“This is a Jesus Jefferson could never understand”

Once in a while, you’re reading something, have no familiarity with the author, no preconceptions, and it dawns on as you read, he gets it.

That is, in a world in which most people writing about topics you know something about never get it right, never seem to understand what it’s like inside, don’t get the lingo right – you happen upon someone with whom you think you could actually have an conversation, instead of trading catchphrases and narrative hooks, someone who doesn’t write about Catholics “getting” the “bread” they think “represents” Jesus. And so on.

Believe it or not, for years, there was a writer at The Onion – and perhaps he/she is still there, but I’ve not read it for a long time – who obviously and clearly was a Catholic, and a knowledgeable one at that. The language in pieces skewering the Pope or some aspect of Catholic life was always absolutely correct. There were some around who suspected this person had Traditionalist leanings….you’d find veiled and somewhat hopeful references to the mythic Trad Onion writer….

Well, a few weeks ago, I was reading a piece in the New Yorker and immediately perked up. This guy, I thought, knows Christianity.

Did a little research, and sure enough.Vinson Cunningham, the author of a piece riffing of a new Peter Manseau book on Thomas Jefferson’s Bible. “What Thomas Jefferson Could Never Understand About Jesus.”

It’s well worth your time, especially if you’re unfamiliar with Jefferson’s cut-and-paste revisioning.

He got a copy of the Bible, cut out some choice passages, glued them onto blank pages, and called the volume “The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth: extracted from the account of his life and doctrines as given by Matthew, Mark, Luke, & John. Being an abridgement of the New Testament for the use of the Indians unembarrassed with matters of fact or faith beyond the level of their comprehensions.”

One of Jefferson’s aims seems to have been to demonstrate—to himself, if to no one else—that, contrary to the claims of his political adversaries, he was not anti-Christian. As Peter Manseau, a curator at the National Museum of American History, points out in “The Jefferson Bible: A Biography” (Princeton), the puzzling reference to “Indians” in the subtitle may be a joke about the Federalists, and their apparent inability to grasp Jefferson’s true beliefs. His opponents often labelled him a “freethinker,” or an outright atheist; milder observers came closer to the mark, pegging him as a deist who largely thought of God as a noninterventionist. But Jefferson did not openly claim the deist label. “I am a Christian,” he insisted in a letter to the educator and politician Benjamin Rush, “in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence, & believing he never claimed any other.” In order to establish that this was the actual limit of Jesus’ claims, one had to carefully extricate him from the texts that contain nearly all we know about his life and thought. That might sound like impossible surgery, but, to Jefferson, the fissures were obvious. What was genuinely Christ’s was “as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill,” he wrote in a letter to John Adams. Jesus, in the Gospel of John, says, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” Jefferson was no lamb, and no follower, but he considered himself a good hearer….

…..

The last few paragraphs of the piece make it clear what Jefferson missed:

There’s a photograph of that monument taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson, in 1957, during the heat of the Black struggle for civil rights. Two Black boys, facing in opposite directions, dawdle just across the Tidal Basin from the memorial. A gentle row of trees and the dome dedicated to Jefferson loom just above their heads. The photograph is a reminder that, science and reason notwithstanding, Jefferson’s laconic Jesus, full of wisdom and bereft of spiritual power, never persuaded him to forfeit the slaves he owned. The boys in the photograph could be Jefferson’s kids; as Americans, they sort of were.

Since 2011, a monument to Martin Luther King, Jr., has sat across the water from the Jefferson Memorial, almost engaging it in a staring contest. The result is a rich spatial symbolism: two ways of seeing Christ duking it out. King saw Jesus in much the way that Douglass did: as a savior, a redeemer, and a liberator sorely degraded by those who claimed his name most loudly. During the Montgomery bus boycott, King reportedly carried a copy of “Jesus and the Disinherited,” a short, beautiful book by the minister and writer Howard Thurman. Thurman had travelled to India, where he made sure to meet Gandhi, whose doctrine of nonviolence he admired; he took what he learned from him back to America, planting an important intellectual seed that would blossom during the civil-rights movement. In his preaching and writings, Thurman reoriented what he called “the religion of Jesus,” pointing out what it might mean for those who had lived for so long under the thumb of the likes of Jefferson. Jefferson’s Jesus is an admirable sage, fit bedtime reading for seekers of wisdom. But those who were weak, or suffering, or in urgent trouble, would have to look elsewhere. “The masses of men live with their backs constantly against the wall,” Thurman wrote. “What does our religion say to them?”

Thurman’s Jesus was a genius of love—a love so complete and intimate that it suggested a nearby God, who had grown up in a forgotten town and was now renting the run-down house across the street. That same humble deity, in the course of putting on humanity, had obtained a glimpse of the conditions on earth—poverty, needless estrangement, a stubborn pattern of rich ruling over poor—and decided to incite a revolution that would harrow Hell. “The basic fact is that Christianity as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed,” Thurman wrote. This is a Jesus that Jefferson could never understand.

In a world as compromised as ours, a soul so exalted was always destined for the Cross. Jefferson’s Bible ends before the Resurrection, with Jesus crucified by the Roman occupiers, as the Gospels tell us he was. Jefferson’s austere editing turns the killing almost into an afterthought—a desiccated reiteration of Socrates’ final encounter with hemlock, the simple consequence of having offended the wrong people. For Thurman, the Crucifixion was an emphatic lesson in creative weakness: by sticking out his neck and accepting the full implications of his own vulnerability, Christ had radically identified himself with the worst off. Those societal castoffs who could never get a break now had a savior, and a champion, and a model. This, for Thurman, is as great a teaching as anything that Jesus merely said. Where death, for Jefferson’s Jesus, is an ending, for Thurman’s it is a necessary precondition—just a start.

Really, really good.

And worth remembering, whenever we are tempted – as all of us are, at one time or another, probably even daily – to cut-and-paste Jesus ourselves.

An interview with Cunningham from Sojourners.

It’s funny you talk about that in terms of writing because this is why I’m so attached to the idea of logos. In every context, spiritual, church, school, wherever, I’ve always had a really good education in terms of words themselves. My middle school was run by a Jesuit. We had this class that was called LSW, literature, speech, and writing, and it was probably a third of the class time. We would have a class where all we did was read, have a class where we did the traditional Socratic method around the table talking about books. Every week we had to write an essay and deliver it to the class. So, it was not only writing persuasively, but it was also oratory. And there was a competition. Every week somebody would come in first, second, third in this essay/speech contest. The first-place winner would win three of their favorite candies. The second-place would win two, third-place would win one. We were always competing over who would get the most Hershey’s milk chocolate.

My mother who’s now a minister was always a lay Bible teacher. She was always very keyed into the textual aspects of the Bible and really encouraged me to memorize passages of Scripture. I’m not as good anymore but I remember going through the Psalms. It was always about the language. And then growing up I went to different kinds of church. My father was a church musician and we ended up moving to Chicago when I was a kid because he got a job at a Catholic church. I was baptized Catholic. I went to a Catholic church in Chicago as well. So really my elementary and middle school was all Catholic although it wasn’t Jesuit in Chicago. Every step of the way there was this language and humanities focus. The Bible and my religious life were always tied to the word. I remember once we moved back to New York, it was my first taste of hearing Pentecostal-style, long preaching. I was so excited by it. I could do an hour sermon, both loving the sermon and also kind of punching it up in my mind being like, “oh, he could’ve said that too.” The King James Bible, especially, is still very foundational to my ear, to what I think sounds good. So, I think those things have always gone together.

Who Should Write What?

One final post on the topic of the week – books, reading, culture, appropriation, space and appropriateness.

I was going to write a post on this, but then I remembered that a few years back, novelist Zadie Smith had penned a marvelous essay on the subject for the New York Review of Books. It’s behind a paywall of sorts, but if you are really interested, you can register at the site just to read this piece. It’s worth it, acknowledging varied points of view with fairness, but not hesitating to take a stand either.

Fascinated to Presumption: In Defense of Fiction

Consequently, my interest here is not so much prescriptive as descriptive. For me the question is not: Should we abandon fiction? (Readers will decide that—are in the process of already deciding. Many decided some time ago.) The question is: Do we know what fiction was? We think we know. In the process of turning from it, we’ve accused it of appropriation, colonization, delusion, vanity, naiveté, political and moral irresponsibility. We have found fiction wanting in myriad ways but rarely paused to wonder, or recall, what we once wanted from it—what theories of self-and-other it offered us, or why, for so long, those theories felt meaningful to so many. Embarrassed by the novel—and its mortifying habit of putting words into the mouths of others—many have moved swiftly on to what they perceive to be safer ground, namely, the supposedly unquestionable authenticity of personal experience.

The old—and never especially helpful—adage write what you know has morphed into something more like a threat: Stay in your lane. This principle permits the category of fiction, but really only to the extent that we acknowledge and confess that personal experience is inviolate and nontransferable. It concedes that personal experience may be displayed, very carefully, to the unlike-us, to the stranger, even to the enemy—but insists it can never truly be shared by them. This rule also pertains in the opposite direction: the experience of the unlike-us can never be co-opted, ventriloquized, or otherwise “stolen” by us. (As the philosopher Anthony Appiah has noted, these ideas of cultural ownership share some DNA with the late-capitalist concept of brand integrity.) Only those who are like us are like us. Only those who are like us can understand us—or should even try. Which entire philosophical edifice depends on visibility and legibility, that is, on the sense that we can be certain of who is and isn’t “like us” simply by looking at them and/or listening to what they have to say.

Fiction didn’t believe any of that. Fiction suspected that there is far more to people than what they choose to make manifest. Fiction wondered what likeness between selves might even mean, given the profound mystery of consciousness itself, which so many other disciplines—most notably philosophy—have probed for millennia without reaching any definitive conclusions. Fiction was suspicious of any theory of the self that appeared to be largely founded on what can be seen with the human eye, that is, those parts of our selves that are material, manifest, and clearly visible in a crowd. Fiction—at least the kind that was any good—was full of doubt, self-doubt above all. It had grave doubts about the nature of the self….

….

Perhaps “containment” and the “fascination to presume” are not that different. They carry the same risk: being wrong. Maybe we only think of it as containment when it goes wrong. The textbook example is Madame Bovary. For over a century, women have profoundly identified with this imaginary woman, created by a man, who himself supposedly claimed an outrageous personal identification with the other: Madame Bovary, c’est moi. I am one of those women readers, and yet there are many moments in Madame Bovary when I feel the presence of a masculine consciousness behind it all, as I do when I read Anna Karenina. Which is to say the mapping of self to other that Flaubert and Tolstoy attempted is not perfect. But it is not nothing. Anna Karenina has meant as much to me as any imaginary woman could.

And I, along with generations of women readers, have wondered: How could a man know so much of us? But the mystery is not so mysterious. Husbands know a great deal about wives, after all, and wives about husbands. Lovers know each other. Brothers know a lot about sisters and vice versa. Muslims and Christians and Jews know one another, or think they do. Our social and personal lives are a process of continual fictionalization, as we internalize the other-we-are-not, dramatize them, imagine them, speak for them and through them. The accuracy of this fictionalization is never guaranteed, but without an ability to at least guess at what the other might be thinking, we could have no social lives at all. One of the things fiction did is make this process explicit—visible. All storytelling is the invitation to enter a parallel space, a hypothetical arena, in which you have imagined access to whatever is not you. And if fiction had a belief about itself, it was that fiction had empathy in its DNA, that it was the product of compassion. 

7 Quick Takes

— 1 —

Well, after who-knows-how-many years, I finally straight-up cancelled my Amazon Prime. Just a first step in disentangling my life from all of the tech behemoth, but…at least it’s a step. And it might be the easiest one. Over time, the “free shipping” has become less and less important, and in fact, less of a reality. The only other “benefit” of Prime that I use is Video, and what’s happened there is a) I have no interest in any of Prime’s original programming and b) most of the movies I’m interested in watching that are on Amazon at any given moment are hardly ever on Prime, and I end up paying for them anyway. Which you can do without paying for Prime. And if you are…you’re paying twice.

I don’t do Amazon music, Prime Reading (there’s hardly ever anything of interest to me), photo storage…etc.

I had been hoping that they would at least inquire as to my reasons, but alas. I had no chance to wax eloquent about their censorship and treatment of authors and destructive, arm-twisting manipulation of the market, and specifically, publishing.

Just a blip in their mega-universe, I know, but one less, at least.

— 2 —

Flannery’s coming!

Explore the life of Flannery O’Connor whose provocative fiction was unlike anything published before. Featuring never-before-seen archival footage, newly discovered journals and interviews with Mary Karr, Tommy Lee Jones, Hilton Als and more.

— 3 —

A piece on poet Claude McKay by poet James Matthew Wilson:

McKay is not the kind of poet likely to get a hearing in an age like ours. His variousness and complexity inconvenience almost everyone. At his most politically radical, he still loved the country that discriminated against him and his race. Anxious like many figures of the Harlem Renaissance to give voice to distinctively black experience, he did so in the language, and with the versecraft, of a tradition that was under assault by the novelty-craving experiments of literary modernism. Blunt in his political expression, he nonetheless took aesthetic pleasure in the shadows of Harlem and was content to live among them. Restless to see justice and a workers’ paradise on earth, he nonetheless saw from the beginning that there was a paradise beyond the radical dreams of communism to which all persons were called. He saw that there was a final truth that we do not use to advance our cause but in whose peace we are called to rest.

For this reason, McKay may be best remembered as the first great poet of the Harlem renaissance, but he should also be known as one of the first great poets of American Catholicism.

— 4 —

Tonight’s read: Stephen Crane’s The Monster – a long short story or novella. I mentioned that I’ve been reading a lot of Crane, sorting out what we should read around here for “class.”

This will make the cut.

It’s an astonishing, painful work about race, otherness, the dark side of small-town life and ethical questions related to life and death. I have written about the difficulties of encountering dated racial attitudes in writing from the past, and touched on the difference, as I see it, between an author’s accurate depiction of racist reality as she see it in front of her, and a racist authorial voice and perspective. Here, Crane walks that line, sometimes veering to one side, sometimes to the other. But that by no means overpowers the greater impact of the story, which is heartrending on a couple of levels.

The structure is fascinating and the writing, as per usual, is sharp, sharp, sharp.

Martha was shining a dish-pan, polishing madly. No reasonable person could see cause for this operation, because the pan already glistened like silver. “Well!” she ejaculated. She imparted to the word a deep meaning. “This, my prophecy, has come to pass.” It was a habit.

The overplus of information was choking Carrie. Before she could go on she was obliged to struggle for a moment. “And, oh, little Sadie Winter is awful sick, and they say Jake Winter was around this morning trying to get Doctor Trescott arrested. And poor old Mrs. Farragut sprained her ankle in trying to climb a fence. And there’s a crowd around the jail all the time. They put Henry in jail because they didn’t know what else to do with him, I guess. They say he is perfectly terrible.”

Martha finally released the dish-pan and confronted the headlong speaker. “Well!” she said again, poising a great brown rag. Kate had heard the excited new-comer, and drifted down from the novel in her room. She was a shivery little woman. Her shoulder-blades seemed to be two panes of ice, for she was constantly shrugging and shrugging. “Serves him right if he was to lose all his patients,” she said suddenly, in bloodthirsty tones. She snipped her words out as if her lips were scissors.

Crane and Gershwin. Two heartbreaking early deaths in American culture.

— 5 —

One of the newsletters I receive is by Matt Taibbi – a journalist with whom I’ve energetically taken issue in the past, but who in the past few years has stood firm as one of the few actually trying to cast a clear, cold, discerning, critical eye over parties on all ideologies and parties.

This isn’t particularly political, but related to cultural matters I was discussing earlier in the week. It’s on Gogol, whose deathiversary was this week. Taibbi comments:

Gogol would not do well in the modern world, which demands that artists be great people in addition to providing clear moral direction in their work. In life, Gogol was a small, neurotic, excuse-making, deeply silly man with a slate of inexplicable views, and his habit of turning even the characters he liked into flatulent buffoons would have rendered any efforts to produce “positive social commentary” disastrous. He’d have been canceled a hundred times over, and died covered in Twitter trolls instead of leeches.

Reading Gogol is a gluttonous, frenzied, disgusting experience: you laugh until you hurt yourself, then keep going. Incidentally, for a thin man, Gogol wrote about food in shocking quantities. When his characters sat for meals, all pretense of story or narrative would end, and his descriptions of dinners would devolve into maniacal, paragraph-length lists of pastries and meat pies and buckwheat kasha and mushrooms and vodka and other Russian tablestuffs that droned on until you could smell it all.

As one of his characters explained, there’s no such thing as being full. A stomach is like a village church that only seems packed: if the Mayor shows up, a place is quickly found. For all the darkness he saw, Gogol noticed one beautiful thing about us. For the good things in life, especially a laugh, we always find room for the Mayor.

— 6 —

Current read for the rest of the evening: South to Freedom:

The Underground Railroad to the North promised salvation to many American slaves before the Civil War. But thousands of people in the south-central United States escaped slavery not by heading north but by crossing the southern border into Mexico, where slavery was abolished in 1837.

In South to Freedom, historian Alice L. Baumgartner tells the story of why Mexico abolished slavery and how its increasingly radical antislavery policies fueled the sectional crisis in the United States. Southerners hoped that annexing Texas and invading Mexico in the 1840s would stop runaways and secure slavery’s future. Instead, the seizure of Alta California and Nuevo México upset the delicate political balance between free and slave states. This is a revelatory and essential new perspective on antebellum America and the causes of the Civil War.

— 7 —

Just a couple of images related to Scripture readings from upcoming liturgies.

Today’s (Friday’s) first reading is Joseph and his brothers:

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This is the first and last page from The Loyola Kids Book of Bible Stories – so you can have a sense of the illustrations and then how I wrap up the end of every story, tying it into a truth related to Salvation history and spirituality, and then posing a question for reflection and a prayer suggestion.

Saturday’s Gospel, also from the Loyola Kids Book of Bible Stories – which is in the section on Lent. Remember that each story is in a section related to the liturgical season in which it’s most frequently heard, and each story ends with a tie-in to some aspect of Catholic life, as well as think/pray prompts.

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Finally, also from the Book of Bible Stories….related to this coming Sunday’s first reading of the giving of the Commandments to Moses.

Here endeth the Lesson.

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Works Cited

Since we’re All About the Books today, let’s do a quick rundown of what I’ve been reading over the past week. Maybe you’ll find something good in there.

None of these were written by 21st century 60-year old cradle Catholic women of WASP-French-Canadian extraction, but I still found them interesting and engaging. Mostly. Go figure.

1. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I’d read it once before, when now-College Kid was in high school. What struck me back then, as I mentioned in this blog post, was the deeply religious aspect of the book. As a student of 19th century American religion and reform movements, I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. Spiritual passions run as strongly as political passions here. Tom, of course, is a Christ figure (as is little Eva), but just as significantly to me is Stowe’s strong point about the power of witness.

Over and over, she makes the point: Christians who either defend slavery or – just as bad – throw up their hands in the name of social and political peace (see Letter from a Birmingham Jail) – are counter witnesses to the truth of Christianity. How, she asks through her narratives and her characters, can anyone take this faith seriously when its professed adherents treat other human beings as chattel?

I do wonder how much this novel is taught in the present day, not just because of the uncomfortable racial assumptions and portrayals that lent themselves, subsequent to publication, to terrible stereotypical representations, but because the book is such a deeply religious one.

For Stowe’s fundamental point, even more foundational than the immorality of slavery, is about Christian freedom. Tom may be enslaved in earthly terms, but he  is a free man because he belongs to Christ, even if the unjust laws of the United States do not recognize that freedom. Tom is a martyr, not for the cause of earthly freedom, but for the sake of the souls whom he dies to protect and who find real freedom – salvation – because of that death.

I can’t even imagine a modern public school classroom being able to deal with this intense religiosity.

So, is this novel problematic in the classroom? It shouldn’t be. Yes, some of the portrayals verge on caricature, and Stowe does, consistent with her time, describe Black characters in terms of aspects “characteristic to their race” – you know, “they” are emotional and naturally this and that. A skilled teacher can certainly use that and apply it to the present, as she can contextualize the now-offensive language, particularly since the story is so strongly anti-slavery and has as its entire purpose confronting the white reader with the undeniable humanity of Black people and the evil of slavery. From a historical perspective, to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin along with 19th century Black writers such as Douglass, Washington, Chesnutt, Dunbar and Pauline Hopkins (all given ample space in the new Norton anthology my older son used in college and we are using), presents a good overview of the period, challenges and all.

2. Daisy Miller – Should I be offended, as a woman, by the portrayal of this lightweight female character? I did feel myself rebelling here and there: All right closeted Henry James, you think you understand women so well…but then I settled myself down and reminded myself: It’s a character. This is who the character is. These are her particular characteristics. Of this character.

And of course, no one really comes out well. That’s a good thing to remember if a character in a book or film strikes you as offensive or unfairly portrayed. There might be truth to your perception, for that does happen – but before you pass final judgment, take a look at the other characters in the piece. Perhaps they are all dolts? It could happen.

Anyway, I enjoyed Daisy Miller – although I think I liked Washington Square more and moreover, I feel comfortable waving goodbye to Henry James at this point. My experience with the sentences in In the Cage was so dispiriting that I’m confident that high school-appropriate James is about as much as I can handle.

“My father ain’t in Europe; my father’s in a better place than Europe.”

Winterbourne imagined for a moment that this was the manner in which the child had been taught to intimate that Mr. Miller had been removed to the sphere of celestial reward. But Randolph immediately added, “My father’s in Schenectady.”

3. Related – those of you who’ve read both will know why – the short story “Roman Fever” by Edith Wharton.

Plot twist! I admit…I didn’t see that coming….nice one, Edith.

4. Also by Wharton: “The Other Two.” Very funny in its own way, with a fascinating glimpse into late 19th century New York personal and social moral codes nd social mores. Eye-opening for those who think that multiple marriages are a 20th century invention.

(These were just the Wharton stories in the Norton anthology).

5. Stephen Crane: “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” which I’d read before, “Horses” – sometimes called “Horses — One Dash,” “The Blue Hotel,” and “The Open Boat.”

What a marvel Crane was, and what a tragedy he died at the age of 28. He is one of the great American writers, anyway, but what he might have written had he lived longer?

Gorgeous, precise descriptions, great ironic humor, and then the Crane naturalism, which places the individual in the midst of forces he can’t control and will, eventually overwhelm him.

Do I “agree” with everything I read in Crane? No. He verges on caricature of ethnic types – and where are the women?! Underrepresentation! – oh, and I certainly don’t “agree” with his existential perspective. But he presents that perspective engagingly and powerfully, it makes sense in the context of the stories he’s telling, and as such, it’s a perspective I can – and must – have a conversation with.

For yes, it does indeed seem at times that Crane’s right – that the universe is not only indifferent, but perhaps at odds with human striving and purpose. What’s the response?

I mean….

None of them knew the colour of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the colours of the sea. The horizon narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose, and at all times its edge was jagged with waves that seemed thrust up in points like rocks.

Many a man ought to have a bath-tub larger than the boat which here rode upon the sea. These waves were most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall, and each froth-top was a problem in small boat navigation.

The cook squatted in the bottom and looked with both eyes at the six inches of gunwale which separated him from the ocean. His sleeves were rolled over his fat forearms, and the two flaps of his unbuttoned vest dangled as he bent to bail out the boat. Often he said: “Gawd! That was a narrow clip.” As he remarked it he invariably gazed eastward over the broken sea.

The oiler, steering with one of the two oars in the boat, sometimes raised himself suddenly to keep clear of water that swirled in over the stern. It was a thin little oar and it seemed often ready to snap.

The correspondent, pulling at the other oar, watched the waves and wondered why he was there.

6. Oh, back to Wharton – Ethan Frome, which I’d read years ago, and misremembered a bit. I thought that the affair was actually consummated and more prolonged and had forgotten the suicidal intentions of the climax, but still. I felt it might have done to be a longish short story rather than a novella – I did get a bit weary of the agony. But, along with serendipity, irony is just about my favorite dramatic trope, so there’s a lot of satisfaction in this ending.

7. Oh, and yes, The Masters of Atlantis by favorite Charles Portis. After finishing, can confirm that this is my least favorite Portis. I don’t think I could recommend it to anyone, although it does have its fans on Goodreads and Amazon, I see. I just found it so different, so much less personal than the other Portis I’ve read, which is all of them. I think the difference is voice. All of the other Portis novels are told with a very distinctive narrative voice. They’re either written in a wry first person or an interiorly-aware third person. I’m sure there’s a term for that, but I don’t know it. That is, those narrative voices have a point of view. No such thing in Masters of Atlantis. It’s a chronicle, more or less, and I didn’t find it to be even effective as a satire of religion, esoteric nonsense or cults.

For months now, I keep starting The Good Soldier, since it seems to be included in lists of somewhat-Catholic-literature – but all asleep at the same point, about three pages in, every time. Maybe I’ll try reading it in the afternoon instead.

What’s next?????

St. Katharine Drexel

Today is her memorial – March 3. You and your children can read about her in my Loyola Kids Book of Saints:

(Link goes to publisher’s website, not Amazon)

And learn all about her here. 

And don’t forget….St. Patrick is coming soon:….

Spiraling

Yes…all it took was one blog post, and here I go….

When it comes to education – formal and informal, in school and in life – I am one for both the “basics” and then thrashing about in the weeds. You learn a formula, a system, a timeline, a set of information – and then you spend the rest of the time getting various perspectives on it all and figuring out what it all might mean.

So, with a piece of literature: you read it, as it is. You get the context and learn about the author. Where he’s coming from, what he’s reacting to. You make sure you get it.

And then you talk. About whatever strikes you as important. If you’re a form and style person, you might focus on that. If you’re a word person, have at it. If you’re into cultural and social connections, you’ll have something to say. If you want to critique the author’s limits and flaws, there’s time for that. If you’re interested in human motivation and personality (raises hand), go for it.

In all of these conversations, you, the reader, are a subject. You are who you are, and you’re interacting. You can’t separate you and your experience from your views and reactions.

But here’s a problem, and the problem is this:

When the primary mode of reaction and analysis to literature becomes …”How does this make you feel?” and “What’s your reaction to this?”

At that point, you have set up a system which prioritizes the impact of a piece of art on your emotions and your very person.

And you have, right there, set in motion the endless cycle of cultural reaction grounded in offense and affirmation. You’ve not even given individuals the chance to learn how to interpret culture in any other framework.

I mean….what do you freaking expect??

If you have been involved in education over the past four decades in any way – student, parent, teacher – you know that this has, indeed, come to pass. Those are the themes of the majority of “discussion” questions in literature courses up to the college level and even beyond, and that’s the angle most liberal arts projects take.

Not: What is this about and what does it tell us about human life, past and present?

But: How did this make you feel?

Where does this present moment of offended cancellation come from?

From the “Discuss” questions in your lit textbook which, of course, are super easy to answer and much less work to grade…..

I never really liked Dr. Seuss much anyway

I mean, I just didn’t.

I guess I liked The Cat in the Hat as a child, for the illustrations in my probably 55-year old copy of it are imprinted in my mind, not just from my own reading of it, but reading it to five children over the years. And that copy still lives, somewhere, I think.

That was the only Dr. Seuss that was a part of my childhood, for some reason. I did, of course, read others to my own kids. Over and over and over. Yes, it would get to the point at which I would hide them. Maybe. They may be good for teaching children how to read, but those same elements – the repetition, the simple vocabulary, make them extremely tedious to read aloud, especially since they are so bloody long, and by the time you’ve been doing this for say, twenty years, yeah, you’re ready to move on.

Also, Seussical was one of the most painful experiences of my theater-going life. And it wasn’t just because it was an amateur production. Amateur productions are pretty good these days, after all.

Anyway, the illustrations are far more memorable than the text, and it is an achievement when your style becomes an adjective and can accurately describe a landscape.

But of the banning? It’s all stupid.

And this? Completely predictable. And hilarious.

Write what you want. Publish what you want. Teach what you want. Stock your libraries with what you want. Withdraw what you want. Prohibit what you want.

Just do it on the most local scale possible, so the rest of us can write, publish, teach, stock, withdraw and prohibit what we want, as well.

Different people and different groups will have various interests and concerns and boiling points. Cultural content ebbs and flows and changes.

But at some point, a person did write those words or create those images. Seeing them today, I might find them inaccessible, irrelevant or even offensive, but if I shoot them down the Memory Hole completely, I’ve made it all the more difficult to understand myself and human beings in general.

Let’s stick to writing. There’s absolutely nothing a particular person could write that every other person on earth would find meaningful, inoffensive or interesting. Nothing. This does not end well. It ends up in slogans. That’s all.

There’s not a piece of writing from the past – whether we are talking Jane Austen, Dickens, Fitzgerald, Hemingway or Shakespeare – that someone, somewhere isn’t going to find problematic or legitimately offensive. (I wrote about the casual, narrator-centered racism in Hemingway and how off-putting it was, here.) Just accept it.

The past is a foreign country.

It’s a foreign country, but peopled by human beings, who haven’t changed much. If you refuse to travel to that foreign country, you’re losing out. You’re cutting yourself off from a chance to more deeply understand human beings – what they have in common with you, and how different they are.

This is the vision of one person. Reading her book, you’re in a conversation with her. You’ll recognize some of her world, some of it will be strange, some of it will strike you as immoral, wrong or crazy, Some of what she says will make you wistful and wish you lived in that world – some of what she says will prompt you to wonder how anyone could live in that world.

It’s a conversation, Listen – and respond.

The problem, here, as I said above, seems to me to be one of scale. It’s in the insistence on mass culture and mass education and mass formation.

Everyone should read this book. No one should read that book. That book should never have been written!

Where does that impulse come from? What’s it about? Well, it’s not a new one, that’s for sure – as governments, society and Church have, up to recent times, long held control over what is published and available to people.

It didn’t work then. It won’t work now.

And to be clear, when I go on these screeds, I’m talking at the level of the individual. Schools are a different matter – but again, here’s where we get to scale and control. What should be in “the canon” or in the curriculum? How about whatever the local teacher, the parents and the students want. Whatever they discern will help students reach goals of understanding, wisdom and perception. And what I think most of us know from experience is that what helps us the most in reaching those goals are not works that we simply glide through, nodding as we go. It’s works that startle us and even make us angry and force us to think through our assumptions and convictions.

Remember when book banning was bad? Remember when parents who didn’t want, say, in my day, Go Ask Alice or Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret on the shelves were excoriated for narrow-mindedness? Or every classroom and library scuffle since then in which those who wanted to limit children’s access to books were told that it was wrong to shelter kids from ideas and realities? That they just needed to toughen up for the real world? When, yes, concerned parents were told…great art will…startle and make us angry and force us to think through our assumptions and convictions?

No, let’s not forget that.

Banned Book Week should be interesting this year

Scratch that. It won’t be. It never is.

Wednesday Random, mostly school

Since we returned from our trip a week ago today, I’ve been doing a lot of reading. Partly news and commentary, filling my head with nonsense over which I have no power, per usual. But also a lot of Literature – we’re in the second semester of American Lit and I needed to reassess, review and get ready.

So, it’s a lot of late 19th century stuff, sorting out what can give the student the strongest sense of the period with the least pain.

So, this month, it ‘s going to be:

• Talk about Uncle Tom’s Cabin (finished reading on the trip)
• Melville: Bartleby the Scrivener
• James: Daisy Miller maybe one of the ghost short stories, not Turn of the Screw, will explain why in a moment.
• Crane: stories: “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” “Horses–One Dash,” “The Open Boat,” “The Blue Hotel.”
• Wharton: Ethan Frome
• Excerpts from Dreiser, Cather.
• Booker T. Washington, excerpt from Up From Slavery
• W.E.B. Du Bois, excerpt from The Souls of Black Folk
• Last section of the Norton Anthology (1865-1914), which contains a mix of fiction and non-fiction excerpts giving a sense of American life in the Gilded Age: Alger, Andrew Carnegie, Turner on the frontier, T. Roosevelt, Jane Addams

That will take us to the end of March, with then the 20th century ahead. The long works for that period will be The Great Gatsby, some Hemingway, not sure which and maybe a Steinbeck – can’t remember if he’s read Of Mice and Men or not.

And FYI, what/who we’ve covered since January: Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Twain (he’d already read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn – twice – so we did excerpts of other works), Bret Harte (“The Luck of Roaring Camp,” “The Outcasts of Poker Flat”), Ambrose Bierce (“Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge), Kate Chopin (“Desiree’s Baby” and “The Story of an Hour”)

It’s been fairly light over the past couple of months because there’s been travel (him to Florida at the end of January, us to Arizona this month) and a bit of intensifying of music, as we have worked out a consistent system to do in-person lessons again, with a recital in the offing. Plus he’s a reader, so I’m not worried that he won’t ever encounter these works again. I mean – this is a kid who’ll probably pick up Moby Dick on his own some time in the next year or two.

Quickly on the James. It’s common to have high school students read Turn of the Screw as their Henry James, but I decided against it (again, he’s free to read whatever he wants and will probably take it in at some point), because I think the writing is more…Jamesian than Daisy Miller and more of a chore than we need right now with all that’s going on, and what do I want him to learn about James right now? Well, his importance in the history of literature, his style, and, most importantly, his themes related to human nature, concealing and revealing, social mores, and the tension between Europe and America. I think that’s best accessed through Daisy Miller at this point.

Same could be said for Crane and why not The Red Badge of Courage. I’ll encourage him to read it on his own, but honestly, these stories are so engaging – including funny – that I think reading them will do more to interest him in more Stephen Crane than starting with Red Badge.

And….as for the rest of school? Here’s what’s happening, in case you’re curious about homeschooling high school, either because of Covid, despite it, or just because:

• Science: Chemistry, taught by a Ph.D through a local co-op. Once a week.
• Math: Algebra II, tutored by a local math teacher
• Latin: tutored by a local Latin teacher. Also he’ll be taking the National Latin Exam next week.
• Religion: Pretty much liturgical catechesis right now, as well as Fraternus weekly gatherings.
• History: Self-guided. I think he’s doing Ancient Rome right now.
• Spanish: Self-guided. I guess he’s doing something. I’m not worried.
• Music: Recital next week. First one in a couple of years. Third movement of the Moonlight Sonata. We’ll see.
• Writing: Started an online fiction writing course a couple of weeks ago.
• Testing: Taking the ACT in April. Hopefully. (He was supposed to take it in December, but that date and location was cancelled)
• PE: Biking and Boxing boot camp 2-3X a week. Sometimes at 5:30 am…..

Gringos

I’ve read a ton over the past week – mostly so I could get my brain attuned for Literature “class” for the next month or so. I’ll run over that in the next post. But first: Gringos.

I’d read it before – seven years ago, right after one of our Mexico trips. Seven years is a long time, so I don’t feel too bad that it was almost all new to me.

If Flannery couldn’t remember much, then I might be okay.

Anyway. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. If you like wry humor, insightful characterization and craziness, try Charles Portis. Not from me, but from another writer:

Casting about for ways to account for the effect of his words on the page, I asked some eminent and accomplished Portisians to explain what they found so compelling about his writing. Roy Blount Jr., a master of humor that relies on voice rather than punch lines, once wrote, “The only adequate response to a Charles Portis novel is to jump in the air, do a flip, and wind up on your feet, like Cheetah the chimp in the Tarzan movies when intensely pleased.”¹ Blount’s email exchange with me centered on the narrow but crucial angle of distinction between Portis’s characters and narrating voice. “Not only do the characters take themselves seriously, but so does the author take them,” he wrote. “So how can they be so funny? There must be some other consciousness behind the author. Maybe the reader is looking over the author’s shoulder as he looks … No, that can’t be it. Worth considering: Portis told me how much he loved Borges.”

I will say that I’m currently in the midst of my last unread Portis, Masters of Atlantis, and it’s probably his least good work. If that makes sense. It’s of a different style than the other books – less about people, who, as exaggerated as they may be, are still real in some sense – than a general satire of cultism and various aspects of 20th century life. It’s entertaining, but without the depth you usually find in Portis.

Anyway, Gringos.

What I wrote before:

 Although much of the action takes place in an area we didn’t see – around Palenque – the parts that occurred in Merida and other spots in the Yucatan were a lot more vivid to me having been there.  It was one of those books that I’m going to have to reread, since I entered into it thinking it was going to be one thing – sort of a madcap expat adventure – and ended up being something slightly different – a melancholy expat adventure.

From another blogger’s summary:

Gringos is a deceptively taut and moving novel about an American in Mexico, Jimmy Burns, who used to traffic in looted pre-Columbian artifacts. It begins:

Christmas again in Yucatán. Another year gone by and I was still scratching around this limestone peninsula. I woke at eight, late for me, wondering where I might find something to eat. Once again there had been no scramble among the hostesses of Mérida to see who could get me for Christmas dinner. Would the Astro Café be open? The Cocina Económica? The Express? I couldn’t remember from one holiday to the next about these things. A wasp, I saw, was building a nest under my window sill. It was a gray blossom on a stem. Go off for a few days and nature starts creeping back into your little clearing.

Though I have read that opening paragraph dozens of times, the way the former tomb raider’s unhurried musing on local dining options leads to a bolt of insight into the entropic temporariness of civilization still gets me every time. Revelation turns out to have been sneaking up on both narrator and reader from the start, its dire grandiosity interwoven with easygoing self-deprecation, a trademark Portis effect.

Essentially: the narrator is a fellow who makes a living in Mexico any way he can, from digging up and selling artifacts, to driving a Texas couple’s RV back to the States, to finding and getting rewards for runaways. The plot of Gringos involves, in no particular order: the attempt to find a missing aliens-made-the-pyramids crackpot, an End Times gathering of hippies and criminals at a Mayan site, the health dramas of various ex-pat archaeologists and entrepreneurs, and the bemused, canny, capitalizing reaction of the locals to all these crazy people.

What I am always looking for in what I read is the sharp, focused observation. Portis gives plenty of them:

Reflecting on the alien-researchers discourse: A millimeter off, either way, and you were a fool. It was the scorn of one crank for another crank.

On a space in a house: …a good room to carry out some quiet mad enterprise.

A Mormon archaeologists hosts the scrappy searchers at his dig site: After the meal, witha playful wink, he said he was sorry but he had no ‘highballs’ to offer us. ‘Gentiles’ of our type, he knew, just barely made it from one drink to the next.

Random:

In the Anthropology Club, as I understood it, you were permitted, if not required, to despise only one thing, and that was your own culture, that of the West. Otherwise, you couldn’t prefer one thing over another.

…

My neighbors, Chuck and Diane, stopped to speak. That wasn’t quite their names, but some names you can’t take in. They could have spelled out their names for me every day for six days running and on Sunday morning I would have drawn a blank again.

I had never known anyone so crazy that he couldn’t understand a 12-gauge shotgun.

My mother didn’t approve of zoos. She took things as they came, and it was always startling when she expressed some strong opinion like that.

Try to save a few pesos on your rent and you end up beating up pit vipers.

On the question of the End Times. All the interested and the experts are trying to figure out why the Doomsday cult has gathered now. They’re all disagreeing, but they find great satisfaction in the process:

Still — Doomsday is at hand. The prophecy never fails to pull you up short. You stop a bit before going on. No one knows and so anyone might hit on it.

On the hippies and drifters who have gathered:

They simply wanted to be on stage for the dramatic finish. It must all wind down with them and nobody else. The thought of the world going on and on without them, much as usual, and they forgotten, was unbearable.

It seems to me you must let a haunted man make his report.