Yes, we had tornados in Alabama and the Birmingham area yesterday. Nowhere near us. Lots of damage and five deaths where it did hit, though.
— 1 —
I’ve not heard when the bill will be coming up for a vote in the Senate.
Also, in case you missed it, a bunch of posts last Saturday on Richard Wright’s book about his travels in Spain, Pagan Spain. Here, here, here and here.
And a quick review of Nomadland.
— 2 —
Evangeline Lilly, who played Kate on Lost is (of course) on Instagram. She’s a very thoughtful person, quite grounded and a bit eccentric (but aren’t we all). She also is honest about her experience acting in the show – not, as a whole, a good experience, difficult and challenging in many ways. But that’s not why I’m pointing you to her account today – it’s because of a couple of posts she did on the (good) animated film Soul. You can just go to her account and find the posts, but I’ll just quote some of what she had to say here:
She begins by remembering the experience of giving a talk to students:
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and settled into my heart. I opened my mouth and let it speak. What came out, to my surprise, was a message about what it means to be a success as an artist. I tried to relay to these middle-schoolers that being successful in our art has nothing to do with how famous we are for it. It isn’t about how much money it earns us or how respected we are by our peers. It’s about the joy that art brings us. I explained that a teacher who gigs at the local café with his little band could be far more successful an artist than Kanye West; that an art student putting their whole heart and soul into their term project could be more successful with that project than I was with LOST.
I have spent years lamenting that children’s stories in our modern society seem obsessed with the “repressed-artist-gives-up-everything-to-follow-their-dream” story. That story was subversive and important in a time when most of our artists were so profoundly repressed. But today? Today in a time when art has become one of our highest and most widely distributed commercial enterprises? Today when the American Dream is no longer a family, a home and freedom, but fame, fortune and influence…often through the arts? That story has gone from a counter-culture rebellion to feeding the power and message of the mainstream. Do we really need to keep telling it to our kids? (Con’t in next post…)
Last night I watched another such film – one that takes the “passion before everything” myth and debunks it. Soul, by Pixar, follows a passionate jazz pianist who would give anything to finally “get his shot”. Its message is deep, soulful and simple: life isn’t about “your shot”, it’s about each moment on the way. It’s a refreshingly mature message during a shockingly immature moment in human history
— 3 —
As I’ve said countless times, one of the most countercultural points we can make as a Church is that we canonize, honor, and pray to homeless people.
— 4 —
Louis Menand’s sharp, incisive piece on Mike Nichols, an essay review of a new biography.
(The reason for the false eyebrows and hairpiece was due to the effects of a contaminated whooping cough vaccine.)
The family was forced to get by on an uncertain income. Brigitte was anxious and demanding, and a rift developed between her and Mike, who was now a teen-ager. (The nagging-mother routine was inspired by a phone call from Brigitte.) She did allow him to be fitted for a hairpiece and false eyebrows, and, for the rest of his life, he had to make himself up every morning, as though he were going on a set.
Nichols later said that he never had a friend until he went to the University of Chicago. He entered in the fall of 1949, when he was seventeen. Nichols was well read, but academically indifferent, professionally undirected, and highly defended. He had nothing to back up his sense of superiority, which is not a good place to be.
But it was Nichols’s philosophy of acting. What reviewers had responded to in “Barefoot in the Park” and “The Odd Couple” was the use of the fourth wall, the imaginary barrier between the actors and the audience. The old style of Broadway comedy had the actors playing to the house, trying for laughs. Working with May had convinced Nichols that actors should not think that what they’re saying is funny. “We’re doing ‘King Lear,’ ” he used to say in rehearsals for “Barefoot in the Park.”
That last bolded line….so true, isn’t it?
— 5 —
In a little-known speech, W. E. B. DuBois once proposed the life of Saint Francis of Assisi as a model of civilization. His was an exemplary life, DuBois pointed out, because he lived in response to the following queries: “What am I? What is this world about me? And the world and I—how shall we work and laugh together?” DuBois happily avoids the dominant modern celebration of Francis as a starry-eyed, nature-loving Romantic. Moreover, coming from a secular author turning to Francis, DuBois’s speech opens up the possibility of dialogue, increasingly rare these days, between sacred and secular about the enduring longings of the human soul—longings whose cultivation is at the core of truly liberal education.
He gave the speech in 1907, not long after a devastating earthquake leveled San Francisco. Like DuBois and his audience, we are living in a moment of cataclysm, in the midst of a pandemic and in a culture in which the foundations that might bind us together seem shattered. Why, DuBois asks, should we ponder the life of a medieval saint? Why go so far back in time to understand where we are today? By fixing in our memories the life of Francis, he argues, we will come to appreciate a certain “attitude toward wealth and distinction and the need and place of human training to emphasize this attitude.” The same is true for us today.
What Hibbs doesn’t mention in his article is that the speech was addressed to Black high school students – hints in the text indicate it was a commencement speech, but I’m not sure. The text isn’t available in HTML form online, but here is a pdf of Du Bois’s typewritten text – it’s quite easy to read, and I’d recommend it.
— 6 —
From the most recent edition of The Convivial Society newsletter, thoughts on silence. So good:
Over the years, I’ve thought on and off about silence in the context of digital media. Mostly, this has taken the form of commending what came to be called strategic silence. The idea being that, given the dynamics of the attention economy, it is sometimes better to pass over certain developments in calculated silence than it is to comment on them or even to speak out against them.1 At other times I’ve commented on how the structure of social media generates an imperative to speak, and how in times of crisis and tragedy this imperative to speak feels especially disordered.
More recently, however, I’ve come to think that it is impossible to be silent online.
I don’t mean that it’s really hard and that we lack to will power to be silent. I mean that it is, quite literally, impossible.
“No, it’s not,” you may be thinking just now, “I do it all the time. It even has a name: it’s called lurking.”
I would propose, however, that we distinguish between the mere absence of speech and what might properly be called silence. Perhaps it would be more precise to say that it is impossible to enter into silence online.
Saying nothing, in other words, is not the same thing as silence. Silence is felt. It is meaningful. It is not mere negation. In fact, it can be, as we shall see, eloquent. But, and here I suppose is the crux of the matter, this kind of silence presupposes bodily presence. Silence, in the way that I’m encouraging us to think of it, emanates from the body taken whole.
— 7 —
Some pages relevant to next week from The Loyola Kids Book of Signs and Symbols:
For more Quick Takes, visit This Ain’t the Lyceum!
Charlotte was Both 