Wednesday

Back at it.

After returning late Saturday night, Mass and writing on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday seemed to be mostly taken up with scrolling through Twitter and various news sites, reading about a) the Vigano document and b) the new trade deal with Mexico. Yes, I have varied interests.

So, let’s return to the digest:

Reading: Over the weekend, I read A Double Life – picked (you know the drill) off the “new books” shelf at the library. It’s a suspense novel – I wouldn’t call it a mystery – loosely based on the Lord Lucan case – a British aristocrat suspected of killing the family nanny and seriously injuring his estranged wife, who disappeared the night of the crimes and was never seen again.

The story is told from the first-person perspective of the suspected murder’s daughter, who was a child at the time. So much in this genre is flatly written, and while the prose in this novel was certainly spare, I found the narrative more complex than the usual, for this reason: the author, Flynn, manages to very gradually, simply through that first-person perspective, reveal to us the terrible, long-term damage that the incident had on her mental and emotional life. When we first meet her, we enter the life of just a fairly content, competent NHS physician, but as we accompany her as she digs more deeply into her father’s disappearance and develops ways to track him, we see that…all is not well. What I appreciated was that it doesn’t get super-crazy and over-the-top – her choices and interactions are conveyed in a way in which we’re constantly brought up short as we think, Well, sure, that’s normal…wait…that’s not normal. 

I will say, that I didn’t particularly like the way the novel ended – but hey, it’s her book, not mine.

Most of my other reading has been, as I said, online. In the rush of commentary and Hot Takes, most useful have been Rod Dreher – a long-time acquaintance of mine, who takes heat for focusing on scandals of the Church he left (for Orthodoxy), but who is doing work that no one else is doing in collating information and news in ways that are accessible and well-organized. A few more: Phil Lawler, who has also been writing about these things forever and Fr. Gerald Murray in First Things and some words from Tolkien. 

But I’m sure you have your own.

Watching: Better Call Saul was stellar this week, but it’s going to take a rewatch for me to process it. We also got to the “Peekaboo” episode of Breaking Bad – in which two things become evident: Jesse Pinkman’s decent core – hauntingly expressed by every moment in the episode, beginning with the seemingly tangential scene of him playing with a bug (and what comes after) and ending with his treatment of the meth-heads’ child –   and Walter White’s stubborn, prideful choice for evil. I’ve always said that Breaking Bad is a show about Genesis 1-11 – the origins and infectious spread of sin. The Walter-Jesse relationship is not only an expression of this, but a perversion of the mentor-student ideal. Jesse – like any of us – does not have to head in the direction he’s going and has a heart – and every time he almost gets there, Walter re-enters his life, manipulates him and draws him back into darkness. It’s astonishing to me that the Jesse character was planned to be killed off early on – I can’t imagine the show without that dynamic, and it once again, offers much me much food for thought – both reassuring and frightening – on the creative process.

And that’s all I’ve got for the digest today. I picked up a bit of a cold, probably from airplane air, and just need to get myself away from the news cycle to do some more substantive..thinking.