Some links:
Eat, Pray, Cringe – More on Elizabeth Gilbert’s self-cancellation.
On Monday, Elizabeth Gilbert, the best-selling author of Eat, Pray, Love, initiated a dramatic, public self-cancellation, and removed her latest “offending” work from publication. The crime? Her unreleased novel, which followed a family’s struggle against Soviet communism in the 1930s, was set in Russia, which a small group of actual crazy people on the internet apparently believe forbidden. Gilbert’s was a wild act of self-censorship, which set a dangerous precedent. But mostly. . . nobody cared, and it was all kind of just embarrassing.
Vibe shift? Confirmed.
Elizabeth Gilbert’s self-cancellation video is, among other things, an ambitious exercise in genre-mixing: the whispering, intimate tone of a TikTok confessional, the stark lighting of a hostage video, and the camera angle of your Boomer parents FaceTiming from an iPad that’s perched on the coffee table. Gilbert leans into the camera, her blonde hair tumbling around her face, a pair of comically oversized orange glasses perched high on her nose. …
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That someone, someday, would take the anti-Russian cultural crusade too far was probably inevitable; the only question was where the line would be drawn. As it turns out, declaring Russia off-limits even as a fictional setting—a place you dare not go even in your own imagination—was too much, even for the scolds among us.
Here, one must feel at least a little bit sorry for Gilbert: if she thought she was doing something here, and it seems she did, getting roasted by PEN America was surely not the result she had in mind. Indeed, in the cold light of day, her video registers less as a brave and thoughtful act of altruism than as a very particular brand of cringe: a plea for relevance by a 53-year-old white woman LARPing as a 22-year-old keyboard warrior, trying too late to find her footing in a culture already in decline. (“I’m not a regular Karen, I’m a cool Karen!”)
But beneath the secondhand embarrassment is an especially rich layer of irony, given Gilbert’s own oeuvre. After all, this is a woman whose entire brand was built on flouting convention, subverting expectations, carving her own path through the world without apology, and inspiring other women to do the same. In Big Magic, her best-selling self-help book for creators, she advised her readers to cultivate what she describes as “the good kind of arrogance,” a brash and ballsy commitment to creative freedom: “believing that you are allowed to be here, and that—merely by being here—you are allowed to have a voice and a vision of your own.”
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Related: On the quiet censorship of The French Connection:
James Baldwin famously argued that “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Axiomatically, a history of racism that is not preserved cannot be faced. The people and institutions who attempt to wash away all past ugliness are condescending to audiences, and the audiences who accept these erasures are self-infantilizing. In the most extreme instance, we all grasp why Holocaust denialism, what the French call négationnisme, is morally reprehensible. Society is duty-bound to remember certain ideas and experiences, attitudes and perversions. Such negationism is obviously insidious because it ignores hatred in order to preserve it. But what we might call “positive negationism” is nearly as disturbing. We cannot accurately gauge how far we’ve progressed as a culture since 1845 or 1971, or even the beginning of the 21st century, when epithets against minorities disappeared from common utterance, without an honest record of that cultural progress.
For that reason, in moments of cynicism I wonder if this is the actual motivation behind all of the catastrophizing and revisionism. There is a strange comfort in believing that the world does not change and that the struggle against racism and other forms of oppression is never-ending. The depravity of previous eras is wiped away and, with nothing to compare it to, we proceed to believe that our contemporary traumas are equally significant.
William Friedkin, the director of The French Connection, was certainly aware that he had cast Gene Hackman to portray an unsavory character from “grungy, pre-gentrification New York City,” as NBC described the era in a 2021 article. Friedkin told NBC that rewatching the film on its 50th anniversary had transported him back to that challenging moment. “I lived for a long time in New York,” he said. “About six months before I made the film, I rode around with the two cops [who inspired it], one in Bedford-Stuyvesant and the other in Harlem. It was devastating … The film reminds me of the different nature of New York back then. Nothing about the city was embellished in the film.”
In a documentary on the making of the project, Roy Scheider recalled that a Black audience in Harlem had expressed satisfaction when Hackman uttered the now-censored dialogue on the big screen. Finally, a reality they knew to exist was being acknowledged, a bittersweet confirmation of a painful experience. Today, the patronizing assumption we make to our detriment is that they wouldn’t be able to handle it.
The excerpt focuses on the harm censoring the past does in general – also of concern is the fact that this stealth editing was done and supported by streaming services, including the Criterion Channel, for pete’s sake.
It’s bad enough to have to put up with pretentious, condescending content warnings before Gone with the Wind and such, but this is worse.
Keep your hard copies, folks. Digital media is too easily manipulatable and less trustworthy by the day.
A marvelous, new-to-me site called Artway:
ArtWay is a website with a great variety of materials and resources for scholars, artists, art enthusiasts and congregations concerned about linking art and faith.
Simple!
Here’s a sample – I found it through Art and Theology (where you can find a marvelous Juneteenth playlist today.)
Trinity Miniatures from the Rothschild Canticles
Some of the most innovative visual imaginings of the Trinity come from a small handheld devotional book from early fourteenth-century Flanders or the Rhineland called the Rothschild Canticles. Made for a nun, the book compiles Bible verses, liturgical praises, and theological and exegetical material, along with forty-six full-page miniatures—an unprecedented nineteen of which are on the subject of the Trinity,* all full of whimsy, warmth, and joy. Much of the text that accompanies this sequence is taken from Augustine’s On the Trinity.
In contrast to other depictions of the Trinity, in the Rothschild Canticles we find, says medievalist Barbara Newman,
a playful, intimate approach to the triune God, marked by spontaneity rather than solemnity, dynamism rather than hieratic stasis, wit rather than awe. There is no hint of narrative, but something more like an eternal dance. . . . The divine persons are caught up in an everlasting game of hide-and-seek with humans while they enact among themselves, in ever-changing ways, that mutual coinherence that the Greek fathers called perichoresis—literally “dancing around one another.” (Newman 135)
Art historian Jeffrey Hamburger says that turning the pages of the Trinitarian section is like turning a kaleidoscope, with clouds, suns, and veils “combin[ing] and recombin[ing] in an apparently endless series of transformations,” most set within a circular matrix (Hamburger 128).
God’s hiddenness, his incomprehensibility, is one of the recurring themes in the Rothschild Trinity miniatures. Take folio 104r for example, the penultimate image in the sequence. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are partially hidden behind a wheel that they turn round and round, the former two touching each other’s bare feet to brace themselves up! The sun has imploded. The text opposite the image states, in God’s voice, “My center is in all places, my circumference nowhere”—a popular medieval axiom to express how God is all-encompassing and cannot be circumscribed.
From Glenn Arbery of Wyoming Catholic:
This past week, adults from across the country gathered at Wyoming Catholic College with participating faculty to discuss the nature and future of technology. We began on Sunday night by thinking about the Greek god of technology, Hephaestus, and we ended last night at the home of our hosts, Jim and Dottie Tonkowich, thinking about the future of technology and how we might benefit from it without losing our human center and endangering our relation to God.
I can’t speak for the other faculty or participants in this regard, but for me the major insight from the week was the necessity of thinking as deeply as possible about technology as the “dispensation” of our age. Technology fascinates us. Last night I discovered that one of our participants had driven a new Tesla from Florida to Lander. He told me about various recharging systems, the difficulty of figuring out how to turn on the windshield wipers, the laptop-sized dashboard display, and so on. In a way, the more “dazzled” we are (as one of our participants put it) by particular innovations, the more difficult it is to keep thinking deeply into what technology itself is, but our readings this week kept bringing us back to what Martin Heidegger calls “the question concerning technology.”