SCOTS: WE’LL DO IT OURSELVES, THANK YOU . . . The scoffers-delight literary theory known as deconstruction, “staggering about for 20 years like a decapitated, one-eyed hen . . . has never much influenced Scottish writers, who have their own tradition of skepticism,” says Alistair Fowler in Times Literary Supplement (TLS) 8/20/04 review of Christopher Whyte’s Modern Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh). One of these Scottish poets, Norman MacCaig, he says “was too well educated to follow such a fashion.”
Whyte’s book “teems with ideas,” says Fowler, who retired in ‘98 as professor of English Lit at U. of Virginia. Head deconstructionist Jacques Derrida (whose recent passing was mourned publicly by another Jacques, Chirac) he calls “the prophet of aporia” – a word that calls for elaboration.
Various sources say aporia, a word of Greek origin, refers to the difficulty in establishing truth, confusion in establishing the truth of a proposition, or as a postmodern term, putting it in a favorable light, wonder and amazement before the confusing puzzles and paradoxes of our lives and of the universe (!). Socrates and other ancient philosophers tried to evoke the philosophic spirit in young men by awakening their aporia, not by simply providing answers to these puzzles. In other words, beware the philosopher.
Whyte assumes “interest in language” to be ipso facto deconstructive, so that MacCaig’s “a hen stares at nothing with one eye” becomes a pointing to “the ambiguous status of language, conveying meaning by stating the impossible.” (Yes!)
WHAT’S THAT YOU SAY? . . . Meanwhile, the late Derrida is chewed up and spit out by an Economist obituary writer on 10/21/04:
The inventor of “deconstruction”—an ill-defined habit of dismantling texts by revealing their assumptions and contradictions—was indeed, and unfortunately, one of the most cited modern scholars in the humanities, says the obit.
His work was impossible to critique, he himself said – credibly because he was obscure and self-contradictory. Socrates knew the type, said the obituarist. “If you ask one of them a question,” he said of Heraclitus and his followers, “they draw out enigmatic little expressions from their quiver, so to speak, and shoot one off; and if you try to get hold of an account of what that one meant, you're transfixed by another novel set of metaphors. You'll never get anywhere with any of them.”
Serving up “weak puns” such as “logical phallusies” (yuk-yuk), “bombastic rhetoric and illogical ramblings,” he was nonetheless “sincere and learned . . . if confused.” (Again The Economist.) He had what some in academe were looking for, however, especially American comparative literature teachers, among whom his thinking “became interwoven with Marxism, feminism and anti-colonialism.”
Derrida’s fellow Frenchmen stopped trying to figure him out in the early ‘80s, but not Americans, who (apparently in the spirit of the Music Man) embraced his “impenetrable new vocabulary” with its added benefit of not “having to master any rigorous thought.” Armed with Derrida, they seemed to think they had undermined or refuted “the notion of objective truth.” Derrida denied his ideas did that, but unconvincingly, since “his work could not easily be interpreted in any other way.”
Then came Derrida’s deconstructionist defense of two philosophers revealed in 1987 as one-time Nazi sympathizers – Paul De Man and Martin Heidegger – the first a leading disciple of Derrida, the other one of his earliest inspirations, “laying down a fog of convoluted rhetoric” and looking very bad in the process. “Deconstruction means never having to say you're sorry,” quipped the NY Review of Books.
NO SPICKA DA PSYCHO . . . The Austrian novelist Robert Musil (1880-1942) was not about to analyze himself a la Freud. “As a sceptical scientist, he rejected Freud’s theories as unsubstantiated speculation,” said Philip Payne, reviewing Robert Musil: Eine Biographie in TLS 8/6/04.
FULL OF FUN . . . The conversation of William Godwin (1756-1836), The Apostle of “Universal Benevolence,” was full of “futile sophisms in jejune language,” said Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was himself known for scintillating conversation. The reformer was apparently a bore.
ZIP A LIP . . . Rev. Michael Becker, a Philadelphia priest, has “seldom if ever” heard gossip confessed. But telling another’s faults is OK only if the other is “a danger to the community,” he said in a 9/10/04 letter to Commonweal.
DO AS HE SAYS . . . David Crystal rejects standardizing of English but uses standard English throughout his The Stories of English (Allen Lane-Penguin) in part because he couldn’t get it published otherwise, but in the process seems “only theoretically sympathetic to non-standards,” says reviewer Tom Shippey, TLS 8/20/04.
Pursuing the standardization business, Shippey wonders how vowel shifts and the like make it to “the Oxford-Cambridge-London ‘Golden Triangle’ . . . infiltrating the BBC and the media.” Same goes for American and Australian language. We may ask how usage gets to networks. Baseball announcer Joe Garagiola said “on [not for] the season,” as in hitting .300 on, not for the season; and by reason of his energy and personality and popularity it took hold.
Shippey finds Crystal’s “sentiments . . . perfectly sound” but notes that they are neither arguments nor analyses. Nice distinction there. He teaches at St. Louis U., wrote JRR Tolkien: Author of the Century, 2000, and was editor of Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories, 1994.
ERIN GO MUSLIM . . . The IRA foot soldier envisions a “pure ethno-state of extremist-republican fantasy,” suggests John Derbyshire in Claremont Review of Books, Summer '04, reviewing and praising RF Foster's book, WB Yeats, Vol. II, The Arch Poet (Oxford). It's a lost cause, Derbyshire adds, in a "euro-ized, globalized" Ireland of today, asking us consider the seven mosques now standing in the Republic. Seven?
PRAISE INDEED . . . The poet and essayist John Dryden “elastically paced the limits of a dry and well-packed mind,” said Mark Van Doren.
BENCH IT . . . "Spot-on" is due for early retirement, having passed the mildly irritating state and entered the very irritating on its way to the grindingly chalk-scraped-on-blackboard stage, after which there is no redemption. Too bad. The first million times it had cachet.
RARE IS GOOD . . . Gardener Andrew Fairservice in Scott's Rob Roy, "no friend to the ladies," calls women "slices of the spare rib,” says, "I keep up the first gardener's quarrel to them."
EARTHY . . . Not Dante but (the younger) Boccaccio dubbed Dante’s commedia “divina,” having understood it as grand and its characters exalted, says Gabriel Josipovici in an 8/6/04 TLS letter. This divinizing by Boccaccio “signals the first romantic reading of Dante,” which is “not at all ‘grand’ in this sense,” but “down to earth in its language, precise and plain – and all the more powerful for that.”
Reviewer Barbara Reynolds responded: Grand characters yes, including Vergil, his guide through hell. Language down to earth yes, like Boccaccio’s. Boccacio appreciated it and had more in mind that exalting, not to say divinizing, the commedia. Rather, he spent years resuscitating it in the view of people of Florence, who had ignored it.
HE’S SO HAPPY . . . In the novel 360-Flip, by Molly McGrann (Picador) are “wounded and sollipsistic characters,” says reviewer Laura Barber, TLS 7/9/04. McG describes the “American Dream-Nightmare.” Nothing like happens in Hugh Hefner’s life, according to the Sun-Times religion writer who showed there is something new under the sun by interviewing HH about his belief in God and spiritual values. (He walks in his garden having noble thoughts.) Out of merde comes something, however, in HH’s recalling the affection-free household he grew up in. He’s been dying for affection ever since and knows how to get it.
CRUEL . . . The novel Canarino, by Katherine Buckness, “like its main character, is devoid of pleasure,” writes Terri Apter, TLS, 7/9/04. It “lingers in the mind,” as the cover blurb promises, but “with a bitter after-taste.” The heroine’s “inability to love her children,” for instance, “crosses over to the unbelievable.” She realizes that “they discover they want things when they see her and . . . are unpredictable, lurching towards her with a hug, even when they are wet,” and so neglects them. They make “terrified adaptation” to the situation. Grim book here, like Hugh Hefner’s life as a child.
GETTING READY . . . In A Complicated Kindness (Counterpoint), Miriam Toews has a Manitoba Mennonite heroine characterize her people’s situation: “We are supposed to be cheerfully yearning for death and in the meantime until that blessed day, our lives are meant to be facsimiles of death or at least the dying process.” (TLS, 7/9/04, review by Stephanie Cross)
MISUNDERSTOOD . . . Most people don’t like irony: The “Free Indirect Style is misunderstood,” as Michel Foucault employed when discussing sexual liberationism, which he was lampooning in La Volonte de savoir in 1976, says reviewer Jonathan Ree, TLS 8/13/04.
ON THEE I SING . . . Sun-Times reviewer Mark Athitakis 9/19 says he found “engaging and thoughtful exegesis on Elizabethan burial rituals” in the Stephen Greenblatt bio of Shakespeare, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. But an exegesis is an explanation of something. He uses it as if it were “riff” (transferred from musicology) or “meditation,” which may be the word he was looking for.
ENOUGH ALREADY . . . Was it redundant for Democrat political consultant Don Rose to say in 9/19 Chi Trib that emphasis on voter polls – “detracting” from the issues, he said, meaning distracting – is “more than redundant”? I’d say so.
PLUGGED . . . Will all those who want to read “a creative novel that bends time, space and language,” as headlined in Chi Trib book section 9/19, please write your congressman or get Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell pronto? Not only does this book bend time etc., but its “various parts . . . are virtually unrelated by events [though] strongly tied by themes,” a subhead says. No standardized English either, I bet.
POKED IN FACE . . . The recent Society of Midland Authors award winner Positively Fifth Street, about playing poker, flies in the face of the time-honored requirement of literature, that it suggest rather than spell out, leaving most details to the imagination, which is all too ready to supply them, even when scatological or gruesome. It’s why this book is boring as well as offensive.
Instead, this author, James McManus, indulges in endless comment, leaving no thought unexposed to our all too forgiving perusal. With ourselves, when tempted to go and do likewise, let us not be so forgiving.
HOPE FOR US ALL . . . Authors such as Dan Brown (DaVinci Code) and Michael Moore (numerous filmed cartoons) should attach a memo to each book or performance saying, “You can make this up. I did!” as encouragement to auteurs, provocateurs, foolers and liars everywhere.
=========================
Response from a sadder but wiser English major of the 90s:
John & I were discussing the death of Jacques Derrida just the other day. John has a long-standing distaste for deconstructionism. Me, I lived it!
It took me 6-8 years to realize and admit that I spent many wasted hours wading through the mud of Derrida, Heidegger, and many other Marxist, feminist, and anti-colonialist theorists. For a long time, I thought I just didn't have the right kind of mind to navigate their essays, but that there must be some truth that I just hadn't grasped. My English Lit professors at Swarthmore certainly presented them as roadmaps for reading the "primary sources."
How very affirming to read Alistair Fowler call Derrida "the prophet of aporia," and then to learn from you what that means!
Aporia, a word of Greek origin, refers to the difficulty in establishing truth, confusion in establishing the truth of a proposition, or as a postmodern term, putting it in a favorable light, wonder and amazement before the confusing puzzles and paradoxes of our lives and of the universe (!).
That is what I experienced. And I wish I had spent more hours reading books. If I ever look for a good English Lit program again, I will certainly look for more of a focus on "primary sources" (including both classics and new literature) and the teaching of writing.
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS OF YESTERYEAR . . . "To cherish [things English] is to be un-American . . . But to defer respectfully to the Irish name . . . is to demonstrate our true Americanism."
– Harper’s Magazine, wry 1889 comment in reaction to supposed overcompensation towards the not native-born.
SOFT ON CRIME . . . We elect prosecutors, Euros appoint them. Crime is up in Europe, down here, because prosecutors are responsive here. It’s this way with "unelected elites," says political scientist (+ criminologist) James Q. Wilson in Claremont Review of Books, Fall, ‘04, reviewing Michael Barone’s Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation’s Future (Crown Forum).
Such elites "tend . . . to be soft. They [want] to tackle all problems by finding and [removing] their root causes." Wilson cites Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, a 1966 book that ISI Books calls "a neglected classic," in which Rieff argues that "the real danger to humanity in our time is not socialism but therapy."
SOFT THINKING . . . In Fundamentalism: the Search for Meaning, Malise Ruthven lumps the American religious right et al. with Al Quaeda while admitting they wish not "to impose a legal system comparable to [Koran-based] sharia on democratic politics or proselytize by global terror," says reviewer Bernice Martin in Times Literary Supplement (TLS) 7/9/04.
MOTORCYCLE DIARIST . . . Che Guevara, "conveniently dead, . . . lies beyond blame and is the ever youthful totemic hero," wrote reviewer Marlowe Fawcett in the 3 September 2004 TLS.
FOR STASHING AWAY . . . Reviewing The Last Templar: the Tragedy of Jacques de Molay, by Alain Demurger, C.J. Tyerman uses the term "conviction politicians," in this case "driven by material interest" (assuming some aren’t), who did Molay in. (TLS 8/13/04)
KEEN POLITICAL ANALYSIS . . . Kerry says no one is to dictate to us, but there’s to be a mysterious "global test." Administered by whom?
He brilliantly observes that leadership is needed. Such as he has shown in a mediocre senate career, vs. Bob Dole’s or Lyndon Johnson’s when they ran for president or vice president?
Bush is not inspiring either, but he has a defensible record at which Kerry can only snipe.
PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL AT WORK . . . In his Anatomy of Racial Inequality, Boston U. economist Glenn C. Loury (say Lowry) opposes a priori any discussion of innate black (or other group) inferiority (p. 91), because it’s impossible to disprove (!) and is inconsistent with "democratic ideals." "Civic duty" forbids it, he says.
At Maggiano’s on Clark Street (one of four Maggiano’s Little Italy restaurants in Illinois, by the way, one of dozens in 17 states and District of Columbia), on 9/9/04, Loury was very good as a speaker but thin on content and argument, though quick with data, of which he had detailed recall. He put "red meat on the table" for q&a, he said. Not so, because though engaging and winning, he was too general. Punchy style, including admirable care for noun-verb agreement (catching himself once, which I greatly appreciate), but surprisingly little punch in content.
The Q&A went well. The first questioner, Timuel Black, Chicago schools activist and author, asked about a U.S. "system problem" in that some get ahead while others fall behind. It goes with free-market competition, said Black, tipping his hand as a socialist.
Not so, said Loury, tossing in a reference to "anti-communism." Black, declaring his opposition to "competitive capitalism," wouldn’t give up, accused Loury of misrepresenting him.
The moderator, Lee H. Walker, wanted to get off Black, whom as a sign of respect and friendship he had called on for the first question, but Loury wasn’t finished. He went on with a story-paradigm about immigrants in Los Angeles doing low-paying jobs, sending money back to towns in Mexico, which got a rush of prosperity from it, while Americans got low-cost labor that meant lower prices, greater profits, etc., making the point that everybody wins in a competitive economy – a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats argument. Loury, very sharp, listened well, picked up on questions, made his points.
Another questioner raised the "system" issue – language that goes back to the ‘60s and the civil rights movement, when changing the system was a constant theme, mostly as regards segregation and unequal opportunity, but also as regards Black’s "competitive capitalism." As often is true of protest movements, there were Marxists in them crowds.
Later, Loury castigated "free-lance operators [who] drive [blacks’] agenda," as in "the spurious, ill-conceived push for reparations," which he called bad strategy.
The Maggiano’s event, co-sponsored by the New Coalition for Economic and Social Change, "devoted to introducing people of color to conservative, moderate, and libertarian ideas on public policy," and the (libertarian) Heartland Institute, drew a number of young black professionals. It was an attractive crowd. At my table, for instance, were a retired couple – she from a community college, he from a federal agency, an accountant, and the well-met if misguided Black.
TRES GAY TELEVISION IN CHURCH . . . "Born-again bigot," shouted the voice from the rear of Calvary Memorial Church a week ago Sunday, during a sermon about gays and the Bible. The man stood next to TV cameras, which had just lit him up. Lights, camera, action! He was hustled out. This was in the morning, when the pastor, Ray Pritchard, was preaching.
But Pritchard was comparing himself, not gays, to mass-murderer Jeffrey Dahmer and other sinners. His best lines, to judge by audience response, was when he consigned himself and the entire congregation to the ranks of the worst sinners that ever lived.
"Preach, preach," called out a listener, not when Pritchard said gays were going to hell (he didn’t) but when he said he was going there if he did not hurl himself on the mercy of Jesus. "Over the door to heaven is written ‘For sinners only,’" he said, and the joint exploded. The bigotry seemed missing.
It was boiler-plate evangelical Christian talk, to be sure. The 6 p.m. guest preacher, evangelist Stephen Bennett, produced more of the same, presenting himself as a wretch saved by amazing grace.
He had led the "gay bar life" after succumbing to drink and sex as a 17-year-old Pratt Institute freshman, eventually acquiring more than 100 sex partners in eleven years, he told the Calvary audience. Once he was pummeled "by thugs" as a gay in heavily gay Provincetown, Massachusetts. Drug-addicted, alcoholic, bulimic, he got rehabilitated, turned to an "unsafe" church for two and a half years, and for three years partnered with "the man of [his] dreams."
Then he met Cathy, who gave him a Bible and prayed for him and got her friend Irene, whom he later married, also to pray for him. He told Cathy he’d been born gay. She said nuts to that. (He chalked it up later to an emotionally distant and abusive father, with whom he became reconciled.) He took to Bible reading, bought the message, and in January, 1992, at 28, was "born again" (the first in his family) and gay no more.
He’s no mean troubadour. At Calvary he sang, "Let me show you Jesus, and I’ll show you life" and got the audience clapping along. He’s accused of hating gays, but his first reference to hating anyone was to call anti-gay preacher Fred Phelps "evil" for saying, "God hates fags," which he called, unsurprisingly, "not a Christian message."
His second reference was to talk-show host Bill O’Reilly, who in a toe-to-toe on-air meeting two years ago looked him in the eye and said, "You hate gays." It was "like looking at the devil," Bennett said.
O’Reilly is not alone in the opinion. Demonstrators offended by his claims of sin and repentance consider him "particularly dangerous," according to a member of the Chicago Anti-Bashing Network. They "sent a clear message" that "hatred against any group needs to be opposed," said another.
"I get it all the time," said Bennett, who was flanked at some distance by two Secret Service-like men who surveyed the audience. It’s from people who "hate the God of the Bible." He was "not scared."
For one who hates gays, he was in poor form at Calvary, however. Asked by an audience member to pray for the demonstrators, he asked God to "invade their stony hearts with love" – which as condemnations go is pretty weak.
BIRD PATROL . . . Meanwhile, down the street from Calvary church, four of God’s winged creatures had some bad luck on a recent morning trying to fly through the library’s windows, ending lifeless on the ground below. A morning stroller looked away at 7:30 but looked back at 8:30 to find the bodies gone.
He discussed the matter with the clean-up man, who unaccountably at first denied their existence, making it a question of whom or what he was to believe, the clean-up man or his own two eyes. He had not long to mull this, as it happened: another stroller happened by and claimed that she had counted 13 such bodies over a recent period.
Which leads the involved citizen to suggest a sign declaring this a no-fly zone, "Abandon hope, all ye birds who try to enter here."
[Wed. Journal of OP&RF, 9/1/04]
========================
Available at Xlibris.com: Priests at Work: Catholic Pastors Tell How They Apply Church Law in Difficult Cases, by Jim Bowman --
. $18.69 in paper. (Formerly Bending the Rules: What American Priests Tell American Catholics)
BLITHE SPIRIT:Commentary & Home for Unpremeditated Art
Jim Bowman, 10/18/04
THE SECOND DEBATE . . . Let’s have another town-hall style debate. Missing from the last one was alternately lugubrious and smart-aleck TV news anchor, repeatedly injecting himself into things. This debate moved quickly, like a good boxing match and less fettered and more blog-like. Bush came out swinging time and again, said his piece without Kerry’s "Let me tell you," even once shoving the moderator aside to make a point -- he wanted to get in on the act, but we did not need him, and Bush did without him.
TELL YOU WHAT I'M GONNA DO . . . "I would say to that person exactly what I will say to you right now."
– Kerry to questioner in 2nd debate.
Well just say it, John. Drop the tic by which you preface every damn thing. It’s so bullshit and must be hard for people taking you seriously or trying to, unlike me, who have you pegged for a $3 bill.
CELTIC PASSION . . . Among early Britons "a turn for melancholy [and] natural magic" combined with a "passionate, turbulent, indomitable reaction against the despotism of fact," said Matthew Arnold in his The Study of Celtic Literature, 1867, as cited by Peter Ackroyd in Albion: the Origins of the English Imagination (Nan A. Talese-Doubleday, 2002) in discussion of enduring Celtic influence.
This is a far cry from Chi Trib managing editor James O’Shea’s railing against "anarchy of information" in his revealing (and maybe regretted) complaint about the blogosphere to Editor & Publisher. This editor thinks we need controls on all that info? Sounds like freedom of press belonging to him with a press of his own.
Indeed, a Chi Trib Sunday book reviewer of 9/25/04, Allen Barra, quotes the author of the memorable "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one," AJ Leibling, commenting that it’s "as true now as when he wrote it." No it isn’t, not with the blogosphere erupting all over the place, most recently as chief investigative agency exposing Dan Rather.
A computer with Internet connection, a (free) blog site, and away goes anybody, competing with the conglomerates. Barra, a contributor to American Heritage mag and author of books on Wyatt Earp and arguments over baseball, should know that. And a book section editor would be justified in calling it to his attention, assuming she knows it.
MAKING YOUR MARK . . . Your religious (or other) extremist spouts radicalism, is picked up by media and played up. His position becomes the standard view, thanks to entrenched institutions of mass communications. This extremist "suddenly acquires an authority . . . it could never attain within its own social context," says Malise Ruthven in Times Literary Supplement (TLS) 8/6/04, reviewing Carl W. Ernst’s Following Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World (U of N. Carolina) and other books. Thing is, capture the fancy of a reporter (and his editors), and away you go.
FIRST THINGS . . . "This misconception that because a child doesn’t speak English, [he or she] wouldn’t be able to perform in a gifted class" is rejected by Alonzo Rivas, a lawyer with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, in Chi Trib Sat. 9/18, apparently pushing for non-English gifted classes. But first a crash course in English, I assume – in which much is achieved in a short time by gifted non-English-speakers. Right?
PASSING BY . . . Man walks slowly on OP Avenue, head down, shuffling through items in his backpack. Pedestrian passes. He looks up, asks "How are you today, Sir?" Pedestrian continues, not responding. If he had, feeling he owed the fellow a the courtesy of a response, the other would almost certainly have had more to say, as "May I ask you a question?" or "Could you tell me how to find St. Edmund’s," the nearest PADS station, or something else, ever with "Sir" attached to the front, lest the pedestrian think he’s being cheeky.
CONUNDRUM . . . Rule for preachers, speakers of all kinds, columnists, etc.: reduce use of first–person singular to almost nothing. Means subduing self-referentiality. But many listeners would object. They like it!
THE THINGS YOU HEAR IN CHURCH . . . The preacher at St. Peter’s in the Loop (9/19 11 a.m. mass) said he once served in a small Indiana town with few Catholics. "The devil made small towns," he commented, alluding to the culture of gossip. In the confessional at St. Peter’s, he is "compassionate" towards penitents so that he will receive compassion from God. Apparently because of this position of his, he is considered "heretical" by some, he said, offering no explanation for the accusation, but denied it, again without explanation.
CRY FOR HELP . . . St. Edmund RC, Oak Park, parish bulletin warns people away from my illegal Latin mass church. It's a "chapel," says the bulletin, "that advertises itself as 'Our Lady Immaculate Roman Catholic Church.'" But it's not Roman Catholic and is run by the (schismatic, split from pope) St. Pius X society founded by Archbishop Lefebvre, who was excommunicated for making bishops without papal OK. The bulletin quotes the Pope about the "grave offense," leading to excommunication, involved in "formal adherence" to the Society.
I'm at risk, therefore, by now and then attending Latin mass at Our Lady Immaculate. So would St. Edmund's consider now and then having a Latin mass, so as to ween me away? For pastoral reasons? A recent special mass for gays and lesbians at neighboring St. Catherine & St. Lucy was a one-time thing, apparently. Maybe have a one-time thing for Latin mass enthusiasts who make no claims about being born that way but only say they were raised that way?
GOOD NEWS . . . Meanwhile, St. Edmund has a new pastor, Rev. John McGivern – ordination class of 1991, late of St. John of the Cross, Western Springs – who reported with unity, coherence, and emphasis in the bulletin how his first hundred days went. What he said about the parish school is striking: He hired a new principal, a Sinsinawa (Wisc.) Dominican nun (they are very strong in this area, with Trinity girls’ high school and Dominican (coed) University), who has "reorganized the entire school," etc. And his meetings with school parents current and prospective have led to a huge bump in enrollment, from 65 to 165!
The rest of his page-long list is well nigh incredible – major loan and contract renegotiations at big savings, new telephones and computers, in-the-black weekly collections, and a dozen or more other substantial items, including getting the church bells ringing again. All eyes should focus on this place and its well organized new leadership.
SORREEEEEEEE . . . "I’m Ryan. I’m here to serve you with our ‘7 Service Basics,’" says the Walgreens receipt of Oct. 10 at 3:12 p.m. That’s the one in the River Forest Town Center, where you can get towed if you leave your car too long, and I mean towed, to Mannheim Road, where the fee is steep and the chain-link fence high.
Ryan’s service was not a problem. When my two Mead memo pads rang up at two-something, not 99 cents as promised on the box label, he left his post to check it out. Returned, he still had to check with the manager, a young man of lordly if not regal demean wearing a lapel badge with the words "Too blessed to be stressed," which may be Walgreens-issue but I doubt it
This young fellow, late 20s, off-white complexion, neat and sure of self, heard Ryan out and shot a look at me, asking peremptorily: "Where did you see 99 cents?" – much as a detective would ask where I had been on a given night. I responded crisply. He looked away, instructed Ryan to change the charge, then turned on his heel and walked away as if an unsightly vision had heaved into view and he wanted no more to do with it.
"He didn’t apologize," I told Ryan.
"I apologize," said Ryan.
GETTING YOUR ARMS AROUND IT . . . Historian Isaiah Berlin was "buffaloed" by the "linguistic scrupulosity" of Wittgenstein, an analytic philosopher. So he did not "illuminate . . . the force of evil," said Clive James in his TLS review of a volume of Berlin’s correspondence. Analytic philosophers did not "like abstractions." Wittgenstein, for instance "said nothing about the Nazi assault on the Jews until it was all over" and he saw pictures of the death camps. If he had said something, he would have had to face up to the force of evil, said James. "For most of the [analytic] philosophers, evil was a word: too large a one and thus lacking in specificity." (As if to say one cannot conceive of such evil without going metaphysical.)
Berlin never made the breakthrough to a realization of evil, as philosopher Stuart Hampshire did while interrogating "final solution" implementer Ernst Kaltenbrunner at Nuremberg. Berlin, on the other hand, was "wedded to ideas" and so "missed the opportunity."
James was raked for this review by letter writers in subsequent issues for talking up inexplicable evil. Some objected that if you say there’s no explanation by way of ideas, you give up the rationalist game. But James was describing the limits of rational explanation.
=============
Available at Xlibris.com: Priests at Work: Catholic Pastors Tell How They Apply Church Law in Difficult Cases, by Jim Bowman --
. $18.69 in paper. (Formerly Bending the Rules: What American Priests Tell American Catholics)
RACING TO WORK . . . Seen frequently in morning rush hour on Marion St. pedestrian mall, Lake St. to Metra tracks, are helmeted men in shirt and tie with suit coat strapped to carrier or in backpack, cycling in no-cycle zone. In a hurry. Put a cop there, seconds from his own parked vehicle in case of emergency, giving tickets. It would be part of an all-village crackdown on The Sidewalk Cyclist, a menace to the unwary pedestrian.
UNEXPECTED PLEASURE . . . Was able during my recent (routine) colonoscopy to watch my innards on TV. Asking what that yellow stuff is, was told shit but in some other, seemly, word, which I forget. Did not forget the picture, however.
BLESSED IMMUNITY . . . “We usually say more in a letter than . . . in conversation [because] in a letter we feel . . . shielded from the indifference or enthusiasm which our remarks may meet with or arouse,” Joel Chandler Harris told his son in a 1900 letter.
Goes double for e-mail in 2004. We sometimes feel free as a bird to say outrageous things, so that a whole new area of moral theology is on its way: How To Do Right on E-mail.
A NAME’S A NAME FOR ALL THAT . . . What no Scotch? Coleridge in 1812 on why “Scots men” not “Scotchmen”: Consider the words that end in “tch” – “Bitch, Botch, Snitch, Blotch, Ditch, Grutch, crutch, clutch, Witch, Scrutch.” Betraying a certain animus in the matter, he called that a “compleat compendium of [the Scotches’] qualities, habits, customs, doings, sufferings, and circumstances.”
“No wonder” Scottish writers go with their “evasive Scots alternative,” says Seamus Perry, reviewing in Times [of London] Literary Supplement (TLS). Coleridge joked but meant it. He was pissed at Scotch reviewers of Lake poets work, his included – and surely Byron felt the same way, excoriating Edinburgh Review people for their acerbity and hostility.
CONFIDENTIALLY . . . Writing out of New York City, on which he writes most interestingly in TLS, Michael Greenberg recalls the origin of the term “confidence man” with this anecdote:
Well-dressed man to stranger: “Do you have enough confidence in humankind to let me hold your watch?” Handed the watch by the stranger eager to prove himself, he walks off with it. In TLS “Freelance” column, 8/6/04
WATCH IT, BUD . . . “Such a look she gave me,” said the preacher at Mabel (Pete) Moore’s joint funeral mass with her husband of 61 years, Ed. As new pastor at Holy Redeemer, he had visited her in her final weeks and noted, innocently, that she must have enjoyed all the Irish music and tradition that surrounded her, not knowing she was 100% English-ancestry and proud of it.
LIGHT IN DARK WORLD . . . “Good fiction grounds us, sentence by sentence . . . We can’t do much about genocide and atrocity and the diasporas of [our] age, but we can . . . refuse the gift of despair. A good book . . . goes against the clockwork agenda so ascendent everywhere . . . It argues against despair, and it gives us hope.”
– Alan Davis, in “Dislocations,” a fiction roundup, in Hudson Review, Summer ‘04, 316.
UH-OH . . . Same issue, the highly literate Brooke Allen uses “kudos” as plural of the imagined word “kudo.”
On WFMT, promoting “Nova,” the announcer reads “triumphant victory” of plane and aero manufacturer Lockheed. Vs. the non-triumphant victory of various others? It’s sell copy, yes, but how’s “resounding” for “triumphant”? On WFMT, no less.
There’s “powerful” evidence on one page, “powerful” critique on another, in Glenn C. Lourie’s The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (305.86 LOU at OPPL). This is weak. Try “convincing.” It’s more germane, considerably more precise; “powerful” applies to a much wider range of things.
HEY! . . . The exclamation point imparts “something finger-wagging” to poetry. “It diverts authority . . . from the reader [who is in charge here, deciding what’s exclamatory and what isn’t] to the writer [who knows what’s best?]. It announces too forthrightly who is in charge,” says John Hartley-Williams in TLS 7/30/04.
LIVELY EXCHANGE . . . In New Criterion mag, the poet William Logan trashes Pulitzer winner Franz Wright. His poems are “nasty, brutish, and short,” and in them religion comes off as “the wheedling piety of a three-time loser before the parole board.” (per J.C. in “N.B.”, TLS, 8/13/04)
The decision not to invite these two to the same party is strongly reinforced by Wright’s note to Logan, in which Wright threatened to administer to Logan “a crippling beating.” To which Logan: Bring it on, with “pies at ten paces.”
BIBLE CLASS . . . Consider readings for 9/12, 24th Sunday in ordinary time:
* Exodus 32.7-11 on God sparing his chosen people, stiff-necked tho they be, when Moses pleaded their case by reminding him of his promises to Abraham et al.: “The Lord relented.”
* 1 Timothy 1.12-17, with Paul going over the top as usual, saying if God can forgive him, “blasphemer. . . persecutor . . . arrogant,” who “acted out of ignorance in [his] unbelief,” he can forgive anyone
* Luke 15.1-32, with the major league forgiveness parables of lost sheep, lost coin, and (the clincher) prodigal son.
It’s a day of repentance (what we do), forgiving (we do it), and forgiveness (God does it). The three go together, in that order, allowing for God’s making the first move by his “prevenient” grace – first move is his.
UP OR DOWN? . . . On the handed-up-or-down-indictment question, ex-Daily News man Dennis Byrne: “I can see [veteran] Bill Mooney fuming at the nonsense, stomping out a cigarette butt on the floor and proclaiming again, ‘These assholes couldn't find their way to the bathroom.’ The answer, as I recall Bill's easy lesson – a judge hands down decisions (to those standing physically below him) and a grand jury hands [indictments] up to the judge. Can't say I didn't learn something sitting next to Moo all those years.”
SELF-LOVE . . . How much more diplomatically could it be said that Jerome Murphy-O’Connor plagiarized himself than to observe, as does A.E. Harvey, reviewing Paul: His Story (Oxford), “[E]thical purists may be dismayed to find that neither the scruples of the author nor the scrutiny of the Oxford U. Press has prevented whole paragraphs of the earlier [Paul: A Critical Life] being reproduced here virtually unchanged without acknowledgment or apology.” (TLS 7/30/04)
“JESUIT ART” . . . Also called baroque, was dismissed as propaganda, intended “to persuade to piety and bring people to God,” said Bishop Gabriele Paleotti in 1582. So what? argues Evonne Levy in Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque (U. of Calif.). It’s still art. Levy undercuts the idea of art for art’s sake as “narrow and one-dimensional,” says reviewer Ian G. Mason, TLS 7/30/04.
GET SOME DISTANCE . . . To read and like your own stuff, you ought first to forget you wrote it, said Wm. Hazlitt, in “On the Pleasure of Painting,” because as he said, using an expression dating back at least to the 6th century B.C. (Aesop) and much used since then (Shakespeare, Mark Twain, et al.), “familiarity naturally breeds contempt.”
DISSING THE DISTAFF SIDE . . . “A woman is a foreign land,/ Of which though there he settle young,/ A man will ne’er quite understand/ The customs, politics and tongue.” (Coventry Patmore, “The Angel in the House”)
And “O love, O hate, O cruell women’s hearts/ That imitate the moon in every chaunge [change],/ And like the planets ever love to raunge [range]:/ What shall I doe thus wronged with distaine [disdain]?” (Christopher Marlowe, “Dido, Queene of Carthage”)
=====================================
Available at Xlibris.com: Priests at Work: Catholic Pastors Tell How They Apply Church Law in Difficult Cases, by Jim Bowman -- . $18.69 in paper. (Formerly Bending the Rules: What American Priests Tell American Catholics)
