable and downright evil, they loudly proclaimed–then the New New Atheists have a more positive project. They want to, as Beha writes, “offer some picture of what comes next,” to “explain what positive values naturally fill the God-shaped hole.” In a world without God, where we do locate happiness? Meaning? Fulfillment? Read the rest of this entry »

Your Breaking Bad update is a day late because I was stuck in traffic near Stamford on Sunday night, thanks to a scary thunderstorm that nearly flooded the Merritt and left trees down along I-95. We were so focused on the road that we forgot all about our date with AMC, which was a blessing — knowing we were missing our show was the one thing that could have made that traffic jam worse.

Anyway, I watched “Fifty-One” last night, and I’m ready to discuss its chilling grimness. When I linked to this little discussion group at dotCommonweal I asked, half in jest, why no one ever seems to swim in the Whites’ pool, and now I want to remark in all seriousness on the bad vibes that surround any and all swimming pools on this show. From that episode where Walt Jr. tried to match his father, shot for shot, and ended up puking into the pool, to the season-two Floating Bear of Foreboding, to season four’s showdown at Don Eladio’s, only bad things ever seem to happen near the pool. (What am I forgetting?) And now we can add Skyler’s watery cry for help. Read the rest of this entry »

Logan Mehl-Laituri, Reborn on the Fourth of July, the Challenge of Faith, Patriotism & Conscience.  Foreword by Shane Claiborne.  Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2012.  238 pp.

“Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.”  Or, as the translation of the Roman Missal introduced last Advent has it, “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.”  Logan Mehl-Laituri mourns the change and its seeming to “rob the verse of its literary and liturgical beauty” (234).  But most significant to him, as a veteran of Iraq and a conscientious objector, is that fact that these words from Mt 8.8, however they are rendered, were spoken by a soldier, an unnamed centurion whose faith Jesus praises.

The image of the centurion helped Mehl-Laituri ”process” what he did and saw in Iraq.  This centurion’s tale narrates a soldier’s unlikely journey to Christian pacifism.  A striking feature is the discovery that “soldiers and veterans come to the Bible with a unique perspective” (189).  Appendix B lists all the New Testament passages where soldiers appear.  Reading the Gospel Passion Narratives, it hit Mehl-Laituri hard that the men who arrested and mocked Jesus, who disfigured his body by flogging and nailed his hands and feet to the cross were centurions like him and just doing their duty.  “The Holy Spirit slapped some heavy conviction on my heart,” he writes (73).  “I had watched friends taunt and assault detaineees for no reason, just like the soldiers that mocked Jesus and crowned him with thorns.”  But then in each of the synoptic gospels, it is a centurion who confesses Jesus on the cross as the Son of God.  And, though the liturgy changes his words to refer to himself rather than his sick servant, it is the centurion whose prayer is repeated at every Mass.  But, in the end, it is “the soldiers (Jn 18.12) who crucify Jesus.  And they do it in performance of “their martial duties.”  They execute him, a duty for which they could not have been blamed any more than a prison guard who administers a lethal injection.

Speaking of the injustices he thought made war morally necessary and the evils entailed in the conduct of even a just war, St. Augustine wrote in Book XIX of City of God, “And so everyone who reflects with sorrow on such grievous evils, in all their horror and cruelty, must acknowledge the misery of them.  And yet a man who experiences such evils, or even thinks about them, without heartfelt grief, is assuredly in a far more pitiable condition, if he thinks himself happy simply because he has lost all human feeling.”  “Heartfelt grief” is Henry Bettenson’s translation for the Latin “animi dolore,” more literally, sorrow of soul.  For Augustine, this deep soul-sorrow is the ordinary human response to what inevitably happens in war.  It is a lament of the virtue that might justify killing another human being.

As he concludes a meditation on the centurions who executed Jesus, Mehl-Laituri puts it this way: “Most, if not all, however, are forever altered by the performance of those duties, no matter their legality or justifiability.  The door through which you go in taking a life doesn’t remain open behind you; the threshold cannot be uncrossed.  It alters your very consciousness; the truths you learn about yourself can never be unlearned” (74).

“I thought PTSD was hard to deal with, and it most certainly was,” he continues, “but it paled in comparison to the harrowing of my conscience … I felt so stupid not to have seen it earlier” (75).  Reborn on the Fourth of July is a traditional Christian confessional narrative, but, as the title indicates, it is cast in terms of an American conversion story, written in an evangelical idiom replete with references to contemporary Christian music.  Mehl-Laituri was blind but now he sees.  But this book is not just about him.  What makes it timely is the way its religious autobiography and advocacy for veterans feed off each other.

As American soldiers return home from Iraq and Afghanistan, when among soldiers on active duty suicides outnumber combat fatalities, and more than seventeen veterans end their own lives each day (177), Mehl-Laituri pleads with churches to welcome veterans home with genuine support that goes beyond “bludgeoning them with our own platitudinous gratitude and ‘sanctimonious trivialities’” (182).

The image of the centurion helped Mehl-Laituri make scriptural sense of his time in Iraq.  But his conversion narrative takes its shape from those he calls the “soldier-saints.”  He invokes St. Maximilian of Tebessa (AD 274-295) and St. Martin of Tours (AD 316-397) throughout.  When he finally turned in his “weapons card” in October 2006, it seemed like an act of worship, “the closest I would come to laying down my weapon in recognition of the age-old cadence of soldier-saints: ‘I am a soldier of Christ; it is impermissable for me to fight’” (142).  These words of Maximilian’s were repeated a hundred years later by Martin and by soldier-saints down the centuries.  Recalling them in the face of charges of irresponsibility, Mehl-Laituri replies, “That’s not anarchy, it’s church history” (105).

He structures the narrative in five Movements.  They cover roughly six years from Mehl-Laituri’s deployment to Iraq between February 2004 and February 2005 to his return to Iraq five years later in 2010 with a Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT).  Appendix E supplies a helpful Timeline of Events.  He had been in the military since 2001, but Movement One deal with Mehl-Laituri’s year in Iraq as an artillery man, a “forward observer/fire support specialist” who achieved the rank of sergeant.  “While in Iraq,” he writes, “I hadn’t just sat in a guard tower; I was on patrol, calling in fire, planning missions, barreling recklessly through villages in the driver seat of a Humvee” (73).  At the time, he judged his combat experience relatively “mild” (60, 166).  But Movement Two finds him in Hawaii experiencing symptoms of PTSD and having his conscience “harrowed” by reading the New Testament as a centurion.  It ends with an April 2006 epiphany or “cystallization of conscience,” something all military conscientious objectors must describe in detail.  It happened in a flash on a bus into the desert, a vision of himself as an unarmed soldier.  He ponders the unfamiliar term “conscientious objector” (CO) and determines “to pursue any and all means to return to Iraq without a weapon” (87).  In Movement Three he begins the difficult process of trying to gain recognition as a military CO.  Officers and former comrades question his courage and competence as a soldier.  His military identity dissolves as hopes of returning to Iraq unarmed help to deem him “unfit” for such deployment.  In Movement Four, as his application process is coming to a head in summer 2006, he is baptized in a swimming pool after a Fourth of July barbeque on the fifth floor of an apartment complex in Honolulu.  By October 2006, he is rear-deployed awaiting discharge.  Movement Five takes him to Palestine as part of a CPT team.  The Palestinaians remind him of Iraqui civilians and Israeli soldiers of himself.  He cannot look at them or greet them.  By the end of Movement Five, he is on his way back to Iraq with another CPT team.  There he comes face to face with children orphaned by the war.

My description fails before the pathos of Mehl-Laituri’s story.  He spent some of the formative years of his life in the military and clearly loved it, his fellow soldiers, and the forms of excellence they achieve.  And yet, “excommunicated” (150) from his Company, he can no longer walk with them.  What he has written does justice to a Christian soldier’s soul.  In an endorsement for the book, Lt. Col. Peter Kilner, who teaches military ethics at West Point, wrote that Mehl-Laituri “provides military readers with deep insights into the mind and motivations of a genuine conscientious objector.”  His story also issues a timely call to the churches to respond in Christian ways to the “flood of grief waiting to be released” (163) by returning veterans.

Such language and stories like Mehl-Laituri’s often elicit the response that a majority of veterans reintegrate successfully into society.  As one New York Times letter writer put it in the wake of the 2009 shootings at Fort Hood, stories “that reinforce some people’s narrative that combat veterans are poor souls forced to war, broken in spirit by its horroors and mostly victims are simply wrong, unhelpful and not clarion calls to action” (Letters, 11/10/09, A30).  And yet, even if we assume that only 10% of soldiers are trained for combat and 80% of those return home to reintegrate successfully into society, after two wars that have lasted more than a decade, and an all-volunteer army that necessitates multiple deployments, the real numbers of soldiers with the invisible wounds of PTSD or Traumatic Brain Injury, not to mention “heartfelt grief,” has to be staggering.

Mehl-Laituri cannot forget them nor those seventeen veterans who take their own lives each day.  In addition to writing this book, he also helped found, with some friends in 2008, the Centurions Guild (www.centurionsguild.org), its mission to “protect and defend prospective, current, and former service members while bearing true faith and allegiance to God” (167). 

On Veterans Day last November, Duke Divinity School hosted the “After the Yellow Ribbon” event (http://sites.duke.edu/aftertheyellowribbon).  Organized entirely by Mehl-Laituri and fellow divinity students, this was a most extraordinary conference.  It brought together soldiers and pacifists, military and civilian psychiatrists, veterans and students, military chaplains and pastors.  Instead of arguing the morality of war, they focused on a serious exploration, from multiple perspectives, of the emerging category of “spiritual” or “moral injury,” war’s invisible wounds — something like the “heartfelt grief” St. Augustine described in the fifth century and, after more than ten years of war, something no one can plausibly deny.

As Mehl-Laituri might remind us, before it was Armistice Day or Veterans Day, November 11 was the feast of St. Martin of Tours.  All “After the Yellow Ribbon’s” plenary sessions took place in Duke Divinity School’s Goodson Chapel.  In the spacious sanctuary, in the background at each talk and panel, stood two icons of “soldier-saints,” recently written by Fr. William Hart McNichols.  In this way, St. Maximilian of Tebessa and St. Martin of Tours presided over the event.  In a similar manner, may they watch over their fellow veterans and help bring to fruition the work of Mehl-Laituri and those gathered for “After the Yellow Ribbon.”

William L. Portier

This past Sunday the world saw the passing of Joe Cunneen, by any standards a great twentieth century American Catholic. Together with his wife Sally and Bill Birmingham, Joe published Cross Currents for half a century. Yes, I said half a century, fifty years to be precise. In that time he was principally responsible for bringing to the American Catholic audience some of the best writings of continental European theologians, before and after Vatican II. Rahner and Küng and Congar and Schillebeeckx and many, many others appeared in the pages of “the mag.”

The excuse for including a note on Joe in the Verdicts column is that for all the greatness of the achievement of Cross Currents Joe was much more. He was a great Francophile, indeed had met his wife Sally in Paris just after the end of the Second World War and always remained especially interested in things French. When his time at Cross Currents came to an end and it became the house journal of the Association for Religion and the Intellectual Life—a worthy journal but very different from the one he had edited—he moved on to become the movie critic of The National Catholic Reporter, wrote a fine book on the films of Robert Bresson and also began to promote the writing of the French priest and novelist Jean Sulivan.

Anyone who knew Joe will surely agree that his personal intellectual accomplishments were second to his capacity for friendship and his enormous enthusiasm for ideas. To receive a letter from him was always an experience. If the syntax strained the bounds of acceptability, it showed that there was no doubt that here was a mind in ferment, frustrated by the restrictions of the printed word. Here below I am including the official obituary, but it is to be hoped that there will be more appreciations published of Joe’s immense contribution to the intellectual vigor of American Catholicism. May he rest in peace alongside Sally, his extraordinary and unforgettable wife and colleague.

“Joseph E. Cunneen, an editor, writer, and teacher on religion, literature, and film, died in his sleep on Sunday at age 89. In 1950, he and his wife, Sally Cunneen, founded Cross Currents, an international ecumenical quarterly that would introduce American readers to such European Catholic thinkers as Emmanuel Mounier and Teilhard de Chardin who would influence the Second Vatican Council. During his 48 years as co-editor, Cross Currents provided a forum for authors such as Hans Kung, Edward Schillebeeckx, Raimundo Panikkar, and Thomas Berry on contemporary religious issues such as feminism, environmentalism, and interfaith dialog.

“For two decades a film critic for the National Catholic Reporter, Cunneen particularly examined how spirituality was shown in film. His scholarship included studies of filmmakers Bresson, Kieslowski, Rohmer, and Tarkovsky and translations of the novels of Jean Sulivan. He contributed numerous articles to Commonweal, America, Esprit, Midstream, and The Nation. Born in New York City to attorney John Cunneen and teacher Mary Beha Cunneen, he attended Xavier High School and the College of the Holy Cross before serving in the 101st Combat Engineers during WW II. After graduate studies at Catholic University, he taught at Fordham, the College of New Rochelle, St. Peter’s College, Baruch, and Mercy College.

“His partner in life, love, and scholarship was his wife of 60 years, Sally McDevitt Cunneen. After Sally’s death of cancer in 2009, Joe’s health declined. He leaves behind three sons, Michael, Peter, and Paul; one grandson, Sean; and many devoted friends.”

Richard Ford cites John Ruskin’s idea on composition as “the arrangement of unequal things” at the beginning and the end of his impressive novel Canada, and this notion is at work both thematically and functionally throughout. The opening pair of sentences—“First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later”—could serve as a creative-writing lesson in how to hook a reader. But of the many hundreds of pages that follow, only a fraction depict the specifics of these events themselves. The vast balance is given over to the recollections and ruminations of the sixty-plus narrator, a teacher who half a century on is still trying to set them in proportion against the rest of his life.

That narrator, Dell Parsons, asserts that it’s precisely those thunderclap moments that change the course of things, no more than when they occur in the middle of adolescence—and when the perpetrators of the crimes are your parents and the parent-like figures in whose care you’re subsequently placed. If the adults in charge can so casually and remorselessly abdicate their role as provider and protector, there’s no telling what might happen to the sons and daughters they leave behind.

With Canada, Ford returns to territory he covered in the stories in Rock Springs and the novel Wildlife, not just geographically but also tonally and substantively (he has said in interviews that the idea for Canada was “in my brain” as far back as 1989, when he committed some of its basic elements to the page). Dell is the earnest son of Bev (“a man’s name,” the father forcefully insists) and Neeva (daughter of Polish-Jewish immigrants), fifteen years old when the novel opens in Great Falls, Montana, in 1960. He’s determined to define himself through such grounded pursuits as education and chess—the better to offset the restless and rootless Bev, a war veteran with declining ability and interest in finding gainful employment. Like the adult males in some of Ford’s earlier fiction, Bev seems destined to fail his son, and when he undertakes a poorly thought plan to rob a bank (a plan in which Neeva reluctantly takes part), the outcome is inevitable. What’s less certain is how this will affect Dell and his twin sister Berner, virtual orphans once their parents are caught and sent to jail.

It’s the robbery’s aftermath that takes up the second half of the novel. Dispatched to Saskatchewan to be cared for by a mysterious American acquaintance named Arthur Remlinger, Dell is put to work helping arrange goose-hunts for visiting sportsmen and quartered in a run-down shack on the bare expanse of the prairie. He continues in his endeavor to somehow define himself, through reading whatever is at hand while keeping a wary distance from the crazy Charley Quarters, a Remlinger employee who has no equal for sheer oddness in any of Ford’s work that I can recall (Quarters would move comfortably through a Denis Johnson story or David Lynch movie). What “action” there is here consists mainly of the run-up to the promised murders—which when they finally occur we glimpse through Dell’s own semi-obscured view, in a scene that is over and done with in a couple of paragraphs.

That may make it sound as if the bulk of Canada exhibits meager momentum, but then momentum (of the page-turning sort) is not really Ford’s aim, in spite of those opening sentences. What pushes the story are Dell’s unending attempts—which proves to be his life-work—to make sense of things he had no control over yet that nonetheless sent him on his way. His “how did I get here?” is not a confused question but a spur to serious self-inquiry. As Ford has noted, he’s a writer more interested in the consequences of human acts, not the acts themselves.

This tends to put us deep inside the heads of his protagonists, and Dell is no less ruminative than Frank Bascombe of The Sportswriter and its sequels, or of the adolescent narrator of Wildlife. But his voice is more compelling: We experience a coalescing of beliefs and philosophy right along with Dell, in a language and sensibility that matches the novel’s geographic and time setting. On his exile to Saskatchewan: “I was now smaller in the world’s view and insignificant, and possibly invisible. All of which made me feel closer to death than life. Which is not how fifteen-year-old boys should feel.” On trying to escape his straitened circumstances: “Life had begun to demand lies to be workable.” On the essential unpredictability of things: “I already knew of course, from my own life—whether I could have said it or not—that the implausible often became as plausible as the sun coming up.” Or on the foolishness of putting faith in ordinary expectations: “The opposite could turn out to be the truth… the opposite of everything obvious deserved consideration.” The last reveals his acceptance of an idea planted earlier with him by one of the few reliable adults in the novel: “There are the people who understand you don’t ever know,” she tells him, “then they’re the ones who think you always do. I’m in the former group. It’s safer.”

What becomes of Dell’s sister Berner takes place mainly off-stage, although we do encounter her once more in the end, gravely changed and all but unrecognizable to Dell. The moment should have greater impact than it does, but Berner from the start is thinly drawn—an unfortunate fate shared by all of the female characters in Canada, who are far less able to vie with men like Bev and Charley and Arthur for the reader’s attention.

But, as Dell contends, events inevitably shove people off into differing orbits, across borders, toward the margins, away from one another and everything they’ve known, sometimes permanently. Retracing your steps, finding your way back, fitting the past into your present—these are labors of composition. What’s superfluous or insignificant or too heavy to bear must be cast off. It’s something the aging Dell continues to struggle with, and what an impatient reader might too: “[C]onnecting the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good, even if admittedly the good is often not simple to find.”

The patient, on the other hand, will be rewarded: There’s plenty that’s good, and some that’s great, in Canada.

Since I’ve been posting so much about television lately, I want to say a word of appreciation for the New Yorker‘s new (well, fairly new) TV critic, Emily Nussbaum. (She’s already written a whole lot of copy, but I think it’s OK to call her “new” until the magazine gets around to including her in its online list of contributors.) I enjoyed the “On Television” columns by Nancy Franklin, but I got the distinct impression that no one at the New Yorker, including and perhaps especially Franklin, actually thought they mattered much. Franklin wrote not as a person who cared deeply about the medium and spent a lot of time thinking critically and intelligently about it, but rather as an intelligent person who could take or leave TV and thought about it only when a deadline loomed. Her approach to the beat was casual to a fault. Nussbaum, on the other hand, takes television seriously as an art form, and takes her job seriously enough that she watches pretty much everything. What is more, she seems to really enjoy a lot of what she watches (sometimes to an alarming degree), which is a good quality in a critic. I don’t watch that much television, but Nussbaum’s enthusiasm is almost enough to make me think I should, in the same way that Sasha Frere-Jones can make me briefly consider listening to more Rihanna. Also, Nussbaum’s writing is crisp and funny and insightful (though I often think her pieces are a little longer than they need to be). Since she started at the New Yorker I am more excited about the back of the magazine than I have been in a long while.

The July 30 issue has an extra-long article by Nussbaum, “Tune In Next Week,” a cultural history of the cliffhanger. Much thought and research went into this piece, which covers everything from Scheherazade to Dickens to Dallas and beyond. It’s full of interesting historical tidbits and smart critical commentary about the evolution of serialized storytelling and what separates (or only seems to separate) “trash” from art.

A cliffhanger, Nussbaum says, “makes visible the storyteller’s connection to his audience…. [Cliffhangers] reveal that a story is artificial, then dare you to keep believing.” This is fascinating to reflect on. But by the end of the essay I felt the notion of “cliffhanger” had been stretched well beyond its useful meaning. Nussbaum gives a quick and very interesting history of how television went from shows like “I Love Lucy,” whose episodes were self-contained stories “designed to run in any order,” to “long-arc” series that sustain a story over many episodes and require more committed viewing. But is telling an ongoing story, one that ends and then picks up again in another installment, enough to qualify as employing “cliffhangers”? In her third paragraph, Nussbaum offers two definitions of the term:

Narrowly defined, a cliffhanger is a climax cracked in half: the bomb ticks, the screen goes black…. Cliffhangers are the point when the audience decides to keep buying.

That narrow definition is a very good one. But if you broaden it too much, it seems to me, you end up saying that any serialized story is a succession of cliffhangers, and that waters down the definition of “cliffhanger” too much for it to be useful. If a show is telling a story, in a serial fashion, well enough that I am invested in the characters, I will want to “tune in next week” to know what happens next generally. That is just the nature of being an audience to a narrative that isn’t over yet. But a “cliffhanger” is something more specific — a break, however long, that leaves a particular question unanswered. So the “Who Shot J.R.?” season-ender on Dallas, which Nussbaum discusses in detail, is a cliffhanger for sure. But when Jim kissed Pam at the end of season 2 of The Office — to take another of her examples — was that a cliffhanger? A “climax cracked in half?” Or was it just…a climax? A cliffhanger, I think, would have stopped the action just before Jim declared his love. (“Pam, I have something I need to say…” black screen; “to be continued.”) As a devoted fan of The Office I spent the summer before season 3 in suspense, eager to find out where the characters and their story would go when the show started up again. But I don’t think that suspense was specific enough for the ending to qualify as a cliffhanger.

This leads me to a quibble, and yes, it relates to Breaking Bad. Don’t read on if you haven’t gotten to the end of season 3 of that show (and you think you someday will). Go read Nussbaum’s article instead. Now, Breaking Bad viewers, I want to know what you think: Read the rest of this entry »

My friend Cathy Kaveny has a few posts up on dotCommonweal about obstacles to evangelization. Christ blames the Pharisees for not understanding the signs of the times (Matthew 16:2-3), and Cathy is right to ask her readers to be sensitive to what might prevent people from embracing the Gospel message. To know what people find difficult about Catholicism or Christianity more generally is not to get rid of those difficulties, but to consider how we might reframe certain issues.

Cathy posted her ideas just as I was reading a book that considers exactly the same issue. Andrew Davison, a priest of the Church of England, has just edited a collection entitled Imaginative Apologetics: Theology, Philosophy, and the Catholic Tradition. The essays in this collection do not address obstacles per se, but they are deeply concerned with how Christians present the faith to the world.

The book recognizes that the task of apologetics has fallen out of favor among Christians. But according to the authors, this is largely because apologetics has been narrowly conceived to be a rational defense of the faith apart from cultural and ethical considerations. But Christianity cannot be proven in the way that the Pythagorean theorem can be proven. The proof of Christianity is in lives of Christians, both in how they act and in how they envision their world. Read the rest of this entry »